∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
Chapter Four
The Broadway Journal: 1845
Briggs began to think seriously of starting a journal early in 1844; the first mention of it in his correspondence occurred in a letter of July 9, 1844, in which he reported to Lowell: “I am still brooding over my project of a weekly Mag, and nothing prevents the immediate undertaking but the want of a proper publisher.”(1) Throughout 1845 and 1844, however, he had fumed at the political bias of the Democratic Review and the editorial unreliability of the Knickerbocker; among the many magazines of the day-there were none that fully satisfied his standards of independence and intelligence. Moreover, Briggs felt that there was a need for a weekly critical review which would have an immediacy and flexibility lacked by established monthlies.
On December 7, 1844, Briggs wrote Lowell:
I have made arrangements for publishing the first number of my long-talked-of paper in January. It will be published by John Biscoe [sic], a shrewd Yankee from Worcester, who has been a schoolteacher in New Jersey and was once the publisher of the Knickerbocker. He is the right person, I think, and if I prove the right one to conduct it, of which I am by no means oversure, it will hold its head up.(2) [page 112:]
In choosing John Bisco as his publisher, Briggs traded on the former Knickerbocker's manager's familiarity with New York journalism; he thus insured a capable printer and reliable distributors. While he clearly intended his magazine to represent his individual synthesis of Whig and Democratic social and political goals, he wanted a publisher whose respectable background would create a favorable impression on potential advertisers.(3) A shrewd Yankee himself, Briggs hoped that the Knickerbocker's cachet would launch his magazine into paying circulation; he would then be free to speak his mind without coercion from financial backers. Briggs's choice of Bisco adumbrated an uneasy relationship with those radical Democrats and abolitionists to whom Knickerbocker Whiggery was anathema. Nonetheless, Briggs counted on friends like Lowell to understand and interpret his intentions. In a sanguine mood, he combined his own slim funds with those of Bisco and a printer, John Douglas, each to receive a third of the profits realized from advertisers and the three-dollar annual subscription rate.
When Briggs and Bisco issued a prospectus for the new magazine, the editor clearly indicated the kind of journal he planned. It would respect the idea of international copyright, even in the absence of such a law, by permitting only original matter into its pages: “Essays, [page 113:] Criticisms in Art and. Literature, Domestic and Foreign Correspondence, and Literary and Scientific Intelligence.” Moreover, it would present original illustrations and show an active civic concern for the design of public buildings. Because the editor and his publisher offered a “free channel” to writers, they hoped that their venture would stimulate “slumbering talent.” Finally, the prospectus, issued a few weeks before Volume I, Number 1 made its appearance on January 4, 1845, made a point of emphasizing that the Journal would “espouse the cause of no political party, but would hold itself free to condemn or approve any men or measures that a patriotic regard for the welfare of the country might dictate.”
The first number of the Broadway Journal began bravely with an epigraph from Locke: “Truth, whether in or out of fashion, is the measure of knowledge and the business of the understanding.” If this motto threatened the first number with a ponderous seriousness, Briggs countered it with a reference to one of his favorite writers: “There is but one way of coming into the world, says Dean Swift, although there are a great many ways of going out of it; and we wish there were but one way of coming before the public in a newspaper for the first time.”(4) Briggs chose to mark his Journal's birth with a full “Introductory,” in which he explained his choice of a [page 114:] name and character for the newborn. The name Broadway Journal represented the magazine's individuality, its indigenousness, and its spirit.
Broadway is confessedly the finest street in the first city of the New World. It is the great artery through which flows the best blood of our system. All the elegance of our continent permeates through it. If there is a handsome equipage set up, its first appearance is made in Broadway. The most elegant shops in the City line its sides; the finest buildings are found there, and all fashions exhibit their first gloss upon its sidewalks. Although it has a character of its own, the traveller often forgets himself walking through it, and imagines himself in London or Paris. Wall Street pouts its wealth into its broad channel and all the dealers in intellectual works are here centered; every exhibition of art is found here, and the largest caravanseries in the world border upon it. Its pavement has been trod by every distinguished man that has visited our continent; those who travel through it are refreshed by the most magnificent fountains in the world. It has a sunny side, too, where we have opened our office of delivery. It terminates at one end in the finest square in the city, doubtless in the Union, and at the other, in the Battery, unrivalled for its entire beauty by any marine parade in the world. So travellers say. For ourselves, we have seen many in the old world and the new, but none that equal it. As Paris is France, and London, England, so is Broadway, New York; and New York is fast becoming, if she be not already, America, in spite of South Carolina and Boston.
Moved to rare exuberance by the fascinating spectacle of the city and the hopeful prospects of his new magazine, Briggs thrust his superlatives before an audience still staggering from the dose of harsh social criticism administered [page 115:] by Charles Dickens and Harriet Martineau. Despite his sharp awareness of the human cost of wealth-gathering, Briggs, like Whitman, was sometimes exhilarated by the extraordinary results of American industry. His magazine's name was a tribute to the magnificence of American material progress, which, Briggs hoped, would somehow come to enlighten men morally. The only off-note was that he had to defy his Boston friends, James and Maria Lowell, who did not like the magazine's name. Briggs wrote firmly to Lowell, “You don’t like it, of course; but I do: and I am determined that one person at least shall be pleased in the business: Another is always entitled to the privilege of naming her first child.”(5) As the year wore on, however, it became clear that the choice of a name symbolized a costlier item in the Journal's budget than Briggs could afford to pay. He challenged South Carolinians and Bostonians to a confrontation by a third set of opinions. In his brief tenure as editor, Briggs was able to please neither such Bostonian abolitionists as Lowell, Robert Carter and the Garrisonians, not such Carolinian apologists for slavery as William Gilmore Simms. For the spirit of Broadway was not conciliatory, but cosmopolitan. The Broadway Journal quoted tans: “For our own part we think it a matter of precious little moment on which side of Mason and Dixon's line a man is born, if he is only a man, ‘for a’ that.’ ”(6) [page 116:]
By writing from what Maria Lowell defined scornfully as “the meridian of Broadway,” Briggs hoped to avoid the harshness of Boston's abolitionism.(7) He planned to gain a national readership, and thus keep a line of Northern influence open to the South. His Journal was to be anti-slavery, but it was not to be obtrusively or exclusively so; its anti-slavery attitude would appear, not as an isolated political program, but as a natural outgrowth of its hatred of all forms of social injustice.(8) Briggs's three novels and his magazine pieces had already demonstrated his awareness that a great city, while a showplace of wealth and elegance, could also be a theater of jarring inequalities. Fittingly enough for a first issue, however, the associations of Broadway are all positive; the editor, for once truly optimistic, foresaw his perseverance overcoming the “reasonable quantity of giants” that threatened his undertaking.
The Journal's primary aim was to promote the cause of an American literature. The British critic, Sydney Smith, had posed the taunting question, “Who reads an American book?” and Briggs and his contemporaries set themselves the task of answering it. Like all who value literature, Briggs knew the importance of preparing an audience receptive to genuine expression. In his first review, he [page 117:] permitted himself a long digression that showed that, above all, he labored to create that audience.
An American author is one of those rare creatures, who think more seriously of the welfare of others than of their own. He is prima facie a good fellow; and as a matter of course, an utterer of inspired thoughts; for having no inducements to exertion, he speaks because he must. He knows no law but the law of his own being, like the wind and the rain, the dew and the lightening. He is, because he is. There are no artificial stimulants to bring him out. No offers from booksellers; no demands from the public. His lightenings are produced by no machinery, but dart from the clouds of his imagination, because they will; they may not strike, nor dazzle always; but they flash of their own accord, without the aid of saltpetre or charcoal. Those who sit in his light think as little of his suffering, from which they derive their enjoyments, as we do of the leviathan that was slaughtered in Coromandel, to afford us the luxury of spermaceti.(9)
If the imagery of this statement makes a modern reader think first of Melville, who had just returned from the South Seas, it could as easily remind him of Hawthorne, who was living in obscurity after the publication of Twice-Told Tales, of Poe, whose compulsion to write was scantily rewarded by his audience, of Thoreau, who had quietly returned to Concord after an unnoticed stint as a tutor on Staten Island, or even of Briggs himself, whose seriousness had always been overlooked by his readers.
Appropriately, then, one of the most important features of the new magazine was a series called “American Prose Writers”; Briggs hoped that it would bring his neglected [page 118:] contemporaries to the attention of their literate, but uninformed, audience. Designed to redress the balance of publicity between English and American novelists and essayists, the series would show that the prose writers were more than equal to America's “much puffed poets.” “Prose Writers” continued with increasing success throughout the period in which Briggs was the sole editor of the Journal. If the first article, on William Alfred Jones, written by Evert Duyckinck, was disappointingly dull in its method and choice of subject, its inclusion did show that Briggs did not intend to exclude non-Whigs; he recognized that Democratic “Young America” would be his loyal ally on the subject of a national literature and copyright.(10) The series included, eventually, articles on N. P. Willis, John Waters (Henry Cary), and R. H. Dana; Briggs was always asking Dowell to write something on Hawthorne or Emerson. However, the idea soon succumbed to increasing pressure on the editor from Lowell and Poe, two men he still regarded as loyal friends.
The staple matter of the Broadway Journal, and the major forum for its editor's support of native writing, was the section devoted to reviews of books and magazines. In his criticism of popular magazines, Briggs hinted at his own editorial procedure. He required that the views of a magazine editor on important topics be clear to his readers. The personality of the editor should determine [page 119:] choice of contributors and subject matter, and he should acknowledge and take responsibility for his views. Briggs thus explained his major objection to the Democratic Review and its Whig counterpart, the American Review: they were party organs, and their editors, mere hacks in his opinion, inserted only such matter as political leaders would find unobjectionable. Godey's Lady's Book, Graham's Gentleman's Magazine, and the Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine also came in for regular scrutiny, but Briggs deployed their sameness. Sentimental fiction and fashion plates elicited a weary response from him.
In one of his regular columns of magazine reviewing, Briggs scanned an issue of Southern Quarterly Review; he wrote, “Any literary publication that narrows itself down to so small a compass as South Carolina prejudices, must, of course, be exceedingly narrow in its moral dimensions. But we do not find anything very exclusive in this number, excepting an article on Annexation — which, being written by an expressed admirer of Mr. Calhoun is, of course, strongly impregnated with the flavor of his prejudices.”(11) In attempting to calmly define and reject Southern Quarterly's political views, while appreciating its good qualities, Briggs gave a clear example of the objectivity his journal would attempt. In effect, it was another challenge thrust at South Carolina and Boston. The battle was still not joined, however, and Briggs continued to present his New York viewpoint. [page 120:]
The Broadway Journal divided monthly magazines into two groups: three-dollar, pink-covered, illustrated magazines, intended for men and women, fifty leaves in length, and published in Philadelphia; and five-dollar, blue or brown-covered New York magazines of one hundred unillustrated pages, intended for men.(12) Although its respect went predominantly to the New York variety, both types of production suffered from what Briggs called, in a later piece, “secrets of the Magazine Prison-House.” Under this foreboding title, he defines the place of the magazine in nineteenth-century American literature:
The want of an International Copyright Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from booksellers, in the way of remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews, which, with a pertinacity that does them credit, keep up in a certain or uncertain degree the good old saying, that even in the thankless field of letters, the laborer is worthy of his hire.(13)
The success of American magazines could not, he felt, be attributed to a large group of principled supporters; the “demagogue-ridden public” seemed to agree with its legislative representatives that “robbing the Literary Europe on the highway” was perfectly allowable. It seemed to have no sense that “a man has any right and title either to his own brains or the flimsy material that he chooses to spin out of them, like a confounded caterpillar as he is.” [page 121:]
However, Briggs claimed that the fact that some magazines did succeed while paying for original contributions was testimony to the fact that here and there a love of literature still survived among Americans. As Briggs repeated over and over, the “whole tendency” of his age was “magazineward”; the lack of livelihood in book publishing forced writers of talent into this medium, and they, in turn, made the magazines worth reading. He was correct in his analysis; those editors who, like Briggs, were devoted to publishing original work and paying for it, made an enormous contribution to a national literature; their reviews, the implicit criticism of their selectivity, and the literary milieu they established, shaped mid-nineteenth-century American literature.
As for book reviewing, in his Journal's second issue, Briggs set forth four “rules” for criticism, mocking the methods of his colleagues:
1) condemn an author on his first appearance;
2) condemn a young publisher unless he can serve you;
3) fall back on verbal or typographical errors, if you don’t know what to say;
4) condemn an author's book for not being what he never intended it to be, when you are determined to ‘toast” him out of envy.(14)
Briggs assured his readers that following these rules will [page 122:] accomplish the reviewer's primary aim, which is to enlarge his own reputation at the expense of the author's. Unlike those editors he and Poe criticized for cliquishness and “puffing,” Briggs used no such rules to guide his own reviewing. His methods were as various as his subjects, which ranged from the latest novel by G. P. R. James to Hints on the Reorganization of the Navy. With wide reading always evident in the comparisons within the reviews, he sometimes wrote a few words of praise or dispraise and then developed his views in a related essay; certain of his reviews characterized all or an author's production (like those of James and Dickens); others chose one aspect of a writer's work for treatment. All however, share the pungency of Briggs's wit, as in this comment on G. P. R. James's Agincourt. He asserted that James was not a writer but an industry; in producing Agincourt, he merely invented a new title for old material: “He has his regular customers, like an old established shop,” and will probably sell the good will when he dies I Because James showed no change or development, “his position in the literary world is as well defined as though he had been dead a century.” Finally, Briggs summed up the Englishman's entire production in a witty image: “The two ends of his stories seemed fastened together, and were continually revolving around a pivot, producing motion, but no increase.”(15) G. P. R. James was a favorite target of [page 123:] Briggs's criticism in The Adventures of Harry Franco; he appeared again The Trippings of Tom Pepper and in the Pinto letters.
Briggs's critical viewpoint was consistent throughout his career; his reviews, in the Journal and elsewhere, are usually identifiable because they relate in some way to one of his major interests. For example, in his treatment of James, he decried formula-writing and self-imitation. In his review of a volume called A Course of English Reading, he revised the author's dull outline to include Swift (“If there is any book in the English language sure of immortality, it is the Tale of a Tub.”) and Restoration drama.
Briggs did not succumb to empty praise even for a dear friend. In his criticism of Lowell's Conversations on the Old Poets, he put aside his partiality for the author to rebuke him for blatant abolitionism: “We see no need for an abolitionist to wear a badge, like one of Father Mathew's disciples, to let the world know what he once was.... It is an old saw that actions speak louder than words.”(16) Briggs's point was that it is unliterary and ungraceful to be doctrinaire; later in the year, rejecting one of Lowell's pieces on abolition, he would criticize the author's satire for bruising, rather than cutting. [page 124:]
The nature of satire was of growing interest to Briggs, as he developed his own brand of it. He remarked that in prose Americans have produced some successful examples of satire, but in verse, only subjects for it. He severely criticized the two best-known American verse satires, and concluded:
It seems to us, however, that we here in America have refused to encourage satire not because what satire we have had touches us too personally — but because what we have had has been too despicably namby-pamby to touch anybody at all.(17)
Determined, above all, not to be “namby-pamby,” Briggs attacked social abuses forthrightly in the Broadway Journal. Often he simply presented a picture of urban conditions: the little immigrant children, barefooted in winter, sweeping the street corners for pennies, while fat, prosperous lawyers hurry by in their high boots. He never failed to draw the notice of New Yorkers to the sharp disparities between the rich and poor, the elegant and slovenly. He openly derided the priorities of a city government that neglected the needs of the public:
While the people are literally dying in consequence or inhaling the unhealthy miasma of filthy streets, the party that has the power to purge the atmosphere and make the city a desirable residence, wastes all of its energies in forcing a certain part of the children under their charge to take their first lessons in reading out of particular books which are repugnant to the feelings of their parents.(18) [page 125:]
On the other hand, Briggs treated the scandalous behavior of an indiscreet bishop with gentle satire, reserving the full force of his disdain for reformers of all kinds. He reminded his readers of Swift's story of the fat man who complained of the crowd about him: “Reformers should reform themselves; like the fat man in the mob of whom Dean Swift speaks, they take up the room.”
If he disapproved of moral crusading, Briggs did not hesitate to use relentless criticism to fight nepotism and corruption in the American Navy. Like Melville, he knew conditions among seamen at first hand. Briggs asked his Journal's readers how sailors could help but be degraded by a system in which the chief director of the Navy “has never seen blue water and ... could not tell a cat-head from a bulkhead to save himself from perdition.” He referred sneeringly to Geroge Bancroft, Secretary of the Navy, as the “National Barber,” for Bancroft's decree that sailors must be clean-shaven. Briggs saw the wider implications of Bancroft's “hirsute tyranny”:
If Mr. Bancroft may compel the officers in the service to shave their faces, he may compel them to emasculate themselves in some other manner; he may next take it into his wise head to crop their ears or knock out their molars.(19)
The editor's aim was truest, however, when he wrote unpretentious little prose pieces like one called “The Devices of Beggary.” Satirizing the opinion of the well-to-do [page 126:] that “beggars go about from sheer wantonness, with crying infants in their arms, or with shrivelled limbs, on purpose to disturb the upper classes by exciting their sympathies,” he exposed the manner in which the prosperous protect themselves from responsibility for the innocent indigent. Noting to a passing well-fed lawyer that a beggar-boy's feet were the color of mahogany, Briggs's narrator sees that the man has insulated himself against pity. When the lawyer responds that he doesn’t like to “encourage roguery,” the narrator remarks under his breath, “very possible, seeing that you live by it.”(20) This slight tale demonstrates the distance between Briggs's methods and those of the abolitionists. While the latter intended to win their point by sheer moral force, Briggs was of another, more worldly persuasion; just as the narrator of the sketch persuades the fat lawyer to give some money to the boy by cleverly reminding him that “we all practice arts” (in this case, the frost-bitten feet that the lawyer regards as a roguish device), Briggs was not one to decline making practical progress through political means. The election of 1844, in which the abolitionists’ uncompromising rejection of Clay had been productive of a greater evil, was a case in point.
Briggs's Journal, as the “Introductory” stated, did not intend to follow Horace Greeley's example, and take up [page 127:] broad programs of reform. Briggs insisted on remaining a critic, an acute commentator. The editor had in mind an amelioration that would be more inclusive than those isolated by reform movements. Briggs claimed that his distaste for reformers had a historical and religious rationale. He asked Lowell, “If you were to look back on slave-holding Rome, would slavery strike you as the greatest sin of the people? Would you, to reform them, make a dead set upon any of their evil habits? Would you not rather do as Haul did, and preach to them of righteousness, temperance and a judgement to come?”(21) Although Briggs clearly felt that his vision was far more radical than his friend's, Lowell increasingly regarded his position as dictated by mere expedience.
The Broadway Journal, meanwhile, developed another weapon in its arsenal of clever comment. One of its most successful satirical devices were engravings. The ideas for the drawings originated with Briggs, and were executed under his direction. The first number of the Journal contained its version of the fashion-plate; satirizing the interest of Godey's and other magazines in women's apparel, the engraving presented the rear of a 1796 “lady of fashion.” The editor commented that monstrous consumption of fabric and unhealthily pinched waists were still characteristic of female dress. The lady, he remarked, had her back turned on the artist out of shame. [page 128:] Like Thoreau, Briggs had nothing but disgust for the nonutilitarian in architecture or clothing.
The second issue's engraving turned the editor's satire on his colleagues, a self-isolating device that was damaging to Briggs, but which he often found irresistible. “Mi Boy and the Brigadier” represented N. P. Willis and General Morris, co-editors of the New York Mirror. The men's physiques, their relationship with each other, and the double-entendre devotion to the Mirror, were illustrated by the portraits of bluff little Morris, posing with his sword and epaulettes, by the side of the tall, slender dandy, Willis, both gazing with supreme self-satisfaction on their images in a large gilt-framed mirror. Briggs's friends exulted at his “hit”; he himself thought the engraving a capital joke.
The guilty Bishop Onderdonk is represented in one of the Journal's engravings, suspended (literally, as well as by the action of his synod) over the city, astride a dragon that could represent either the “foul spirit of detraction” or the “unclean monster” that urged him to his deed. Briggs jokingly called him Pope Thunderdunk. The Broadway Journal's editor was too sophisticated to take a moralistic position; laughing at the Bishop's accusers as well as his defenders, he placed a sordid affair in its proper perspective.
The most striking of the engravings appeared in March, 1845, after annexation of Texas had been tentatively [page 129:] approved, by Congress. The drawing of a small, fat, exceedingly ugly creature, with an unpleasant leer and two small pointed horns, purported to be the “portrait of an annexationist.” Briggs's accompanying caption is worthy of being quoted, in view of his censure by the abolitionists:
It has not been for lack of interest or opinion that we have kept silent on the important subject of annexation. But seeing that the thing was determined upon, we saw no good in wasting our little space by fretting and fuming to no purpose. The deed has been done, and the whole country has been standing with open mouth ever since it was done, waiting to see how it would affect the various powers, — England, France and Mexico, but no intelligence has been had yet from either. There is one great power, however, a crowned head, of whom nobody seems to have had a thought, who has felt more interest in the matter than any other potentate, and from whom we have heard by mesmeric express. To him the news of the joint resolutions came like a cool wind in summer, bracing his nerves, and giving him a sensation of ineffable satisfaction. His imperial majesty, Satan the First, received the intelligence with unbounded and inexpressible delight, inexpressible at least in words. To give the public some idea of his content, our artist has furnished us with a fac simile of his serene highness ... though commonly of lean habit, it will be seen that he has grown fat upon it; his fancy is tickled to a point past bearing, with visions of prospective fields of carnage, of an extended area of —— Freedom; of battles by sea; of captives in prison; of broken-hearted widows; of weeping orphans; of national debts; of privateers; of pirates; of burning villages; sinking ships; heroes, chieftains; gold lace; epaulettes; cripples, drunkards, idlers, ruined cities, and innumerable other delights which he feels sure will follow on the heels of annexation.(22) [page 130:]
This piece was never cited when Briggs was indicted by his Bostonian friends for lack of appropriate fervor; its virtue resided in its acuteness as commentary, its sensitivity to the human consequences of political action, rather than its effectiveness as stirring rhetoric. If the “portrait of an annexationist” did not attempt to convert the South Carolinians, it certainly could leave no conceivable doubt in their minds that the editor was a committed foe of the extension of slavery.
The most pointedly personal of the Broadway Journal's engravings was directed against Briggs's fellow-journalist, Margaret Fuller, a woman for whom his acrimony was unabated throughout the 1840's. Titled “Engraving of a distinguished authoress,”(23) the editor described the thin, long-necked haughty-looking woman as recognizable by her Grecian nose and the “fine phrenzy” in her eye. He pretended to criticize his artist for making the chin rather shrewish, and the ink in the writer's well-stand too blue. He claimed that the lady, engaged in reading the Journal's criticism of her verses directed “To the Universe,” would be recognized the world over, “unless the acidity of her expression” disguised the likeness. Margaret Fuller, the Boston bluestocking, had come to New York as a reviewer for Horace Greeley's Tribune; her book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, issued early in 1845, aroused Briggs's dissent. [page 131:] The insulting engraving appeared in the March 8, 1845 issue of the Broadway Journal, the same issue that Briggs opened with his second long attack on Margaret Fuller's book.
Woman in the Nineteenth Century was first reviewed in the pages of the Broadway Journal on February 15, 1845, by a regular reviewer, the writer and abolitionist, Lydia Maria Child. Her work, always acceptable to Briggs (he later favorably contrasted one of her heroines to one of Margaret Fuller's “Glumdalclitches”), had appeared in the Journal from its inception; her function evidently was to secure the readership of anti-slavery Bostonians. Mrs. Child confined herself to saying of Miss Fuller's volume that “it earnestly and powerfully raises questions” of woman's mission and status. By March 1, Briggs had perused the volume. His first complaint was that Margaret Fuller's book was mistitled: “We Keep looking for women of the nineteenth century, but we find only a roster of female names.” Briggs felt that there were no rights nor wrongs that were exclusively women's. His major point in the first review was that a woman is unfulfilled unless she realizes her destiny as wife and mother. Whatever else she may accomplish in intellectual or physical endeavor, outside the circle of her home, he considered secondary. Briggs had only admiration for women like Maria Lowell and Lydia Child, whose accomplishments enabled them to emerge from pure domesticity; he reminded his readers, however, that women should not stand alone, in commanding [page 132:] positions. Margaret Fuller had asserted that “The idea of woman must be represented by a virgin”; Briggs countered that the woman who is sexually unfulfilled “sees things through a false medium; ... her nature is distorted and unnatural.” His perfect woman was Eloisa, whose guiding forces were love and loyalty, rather than self-assertiveness and independence. Briggs's theory aroused vehement disagreement among the liberals of the day. The abolitionists, one of whose programs called for female suffrage, were outraged at what they deemed the editor's conservatism. Briggs's necessarily oblique manner of stating the sexual basis for the difference between men and women made his position seem stodgier than it was. He correctly claimed that his critics, among the most vociferous of whom were the Lowells,(24) failed to understand him. They felt that Briggs was trying to pour the different spirits and talents of women into one mold; he countered that women who had to play men's roles were unfortunates.
Urged by all the disagreement into continuing his review in the next number of the Journal,(25) Briggs emphasized the physical basis for his distinction between the sexes:
The well-being of the body is the great end of all moral teaching. ... It is the too frequent way with moral philosophers and religious teachers to exalt the dignity of the soul, by treating its habitation, the body, with neglect. [page 133:]
However valid Briggs's insistence on the physical fulfillment of woman was, he teetered toward reaction in opposing female suffrage. Unaccountably, he stated that such a privilege is one they could not properly exercise if it were permitted. Returning to Margaret Fuller's book, he made a just comment on her work: “Miss Fuller writes vigorously but womanly; she has gathered together the materials for a very profitable book, but they are so loosely arranged, and so pervaded with threads of error, that as a whole we doubt whether the work will be productive of much either of good or evil.” Predicting correctly that one good result of her authorship of the book would be an increase in her reputation, Briggs regrettably could not envison Margaret Fuller's metamorphosis into wife and mother, in Italy. In his final mention of her volume, in the March 22 Journal, he made his harshest remarks by implying her ignorance of the true role of woman: “no unmarried woman has any right to say anything on the subject.”
The Broadway Journal's stand on “the vexed question of woman” had the effect of further alienating liberal abolitionist readership. Briggs seemed, perversely, to be always standing against them, while protesting that he was misunderstood. To Sydney Howard Cray's wife, with whom he was on the most pleasant of terms, the editor wrote a long earnest letter expressing hia bitterness [page 134:] at the reception of his views on women:
I have delved and patiently sought out what I have got, and it is not pleasant to me, after working and toiling after a lump of gold, when I fancy I have got the precious metal, to have people object to the smuttiness of my hands and prefer the polished brass which is proferred by more delicate fingers.(26)
If Briggs's persistence in commenting on physical realities rather than on spiritual matters earned him a reputation for dirty hands, that did not stop him from continuing to use his Journal as a forum for his views, however unpopular they might be with a significant group of his readers.
Having succeeded in alienating both pirating publishers and advocates of “Young America,”(27) abolitionists and slaveholders, his fellow magazinists, suffragettes, wealthy lawyers, and city officials, Briggs also turned a sharp eye on popular taste in art and architecture. Lowell wrote, after the second number of the Journal had appeared, that he recognized an article as authored by Briggs “chiefly from the snub which ‘The Gothic’ ” receives in it.(28) By 1845, Briggs had already established his aversion to sterile imitation of past styles; he particularly loathed the pseudo-Gothic structures springing up all over the city. “Any structure of the so-called Gothic order,” he wrote of Trinity Church, “must, of [page 135:] necessity, be an incongruous work, unless it be an exact copy, and then it must be unfit.”(29) Imitation of the Gothic was discordant in Briggs's New York, because the style contributed in no way to the social function of the building. As an example of its meaninglessness, Briggs told of four churches of different denominations then in the process of erection in Brooklyn. The identical Gothic facades could not claim to have any “affinity with the religion whose outside expression they have endeavored to copy.” Briggs's overriding principle in his discussion of architecture and ornament was “where use is exiled, beauty scorns to dwell.”(30) Wall Street was a prime example for the ex-merchant. The street was overwhelmed by a mixture of inappropriate styles; the worst and most costly mistakes were the Custom House and the Exchange, These, Briggs noted ruefully, “will doubtless stand forever, monuments of the inefficiency of mere money to produce anything great in art without the assistance of knowledge or genius.”(31) Poorly proportioned granite and marble heaps, the buildings seemed “to weigh upon the mind like a nightmare.”
The craze for the Gothic was not limited to public [page 136:] buildings but had spread to private homes, creating the ridiculous conglomeration Briggs described as follows a cottage with a red-brick front, Grecian doorway, green outdoor Venetians, and Gothic transparencies! A genuinely contemporary style did not exist in his time, Briggs felt; one had to look for such a style, he asserted, “in the uncontaminated period of a nation's existence, and if we entertain the hope of producing a great architect on our continent, we must look for him in our backwoods .... Art does not produce art. Rude nature has always produced the best artists.”(32) To a ‘nation of upstarts,” he continued, a little learning was proverbially dangerous:
A barbarian and an ignoramus will consult only their own wants, and with the same disregard for precept and example which the beaver and oriole manifest ... but the half-enlightened Christan, who was born in a log hut, and has made his fortune in a narrow brick store, in the peaceful occupation of selling drugs or ten-penny nails, is troubled with ambitious longings after the way of life which some chivalrous robber led.
Briggs approved the style of old Dutch stone farmhouses contracted with local materials, and formed to the features of the climate. In a review of a volume on rural architecture, he criticized its authors complaint that contemporary homes were replete with solecisms. In a paragraph that explained his pragmatic viewpoint clearly, Briggs wrote that the solecisms in these eclectic homes [page 137:] were their “only redeeming points”;
They are evidences that the minds of the people are not wholly prostrated by foreign example. Windows of any kind, Gothic windows not peculiarly so, are sufficiently incongruous in a Grecian temple, but it is better to commit a solecism in taste than to sit in the dark, and if nothing short of green Venetian blinds can render an English cottage endurable in our scorching summers, it Would be better to pain an architect by their adoption than to be roasted or parboiled by leaving them off for the sake of avoiding a solecism. The solecism would be more easily borne than the solstice.
Use and appropriateness, then, took precedence, in his view, over a decadent ideal of beauty. It was not the style of medieval Gothic cathedrals for which Briggs expressed dislike; that style was created by architects who sought to convey the aspiration of the human spirit. It was his admiration for their creative act, Briggs insisted, that caused him to demand that contemporary architects cease debasing it.
From the artist as well as the architect, Briggs demanded the expression of an original vision. In reviewing a volume called Letters from a Landscape Painter, Briggs rebuked the author for claiming that an artist must seek to express “ideal perfection.” He wrote, on the other hand, that “the only thing to be aimed at, in giving a copy of a man's face, is truth; any departure from the exact lineaments of a man's countenance must cause a false impression of his character.”(33) A man's [page 138:] appearance is expressive of his inner self just as the appearance of a place is expressive of its quality. Briggs objected as vociferously to the idealization of his own features as he did to softening the harshness of Nantucket's aspect. In the May 3 issue of the Broadway Journal, he reprimanded the artists of New York for failing to present an accurate portrait of their bay and its traffic; “Of all the painters in the world,” he went on, “a New Yorker is the least excusable for libelling water.” Briggs's continuing criticism of public buildings and paintings in the pages of the Journal did not make his magazine any more welcome to those whose vested interests and reputations he was damaging.
Briggs's contributions to the Journal were not limited to editorial commentary. As a writer of fiction, he contributed several characteristic tales to the Journal at wide intervals. In the first of these, “The False Ringlet,” published in the third number, Briggs illustrated his favorite theme, the disparity between appearance and reality. A young Englishman, who marries an American girl for the sake of the adorable ringlet that hangs down her neck, recovers from his passion after discovering that the ringlet was not an organic part of his love, but a false appendage. The discovery is symbolic of the fact that she also misrepresented herself on more fundamental grounds. Disencumbered of his wife by her elopement with [page 139:] another, the young man is asked by an unsuspecting friend if he is as happy as he had been in the early days of his courtship; “replied the wifeless husband, ‘Then I thought I was happy — now I know that I am.’ ”(34)
“A Commission of Lunacy” is a more serious piece of work, but informed by the same spirit of ironic skepticism. It begins dramatically at the scene of a trial called to judge a man's sanity. The defendant, turning to the jurors, warns them, “Be careful, gentlemen, how you pronounce me mad, lest tomorrow I be called to pronounce you so.”(35) The narrator, a juror, falls asleep during the deliberations; during the dream sequence that follows, the manner in which society can judge of sanity or insanity, turning dissent into madness and treason, is explored. The juror at first dreams of a young man consigned to the madhouse for several offenses — wearing a beard, dressing as a peasant, marrying beneath his circle. Briggs then turned to the distortion of dreams as a technique; as he is led away, the young man metamorphoses into an older, graver, man, with even more unorthodox beliefs and manners. He had been heard pitying slaves and convicts, and had been guilty of sharing his food with the hungry. Suddenly the stand is occupied by many men and women, whom Briggs enumerates in the manner of a Whitmanesque catalogue; [page 140:] they range from the honest Wall Street broker to the modest poet. Among the other oddities are principled lawyers, democratic marine lieutenants, editors who never call names, artists who paint from nature, authors who are not jealous, critics who doubt their infallibility. Awaking with a start, the troubled juror decides to pronounce the defendant sane, fearing to establish a precedent by which he himself may be judged mad someday. This story was a favorite among the abolitionists, who understood the power of organized society to imposed its vision of right and wrong, sanity and insanity, to deprive dissenters of civil liberties; the piece was chosen to appear in the abolitionists’ anthology, Voices of the True-Hearted, and is one of Briggs's most effective tales. It has some of the force of Hawthorne's The Minister's Black Veil, or Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener; it might, indeed, be read as commentary on those profounder and more artful studies of human isolation.
The third of Briggs's tales to appear in the Broadway Journal was entitled “The Grateful Clerk, A Tale Founded on Facts.”(36) This is the story that Poe damned with faint praise in the “Literati” papers, under the doubtless purposely mistaken title, “Dobbs and his Cantaloupe.” Its anti-hero, a fabric salesman named Hubs, finally blunders into marriage. A strange, withdrawn man, with little vitality, he soon feels a trifle disappointed; [page 141:] “not that the matrimonial state was not all that he anticipated, but it proved to be a vast deal more.” By degrees his affection turns from his self-involved, nagging wife, to his employer, for whose generosity he feels grateful. Determined to please the palate of Mr. Hinks, who is excessively devoted to cantaloupes, Hubs turns to horticulture. As his marriage has failed to produce offspring, it soon becomes the passion of his life to produce a fine fruit to present to his employer. As in his other endeavors, chance and the malevolence of others repeatedly destroy his work, although he keeps trying. The effort lends meaning to his life:
The trees in the Park, the flowers in street windows, the vegetables in the market, and the fruit on the street stalls, all attracted his attention, not as things of traffic or of nourishment, but as organized existences obeying the laws of their own being.
The outcome is humiliating disaster, for after producing a fine-looking fruit, he brings his employer home to partake of it only to discover that, through trickery, he has nurtured, not a cantaloupe but a Valparaiso pumpkin. Briggs presents a witty picture of a drab existence; even when enlivened by a modest hope, bad luck and humorlessness prevail in it. Briggs himself raised huge pumpkins in his fruit and vegetable garden on Staten Island; moreover, Hubs is similar in character and in the tone of his existence to Jeremiah, the poor but loyal clerk in The Haunted Merchant. Without making an unwarranted and simplistic equation, one can note that in those two [page 142:] characters whose lives were so bound up in failure, Briggs put intimate traces of himself. Hubs's real satisfaction came from his gardening, just as Jeremiah's serenity thrived in a cottage modeled on Briggs's Willowbrook. A reader familiar with Briggs's sense of his inability to equal his ambitions, with his disappointment in his own fiction, with his unhappiness in his childlessness, with his remark to Lowell about his “luck,” cannot help but feel that he presented in Jeremiah and Hubs a kind of ironic self-caricature. A man able to mock himself, Briggs, unlike Clark, Mathews, Duyckinck and Poe, always saves himself from appearing ridiculous.
The Broadway Journal had other voices of talent to display besides that bf its editor. Briggs received critical pieces from Evert Duyckinck and William Alfred Jones. Maria and James Lowell were generous with poems and reviews, at least during the first two or three months of the Journal's existence. Robert Carter, Lowell's co-editor in the short-lived Pioneer venture, wrote allegories for the Broadway Journal, and Lydia Maria Child was a frequent reviewer. Briggs highly prized William Page's series of articles on the use of color in painting. For the most part, however, the fourteen-page weekly was filled largely by the pen of its editor. From the start Briggs needed help, claiming, without explanation of any kind, that he was liable to be “called off the business” [page 143:] of the magazine at any time.(37)
Introduced to Poe in December, 1844, by a highly flattering letter from Lowell, Briggs thought he had found the man he needed. Poe had extensive editorial experience and knew how to ingratiate himself. He was merely a contributor at first, but soon persuaded Briggs, who was very much impressed by him, that publishing his name as editor would attract a larger readership. In the March 8 number, Poe's name appeared with Briggs and that of the music critic, Henry Watson. Briggs's contract with Bisco was rewritten, and the publisher drew up a new agreement with Poe. It read,
Edgar A. Poe agrees to assist Charles Frederick Briggs in the editorship of the Broadway Journal, to allow his name to be published as one of the Editors of said paper, to supply each and every week, original matter to the amount of, at least, one page of said paper, and to give his faithful superintendence to the general conduct of the same; but should the said Poe break the agreement by neglecting any of the duties of assistant editor of said paper then he shall forfeit all claim to any part of the profits of said paper.(38) [page 144:]
Poe began his takeover in a small way, by increasing the number of his reviews and other contributions. It wasn’t long, however, before he was able to cloud the Journal's original image. During its first two-and-a-half months, the magazine was at its best as a review and social commentary. The flavor of Briggs's independence penetrated every piece. If the paper had a failing, it was that it had not succeeded, as the prospectus had suggested, in awakening “slumbering talent.” The Journal would have benefitted by having more distinguished contributors. The clearest measure of its failure is that Thoreau, who lived with the William Emersons on Staten Island during 1843, looking for an appropriate outlet for his work, did not find his way into its pages, nor did Hawthorne, another New Englander whose work Briggs often admired publicly, but whose indifference he never personally penetrated. Poe's tales and poems more than filled the gap left by the Lowells, but soon his determination to monopolize the weekly became apparent.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 112:]
1. Briggs to Lowell, July 9, 1844, Page Papers. Even earlier Briggs had spoken freely about his plans; in a letter from Evert Duyckinck to W. A. Jones of Oct. l, 1845, Briggs's plans for a magazine are noted (Duyckinck Collection).
2. Briggs to Lowell, December 7, 1844, Page Papers.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 112:]
3. Bisco, whose business address was 153 Broadway, does not appear in any of the biographical dictionaries, nor have I located a publishers’ directory that furnished any information about him. The fullest mention of him appears in A. H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe. A Critical Biography (New York, 1941), p. 151. Quinn reprints the contract between Bisco and Poe, but not the original.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 112:]
4. “Introductory,” the Broadway Journal, I (January 4, 1845), 1.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 115:]
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 116:]
7. Identifying the abolitionist stand with the city of Boston is an oversimplification. However, the militant Garrisonians were at their strongest there, and Briggs, in his letters, identifies his antagonists as the Bostonians.
8. Historians distinguish between anti-slavery sentiment and the abolitionist stand. Briggs, in his willingness to wait for Henry Clay's prudent moment” took the anti-slavery position.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 117:]
9. For his first review, Briggs chose an interesting volume of stories and poems written by the women cotton mill workers in Lowell, Mass. It was called Mind Among the Spindles. Broadway Journal, I (Jan. 4, 1845), 1.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 118:]
10. “American Prose Writers,” Broadway Journal, I (Jan. 4, 1845), 2.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 119:]
11. Broadway Journal, I (Jan. 25, 1845), 61.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 120:]
12. Broadway Journal, I (Feb. 8, 1845).
13. “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House,” Broadway Journal, I (Feb. 15, 1845), 7.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 121:]
14. “Four Rules for Criticism,” Broadway Journal, I (Jan. 11, 1845), 2.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 122:]
15. “Agincourt,” Broadway Journal, I (Jan. 11, 1845), 2.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 123:]
16. Broadway Journal, I (Jan. 18, 1845), 35.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 124:]
17. “Satirical Poems,” Broadway Journal, I (March 15, 1845), 155.
18. “The Sanitary Conditions of the Laboring Population of New York,” Broadway Journal, I (Feb. 20, 1845), 113.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 125:]
19. “The National Barber,” Broadway Journal, I (May, 10, 1845), 315.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 126:]
20. “The Devices of Beggary,” Broadway Journal, I (Feb. l, 1845), 72.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 127:]
21. Briggs to Lowell, March 19, 1845, Page Papers.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 129:]
22. “Portrait of an Annexationist,” Broadway Journal, I (March 29, 1845), 200.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of pate 130:]
23. Broadway Journal, I (March 8, 1845), 153.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom fo page 131:]
24. Ironically, much of Briggs's antagonism for Margaret Fuller sprang from her preference for the poetry of Cornelius Mathews over that of Lowell.
25. Broadway Journal, I (March 8, 1845), 145.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 134:]
26. Briggs to Elizabeth Neall Gay, unpublished letter dated Sept. 6, 1847, deposited in the Gay collection, Columbia University.
27. Briggs sketched Mathews and Duyckinck in a short satire on American writers.
28. Lowell to Briggs, Jan. 16, 1845, Houghton Library.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 135:]
29. Letter on Trinity Church,” Broadway Journal, I (Jan. 18, 1845), 41.
30. “Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume,” Broadway Journal, I (March 8, 1845), 146.
31. Broadway Journal, I (Feb. 1, 1845), 76.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 136:]
32. “Rural Architecture,” Broadway Journal, I (April 15, 1845), 215.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 137:]
32. “Letters from a Landscape Painter,” Broadway Journal, I (February 15, 1845), 99.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 139:]
34. Harry Franco, “The False Ringlet,” Broadway Journal, I (Jan. 18, 1845), 42.
35. Harry Franco, “A Commission of Lunacy,” Broadway Journal, I (March 29, 1845), 198.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 140:]
36. “The Grateful Clerk, A Tale Founded on Facts,” Broadway Journal, I (May 3, 1845), 279 ff.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 143:]
37. Briggs to Lowell, March 8, 1845, Page Papers. “It was requisite that I should have ... some other person's assistance on account of my liability to be taken off the business of the paper.” Evidently Briggs had some other employment, but whether it was mercantile or another editing job — perhaps writing for the Mirror — he never mentioned. Certainly no other activity of 1845 had the importance of the Journal for him.
38. Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, A Critical Biography (New York, 1841), 151.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
Notes:
None.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
[S:0 - CFB68, 1968] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Charles Frederick Briggs (Weidman)