the reasons for the appearance of such a dominating medium in a
comparatively unliterary country is relevant to the discussion to
follow. The magazine of those days was vigorous. It was vigorous
because, unlike other American publications, it was not oppressed
by competition. Until the laws of international copyright were
completed, the latest novels of the Victorians, then at their
prime, could be rushed from a steamer, and distributed in editions
which were cheap because no royalties had to be paid. Thackeray
and Dickens could be sold at a discount, where American authors of
less reputation had to meet full charges. And the like was true of
poetry. But the magazine, like the newspaper, was not
international; it was national at least in its entirety, and for
it British periodicals could not be substituted. Furthermore, it
could, and did, especially in its earlier years, steal
unmercifully from England, so that a subscriber got both homebrew
and imported for a single payment. Thus the magazine flourished in
the mid-century while the American novel declined.
A notable instance of this vigor was the effect of the growing
magazine upon the infant short story. Our American magazine made
the development of the American short story possible by creating a
need for good short fiction. The rise of our short story, after a
transitional period when the earliest periodicals and the
illustrated Annuals sought good short stories and could not get
them, coincides with the rise of the family magazine. It was such
a demand that called forth the powers in prose of the poet, Poe.
And as our magazine has become the best of its kind, so in the
short story, and in the short story alone, does American
literature rival the more fecund literatures of England and
Europe.
That a strong and native tendency made the American magazine is
indicated by the effect of our atmosphere upon the periodical
which the English have always called a review. Import that form,
as was done for _The North American_, _The Atlantic Monthly_, _The
Forum_, or _The Yale Review_, and immediately the new American
periodical begins to be a little more of a magazine, a little more
miscellaneous in its content, a little less of a critical survey.
Critical articles give place to memoirs and sketches, fiction or near
fiction creeps in. There is always a tendency to lose type and be
absorbed into the form that the mid-century had made so successful: a
periodical, handsomely illustrated, with much fiction, some
description, a little serious comment on affairs written for the
general reader, occasional poetry, and enough humor to guarantee
diversion. This is our national medium for literary expression--an
admirable medium for a nation of long-distance commuters. And it is
this "family magazine" I wish to discuss in its literary aspects.
The dominance of the family magazine as a purveyor of general
literature in America has continued, but in our own time the
species (like other strong organisms) has divided into two genres,
which are more different than, on the surface, they appear. The
illustrated _literary magazine_ (the family magazine _par
excellence_) must now be differentiated from the illustrated
_journalistic_ magazine, but both are as American in origin
as the review and the critical weekly are English.
It was the native vigor of the family magazine that led to the
Great Divergence of the 'nineties, which older readers will
remember well. The literary historian of that period usually gives
a different explanation. He is accustomed to say that the old-time
"quality" magazines, _Harper's_, _Scribner's_, and the rest, were
growing moribund when, by an effort of editorial genius, Mr. McClure
created a new and rebellious type of magazine, which was rapidly
imitated. We called it, as I remember, for want of a better title, the
fifteen-cent magazine. In the wake of _McClure's_, came _Collier's_,
_The Saturday Evening Post_, _The Ladies Home Journal_, and all the
long and profitable train which adapted the McClurean discovery to
special needs and circumstances.
I do not believe that this is a true statement of what happened in
the fruitful 'nineties. _McClure's_ was not, speaking biologically, a
new species at all; it was only a mutation in which the recessive
traits of the old magazine became dominant while the invaluable type
was preserved. To speak more plainly, the literary magazine, as
America knew it, had always printed news, matured news, often stale
news, but still journalism. Read any number of _Harper's_ in the
'seventies for proof. And, _pari passu_, American journalism was
eagerly trying to discover some outlet for its finer products, a
medium where good pictures, sober afterthoughts, and the finish that
comes from careful writing were possible. _Harper's Weekly_ in Civil
War days, and later, was its creation.
And now it was happily discovered that the family magazine had a
potential popularity far greater than its limited circulation.
With its month-long period of incubation, its elastic form, in
which story, special article, poetry, picture, humor, could all be
harmoniously combined, only a redistribution of emphasis was
necessary in order to make broader its appeal. Mr. McClure
journalized the family magazine. He introduced financial and
economic news in the form of sensational investigations, he bid
for stories more lively, more immediate in their interest, more
journalistic than we were accustomed to read (Kipling's journalistic
stories for example, were first published in America in _McClure's_).
He accepted pictures in which certainty of hitting the public eye was
substituted for a guarantee of art. And yet, with a month to prepare
his number, and only twelve issues a year, he could pay for
excellence, and insure it, as no newspaper had ever been able to do.
And he was freed from the incubus of "local news" and day-by-day
reports. In brief, under his midwifery, the literary magazine gave
birth to a super-newspaper.
Needless to say, the great increase in the number of American
readers and the corresponding decline in the average intelligence
and discrimination of the reading public had much to do with the
success of the journalistic magazine. Yet it may be stated, with
equal truth, that the rapid advance in the average intelligence of
the American public as a whole made a market for a super-newspaper
in which nothing was hurried and everything well done. The
contributions to literature through this new journalism have been
at least as great during the period of its existence as from the
"quality" magazine, the contributions toward the support of
American authors much greater. Like all good journalism, it has
included real literature when it could get and "get away with it."
Birth, however, in the literary as in the animal world, is
exhausting and often leaves the parent in a debility which may
lead to death. The periodical essay of the eighteenth century bore
the novel of character, and died; the Gothic tale of a later date
perished of the short story to which it gave its heart blood. The
family magazine of the literary order has been debile, so radical
critics charge, since its journalistic offspring began to sweep
America. Shall it die?
By no means. An America without the illustrated literary magazine,
dignified, respectable, certain to contain something that a reader
of taste can peruse with pleasure, would be an unfamiliar America.
And it would be a barer America. In spite of our brood of special
magazines for the _literati_ and the advanced, which Mr. Ford
Madox Hueffer praises so warmly, we are not so well provided with
the distributive machinery for a national culture as to flout a
recognized agency with a gesture and a sneer. But the family
magazine has undeniably lost its vigorous appeal, and must be
reinvigorated. The malady is due to no slackening of literary
virility in the country; indeed there has probably not been so
much literary energy in the country since the 'forties as now--not
nearly so much. Nor is it due to a lack of good readers. Nor, in
my opinion, to the competition of the journalistic magazine. The
literary magazine does not compete, or at least ought not to
compete, with its offspring, for it appeals either to a different
audience or to different tastes.
Roughly stated, the trouble is that the public for these excellent
magazines has changed, and they have not. Their public always was,
and is, the so-called "refined" home public. Homes have changed,
especially "refined" homes, and a new home means a new public.
The refined home nowadays has been to college. (There are a
million college graduates now in the United States.) Forty years
ago only scattered members had gone beyond the school. I do not
propose to exaggerate the influence upon intelligence of a college
education. It is possible, nay, it is common, to go through
college and come out in any real sense uneducated. But it is not
possible to pass through college, even as a professional amateur
in athletics or as an inveterate flapper, without rubbing off the
insulation here and there, without knowing what thought is
stirring, what emotions are poignant, what ideas are dominant
among the fraction of humanity that leads us. Refined homes may
not be better or happier than they used to be, but if they are
intellectual at all, they are more vigorously intellectual.
This means at the simplest that home readers of the kind I have
been describing want stimulating food, not what our grandfathers
used to call "slops." Sometimes they feed exclusively upon highly
spiced journalism, but if they are literary in their tastes they
will be less content with merely literary stories, with articles
that are too solid to be good journalism, yet too popular to be
profound, less content, in short, with dignity as a substitute for
force.
What should be done about it specifically is a question for
editors to answer. But this may be said. If the old literary
omnibus is to continue, as it deserves, to hold the center of the
roadway, then it must be driven with some vigor of the intellect
to match the vigor of news which has carried its cheaper
contemporary fast and far. By definition it cannot embrace a cause
or a thesis, like the weeklies, and thank Heaven for that! It is
clearly unsafe to stand upon mere dignity, respectability, or
cost. That way lies decadence--such as overcame the old
Quarterlies, the Annuals, and the periodical essayists. Vigor it
must get, of a kind naturally belonging to its species, not
violent, not raucous, not premature. It must recapture its public,
and this is especially the "old American" (which does _not_
mean the Anglo-Saxon) element in our mingled nation.
These old Americans are not moribund by any means, and it is
ridiculous to suppose, as some recent importations in criticism
do, that a merely respectable magazine will represent them. A good
many of them, to be sure, regard magazines as table decorations,
and for such a clientele some one some day will publish a monthly
so ornamental that it will be unnecessary to read it in order to
share its beneficent influences. The remainder are intellectualized,
and many of them are emancipated from the conventions of the last
generation, if not from those of their own. These demand a new
vitality of brain, emotion, and spirit in their literary magazine, and
it must be given to them.
No better proof of all this could be sought than the renaissance
in our own times of the reviews and the weeklies, probably the
most remarkable phenomenon in the history of American publishing
since the birth of yellow journalism. By the weeklies I do not
mean journals like _The Outlook_, _The Independent_, _Vanity Fair_,
which are merely special varieties of the typically American magazine.
I refer, of course, to _The New Republic_, _The Nation_, _The
Freeman_, _The Weekly Review_ in its original form, periodicals formed
upon an old English model, devoted to the spreading of opinion, and
consecrated to the propagation of intelligence. The success of
these weeklies has been out of proportion to their circulation.
Like the old _Nation_, which in a less specialized form was
their predecessor, they have distinctly affected American
thinking, and may yet affect our action in politics, education,
and social relations generally. They are pioneers, with the faults
of intellectual pioneers, over-seriousness, over-emphasis,
dogmatism, and intolerance. Yet it may be said fairly that their
chief duty, as with the editorial pages of newspapers, is to be
consistently partisan. At least they have proved that the American
will take thinking when he can get it. And by inference, one
assumes that he will take strong feeling and vigorous truth in his
literary magazines.
The reviews also show how the wind is blowing. The review, so-
called, is a periodical presenting articles of some length, and
usually critical in character, upon the political, social, and
literary problems of the day. The distinction of the review is
that its sober form and not too frequent appearance enable it to
give matured opinion with space enough to develop it.
Clearly a successful review must depend upon a clientele with time
and inclination to be seriously interested in discussion, and that
is why the review, until recently, has best flourished in England
where it was the organ of a governing class. In America, an
intellectual class who felt themselves politically and socially
responsible, has been harder to discover. We had one in the early
days of the Republic, when _The North American Review_ was founded. It
is noteworthy that we are developing another now and have seen _The
Yale Review_, the late lamented _Unpartisan Review_, and others join
_The North American_, fringed, so to speak, by magazines of excerpt
(of which much might be written), such as _The Review of Reviews_,
_Current Opinion_, and _The Literary Digest_, in which the function
of the review is discharged for the great community that insists
upon reading hastily.
The review has come to its own with the war and reconstruction;
which, considering its handicaps, is another argument that the
family magazine should heed the sharpening of the American
intellect. But, except for the strongest members of the family, it
is still struggling, and still dependent for long life upon
cheapness of production rather than breadth of appeal.
The difficulty is not so much with the readers as the writers. The
review must largely depend upon the specialist writer (who alone
has the equipment for specialist writing), and the American
specialist cannot usually write well enough to command general
intelligent attention. This is particularly noticeable in the
minor reviews where contributions are not paid for and most of the
writing is, in a sense, amateur, but it holds good in the
magazines and the national reviews also. The specialist knows his
politics, his biology, or his finance as well as his English or
French contemporary, but he cannot digest his subject into words
--he can think into it, but not out of it, and so cannot write
acceptably for publication. Hence in science particularly, but
also in biography, in literary criticism, and less often in
history, we have to depend frequently upon English pens for our
illumination.
The reasons for this very serious deficiency, much more serious
from every point of view than the specialists realize, are well
known to all but the specialists, and I do not propose to enter
into them here. My point is that this very defect, which has made
it so difficult to edit a valid and interesting review (and so
creditable to succeed as we have in several instances succeeded),
is a brake also upon the family magazine in its attempt to regain
virility. The newspaper magazines have cornered the market for
clever reporters who tap the reservoirs of special knowledge and
then spray it acceptably upon the public. This is good as far as
it goes, but does not go far. The scholars must serve us
themselves--and are too often incapable.
Editorial embarrassments are increased, however, by the difficulty
of finding these intellectualized old Americans who have drifted
away from the old magazines and are being painfully collected in
driblets by the weeklies and the reviews. They do not,
unfortunately for circulation, all live in a London, or Paris.
They are scattered in towns, cities, university communities,
lonely plantations, all over a vast country. Probably that
intellectualized public upon which all good magazines as well as
all good reviews must depend, has not yet become so stratified and
homogeneous after the upheavals of our generation that a
commercial success of journalistic magnitude is possible, but it
can and must be found.
The success of _The Atlantic Monthly_ in finding a sizable and
homogeneous public through the country is interesting in just this
connection. It has, so it is generally understood, been very much a
question of _finding_--of going West after the departing New Englander
and his children, and hunting him out with the goods his soul desired.
One remembers the Yankee peddlers who in the old days penetrated the
frontier with the more material products of New England, pans,
almanacs, and soap. But an observer must also note a change in the
character of _The Atlantic_ itself, how it has gradually changed from
a literary and political review, to a literary and social magazine,
with every element of the familiar American type except illustrations
and a profusion of fiction; how in the attempt to become more
interesting without becoming journalistic it has extended its
operations to cover a wider and wider arc of human appeal. It has both
lost and gained in the transformation, but it has undoubtedly proved
itself adaptable and therefore alive. This is not an argument that the
reviews should become magazines and that the old-line magazine
should give up specializing in pictures and in fiction. Of course
not. It is simply more proof that vigor, adaptability, and a keen
sense of existing circumstances are the tonics they also need. The
weekly lacks balance, the review, professional skill in the
handling of serious subjects, the family magazine, a willingness
to follow the best public taste wherever it leads.
It has been very difficult in this discussion, which I fear has
resembled a shot-gun charge rather than a rifle bullet, to keep
the single aim I have had in mind. The history of the periodical
in American literary thinking has not yet been written. The
history of American literature has but just been begun. My object
has been to put the spotlight for a moment upon the typical
American magazine, with just enough of its environment to make a
background. What is seen there can best be summarized by a
comparison. The American weekly is like the serious American play
of the period. It has an over-emphasis upon lesson, bias, thesis,
point. The review is like much American poetry. It is worthy, and
occasionally admirable, but as a type it is weakened by amateur
mediocrity in the art of writing. The family magazine is like the
American short story. It has conventionalized into an often
successful immobility. Both must move again, become flexible,
vigorous, or their date will be upon them. And the family
magazine, the illustrated literary magazine, is the most
interesting vehicle of human expression and interpretation that we
Americans have created. With a new and greater success, it will
draw all our other efforts with it. If it fails, hope for the
interesting review, the well-balanced weekly, is precarious. If
they all submerge, we who like to read with discrimination and
gusto will have to take to books as an exclusive diet, or make our
choice between boredom and journalism.
III
THE NEW GENERATION
THE YOUNG ROMANTICS
We have talked about the younger generation as if youth were a new
phenomenon that had to be named and described, like a strange
animal in the Garden of Eden. No wonder that our juniors have
become self-conscious and have begun to defend themselves.
Nevertheless, the generation born after the 'eighties has had an
experience unique in our era. It has been urged, first by men and
then by events, to discredit the statements of historians, the
pictures of poets and novelists, and it has accepted the
challenge. The result is a literature which speaks for the younger
writers better, perhaps, than they speak for themselves, and this
literature no reader whose brain is still flexible can afford to
neglect; for to pass by youth for maturity is sooner or later to
lose step with life.
In recent decades the novel especially, but also poetry, has
drifted toward biography and autobiography. The older poets, who
yesterday were the younger poets, such men as Masters, Robinson,
Frost, Lindsay, have passed from lyric to biographic narrative;
the younger poets more and more write of themselves. In the novel
the trend is even more marked. An acute critic, Mr. Wilson
Follett, has recently noted that the novel of class or social
consciousness, which only ten years ago those who teach literature
were discussing as the latest of late developments, has already
given way to a vigorous rival. It has yielded room, if not given
place, to the novel of the discontented person. The young men, and
in a less degree the young women, especially in America, where the
youngest generation is, I believe, more vigorous than elsewhere,
have taken to biographical fiction. Furthermore, what began as
biography, usually of a youth trying to discover how to plan his
career, has drifted more and more toward autobiography--an
autobiography of discontent.
There is, of course, nothing particularly new about biographical
fiction. There is nothing generically new about the particular
kind of demi-autobiographies that the advanced are writing just
now. The last two decades have been rich in stories that need only
a set of notes to reveal their approximate faithfulness to things
that actually happened. But there is an emphasis upon revolt and
disillusion and confusion in these latest novels that is new. They
are no longer on the defensive, no longer stories of boys
struggling to adapt themselves to a difficult world (men of forty-
odd still write such stories); their authors are on the offensive,
and with a reckless desire to accomplish their objectives, they
shower us with such a profusion of detail, desert the paths of use
and wont in fiction so freely, and so often disregard the comfort,
not to speak of the niceties, of the reader, that "the young
realists" has seemed a fair, although, as I think, a misleading
title, for their authors. To a critic they are most interesting,
for the novel of the alleged young realist is like a fresh country
boy on a football field, powerful, promising, and utterly wasteful
of its strength.
Recent American literature has been especially rich in such
novels. There was, for example, Fitzgerald's ragged, but
brilliant, "This Side of Paradise," which conducted aimless and
expansive youth from childhood through college. There was the much
more impressive "Main Street," biographic in form, but with teeth
set on edge in revolt. There was the vivid and ill-controlled sex
novel "Erik Dorn," and Evelyn Scott's "The Narrow House," in which
the miseries of a young girl caught in the squalid and the
commonplace had their airing. There was Stephen Benet's "The
Beginning of Wisdom," where the revolt was a poet's, and the
realist's detail selected from beauty instead of from ugliness;
and Aikman's "Zell," in which youth rubs its sore shoulders
against city blocks instead of university quadrangles. There was
Dos Passos's "Three Soldiers," in which the boy hero is crushed by
the war machine his elders have made. These are type examples,
possibly not the best, certainly not the worst, drawn from the
workshops of the so-called young realists.
What is the biography of this modern youth? His father, in the
romantic 'nineties, usually conquered the life of his elders,
seldom complained of it, never spurned it. His son-in-the-novel is
born into a world of intense sensation, usually disagreeable.
Instead of a "Peter Ibbetson" boyhood, he encounters disillusion
after disillusion. At the age of seven or thereabout he sees
through his parents and characterizes them in a phrase. At
fourteen he sees through his education and begins to dodge it. At
eighteen he sees through morality and steps over it. At twenty he
loses respect for his home town, and at twenty-one discovers that
our social and economic system is ridiculous. At twenty-three his
story ends because the author has run through society to date and
does not know what to do next. Life is ahead of the hero, and
presumably a new society of his own making. This latter, however,
does not appear in any of the books, and for good reasons.