THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER.

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter. But first of all let us think of the many mercies for which we have to be thankful, and then let us be just as well as generous; for certainly the magazines have been of enormous benefit to the reading public as well as to those whose profession it is to entertain, amuse, or instruct that public.

The magazines have not only raised the rates of compensation for literary labor, but they have spread the reading habit to an enormous extent, and are still educating vast numbers of people—of a class[Pg 161] that do not read at all when they happen to be born in other countries—to become habitual buyers of books and periodicals. Moreover it must be said of the editors of these publications that they place their time at the disposal of every aspiring author who brings his manuscript to them. In other words, they give careful attention to whatever work is submitted to them, and are glad to buy and pay promptly for such stories and poems as they may deem suitable to their needs. I have never seen any disposition on the part of any of them to crush budding genius, but, on the contrary, I have frequently met them on dark, rainy nights hunting through the town with lanterns in their hands for new writers. In fact, I do not know of any place in this world where a young man may look for fairer attention and encouragement than he will find in the office of a modern magazine.

I have heard these editors denounced,[Pg 162] one and all, by infuriated poets and romancers, for the “favoritism” which had been shown to certain contributors, but I have generally found that when they erred in this way it was on the side of charity; and if certain writers whose contributions we generally skip occupy more room in the monthlies than we think they ought to, it is not because they are editorial pets, but because they have been careful students of the great literary principles described in these pages, and have thereby acquired the art of writing exactly what can be printed without injury to the susceptibilities of a single advertiser or subscriber.

But we have special cause for being thankful to the magazines when we read some of the hysterical, obstetrical, and epigrammatic romances which have enjoyed such an astonishing vogue in England of late years. Thank Heaven! no American magazine—so far as my knowledge[Pg 163] goes—has had the effrontery to offer its readers any such noisome, diseased literature as that with which the alleged “clever” people of London have flooded our market. To my way of thinking the epigrammatic books are the most offensive of the whole lot, and certainly there is nothing better calculated to plunge one into the depths of despair and shame than the perusal of a modern British novel whose characters are forever “showing off,” as children say, and who seem to devote their lives to uttering sixpenny cynicisms and evolving, with infinite pains and travail, the sort of remarks that pass current in the “smart London set”—if these chroniclers are to be believed—as wit.

Callow and ingenuous youth betrays itself by two unmistakable earmarks. One of these is in the form of a slight down on the cheek, and the other is the belief that Oscar Wilde writes brilliant epigram.

[Pg 164]I attended the first American representation of a play by that distinguished author, and can well recall my feelings when an able-bodied mummer took the centre of the stage and said, with the air of a man who has been rolling a good thing under his tongue all the evening, and at last has a chance to utter it: “Time is the thief of procrastination.” A murmur of admiration ran through the house, but I—I sobbed like a heart-broken child.

And yet Mr. Wilde is one of the cleverest of the whole brood of fat-witted chromo-cynics whose vulgar flippancies have somehow come to be regarded as witty and amusing, and that, too, by people who ought to know better. It positively makes me sick to see one of these paper-covered chronicles of fashionable imbecility lying on a parlor table, and to hear it spoken of as “so delightfully bright and clever, don’t you know.”

[Pg 165]Heine was a genuine cynic and the maker of epigrams which he wrote as easily and naturally as Bobby Burns wrote verses; and if there is anything in the world which can be accomplished, if at all, without manual labor and the accompanying sweat of the brow, it is the utterance of really witty or epigrammatic remarks. But these leaden-footed English wits somehow convey to me a vision of a cynic in toil-stained overalls going forth in the gray of the early morning, dinner-pail in hand, for a hard day’s work at being epigrammatic and funny.

And while I am on the subject of epigram and cynicism, I cannot help wondering what Heine would have done for a living had his lot been cast in our own age and country. Imagine him offering manuscript to the Ladies’ Home Journal! (By the way, Bok ought not to let those photographs go for twenty-five cents apiece. They’re worth a dollar if they’re[Pg 166] worth a cent.) Think of the sensation that the Reisebilder would create in the Century office!

My own opinion is that Heine would, were he living here to-day, find occupation as a paragrapher on some Western paper, acquire some nebulous renown as the “Ann Arbor Clarion man” or the “Omaha Bumblebee man,” and be consigned in his old age to that Home for Literary Incurables known as the McClure Syndicate.

There is a book of excerpts from the writings of this gifted man, published some years ago by Henry Holt & Co., and now, unhappily enough, out of print. These excerpts are so well selected and convey to us so vividly the charm of this matchless writer that I took the trouble some time ago to inquire into the way in which the work was done. I learned on undisputed authority that Mr. Holt, who has not spent his life in the literary business for nothing, borrowed a pruning-hook[Pg 167] from the Century office, placed it, together with Heine’s complete works, in the hands of an experienced and skilled magazine editor, and bade him “edit” them as if they were intended for publication in his own monthly. The skilled and experienced editor opened the volumes, and the pruning-hook—also a skilled and experienced instrument of mutilation—fairly leaped from its scabbard in its eagerness to eliminate the dangerous passages. When the editor had completed his task Mr. Holt gathered up the parings from the floor and published them under the title of Scintillations from Heine; and I sincerely hope that a new edition of this book will be brought out before long, if for no other purpose than to show people what a real epigram is and how sharp it can bite.

There is another variety of literature which I dislike, and which seems to have attained a ranker and more unwholesome[Pg 168] growth in this country than elsewhere. I refer to those articles and books whose sole purpose seems to be the exploiting of men and women who are really unworthy of any serious consideration. The Johnsonian period is rich in specimens of this sort of work, and the future historian will marvel at the absurd prominence given in this enlightened age to people who have never accomplished anything in their lives, and who themselves evince the greatest eagerness to transmit to posterity authentic records of their failures.

“How I Lost the Battle,” by Captain Runoff, of the Russian army; “Driven out of Asia Minor,” by General Skates; and “Ever so Many Miles from the North Pole,” by Lieutenant Queary, are excellent examples of this style of literature; but a far lower depth was reached about two years ago, when the Harpers burst into enthusiastic praise of a young man named Chanler, who had announced his[Pg 169] intention of discovering Africa, and proposed to awe and conciliate the ferocious native chiefs by performing in their presence various difficult feats of legerdemain which he had taken the pains to learn from a professional master in London.

What has become of that gifted young man for whom the Harpers predicted such a rosy future? Perhaps at this very moment he is seated in a deep, shady African jungle making an omelet in a high silk hat or converting a soiled pocket-handkerchief into a glass globe full of goldfish. I can picture him standing, alone and unarmed, before thousands of hostile spears. His eye is clear and his cheek unblanched. In another moment he will be taking rabbits out of the chieftain’s ears, and the dusky warriors will cower, in abject submission, at his feet.

There is one thing that can be said in favor of Mr. Chanler, and that is that up[Pg 170] to the present moment he has not annoyed his fellow-creatures with any lectures or articles or stories descriptive of the wonders that he did not discover during his journeyings in the Dark Continent. His reticence is commendable, and should serve as an example to various windy travelers who “explore” during a period of eight weeks and then talk for the rest of their lives.

Verily this is a golden age for “fakirs,” quacks, and intellectual feather-weights............