X.

Whether the newspapers will become the rivals of the magazines as the

vehicle of literature is a matter that still remains in doubt with the

careful observer, after a decade of the newspaper syndicate. Our daily

papers never had the habit of the feuilleton as those of the European

continent have it; they followed the English tradition in this, though

they departed from it in so many other things; and it was not till the

Sunday editions of the great dailies arose that there was any real hope

for the serial in the papers. I suspect that it was the vast demand

for material in their pages--twelve, eighteen, twenty-four,

thirty-six--that created the syndicate, for it was the necessity of the

Sunday edition not only to have material in abundance, but, with all

possible regard for quality, to have it cheap; and the syndicate, when

it came into being, imagined a means of meeting this want. It sold the

same material to as many newspapers as it could for simultaneous

publication in their Sunday editions, which had each its special field,

and did not compete with another.

I do not think the syndicate began with serials, and I do not think it

is likely to end with them. It has rather worked the vein of

interviews, personal adventure, popular science, useful information,

travel, sketches, and short stories. Still it has placed a good many

serial stories, and at pretty good prices, but not generally so good as

those the magazines pay the better sort of writers; for the worse sort

it has offered perhaps the best market they have had out of book form.

By the newspapers, the syndicate conceives, and perhaps justly, that

something sensational is desired; yet all the serial stories it has

placed cannot be called sensational. It has enlarged the field of

belles-lettres, certainly, but not permanently, I think, in the case of

the artistic novel. As yet the women, who form the largest, if not the

only cultivated class among us, have not taken very cordially to the

Sunday edition, except for its social gossip; they certainly do not go

to it for their fiction, and its fiction is mainly of the inferior sort

with which boys and men beguile their leisure.

In fact the newspapers prefer to remain newspapers, at least in quality

if not in form; and I heard a story the other day from a charming young

writer of his experience with them, which may have some instruction for

the magazines that less wisely aim to become newspapers. He said that

when he carried his work to the editors they struck out what he thought

the best of it, because it was what they called magaziny; not

contemptuously, but with an instinctive sense of what their readers

wanted of them, and did not want. It was apparent that they did not

want literary art, or even the appearance of it; they wanted their

effects primary; they wanted their emotions raw, or at least saignantes

from the joint of fact, and not prepared by the fancy or the taste.

The syndicate has no doubt advanced the prosperity of the short story

by increasing the demand for it. We Americans had already done pretty

well in that kind, for there was already a great demand for the short

story in the magazines; but the syndicate of Sunday editions

particularly cultivated it, and made it very paying. I have heard that

some short-story writers made the syndicate pay more for their wares

than they got from the magazines for them, considering that the

magazine publication could enhance their reputation, but the Sunday

edition could do nothing for it. They may have been right or not in

this; I will not undertake to say, but that was the business view of

the case with them.

In spite of the fact that short stories when gathered into a volume and

republished would not sell so well as a novel, the short story

flourished, and its success in the periodicals began to be felt in the

book trade: volumes of short stories suddenly began to sell. But now

again, it is said the bottom has dropped out, and they do not sell, and

their adversity in book form threatens to affect them in the magazines;

an editor told me the other day that he had more short stories than he

knew what to do with; and I was not offering him a short story of my

own, either.

A permanent decline in the market for a kind of literary art which we

have excelled in, or if we have not excelled, have done some of our

most exquisite work, would be a pity.

There are other sorts of light literature once greatly in demand, but

now apparently no longer desired by editors, who ought to know what

their readers desire. Among these is the travel sketch, to me a very

agreeable kind, and really to be regretted in its decline. There are

some reasons for its decline besides a change of taste in readers, and

a possible surfeit. Travel itself has become so universal that

everybody, in a manner, has been everywhere, and the foreign scene has

no longer the charm of strangeness. We do not think the Old World

either so romantic or so ridiculous as we used; and perhaps from an

instinctive perception of this altered mood writers no longer appeal to

our sentiment or our humor with sketches of outlandish people and

places. Of course this can hold true only in a general way; the thing

is still done, but not nearly so much done as formerly. When one

thinks of the long line of American writers who have greatly pleased in

this sort, and who even got their first fame in it, one must grieve to

see it obsolescent. Irving, Curtis, Bayard Taylor, Herman Melville,

Ross Browne, Ik Marvell, Longfellow, Lowell, Story, Mr. James, Mr.

Aldrich, Colonel Hay, Mr. Warner, Mrs. Hunt, Mr. C.W. Stoddard, Mark

Twain, and many others whose names will not come to me at the moment,

have in their several ways richly contributed to our pleasure in it;

but I cannot now fancy a young author finding favor with an editor in a

sketch of travel, or a study of foreign manners and customs; his work

would have to be of the most signal importance and brilliancy to

overcome the editor's feeling that the thing had been done already; and

I believe that a publisher if offered a book of such things, would look

at it askance, and plead the well-known quiet of the trade. Still, I

may be mistaken.

I am rather more confident about the decline of another literary

species, namely, the light essay. We have essays enough and to spare,

of certain soberer and severer sorts, such as grapple with problems and

deal with conditions; but the kind I mean, the slightly humorous,

gentle, refined, and humane kind, seems no longer to abound as it once

did. I do not know whether the editor discourages them, knowing his

readers' frame, or whether they do not offer themselves, but I seldom

find them in the magazines. I certainly do not believe that if anyone

were now to write essays such as Mr. Warner's "Backlog Studies," an

editor would refuse them; and perhaps nobody really writes them.

Nobody seems to write the sort that Colonel Higginson formerly

contributed to the periodicals, or such as Emerson wrote. Without a

great name behind it, I am afraid that a volume of essays would find

few buyers, even after the essays had made a public in the magazines.

There are, of course, instances to the contrary, but they are not so

many or so striking as to make me think that the essay could not be

offered as a good opening for business talent.

I suspect that good poetry by well-known hands was never better paid in

the magazines than it is now. I must say, too, that I think the

quality of the minor poetry of our day is better than that of

twenty-five or thirty years ago. I could name half a score of young

poets whose work from time to time gives me great pleasure, by the

reality of its feeling, and the delicate perfection of its art, but I

will not name them, for fear of passing over half a score of others

equally meritorious. We have certainly no reason to be discouraged,

whatever reason the poets themselves have to be so, and I do not think

that even in the short story our younger writers are doing better work

than they are doing in the slighter forms of verse. Yet the notion of

inviting business talent into this field would be as preposterous as

that of asking it to devote itself to the essay. What book of verse by

a recent poet, if we except some such peculiarly gifted poet as Mr.

Whitcomb Riley, has paid its expenses, not to speak of any profit to

the author? Of course, it would be rather more offensive and

ridiculous that it should do so than that any other form of literary

art should do so; and yet there is no more provision in our economic

system for the support of the poet apart from his poems, than there is

for the support of the novelist apart from his novel. One could not

make any more money by writing poetry than by writing history, but it

is a curious fact that while the historians have usually been rich men,

and able to afford the luxury of writing history, the poets have

usually been poor men, with no pecuniary justification in their

devotion to a calling which is so seldom an election.

To be sure, it can be said for them that it costs far less to set up

poet than to set up historian. There is no outlay for copying

documents, or visiting libraries, or buying books. In fact, except as

historian, the man of letters, in whatever walk, has not only none of

the expenses of other men of business, but none of the expenses of

other artists. He has no such outlay to make for materials, or models,

or studio rent as the painter or the sculptor has, and his income, such

as it is, is immediate. If he strikes the fancy of the editor with the

first thing he offers, as he very well may, it is as well with him as

with other men after long years of apprenticeship. Although he will

always be the better for an apprenticeship, and the longer

apprenticeship the better, he may practically need none at all. Such

are the strange conditions of his acceptance with the public, that he

may please better without it than with it. An author's first book is

too often not only his luckiest, but really his best; it has a

brightness that dies out under the school he puts himself to, but a

painter or sculptor is only the gainer by all the school he can give

himself.