Text: Bette Statsky Weidman, “Chapter Eight,” Charles Frederick Briggs, dissertation, 1968 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 245:]

On a bright June day in 1852, Briggs dined with his young friend, George William Curtis, at Windust's Restaurant in Park Row. Curtis, a fellow resident of Staten Island, was twenty years younger than Briggs; he was the son of a well-to-do Rhode Island banker, and with his brother Burrill, had participated in the Brook Farm experiment. His charm and cultivation had earned him intimacy with those New England literary men — Bancroft, Dr. Holmes, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow — to whom Briggs was an unknown New York journalist. It was doubtless with this in mind that Briggs, who seems to have gotten on well with younger men, asked Curtis for his opinion on the formation of a new monthly, to be composed entirely of original contributions from American writers.(1)

Between the early summers of 1850 and 1852 there is only scattered evidence of Briggs's employment. In June 1850, he had left Holden's in the care of its proprietors; he then turned to a different major employment, his former colleagues publicly wishing him luck in a new venture. Probably he assumed greater responsibility on the Mirror.(2) In any event, the job on Holden's had been only temporary and part-time, for the dollar magazine did not have the [page 246:] style or resources Briggs required. By the end of the 1840's, Briggs had also found a place in an eddy of the political mainstream. As a result of his valuable service to the New York Mirror. he was awarded a modest plum of political patronage when Zachary Taylor, the candidate that newspaper strongly supported, won the Presidency. Hiram Fuller was so well pleased with the popularity of Tom Pepper and the Pinto letters that he pragmatically overlooked Briggs's reservations about Taylor's ability and his hatred of the Mexican War, and recommended him for a post in the New York Custom House. The clerkship in the Debenture Room at the Custom House was evidently reserved for literary figures, for when the election of a Democratic President, Franklin Pierce, swept the Whig appointees out of patronage positions, Richard Henry Stoddard was appointed to take Briggs's place. In fact, Briggs suggested that Stoddard apply for the position from which he himself had been ejected Neither man identified the duties of the office, though there were evidently enough of them to help keep Briggs's mind off his editorial troubles.(3) The depressing ambiance of the Custom House was later described by Stoddard in his autobiography:

When Briggs broached the subject of a new magazine to Curtis, he was still working in the Custom House, and had possibly already begun editing a weekly paper called the Sunday Courier.(5) However interesting and remunerative these positions may have been, they did not satisfy Briggs. Since the failure of the Broadway Journal, he had been casting around for a new venture in independent editing. The early trial satisfied him that he could not go it alone. The Journal had petered out in the effort to wake slumbering talent; it never went far beyond demonstrating the modest abilities of Evert Duyckinck and Lydia Child. Briggs concluded that his name alone did not have the power to draw contributors from among the most talented American writers, especially from that New England contingent that generally remained aloof from any New York plan. Curtis, whom Briggs had known at least since 1851,(6) and probably earlier through their common friendships with Gay and Lowell, was just the figure to overcome regional suspicion. [page 248:]

The success of Harper's Magazine, founded in 1850, was another stimulus to Briggs's search. The Harpers were thriving, partly as a result of their editorial policy of “literary piracy,” for, in addition to a few original pieces, for which they paid authors, they freely copied prose and poetry from English magazines. With a sure sense of what appealed to a general public whose literary tastes were formed on British reprints, the Harpers gained popularity for their family magazine without substantial outlays in payments to contributors. If Harper's was gladly welcomed into many American homes, some of its readers disliked its policy and its content. Henry James, Sr. spoke for these — and Briggs — when he wrote that “Harper's Magazine is a mere stale and dishonest hash.”(7) The success of Harper's gave an added urgency to Briggs's hunt for sponsorship of a new magazine, since he saw that publication as destructive to the development of young American writers.

Harper's Magazine did have an important advantage in its backing by a publishing house. Not only were its financial resources increased, but the ability of a publisher to attract contributors exceeded that of an editor who could not hold out the immediate inducement of book publication. Briggs and Curtis wisely interested George Palmer Putnam in their plan. Putnam, whose prosperity had been assured [page 249:] since Washington Irving became one of his authors in 1848, was almost unique among American publishers, for he had broader interests than speedy profiteering. During the 1840's, Putnam had been the London agent for the firm of Wiley and Putnam; he had established an outlet for the sale of American books in England, and had undertaken to instruct the English in a volume called American Facts in 1845. He demonstrated his interest in backing a high quality magazine when he supported the Literary World, edited by Evert Duyckinck, in 1847. He was an earnest advocate of international copyright law, and thus an ally of Briggs in his plan for a magazine filled with original American writing. Wiley and Putnam had not published any of Briggs's novels, but they had published Lowell's A Fable for Critics, which Briggs saw through the press in 1848. Putnam must have known Briggs through the latter's efforts in behalf of copyright legislation as well as in his role of informal literary agent.

In the combination of Curtis’ familiarity with the New Englanders, and Putnam's financial and moral backing, Briggs, adding those characteristics Curtis enumerated as “nimble wit, ... experience and ... instinct of the popular taste,” had a fortunate combination. In the fall of 1852, gathered at a second dinner, this time at Putnam's home, Briggs, Curtis, Caroline Kirkland, Parke Godwin, George Sumner, and Mr. and Mrs. Putnam, made their plans [page 250:] for the magazine's first number. Briggs, who had originated the idea, became editor-in-chief; Parke Godwin, son-in-law of William Cullen Bryant, a prominent Democrat, took over the magazine's political comment, and Curtis undertook a contributing editorship. However, the major work of putting the monthly together was done by Briggs. The undependable, mercurial Curtis, often on lecture trips in the West and pleasure tours to Newport, wrote witty sketches at Briggs's suggestion, prepared some of the reviews, and kept urging his New England friends to contribute.

The first number of Putnam's carried an article called “Homes of American Authors.” Written by Briggs, it was the introduction to a volume that took shape well before that second planning dinner at Putnam's home. Planned as a gift book with a serious purpose, the Homes was designed to show that there not only were a number of distinguished American writers, but that their writing had brought them recognition and prosperity. As Briggs expressed it, “America holds out the promise of reputation and influence as well as pecuniary success and social compensation.”(8) Such a volume could only encourage young writers to persevere, and help to create a sense of pride in a national literature. Briggs edited the book for Putnam, wrote two of the essays,(9) [page 251:] and generally undertook the labor of preparing a volume, the high purpose of which did not conceal its gift book style. Curtis, from Newport, took on the job of persuading the New England literati to participate. Thus the book was created with the same division of tasks as the magazine. Perhaps Homes of American Authors was the original occasion for the combination of Briggs, Putnam and Curtis, in the course of the work, the anti-Harper's, pro-copyright sentiments of Briggs and Putnam coalescing into a plan to present a monthly. Certainly the magazine was a natural extension of the book's theme: that the editor could draw on a body of native writers as intelligent and talented as their British counterparts. Putnam's was dedicated to those beliefs that Briggs had supported since his early articles in the New World: that “piracy” of British works stifled American creativity, encouraging false and irrelevant pretensions to aristocracy in our democracy, and that denying the protection of copyright to an author was as clear a theft as stealing his material possessions. Briggs expressed his own opinion as well as Putnam's when he wrote, in the “Introductory” to the first number:

Putnam's backed up its promise by putting aside the coterie spirit and New York caricature of Transcendental New England, and requesting help from talented native writers from all sections of the country. It was so successful that it remains excellent reading today.

Among the ultimately most memorable pieces published in Putnam's were Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “The Encantadas,” “Israel Potter,” and “The Lightning-Rod Man,” and Thoreau's “An Excursion to Canada.”(10a) The inclusion of these two writers demonstrated that Briggs was more than a practical editor who carefully considered the preferences of “that monster, the public.” He shaped his magazine so that enough of it appealed to the public to permit him to elevate popular taste with a few well-chosen pieces. Briggs also published Cooper's “Old Ironsides,” Lowell's “A Moosehead Journal,” and “Fireside Travels,” Longfellow's “Warden of the Cinque Ports,” and Curtis’ “Potiphar Papers” and “Prue and I.” But all of Putnam's contributors made their way into the public's approval by the virtue of their work, all of which was unsigned.

There were several excellent stories that ran serially; “Wensley,” by the abolitionist, Edmund Quicy, was well received as a sample of regional writing. The “Sparrowgrass Papers,” “Stagecoach Stories,” “Notes from my Knapsack,” [page 253:] “Sketches in a Parisian Cafe,” were among the prose serials that further testified to Putnam's interest in local color and realism. Notably absent from the magazine are sentimental tales such as often marred Holden's, as well as most contemporary ladies’ magazines. Moreover, Briggs's interest in engravings, demonstrated in the Broadway Journal and in Holden's, gave rise to a valuable series called “New York Daguerreotyped.” The magazine firmly localized itself in the city, and sought to record its design, its institutions, and its spirit as the center of American culture. Putnam's, without boasting of it, was able to make good Briggs's claim in the first number of the Broadway Journal that “as Paris is France and London, England, so is New York, America, in spite of South Carolina and Boston.” Putnam's included, in addition to its literary contributions, articles on diverse subjects, ranging from descriptions of the West to essays on paleontology, from a look at almanacs to a study of punning, from a piece on Japan to a visit to Popocatepetl; there were biographical articles on Daniel Webster, Joan of Arc and Count Stedingk, among others. The tone was informal and intelligent, the subjects, widely varied.

Putnam's political orientation, like its literary nationalism, was liberal. On the issue of the day, it reflected Briggs's view in siding with anti-slavery, rather than abolitionist sentiment. It was confident that so unjust an institution as one that treated human beings as [page 254:] property, was bound to dissolve before that herald of moral progress, modern industry and science. Putnam's linked the slave-holding South with the corrupt English aristocracy, and ranged itself with democracy and Christianity Its political editor, Parke Godwin, did not hesitate to call off a list of American despotisms, among which he included the bigoted church, the political parties, uninformed public opinion, and slavery. The animating purpose of despotism, in America as anywhere else, he wrote, is the suppression of the “free formation and publication of opinion.”(11) In opposition to all forms of despotism, Putnam's was dedicated to preserving an outlet for free opinion. It was a measure of the breakdown of the Democratic and Whig Parties that the political editor, an avowed Democrat, could sound so much like his editor-in-chief, who had always been identified with Whigs. Godwin had this to say of his and Briggs's view of the function of literature in a democracy:

Putnam's was edited in such a unity of spirit that unity of tone, in literary reviews, at least, was the inevitable result. Although it is quite possible that [page 255:] Briggs did not write all of the reviews that seem to be his,(12) he had succeeded in gathering writers who shared his anti-sentimentalism, his attraction to realism, his respect for language, and his appreciation of narrative skill. The intelligence of Putnam's reviews is, apart from the choice of contributors, its chief claim to a significant place in American literary history.

Five of these reviews deserve to be singled out as examples of the magazine's, and its’ editor's, literary expectations. In August, 1854, Briggs included a review of Lyrics by the Letter H. The unknown poet, who preserved his anonymity after the example of one of his English contemporaries, was guilty of imitation in his verses, too. The reviewer analyzed the poems grammatically, demonstrating that they were not even meaningful on that level; moreover, some of them, in their conventional treatment of the seashore and their careless employment of language, betrayed a “singular physics.” The Letter H. is disposed of in a parody that the reviewer confessed took him one minute and three seconds to write. The importance of the review, however, lies in the fact that its writer, after tossing the feeble poet around in the way a lion would toy with a mouse, rose to real indignation with the question: “By what authority does H. publish this volume?” Disgusted with the imitative [page 256:] work of so many American poetasters, he went on to state:

When Walt Whitman filled that opening less than a year after Putnam's demand, Briggs was no longer editor of the magazine. However, in the opening lines of “Song of Myself,” Whitman responded to the reviewer's question, answering, in the manner Briggs would have approved heartily, that the authority for his volume lay within himself. Although Putnam's was often compared to the British Blackwood's in terms of influence, it did not share that magazine's tone. If Putnam's was merciless to the Letter H.'s poetry, it did not sneer at his education, his social class, his finances and his politics, in the way Blackwood's infamously did in the case of young Keats.

In the long review entitled “Lowell the Poet,” Putnam's further defined its style of literary criticism. Briggs required the “unaffected, plain-spoken judgement of a sensible well-informed man.” He asked for a “critic who calls things by their right names, and provokes from the understanding reader the remark, ‘just what I thought.’”(14) Lowell's reviewer, William S. Thayer, reminded the poet og what his friend Briggs had written to him eight years earlier: “Anti-Slavery, Temperance and Peace have each their [page 257:] separate claim; and Poetry, subjected to such hard labor, becomes ungainly and loses its attractiveness.” Putnam's anticipated modern criticism of Lowell by commending his “Biglow Papers” over all of his other work, for there Lowell's subject and his preference for “good, homely, Saxon” language made him a truly American poet. If Thayer wrote the review, he doubtless had a good deal of help from his editor, for the piece concluded with the statement that Lowell is greater than any of his books. In 1848, Lowell had written to Briggs, “You are a great deal better than anything you write .... If I did not think that I were better than my books, I should never dream of writing another.”(15)

Briggs's review of Walden is not a full and considered study of a body of writing, like Thayer's essay on Lowell; rather, it is an appreciative notice relying heavily on quotation.(16) Calling Thoreau a “Yankee Diogenes,” an epithet Curtis applied to Briggs himself, Briggs wrote: “His aim was the very remarkable one of trying to be something, while he lived upon nothing; in opposition to the general rule of striving to live upon something while doing nothing.” Although he betrayed some confusion about the meaning of Thoreau's experiment (he questioned Thoreau's leaving the woods), he was certain enough that the bean planter was “more valuable to mankind than a hundred sturdy agriculturists.” Briggs quoted three passages from Walden that were most [page 258:] meaningful to his: “Trade curses everything it handles,” the woodchuck passage on wildness, and Thoreau's remarks on household furnishings. One measure of the difference between the Broadway Journal and Putnam's is that in the earlier magazine, Briggs was unable to call upon Thoreau as a contributor, and proximity notwithstanding, gave no sign of having known him personally.

The second number of Putnam's carried an article on Herman Melville, in a series called “Our Young Authors,” paralleling the Broadway Journal's “American Prose Writers.” Briggs had been reviewing Melville's novels as they were published, beginning with Typee and Omoo, in the New York Mirror; in Holden's he had called Mardi the elegant and entertaining work of a poet and printed four-and-a-half columns of quotes. Again, in Holden's, he wrote that Redburn was “exceedingly interesting ... even with all its faults.” In this last review, Briggs praised Melville's style, calling it “copious, free and transparent,” but criticized the novelist's “ambitious desire to appear fine and learned,” which caused him to drag in irrelevant images. In the May, 1850, issue of Holden's, a few columns after he had exulted over The Scarlet Letter, Briggs generously praised White-Jacket as “an eloquent, humorous, and faithful picture of man-of-war life.” Oddly, Briggs never reviewed Moby-Dick separately. Putnam's review of Melville, attributed to Fitz-James O’Brien, reflected Briggs's opinion clearly, in its assertion that, in Pierre, Melville “totters [page 259:] on the edge of a precipice.” O’Brien called the novel a piece of “nonsense-writing”; while he was full of admiration for Melville's style, he regarded the “philosophical parts” of Mardi as the worst.(17)

In another Putnam's review, Briggs set forth the standard of realism that he held up to Melville's work: “It is only swaggering talent that seeks to elevate itself by getting astride the shoulders of a lofty subject where it shows like a dwarf on the giant's back.”(18) Briggs advised Melville, whose tales he was all the while eagerly printing, to “diet himself for a year or two on Addison and avoid Sir Thomas Browne.” Briggs, though he sensed Melville's growing desperation, was even more unable to aid him than Hawthorne, in his perilous attempt to comprehend the “ungraspable phantom of life.” Even in his fiction, Briggs had dealt poorly with phantoms, and now, confined to editing, he found them as damaging as affronts to public opinion. Thus he regretfully rejected a story by Melville called “The Two Temples,”(19) returning to the position that had so angered Lowell eight years before: “My editorial experience compels me to be very cautious in offending the religious sensibilities of the public and the moral of the 2 Temples would array against us the whole power of the pulpit.” In [page 260:] Briggs's defense, it must be added that he bitterly regretted the rejection, but felt it necessary because of attacks made on Putnam's religious orthodoxy by Rufus Griswold. Later, when he advised the founders of the Atlantic Monthly to take a pragmatic stand, avoiding offense to conservative religions, he remembered the battle he waged with his literary sensibility, in order to keep his on magazine safe.(20) Despite his rejection of “The Two Temples” and his reservations about Melville's later work, Briggs valued him highly. In 1868, when Belville was almost forgotten, Briggs reminded readers of Putnam's second series of “that copious and imaginative author.”

Putnam's, then, was not only engaged in stringent criticism of American poetry, but it was just and generous in reviewing and publishing the finest American prose writers of its day. Moreover, Briggs was equal to the task of dealing with such a phenomenon as Uncle Tom's Cabin. His praise of that extraordinary work rested on Mrs. Stowe's “consummate art” as a storyteller. She had written a “live” book, that owed its interest not to the “effete subject of slavery of which all are wearied,” but on her delineation of character, especially in the portrait of Topsy, and her narrative skill.(21) [page 261:]

He came back to the subject of Mrs. Stowe's abilities in September, 1854. Her trip to England had aroused the “jealous popular sense”; public opinion turned against the American woman who denounced the slave system but praised British aristocrats, “a class who themselves subsist by a systematic violation of human rights.”(22) Putnam's thus sought to explain the public outcry against Mrs. Stowe, not on the grounds of her anti-slavery sentiment, in which its editor fully concurred, but in the “flagrant inconsistency” of her acceptance of an ovation from British aristocrats, whom she had characterized as “charitable”:

Here Briggs recalled his old linking of slavery, flogging and the “aristocratic military” system in Harry Franco and Working a Passage; Pinto's defense of slavery to the abolitionist English aristocracy; the 1845 letters to Lowell in which he argued that-slavery is not an isolated evil; and finally, [page 262:] Tom Pepper's escape from a corrupting democracy into the limbo of transplanted aristocracy. His lifelong awareness of the inequalities of wealth and power came to the surface in his remarks on Mrs. Stowe abroad; he suggested some comments she might have made to her English supporters:

Briggs proposed sending an American missionary to England to enlighten her “as to the rights of Man.” The need for missionaries among the so-called civilized was one of Thoreau's favorite paradoxes; Briggs had learned it from Swift, before he read in Walden that those who yield respect to men's outer appearances are “so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to them.”

Putnam's, then, stood substantially where the Broadway Journal had, in opposing slavery without supporting abolitionists; the magazine's viewpoint, soon to be proven wrong, was that slavery should not be dignified with the name of “domestic institution,” but should be regarded merely as [page 263:] a local manifestation which “will be driven off by advancing civilization.” It must have struck Briggs as ironic that this far more ambitious magazine did not get the dressing-down from the abolitionists that the little Broadway Journal received.

All of Briggs most deeply felt beliefs are discussed in Putnam's. The outstanding one, on which he had based the magazine's existence, was the need for copyright legislation. One of Putnam's readers, an economist, Henry O. Carey, disagreed with this stand and sent a letter to the editor. Carey believed that an international copyright law would have the unfortunate effect of centralizing the production of books; he considered writing a form of leisure activity and not a proper source of livelihood. He contended that ideas were the property of no man, and failed to see the logic of protecting the form in which a man expresses common insights of the human race. Carey felt that the cause of a national literature would benefit more from restraint on trade than from recognition of the principle of copyright. This Whig position was regarded as impossible by Briggs. Politely acceding the economist's offer to exchange Views, he nonetheless remarked that copyright legislation was a subject “upon which I am as free from prejudice as that of the Newtonian theory of gravitation.”(23) Briggs no longer felt that he had to veil his anti-Whig viewpoint in satire, and thoroughly devastated Carey's [page 264:] argument in his magazine.

Just as many pages of the Broadway Journal had been devoted to criticism of art and architecture, so Putnam's had its say on those subjects. In September, 1853, in an essay, accompanied by engravings, on hew York church architecture, Briggs repeated his earlier demands that the external design of a building represent its function and spirit to repair the contemporary state of church architecture, he recommended the immediate planting of a great deal of American ivy. Briggs brought his common sense realism and nativism to bear in all of Putnam's pieces on art, as when he reported, with rueful amusement, that in porcelain painting, native artists used only European designs, but afterwards gave the work an “American baptism in molten gold.”(24)

The “vexed question of woman” came in for Putnam's full treatment in march, 1853. Briggs's Broadway Journal viewpoint, once regarded with horror by liberals, had become respectable in Putnam's. “Woman. and the Woman's Movement,” attributed to Henry James, Sr., recurred to the beliefs and even the language of Briggs's earlier article.(25) “The only mission God saw fit to endow woman with,” Putnam's claimed, “was that of civilizing this private Patagonian of hers [her husband] and evangelizing these little Choctaws of her own invention.”

In dividing the labor of this world between [page 265:] men and women, Briggs and James sloughed off the stridency of the anti-Margaret-Fuller reviews,(26) and defined woman's role truly eloquently. If home was her “true sphere,” they did not intend it to be a place of bondage. Rather, James adopted Briggs's Broadway Journal definition of man's home as his sanctuary, the “comfortablest part of his whole life.” Woman, as the creator of this home, James wrote, has an essential relationship to man as “the casket of his privacy, the shield of his true individuality, the guardian of his essential humanity.” Briggs's opinion on this and other subjects had not altered appreciably in the eight years since he had edited the Journal; however, as the piece on woman shows, the new magazine's manner of expression had ripened from the Broadway Journal's tendency to satire and invective.

When Briggs, as the influential editor of a widely-read magazine, was bitterly impassioned on a subject, he turned to an old option — the creation of a fictional character. He invented the Quaker, Bildad Hardhed (as he had earlier, for the Knickerbocker, invented Hezediah Starbuck), to express his opposition to the war-hawks of the mid-1850's.(27) Hardhed appeared in the editorial offices of Putnam's to confront General Delablueblazes, whose animating belief (in direct contrast to Briggs's in Working a Passage) was “In time of peace, prepare for war.” Bildad rises into a rage at the [page 266:] militarist's espousal of war as the solution to political problems: “Shall the fair young wife, who now laughs to her crowing baby, in the coming years see the child, brought home a mutilated man?... Point out the women who shall turn over the dead corpses after the battle.” Hardhed concludes blackly, in words strong enough to remain in the minds of readers, that those who advocate war should be “shut up with the corpse of a friend” to contemplate at leisure the results of their policy.

Briggs did not leave his early experience as a merchant unmentioned in the pages of Putnam's. for as an obituary notice would later point out, Putnam's “was Mr. Briggs in his prime.”(28) In “Wall Street: A Brobdingnagian Looks at It,” Briggs finally expressed, in the language of his favorite author, a sense of real achievement, restating the theme of The Haunted Merchant ten years after its publication:

Just as Thoreau remonstrated with his readers on the curse of trade, Briggs's narrator envisions the figure of Mammon, standing “amid those stony purlieus, like an invisible taskmaster, driving men ... as if they were but quarry slaves.” Moved by his vision to escape the center of commerce, he climbs Trinity Church spire, and achieves the sense of being a Brobdindnagian. In the editorship of Putnam's, Briggs had finally achieved what was impossible at the “meridian of Wall Street” — the ability to “get a living, and at the same time, to keep the native characteristics of one's life intact.” In language that could have been Thoreau's, he remembered wondering how, as a denizen of Wall Street, “I could take care of my life, while pursuing the perilous process of getting a living.”

Briggs looked upon the editorship of Putnam's as the culmination of his career, the best effort he could summon in behalf of a national literature. If he depreciated his novels, he did not overlook the importance of his editing. Two articles called “The Editor-at-Large^’ that appeared in Putnam's in September and October, 1854, expressed his pleasure in the job. Briggs summoned up a fictional character, the well-to-do Dimes, to represent the American public; he engaged in an expansive, one-sided conversation with his creation. The mundane Dimes, the editor asserted, prefers Hoboken to Typee:

Glancing momentarily at Wall Street (“that defaulting street”), Briggs dashed on to recommend American wines and William Page's painting. He suggested that Dimes join Curtis and himself on an outing to Coney Island. The piece, full of exuberant good nature, is designed as a witty compliment to Curtis, who was called “Howadji” and “the Bard of the Orient” after the subject of his travel books. Briggs was not only earning a living in a self-fulfilling way, but he had the company of congenial co-workers.

In the second “Editor-at-Large,” Dimes is treated to a discourse on the etiquette-mongers. Like Briggs's old antagonist, Count D’Orsay, those who put forth rules of formal etiquette march “among their species, armed like a French gardener, with huge shears, clipping humanity into what they believe to be symmetry. Our nature must have no offshoots; no remarkable boughs sticking out to give us an individual character.”(31)

Evan at this stage in his career, Briggs could not be “clipped into symmetry.” He and Curtis, for example, often disagreed strenuously on the merits of submitted articles. [page 269:] Yet the letters from Curtis to his superior editor are full of warmth, wit and apologies for unfulfilled promises. Curtis’ relationship with Briggs was characterized by respect and affection, as indicated by the salutations he employed; “My dear uncle,” “Dear great man and worker in the fields of time,” “My most admonitory of mentors.” Curtis remained a loving friend long after Lowell had faded from Briggs's life; in 1874, he wrote that he had seen an article by Briggs in a newspaper and “[his] heart smiled as if you had walked into the room.”(33)

In the Lowell-Briggs correspondence of the period, there is evidence that the editor often displeased his closest friend. Lowell was moved to suggest that Briggs adopt a “nominative personality” as editor. Offended by cuts, misprints, and Briggs's criticism of his long poem, “Our Own,” Lowell was often “cross as a sawhorse.” He wished Briggs were not an editor, and volunteered to “cut him in two and call one half (my half) Briggs and the other half Putnam.”(34) Lowell was suffering from deep depression during 1853 as the result of his wife's desperate illness. When Maria Lowell died in the fall, he wished he could see Briggs; “It would be a great comfort — For I do love you most heartily and the older I grow the more.” But if this was so in 1853, Lowell [page 270:] was soon consoled by his Harvard professorship, his public life, and his remarriage; Briggs seemed to belong to his earlier years, and although there are scattered letters until 1861, Lowell's protestations of continued affection were stimulated more by his sense of guilt than by true feeling.

Briggs's letters to another contributor and friend provide an example of his editorial manner. Briggs met Edmund Quincy, a Massachusetts abolitionist, through Lowell and Sidney Howard day. Quincy's inheritance allowed him to cultivate scholarship and he looked upon writing as an avocation. Briggs tactfully advised changes in his tale, Wensley, gave encouragement, suggested other topics for Quincy to work on, and volunteered to act as informal literary agent for him. Although he advised his friend not to associate his name with that of the Harpers, who, in Briggs's view, habitually emasculated liberal sentiment and attempted to destroy competing publishers, he generously arranged matters for Quincy when the latter persisted.(35) Throughout the letters, Briggs combined tact and personal warmth with a firm, unhesitating expression of his opinion, much in the manner of an admired editor of the next century, Maxwell Perkins. The Briggs-Quincy correspondence reveals that Putnam's had, for its day, a wide audience; in June, 1853, Briggs told Quincy that the magazine was circulating 35,000 copies. These letters expose, too, one of Briggs's [page 271:] wearying editorial tasks: prying the continuations of serials out of the hands of his contributors in time for their appointed inclusion.

In one of the last numbers of Putnam's that appeared under his guidance, Briggs enumerated his duties. He calculated that he had to wade through 50,000 pages of manuscript each year, avoid the appearance of hardheartedness in rejecting contributions, “do” the books, overcome literary pirates, succeed in being the exponent of national thought, the supporter of what is right and true, and — at the same time — please public taste!(36) As a practical editor, his first concern was always preservation of the magazine; Briggs knew that if he held rigidly to a principled stand, ignoring public taste, his noble motive would succeed only in destroying the usefulness of his journal. He was still a supporter of compromise, of “redeeming the time being from insignificance” by meaningful action within the framework of the possible.

That he knew the importance of his job is shown by an editorial he wrote for the April, 1855 number of Putnam's. American democracy, Briggs said, despite the discouraging lack of international copyright, had produced scores of aspiring writers; in order to keep its literature from “degenerating into a vast stream of milk and water,” responsible critics must rise to the assistance of the glutted reading [page 272:] public. Lamenting, as his one-time assistant Poe had. done, that contemporary criticism was generally so much “puffery,” Briggs wrote that instead of reading criticism to judge books, “it is now necessary to tread the book to judge the criticism.”(37) He made a stirring appeal to critics to cherish their honesty and to American authors to remain true to their profoundest perceptions. After eighteen months of editing Putnam's, Briggs was optimistic about the future of the literature he was trying to shape. He concluded his tenure as editor by remarking that his magazine had already succeeded in publishing superb American writers; that Putnam's leaved and flowered so soon and so luxuriantly shows unusual pith and vigor” in the young American literature. He went on to write, in the prophetic style of Whitman:

In July, 1854, Curtis confided to Parke Godwin that the publisher, Putnam, who had always taken an active interest in the magazine, was desirous of becoming the editor himself. Curtis personally opposed the change, describing his great regard and admiration for Briggs, whom he affectionately called His Majesty Rhadamanthus: [page 273:]

If Putnam did take over the editorial management during the summer of 1854, keeping Briggs, Godwin and Curtis as a panel of advisers, neither the magazine nor Briggs's correspondence betrays a sign of change. Briggs clearly thought of himself as the magazine's editor until its purchase by Dix and Edwards, in June, 1855.(40) He gave up his position with good grace, as his letter to the new publisher shows; Briggs reviewed Dix and Edward's first number enthusiastically, concluding, “I congratulate you with great satisfaction on your having done better than I was able to do. Hoping you may do even better ....”(41)

The editorship of Putnam's was clearly an arduous task, requiring a tact that strained Briggs's natural brusqueness and a creative daring that eluded the cautious founder of the Broadway Journal. Whether or not these lacks in Briggs [page 274:] caused his displacement, Putnam's was an influential magazine, and the man who initiated it did not have the power to hold an editorship so attractive to younger, talented men. It is ironic that Curtis should have defended Briggs against Putnam's proposed changes, for under Dix and Edwards, he, along with Charles Dana and Frederick Law Olmstead, became the magazine's editor. The names of these men were kept secret from the public,(42) although it is hard to believe that Briggs did not know them, If he did, however, he made no recorded remark.

His loss of the editorship of Putnam's was different in one major respect from Briggs's long history of disappointments. Though the job lasted for less than two years, Briggs did not regard it as another “twelve month voyage in pea-green covers toward obscurity and the chaos of failure.”(43) In his own metaphor, he had combined the genius of others with his own thrift, accomplishing the alchemist's task of transforming paper into literary gold. In retrospect, his work must have satisfied Putnam, too, for the publisher called on Briggs fourteen years later to assist at the founding of the magazine's second series. At that time, Briggs looked back on Putnam's first series, and wrote:

The reason for Briggs's content, then, was his sense of having created something permanent, something with a life of its own; if he could not carry it on, he had the indubitable satisfaction of knowing that he would be remembered as its founder and first editor. In his comprehensive history of American magazines, Frank Luther Mott justified this confidence by calling Putnam's under Briggs “often brilliant and lively and always intelligent ... the first genuinely civilized magazine in America.”(45)

The editorship of Putnam's brought Briggs the reputation among men of letters that none of his earlier ventures had. As a result of his connection with Putnam, he contributed to two anthologies, the first of which he also edited: Homes of American Authors and Homes of American Statesmen. Moreover, he finally gained precious recognition from his fellow [page 276:] Nantucketers. In the despair that followed the death of his infant son in 1844, Briggs had written to a Nantucket cousin, Mrs. Martha Jenks, “I do not know if I have a reader in the Island .... I have no claims, to be sure, on the sympathies of anybody in the Island and I fear that I shall never be able to accomplish anything to make my townspeople overanxious to claim me for one of their brethren.”(46) By 1853, however, the fear had faded, and Briggs contributed two poems he had written in the early 1840's to a volume entitled Seaweeds from the Shores of Nantucket.(47) In one of his verses, he wrote that whenever he rhymed his birthplace would be his theme.

But one result of his editorship of Putnam's was to reinforce his position as a prominent New Yorker. Briggs had always expressed a sense of civic responsibility; now he extended his early commitment to public causes like the Art Union and Copyright Club, by undertaking a new position. He began to write the annual introductions for Trow's New York City Directory, a job he held for the next twenty-five years. In these unsigned prefaces, Briggs summarized all aspects of the city's growth, helping New Yorkers to achieve a necessary perspective on the rapid, if not always correct, development of their metropolis. Even more rewarding was his selection, in 1856, as one of a small [page 277:] group of prominent citizens whose mission it was to plan the development of Central Park.(48)

It was probably during this active period as editor and civic leader that J. C. Derby, a young man who worked for the publishing firm of Rudd and Carleton, admired Briggs from afar; Derby listed Briggs as one of the “brightest and most popular humorous men of the day,” along with Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, Thomas Bailey Aldrich and others, who frequented Carleton's bookstore and lunched at “Pfaff's celebrated German restaurant, in a Broadway basement near Bleecker Street, the rendezvous at that day of the so-called Bohemians.”(49) Now over fifty, Briggs had changed in appearance since he sat for William Page thirteen years earlier. His hair had become gray and thinner, and he had adopted long sideburns, a bushy Mark Twain mustache, and a short, rough goatee. But if the beard seemed to soften his thin face and jutting chin, the penetrating, appraising expression of his eyes was made fiercer by deep vertical furrows between them. He was clearly a man of whom the preceding decade had required purpose and sacrifice, more than pleasure and ease.

It must have been an extraordinary gathering, when [page 278:] Whitman, then a thirty-six-year-old free-lance newspaper writer joined the group of journalists at Pfaff's. Just the age Briggs had been when he wrote Harry Franco, Whitman was about to publish Leaves of Grass. Although meetings between the two men remain unrecorded, it is not difficult to Imagine the disdain Briggs must have felt for Whitman in 1855. He had good reason to despise Whitman's politics, for as a young editor, Whitman had been a regular Democrat, campaigning vigorously for Van Buren and Polk. His 1846-47 Daily Eagle editorials had fully supported Polk's imperialist Mexican War policy, and Whitman seemed to lack entirely Briggs's painful awareness of the relationship between democratic rhetoric and the urgency of land-grabbers and industrialists. There was a deep temperamental difference between Briggs and Whitman, the poet an intensely optimistic yea-sayer, and the novelist, an acute critic who held himself aloof enough to view the workings of American democracy dispassionately. It was the wholeness of Whitman's sympathy that enabled him, as Newton Arvin has Suggested, to ignore the less ideal aspects of the Civil War and of Lincoln — as Briggs never could — in the interests of a singing poetry, while Briggs was forced into unhappy silence, during the terrible war years. Although Whitman would later criticize presidential politics in the bitter terms Briggs had been employing for ten years, and in some of his poetry would respond to just those questions Briggs had asked in Putnam's, in 1855 the two men were not prepared for friendship. Briggs, if he noticed him at all [page 279:] in the winter and spring of 1855, probably found Whitman self-absorbed and naive, grossly inferior to his contemporary, Lowell. To Whitman, Briggs must have originally been a remote and relatively powerful figure, but after his displacement at Putnam's, only a curiously cynical maverick.

In 1855, between dinners and the Press Club, for which he often arranged the program, and jolly luncheons at Pfaff's, Briggs found time to characterize the life of a literary editor. He was writing about his own first editor, Lewis Gaylord Clark, of the Knickerbocker, in a testimonial volume. However, Briggs's piece, entitled “A Literary Martyrdom,” fit his own case as well as Clark's. The hero of the tale, Marvin Smilax, learns to his chagrin that the reputation and wealth that he had supposed would be his as a prominent editor, were more than outweighed by the drawbacks of his position. Though he called his office a “sanctum,” it was “open to the inroads of impertinent people.” His battles with sentiment-loving readers were equalled only by the importunities of would-be contributors. And the only place his autograph was required was on the back of a banknote. Marvin Smilax solves the problem by giving up his position and turning to importing dolls for a living: “The delusive idea of distinguishing himself by acting as a monthly nurse to other people's literary bantlings, and of elevating popular taste by any such means, was entirely dissipated.”(50) [page 280:]

Although Briggs left Putnam's by request, and not voluntarily, he must have given up the editorship with something like Marvin Smilax's sense of relief. However, if he gave of the difficult job of monthly midwife to works of more or less literary merit, he took on the no less arduous task of interpreting, not only books and authors, but political and social events. In 1855, at the most exciting moment of what has come to be known as the “American Renaissance,” Briggs set aside purely literary matters for the work of the daily press.

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