THE LITERARY SHOP
AND OTHER TALES

BY
JAMES L. FORD

AUTHOR of “HYPNOTIC TALES,” “DR. DODD’S SCHOOL,” “THE THIRD ALARM,” ETC.

NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION

NEW-YORK
THE CHELSEA COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1894,
By Geo. H. Richmond & Co.
Copyright, 1899,
By The Chelsea Company.

PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.

The Literary Shop was first printed in book form in the fall of 1894, nearly five years ago. Some of its constituent papers had already appeared in the pages of Truth and Puck. To the present edition have been added the sketches that deal with life and letters in the McClure village of Syndicate. This model literary community was established about four years ago, on a convenient and healthful rise of ground overlooking the Hackensack River, which is navigable at that point. It has a population of several hundred poets and prose hands, all of whom are regularly employed on the magazine and the newspaper syndicate controlled by Mr. S. S. McClure. These sketches are reprinted by permission from the New York Journal and the Criterion.

New York, March 8, 1899.

J. L. F.

AUTHOR’S NOTE.

Many of these papers are new. Others are reprinted by permission from Puck and Truth.

CONTENTS.

THE LITERARY SHOP.

THE LITERARY SHOP

CHAPTER I.
IN AN OLD GARRET.

I am lying at full length on a broken-down haircloth sofa that has been placed near the cobwebby window of an old garret in a country farm-house. It is near the close of a rainy day, and all the afternoon I have listened to the pattering of the heavy drops on the shingled roof, the rustling of the slender locust-trees and the creaking of their branches as the wind moves them.

There are pop-corn ears drying on the floor of this old garret; its solid rafters are festooned with dried apples and white onions. Odd bits of furniture, and two or three hair trunks bearing initials made with brass-headed nails, are scattered about the room, and from where I lie I can see a Franklin stove, a pair of brass andirons, and one of those queer wooden-wheeled clocks that used to be made in Connecticut years ago, and which are a fitting monument to the ingenuity of the Yankee race.

Every article in the room is carefully treasured, and none is held in more tender regard than are certain square, dust-covered packages of what might be old newspapers that are piled up in big heaps beside the old chairs and tables. One of these bundles lies on the floor beside my sofa, with its string untied and its contents scattered carelessly about. Look down and you will see that it contains copies of the New York Ledger, of a year that was one of the early seventies, and which have been religiously preserved, together with fully twoscore of other similar bundles, by the excellent people who dwell in the house.

The number which I hold in my hand contains instalments of four serials, as many complete stories, half a dozen poems, contributions by Henry Ward Beecher, James Parton, and Mary Kyle Dallas, and a number of short editorials and paragraphs, besides two solid nonpareil columns of “Notices to Correspondents.” One of the serials is called “The Haunted Husband; or, Lady Chetwynde’s Specter,” and deals exclusively with that superior class of mortals who go to make up what a great many of the old Ledger readers would have called “carriage trade.” Another story, “Unknown; or, The Mystery of Raven Rocks,” bears the signature of Mrs. E. D. N. Southworth, a name venerated in every household in which a red-plush photograph-album is treasured as a precious objet d’art. The short stories are simple and innocuous enough to suit the most primitive of brain-cells. The fiction is embellished with three pictures, which are interesting as specimens of a simple and now happily obsolete school of art.

The “Notices to Correspondents” are a joy forever, and reflect with charming simplicity and candor the minds of the thousands of anxious inquirers who were wont to lay all their doubts and troubles at Robert Bonner’s feet.

It is here that the secrets of the maiden heart are laid bare to the gaze of the whole world. It is here that we read of the young man who is “waiting on” a young widow and formerly “kept company with” a lady friend who is the cashier of the laundry which he patronizes. Not knowing which of the two he ought to marry, he pours out his soul in this free-for-all arena of thought and discussion. “Mary X.” writes from Xenia, O., to inquire if she is a flirt because she has a new beau every two weeks, and is solemnly warned by Mr. Bonner that if she goes on in that way she “will soon have no beaux at all.” “L. L. D.” is a young girl of eighteen, whose parents are addicted to drink. She wishes to know if it is proper for her to correspond with a young gentleman friend who is a telegraph-operator in Buffalo and has made her a present of a backgammon-board last Christmas. That these letters are genuine is proved by their tone of artless simplicity, and by the fact that no single mind or score of minds could invent the extraordinary questions that were propounded from week to week.

Careful perusal of the Ledger lyrics reveals a leaning on the part of the poets of that period toward such homely themes as “The Children’s Photographs,” “The Mother’s Blessing,” and “Down by the Old Orchard Wall.” They are all written on the same plane of inanity, and are admirably well suited to the tastes of the admirers of Mrs. Southworth and Sylvanus Cobb, Jr.

It is growing dark in the old garret—too dark to read—and I arise from the horsehair sofa, filled with memories of the past which have been awakened by perusal of the yellow sheet of twenty years ago. As I tie up the bundle and place it on the dust-covered heap with its fellows, my eye falls upon a dozen packages, different in shape from these and containing copies of the Century Magazine for the past decade, which are preserved with the same tender care that was once bestowed upon the Ledger alone.

But as I slowly descend the staircase my mind is full of the favorite old story-paper, and of the enormous influence which its Scotch proprietor, Robert Bonner, exerted over the literature of his day and generation—an influence which is still potent in the offices of the great magazines which now supply us with reading matter. I doubt if there has ever been, in this country, a better edited paper than the Ledger was in the days when its destinies were shaped by the hand of its canny proprietor. No editor ever understood his audience better, or, knowing his readers, was more successful in giving them what they wanted, than was Robert Bonner, whose dollars accumulated in his own coffers even as the files of his paper accumulated in country garrets in all parts of this broad land.

“Well, where do you find evidences of such careful editing in that hotch-potch which you describe so carefully?” I hear some carping critic ask, and as I run my eye over what I have written I realize that I have utterly failed in my attempt to convey an idea of the glories of that particular number of the Ledger. I would say, however, to my critical friend that the paper is well edited because it does not contain a line of prose or a stanza of verse that is not aimed directly at the hearts and minds of the vast army of farmers, midwives, gas-fitters’ daughters, and the blood-relations of janitors who constituted its peculiar clientèle. And I would add that if the critical one desires to get at the very bone and sinew of Ledger literature he should make a careful study of the poems which were an important feature of it, and in which may be found the very essence of the great principles by which the paper was guided.

Indeed, Mr. Bonner used to be more particular about his poetry than about his prose, and always read himself every line of verse submitted to him for publication. Some of the poems were written by women of simple, serious habits of thought; but a great many of the highly moral and instructive effusions that were an important feature of the paper were prepared by ungodly and happy-go-lucky Bohemians, who were glad to eke out the livelihood earned by reporting with an occasional “tenner” from Mr. Bonner’s treasury. These poets studied the great editor’s peculiarities and personal tastes as carefully as the most successful magazine contributors of to-day study those of the various Gilders, Johnsons, Burlingames, and Aldens who dominate American letters in the present year. For example, no horses in Ledger poems were ever permitted to trot faster than a mile in eight minutes, and it was considered sagacious to name them Dobbin or Old Bess. Poems in praise of stepmothers or life-insurance were supposed to be distasteful to the great editor, but he was believed to have an absolute passion for lyrics which extolled the charm of country life and the homely virtues of rural folk. If a poet wrote more than one rhyme to the quatrain he was warned by his fellows not to ruin the common market.

And now I hear from the carping critic again: “But you don’t mean to tell me that any good poetry was produced by such a process? Why, suppose one of our great magazines—”

“Who said anything about good poetry? It was good poetry for the Ledger subscribers to read, and as to the great modern magazines—haven’t I told you already that I stumbled over a heap of them just as I was leaving the old garret where the pop-corn and the wreaths of dried apples and the bundles of Ledgers are kept?”

CHAPTER II.
THE “LEDGER” PERIOD OF LETTERS.

A quarter of a century hence, perhaps, one of those arbiters of taste to whom poetastry owes its very existence will lecture before the intellectual and artistic circles of that period on “The Literary Remains of the Bonnerian Period”; and the Ledger school of poetry, long neglected by our critics, will become a fashionable cult. I hope, too, that the names of those writers who, as disciples of that school, gave an impetus to those great principles which live to-day in the beautifully printed pages of our leading periodicals will be rescued from the shades of obscurity and accorded the tardy credit that they have fairly won.

These principles have lived because they were founded on good, sound, logical common sense, for Mr. Bonner possesses one of the most logical minds in the world. In the days when he was—unconsciously, I am sure—moulding the literature of future generations of Americans, he was always able to give a reason for every one of his official acts; and I doubt if as much can be said of all the magazine editors of the present day. It was this faculty that enabled his contributors to learn so much of his likes and dislikes, for if he rejected a manuscript he was always ready to tell the author exactly why the work was not suitable for the Ledger.

For instance: One day a maker of prose and verse received from the hands of the great editor a story which he had submitted to him the week before.

“If you please,” said the poet, politely, “I should like to know why you cannot use my story, so that I may be guided in the future by your preferences.”

“Certainly,” replied Mr. Bonner. “This story will not do for me because you have in it the marriage of a man with his cousin.”

“But,” protested the young author, “cousins do marry in real life very often.”

“In real life, yes,” cried the canny Scotchman; “but not in the New York Ledger!”

And it is related of this talented young maker of prose and verse, that he changed his hero and heroine from cousins to neighbors, and the very same night was seen in Pfaff’s quaffing, smoking, and jesting with his fellow-poets, and making merry over the defeat that was turned into a victory. And in the generous fashion of Bohemia he told all his comrades that “Bonner was down on cousins marrying”; and thereafter neither in song nor story did a Ledger hero ever look with anything but the eye of brotherly affection on any woman of even the most remote consanguinity.

“In real life, yes; but not in the New York Ledger!”

That gives us a taste of the milk in the cocoanut, although it does not account for the hair on the outside of the shell.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Bonner knew that a great many of his subscribers did not approve of a man marrying his own cousin when there were plenty of other folks’ cousins to be had for the asking; and so, rather than cause a moment’s annoyance to a single one of these, he forbade the practice in the columns of his paper.

I knew a number of these Ledger writers in my salad days, and have often heard them discussing their trade and the condition of the market in a way that would have lifted the hair of some of the littérateurs of the modern “delightfully-Bohemian-studio-tea” and kettledrum school.

Years ago one of them confided to me his recipe for a Ledger poem. “Whatever you do,” he said, “be careful not to use up a whole idea on a single poem, for if you do you’ll never be able to make a cent. I usually cut an idea into eight pieces, like a pie, and write a poem for each piece, though once or twice I have made sixteen pieces out of one. My ‘Two Brothers’ idea yielded me just sixteen poems, all accepted, for which I received $160. What do I mean by cutting up an idea? Well, I’ll tell you. I took for a whole idea two brothers brought up on a farm in the country, one of whom goes down to the city, while the other stays at home on the farm. Well, I wrote eight poems about those brothers, giving them such names as Homespun Bill and Fancy Jake, and the city man always went broke, and was glad to get back to the country again and find that Homespun Bill had either paid the mortgage on the place or saved the house from burning, or done something else calculated to commend him to the haymakers who subscribed for the paper. Then I wrote eight more, and in every one of those it was the yokel who got left; that is to say, Fancy Jake or Dashing Tom, or whatever I might choose to call him, would go to the city and either get rich in Wall Street—always Wall, never Broad or Nassau Street or Broadway, remember—and come back just in time to stop the sheriff’s sale and bid in the old homestead for some unheard-of figure, or else he would become a great physician and return to save his native village at a time of pestilence, or maybe I’d have him a great preacher and come back and save all their souls; anyway, I got eight more poems out of the pair, to say nothing of some stories that I used in another paper.”

I pondered for several moments over the words of the poet and then I said to him, “But if you were so successful with the ‘Two Brothers’ why didn’t you try to do as well with two sisters?”

“I did,” he replied. “I started a ‘Two Sisters’ series as soon as the brothers were all harvested, but I got them back on my hands again. You know Bonner is down on sisters.”

“Bonner is down on sisters!”

What stumbling-blocks there were in the path to literary fame which the poets of the early Ledger period sought to tread!

Fancy the feelings of one who has poured out his whole soul in a poem descriptive of sisterly love and learns that his labor has been in vain, not because of any fault on his part, not because his poem is not good, but simply and solely because “Bonner is down on sisters”! And then I hear the carping critic ask if I call that good editing. I say that it was the very best of editing. At any rate, it was good enough to make the Ledger fiction popular from one end of this country to the other; and it is because of that editing that we still find the old dusty files in the country garrets, along with the pop-corn ears and the wreaths of dried apples. I wonder how much of the ephemeral literature of to-day will be found sacredly guarded in anybody’s garret a quarter of a century hence?

But there were other folks besides sisters and matrimonial cousins who were regarded with disfavor by the great editor and thinker who long ago set the pace for modern American fiction.

Well do I remember Jack Moran coming upon us one bright morning, a dozen years ago, with bitter invective on his lips because his poem, “The Stepmother’s Prayer,” had been returned to him from the Ledger office. He read it aloud to us, and then inquired, pathetically, “Isn’t that poem all right?”

It was more than “all right.” It was a delicate, imaginative bit of verse, descriptive of the young bride kneeling reverently in the nursery of her new home and praying that God would make her a good mother to the sleeping stepchildren. It was a real poem—such a poem as poor, gifted Irish Jack Moran could write, but only when the mood was upon him, for he was not one of those makers of verse who go to work at six in the morning with their dinner-pails.

“Ah, Jack!” exclaimed a sympathizing poet, “you never should have taken it to the Ledger. Didn’t you know that Bonner was down on stepmothers? Change it round so as to make the stepmother a beast, and he’ll give you ten for it.”

“By the way, Jack, do you remember the time there was a death in the old man’s family, and we all got in on him with poems about meeting on the further shore and crossing the dark river?”

“I do,” replied Jack, briefly. “It was worth just twenty to me.”

And why was Bonner “down” on stepmothers? Simply because he wished to avoid giving offense to those who disapproved of second marriages, and who formed a very large part of his constituency.

I hope that I have thrown sufficient pathos into my description of the condition of the poor rhymester of a dozen or fifteen years ago to touch the hearts of my sympathetic readers. How much better off, you say, is the literary man of to-day, who makes steady wages in Franklin Square, or occupies one of the neat white cottages erected for the employees of the McClure Steam Syndicate Mills in Paterson!

Better off in some respects, perhaps, dear reader, but in others his state is none the more gracious than it was in the days when Jack Moran’s “Stepmother’s Prayer” was rejected because Bonner was down on stepmothers. The great Ledger editor has retired to his stock-farm, but the principles which have enabled him to possess a stock-farm still live in every magazine office in the land, and the writer of to-day must be just as careful in regard to forbidden topics as his predecessor was, and, moreover, must keep his eye on three or four editors, with their likes and their dislikes.

But these remarks are not made in a carping spirit. There is some good reason for every one of these likes and dislikes. If Mr. Gilder prefers oatmeal to wheaten grits as a breakfast-table dish for the hero of the new Century serial, it is because he has an eye on his Scotch subscribers; and if the manuscript of Robinson Crusoe is returned to Mr. De Foe with the remark that “Burlingame is down on goats,” it is simply because Scribner’s Magazine is not pushing its sale in Harlem and Williamsburg.

In regard to the practice of cutting an idea into eight pieces and serving up each piece as a separate poem or story, can any one familiar with current literature deny that ideas are just as much cut up now as they ever were? More than that, have not some of our writers solved the old problem of making bricks without straw? Why, then, you ask, is their manuscript printed in preference to matter that is more virile and fresh and readable? For the same reason that Jack Moran’s “Stepmother’s Prayer” was returned to him by the very hand that was stretched forth in glad eagerness to grasp the sixteen poems that had sprung from the solitary idea of the two country brothers. Why, I know of one or two poets whose verses enjoy the widest sort of publicity, and who, I am sure, cut an idea into thirty-two pieces instead of sixteen.

CHAPTER III.
SOMETHING ABOUT “GOOD BAD STUFF.”

“Bonner is down on stepmothers!” “All Ledger horses must be called Dobbin, and there is a heavy fine for driving them through a poem or serial faster than a walk, or, at best, a slow trot!” “Don’t write anything about cousins marrying unless you want to have them back on your hands again!” These were a few of the beacon-lights that shone on the literary pathway of twenty years ago, and I know of more than one successful writer whose early footsteps were guided by the great artistic principles first laid down by Robert Bonner and religiously followed by the makers of prose and verse who brought their wares to him every Friday morning. But poor Jack Moran did not live to become a successful writer. He dropped out of the ranks just as the rest of us were passing the quarter-post, but it was the first hurdle that really did for him. I have often thought that if Jack had taken his friend’s advice and “changed his poem round so as to make the stepmother a beast,” he might have lived to fill a responsible position in the Franklin Square Prose and Verse Foundry, or at the Eagle Verse Works in Jersey City. But Jack was a poet, and therefore did not know how to “change his poem round,” and besides he hated to go to work every morning with his dinner-pail in his hand, and there were cakes and ale in Bohemia in those days for such as he.

As for the poet who tried to guide Jack’s footsteps in the path that led to fame, he is alive to-day, and a highly esteemed member of the guild. Indeed, a more industrious, sober, or thrifty man of letters never put on a pair of overalls or crossed the North River in the early morning boat with a basket of poems, jokes, and stories on his arm.

One Friday morning, many years ago, I went with this poet to the Ledger building, and there found half a dozen writers gathered together in an outer office, anxiously watching the dark shadow of a man that was thrown upon a partition of ground glass that extended from floor to ceiling across the room and separated it from the private office of the great editor.

The dark moving shadow on which every eye was fixed was that of Robert Bonner himself, and as it was seen to cross the room to a remote corner—growing smaller and fainter as it receded—every face brightened with hope, and forms that had seemed bent and dejected but a moment before were suddenly straightened. An instant later the door opened and the editor of the Ledger crossed the threshold, handed a ten-dollar bill to one of the waiting poets, and then hastily retired to his own den again.

Then my friend showed me how the watchers could tell by the movements of the dark shade whether a poem had been accepted or refused. If the editor walked from his desk to the remote corner of his private office they knew that he did it in order to place a poem in the drawer of an old bureau in which he kept the accepted manuscript; but if, on the other hand, he came directly to the door a horrible feeling of anxiety came into every mind, and each poet uttered a silent prayer—while his heart literally stood still within him—that the blow might fall on some head other than his own.

On this occasion my friend received ten dollars for his poem entitled “When the Baby Smiled,” and in the fullness of his heart he invited the author of the rejected verses on “Resignation”—who, by the way, was uttering the most horrible curses as he descended the staircase—to join us in a drink.

It was on this occasion, also, as I distinctly remember, that my friend the poet put the whole trade of letters in a nutshell:

“There are plenty of people,” he remarked, “who can write good good stuff, but there are not many who can write good bad stuff. Here’s one of those ‘Two Brothers’ poems I told you about, and if that isn’t good bad stuff, I’d like to know what is.” He handed me a printed copy of the poem, and I can still recall the first verses of it:

Herbert to the city went,

Though as sturdy was his arm

As plain Tom’s, who, quite content,

Stayed at home upon the farm.

Herbert wore a broadcloth coat,

Thomas wore the homespun gray;

Herbert on display did dote,

Thomas labored every day.

These lines have clung to my memory during many changing years, and I quote them now with undimmed admiration as almost the best example of “good bad stuff” that our literature possesses. And if the lines compel our regard, what must be our respect for the genius which could extract sixteen ten-dollar poems from the one primitive idea of the two rustic brothers?

The bard who penned these deathless stanzas has progressed with the times, and now writes many a poem for the Century and Scribner’s, but I never see his name in one of the great monthlies without thinking of the days when he used to sit in the outer office of the Ledger, with half a dozen of his contemporaries, wondering whether he would get a ten-dollar bill or his rejected poem when Mr. Bonner came out to separate the chaff from the wheat.

Some of my readers may wonder what became of all the poetry that was rejected by Mr. Bonner, and to these I would reply that it was seldom, indeed, that any literary matter—either in prose or in verse—was allowed to go to waste. The market was not as large then as it is now, and a serious poem could “make the rounds” in a very short time. If it failed as a serious effort it was an easy matter for a practical poet to add to it what was called a “comic snapper,” by virtue of which it could be offered to Puck or Wild Oats.

For instance, a poet of my acquaintance once told me that he wrote a poem about “Thrifty Tom,” as he called him, who insured his life for a large sum of money, paid the premiums for two or three years, and then died, leaving his wife and children comfortably provided for. Now it happened that the great Scotch editor did not believe in life-insurance as an investment—the Ledger published no advertisements of any description in those days, so he was enabled to view the matter with an unbiased mind—and therefore he declined the verses, not wishing to promote the interests of a scheme which he could not indorse. And straightway the poet sate himself down and gave to his stanzas a comic snapper which told how “Idle Bill” proceeded to court and marry the widow, and passed the remainder of his days in the enjoyment of the money which the thrifty one had struggled so hard to lay aside for his family. In its new form the poem was sold to Puck, and the word went out to all the makers of prose and verse that Bonner was “down on life-insurance.”

Is there any demand for “good bad stuff” nowadays?

There is an almost limitless demand for it, and there always will be, provided the gas-fitters and the paper-hangers and the intelligent and highly cultivated American women continue to exert the influence in the field of letters that they do to-day.

The “good bad stuff” of the present era is printed on supercalendered paper, and illustrated, in many instances, with pictures that are so much better than the text that it is difficult to comprehend how even the simplest observer can fail to notice the contrast. Moreover the good bad stuff of to-day commands much higher prices than were ever paid during the Ledger period, and it is not infrequently signed with some name which has been made familiar to the public ear—if only by mere force of constant reiteration—and is therefore supposed to possess a peculiar value of its own. Nevertheless it is good bad stuff all the same, and can be recognized as such by those whose eyes are too strong to be blinded by the glare from the pictures and the great big literary name.

Don’t understand me to say that there is no good prose or verse to be found on those highly glazed, beautifully printed pages to which we of the present generation of readers turn for our literary refreshment. On the contrary, the modern magazines give us so much that is admirable, so many thoughtful essays and descriptive articles, that one wonders only why so much of the fiction which they offer should be of such poor calibre.

But the editors and publishers of the great monthlies know what they are about as well as Mr. Bonner ever did, and they know, too, the immense value of the good bad stuff which they serve to their patrons in such tempting and deceptive forms.

CHAPTER IV.
THE EARLY HOLLAND PERIOD.

When, near the close of the year 1870, Dr. J. G. Holland started Scribner’s Monthly, American letters entered upon a new stage of its development. The literary field was then occupied by the poets, humorists, and essayists of the Pfaff school, dwelling under the perpetual shadow of the Bonnerian maxims, and the occasional one of pecuniary depression; also a few men of the James Parton type who knew not Bohemia, and women writers like Mrs. Dallas.

It must be remembered that at this time no signatures were allowed in the Harpers’ publications, and the matter published in the Monthly was either of foreign manufacture or else prepared in the Franklin Square Foundry by poets employed by the week at fair but not exorbitant wages. The Ledger principles were observed here to a certain extent, but were not enforced as rigidly as they were by Mr. Bonner in his own establishment. I think, myself, that the Pfaff poets were more directly accountable for the introduction of the Bonnerian maxims than were the Harpers themselves, because they had become so accustomed to eliminate stepmothers, sisters, fast trotters, and other objectionable features from their work that they had come to regard them as quite as much outside the pale of ordinary fiction as if they were dwellers on the planet Mars. Moreover a poem or story constructed on the Bonner plan might, if rejected by the Harpers, still prove acceptable to the Ledger.

From the very first Dr. Holland showed a commendable purpose to raise the tone of the new Monthly above that of Mr. Bonner’s story-paper, and although we see distinct evidences, in his earlier numbers, of Ledger influences, it was not long before a gradual emancipation from the strictest and most literal interpretation of Mr. Bonner’s iron-clad rules began. Horses soon began to strike a swifter gait in the serial stories, and in “Wilfred Cumbermede” one of these quadrupeds has the hardihood to throw its rider over its head. But that would never have happened if George Macdonald had been trained in the modern Ledger school of fiction.

Looking over these old numbers in the light of ripened knowledge, I can see Dr. Holland slowly groping his way along an untrodden pathway leading from the Ledger office to the broad fields of literature, where our magazine barons hold undisputed sway. That he kept a watchful eye on his rural subscribers is shown by an extended illustrated article on Fairmount Park, and another one descriptive of Philadelphia—subjects which possess about as much interest for metropolitan readers as that masterpiece of bucolic romance, The Opening of a Chestnut Burr. Among the writers whose names appear in these numbers are Alice Cary, Edward Eggleston, J. T. Headley, and Washington Gladden—all graduates or disciples of the great Ledger school.

Of these I consider Washington Gladden entitled to the highest rank as an exponent of mediocrity. Indeed, after a careful survey of the magazine barons’ wide domain, I must award the palm of merit to this popular manufacturer of literary wares for even mediocrity, unspoiled by the slightest sense of humor. It is that very lack of humor which has brought success to many a man whose mission in life has been to write for the great, simple-minded public. The poets and humorists of the Jack Moran school, who were compelled to descend to the commonplace and the stupid because of their temporal necessities, never really became thorough masters of the divine art of writing mediocrity, because their sense of the ludicrous brought them to a halt before those Alpine heights of tedious imbecility which people like E. P. Roe and Washington Gladden scaled with unblanched cheeks.

But to return to Washington Gladden. If any of the large and thoughtful circle whom I have the honor to address have never read a story from this gentleman’s pen, entitled The Christian League of Connecticut, I implore them to seek out the numbers of the Century in which it appeared about a decade ago, and sit down to the enjoyment of one of the finest specimens of unconscious humor that our generation has known.

This story deals with a league composed of all the Protestant churches in a small Connecticut town, for the promotion of large-hearted geniality and mutual aid in the work of evangelization. It contains a description of a scene in the Methodist Church at the moment when it seems that the congregation will be unable to raise the debt which has long weighed them down. They are about to abandon the attempt, when the other churches in the town learn of their distress and proceed to help them out. The First Congregational Church pledges $1675, the Universalist Church sends $500, and finally the Second Congregational Church raises the ante to $1810, while the people burst forth into shouts of “Hallelujah!” and fervent songs of praise.

If any one were to write a wild burlesque on the ecclesiastical methods in vogue in Connecticut he would fall far short of Mr. Gladden’s account of this extraordinary meeting. The New England country parson who gets his salary regularly is a fortunate man, and as to subscriptions for the church, they are usually collected with the aid of a stomach-pump. I have never yet heard of a man giving anything toward any church save that in which he had a pew, but I do remember the scene which ensued one morning in a little country meeting-house, when the richest man in the congregation relaxed his grip on three hundred dollars—and there was a string tied to every bill, too.

Another chapter of The Christian League tells us how Judge Beeswax returned to his native village from the city in which he had grown wealthy, and generously gave a thousand dollars to save the old church, in which he had worshiped as a boy, from being sold for old timber.

And this dénouement bears such a wonderful resemblance to that in eight of the sixteen “Two Brothers” poems that I am half inclined to suspect that in his younger days Mr. Gladden was one of the poets who turned up at the Ledger office every Friday and waited for the verdict.

And I am sure that Dr. Holland had been, in his time, a close student of the Bonnerian maxims, and especially of that which I have already alluded to—“In real life, yes; but not in the New York Ledger!” To which might be added, “nor in the old Scribner’s either.” All through the Holland period we find evidences of the deep hold that this maxim had taken on the minds of both writers and barons.

For example, I believe that it is pretty well known that extreme prohibition measures bring about the most degrading and terrible forms of drunkenness known outside of Liverpool, and that of all the prohibitory statutes the Maine Liquor Law is about the worst. That is the case in real life, but not in Scribner’s Monthly, for in the year 1877—Dr. Holland being then the dominant figure in American letters—we find in an article on the Rangeley Lakes the following paragraph: “The Maine Liquor Law has certainly put an end to this régime (a barrel of rum to a barrel of beans), and with it have disappeared to a very great extent drunkenness, profanity, and kindred vices.”

Yes, my carping friend, we all know that the sentence which I have quoted is ridiculously untrue, and entirely out of place in a very interesting article on trout-fishing, but there was just as good a reason for printing it as there was for publishing The Christian League of Connecticut. That paragraph was well calculated to please folks of the variety that swooped down upon New York thirty thousand strong, under the banner of the Christian Endeavor Society.

I do not know why it is, but people of this class fairly revel in humbug of every description, and nothing pleases them more than to read about the beneficent influences of prohibitory legislation, or to swallow once more the old Anglo-Saxon lie about Albion’s virtue and the wickedness of France—and if you would like to see that miserable fallacy whacked in the head read Mr. Brownell’s French Traits—or even to gloat over Mr. Gladden’s story of the princely generosity that prevails in the religious circles of New England.

These Christian Endeavor people are a mystery to me. More than thirty thousand of them took possession of our city, and there was one erring brother among them who fell by the wayside, and was locked up in the House of Detention, charged with having been robbed of his return-ticket and about two hundred dollars in money. He was confined nearly a week, and during that time not one of his fellow Christian Endeavorers held out a helping hand to him. If the unfortunate man had come on from the West to attend a convention of sneak-thieves he would have fared better than he did.

“But what have the Christian Endeavorers to do with literature?” asks my doubting and critical friend. They have a great deal to do with literature just now, more’s the pity. I did not drag them into these pages by the neck and ears simply to say what I thought of them (although I am not sorry to do that), but to give my audience an idea of one of the elements—and it is a large one, too—to which our magazine publishers are obliged to cater, if they wish to hold their own in point of circulation.

It is because of just such people as these that our periodical literature is constantly defaced by matter of the sort that I have mentioned, and we are all the time saying, just as Bonner said to the Pfaff poet, “It’s one thing in real life, but another in Harper’s and the Century.” So it happens that intelligent human beings must have their nostrils assailed with rubbish about the Maine Liquor Law putting a stop to profanity, because, forsooth, it is supposed to tickle the palates of a lot of sniveling humbugs, who are so busy with prayers and psalm-singing that they have not time to perform the commonest acts of decency and charity for one of their own kith and kin.

Understand me, I am not blaming the barons for putting stuff of this sort into their publications. If I were the proprietor of a great magazine I would have a picture of Robert Bonner over my desk, and the walls of my editorial rooms and business offices should be hung with the great Ledger maxims. There are a thousand mediocre people in this country to where there are five of superior intelligence; but, after all, the five have some rights that magazine barons are bound to respect, and I think that about Christmas-time every year some little attention ought to be shown them.

CHAPTER V.
MENDACITY DURING THE HOLLAND PERIOD OF LETTERS.

The Holland age of letters may be said to have extended over the eighth decade of this century, and that it was an era of change and progress can be readily seen by a glance at the periodical literature of the seventies.

It is during this era, however, that we find indications of a deplorable tendency on the part of the good doctor to pander to the prejudices of the gas-fitter and the paper-hanger element, by the publication of stories and articles which were either spurious as literature or else absolutely mendacious as to the facts which they recorded and the scenes which they described.

Of course I do not pretend that literary mendacity began under Dr. Holland, for the Ledger school was a highly imaginative one, at best; but the vein of untruth which is found cropping out from time to time during the eighth decade has proved infinitely more harmful to modern literature than were the lurid and confessedly improbable tales of bandits and haunted castles and splendid foreign noblemen which found so many eager readers a score of years ago. The aristocratic circles of English society which were enlivened by the nebulous presence of Lady Chetwynde’s spectre were so far removed from those in which the spellbound hay-maker, who read about them, had his being that it made very little difference to him—or to literary art either—whether they were truthfully portrayed or not; but the mendacious and meretricious literature which we find in the Holland period is more pretentious in its imitation of truth, and therefore all the more dangerous.

It was within a year after the first number of Scribner’s had been issued that Dr. Holland began the publication of a series of papers, afterward printed in book form, which deserve special mention here because they are so thoroughly characteristic of the period in which they saw the light. They are known to the world as Back-log Studies, and the average reader of ordinary intelligence will tell you that Mr. Warner’s book is “delightful reading,” that he possesses a “dainty style,” and that his studies of the open fireplace are “fresh, original, and altogether charming.”

Now did you ever happen to read The Reveries of a Bachelor? If you did you will admit that there was very little left in an open fire when Ik Marvel got through with it; and if you have also read Back-log Studies in the conscientious, critical way in which all books should be read, then you will agree with me in my opinion that Mr. Warner found very little to say about it that had not already been much better said by Marvel.

The book is neither fresh nor original nor charming, but it imitates those qualities so artistically and successfully that it has won for itself a unique place in the literature of a period in which the Ledger and the Holland schools of fiction may be said to have struggled for the supremacy.

I do not call Back-log Studies mendacious. They are merely imitative, and deserve mention here only because they were put together with so much cleverness that nearly the whole of the reading public has been deluded into believing them wholly original and of a high order of merit.

In a previous chapter I have cited certain glaring examples of mendacity that occurred during the Holland period; but none of them deserves to rank, in point of barefaced and unscrupulous perversion of facts, with Abbott’s Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, published in Harper’s Magazine years before Dr. Holland became the leading figure in American letters, which he was during the seventies. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that the present literary age has given birth to no end of stories and novels and descriptive articles which are disgracefully mendacious in color, fact, and sentiment.

But if you, my dear reader, would like to see a descriptive article which is absolutely matchless in point of mendacity and asinine incompetency, turn to the June Scribner’s of 1875—the very middle of the Holland age—and read what a certain Mr. Rhodes has to say about the Latin Quarter of Paris. I suppose the whole world does not contain a corner that offers so much that is picturesque, fascinating, interesting—in short, so well worth writing about—as the Quartier Latin in the French capital.

At the time this article was printed there were dozens of clever young men—Bohemians, poets, and humorists of the class that used to gather in Pfaff’s of a Saturday night to make merry with the “tenner” received the day before for a Ledger poem entitled “Going Home to Mother” or “Be Prepared; Bow to the Will Divine.” I doubt if we have to-day young men better equipped for the task of describing the student life of Paris than were those who dwelt in our own Bohemia in 1875. But the conductors of Scribner’s Monthly passed them by and intrusted the work to this Albert Rhodes, concerning whom history is silent, but who seems to have been more incompetent and more unworthy of his great opportunity than any human being on the face of the earth.

What shall we say of a man who quotes one of the best things in the Scènes de la Vie de Bohême and then blandly remarks that he does not see anything funny in it?

That is precisely what Mr. Rhodes does. He prints the program of the soirée given by Rodolphe and Marcel, and then observes, with the solemnity of a Central Park pelican: “There is nothing very humorous in this, as will be observed, and yet it may be regarded as one of the best specimens of Murger’s genre.”

Well, I can inform Mr. Rhodes, and also the simple-minded folk who believed in him because he wrote for the magazines, that if that chapter of the Vie de Bohême is not funny, there is nothing funny in the world. It begins with the “opening of the salons and entry and promenade of the witty authors of the Mountain in Labor, a comedy rejected by the Odéon Théâtre,” and closes with the significant warning that “persons attempting to read or recite poetry will be cast into outer darkness.”

The gifted Mr. Rhodes was probably in doubt as to the humor of this passage because it is not prefixed with “Our friend K—— sends the ‘Drawer’ the following good one,” and because its point is not indicated by italics after the fashion of humor of the Ayer’s Almanac school; but he can rest assured that that brief quotation from Murger is the funniest thing in his essay, always excepting his own bovine lack of perception. It is particularly funny to me because I have sometimes witnessed the “entry and promenade” through the salons of the witty authors of stories that have been accepted by magazines—a spectacle calculated to produce prolonged and hilarious merriment—and I have often wished that the recitation clause in the Bohemian’s program could be enforced in every house in the town.

I have devoted a good deal of space to this long-forgotten article because it is a fair sample of the sort of stuff that is offered to us from time to time, prepared especially for us, like so much baby’s food, by men and women who are carefully selected by the magazine barons, and who generally rival Mr. Rhodes in point of simian incompetence and utter lack of all appreciative or perceptive qualities.

But let us turn from the awful spectacle of Mr. Rhodes standing like a lone penguin in the very midst of the Latin Quarter of Paris, and wailing mournfully about the poor girl who “sometimes compels the young man to marry her.” A far brighter picture is that presented by the distinguished English gentleman who, having won the highest distinction with his pencil, takes up his pen with the air of one who is enjoying a holiday fairly earned by a lifetime of toil, and portrays the real Quartier Latin of the Second Empire with a humor that makes us think of Henri Murger, and with a delicacy of touch, a human sympathy, and a tendency to turn aside and moralize that place him very near to Thackeray.

If you wish to read a story which is at once human, truthful, and interesting, read George Du Maurier’s “Trilby,” and note the skill with which he has caught the very essence of the spirit of student life, preserved it for a third of a century, and then given it to us in all its freshness, and with the fire of an artistic youth blended with the philosophy and worldly knowledge that belong only to later life.

To read “Trilby” is to open a box in which some rare perfume has been kept for thirty odd years, and to drink in the fragrance that is as pervading and strong and exquisite as ever.

And while we are enjoying this charming story, let us not forget to give thanks to the Harpers for the courage which they have shown in publishing it, for if there is anything calculated to injure them in the eyes of the gas-fitters and paper-hangers it is a novel in which the truth is told in the high-minded, cleanly, and straightforward fashion in which Mr. Du Maurier tells it here. Fancy the feelings of a Christian Endeavorer—the modern prototype of the Levite who passed by on the other side—on finding in a publication of the sort which he has always found as soothing to his prejudices and hypocrisy and pet meannesses as the purring of a cat on a warm hearthstone—fancy the feelings of such an one as he finds the mantle of charity thrown over the sins and weaknesses of the erring, suffering, exquisitely human Latin Quarter model.

One need not read more than a single instalment of “Trilby” to realize that its author never learned the trade of letters in either the Ledger primary school or the Dr. Holland academy, for there is scarcely a chapter that does not fairly teem with matter that has long been forbidden in all well-regulated magazine offices, and I know that a great many experienced manufacturers of and dealers in serial fiction believe that it marks a new era in literature.

But to return to our sheep—and in the case of Mr. Rhodes the word is an apt one—why was that article about the Latin Quarter of Paris published?

Perhaps some of my readers think it was that the Scribner people did not know any better, or because Mr. Rhodes belonged to that “ring of favored contributors” of which one hears so much in certain artistic circles. In reply, let me say that the “ring of favored contributors” is a myth, or at least I have never been able to find reasonable proof of its existence. Magazine editors buy exactly what they consider suitable for their readers, and they buy from whoever offers what they want. If they allowed themselves to be influenced by their small personal likes and dislikes the whole literary system which they have reared would go to pieces, and some dialect-writers that I wot of would be “back on the old farm,” like the slick chaps in eight of the “Two Brothers” poems.

As for the Scribner editors “not knowing any better,” let none be deceived. They have always known a great deal more than their rejected contributors gave them credit for, and there was a distinct and vital reason for every important step that they took in building up the magnificent property now known the world over as the Century Magazine. Personally I have the highest confidence in the wisdom of the magazine barons. If a barbed-wire fence is stretched across a certain pasture it is with a purpose as definite and rational as that which led Mr. Bonner to reject Jack Moran’s “Stepmother’s Prayer” and pay $160 for the sixteen poems about the two brothers.

No; there was something in this article that made it valuable for magazine purposes. It was well calculated to please those who revel in that sniveling Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy and humbug about British virtue and the wickedness of the French people. Mr. Rhodes was employed by Dr. Holland because he was probably the only living creature who could stand on the spot from which has come so much that has made the world brighter and better and happier, and utter his silly platitudes about “young men draining the cup of pleasure to the dregs.” I say that the editor of Scribner’s had just as good a reason for publishing the Quartier Latin essay as Mr. Bonner had for being “down on stepmothers” and refusing all poems that treated of them: Dr. Holland was down on grisettes.

CHAPTER VI.
THE DAWN OF THE JOHNSONIAN PERIOD.

When the good Dr. Holland passed away, his mantle descended upon the shoulders of Mr. R. U. Johnson, the foremost of his disciples, and one who had literally sat at the feet of the great master of the eighth decade of the present century, and learned from his lips the deathless principles of modern magazine editing. Since then Mr. Johnson has, in his capacity of associate editor of the Century Magazine, so skillfully blended the methods of the canny Scotch Ledger editor with those of Dr. Holland that he has not only kept his own periodical well in the lead, but has also set the pace for American literature and compelled his rivals to watch his movements at all times with the closest care, and frequently to imitate him.

I first heard of the existence of Mr. Johnson, who is unquestionably the one dominant figure in American literature of to-day, about fourteen years ago, just as I was beginning to learn something about the trade of writing. I had placed in the hands of a literary friend—now well known as one of the most successful of the modern school of story-writers—the manuscript of a story which dealt with the criminal life of the lower east side of the town, and was wondering how soon I was to awake and find myself famous when my manuscript was returned to me with a brief note from my friend, in which he said:

“I read your story through yesterday, and was so much pleased with it that my first impulse was to take it to the Century Magazine. Indeed, I would have done so had I not remembered at that moment that Johnson does not like low life; so you had better try one of the daily papers.”

“Johnson does not like low life!”

That was encouraging news for a young man who believed that literary methods had not materially altered since the days when Oliver Goldsmith wrote The Vicar of Wakefield.

The pen fell from my hand—it happened to be employed just then on a story dealing with life in a Pell Street opium-joint—and I said to myself: “Merciful heavens! must I devote my life to the delineation of what are called society types, simply because Johnson—whoever he may be—does not like low life?”

I think that if I had known then that low life was only one of a thousand things that could not meet the approval of Johnson, and that, moreover, Bonner was down on fast horses, stepmothers, sisters, matrimonial cousins, and brindle-pups, I would have thrown down my pen and endeavored to support myself in some other way.

But I did not know anything about the practical side of literature then, so I blundered on, wasting a great deal of time over forbidden topics, until I made the acquaintance of Jack Moran and others of his school, who welcomed me to Bohemia, and generously bade me share their treasure-house of accrued knowledge of editorial likes and dislikes. My low-life story—in my sublime faith I had written it on the flimsiest sort of paper—traveled from one office to another until it had eaten up $1.28 in postage and looked like Prince Lorenzo in the last act of The Mascot. Then, held together by copper rivets, it sank into its grave in the old daily Truth, unwept and unsigned.

I came across this forgotten offspring of my literary youth not long ago, and candor compels me to say that if Mr. Johnson had read that story and printed it in the Century Magazine he would not be to-day the dominant figure in the literature of our country that he is. My romance was not nearly as good as a great many that I have read in daily papers from the pens of clever newspaper men who know what they are writing about. In point of intense dramatic interest it was not within a thousand miles of the Sun’s masterly history of the career of George Howard, the bank burglar, who was murdered in the Westchester woods about fifteen years ago. The story of Howard’s life and crimes was told in a page of the Sun, I think by Mr. Amos Cummings, and if I could find any fiction equal to it in one of our magazines I would gladly sound the praises of the editor who was courageous enough to publish it.

I can afford to smile now as I recall the bitterness of spirit in which I used to chafe under the restrictions imposed upon us by the all-powerful barons of literature. I used to console my wounded vanity then by picturing to myself a bright future, when Johnson would stretch out his hands to me and beg me to place on the tip of his parched tongue a few pages of my cooling and invigorating manuscript. And with what derision would I have laughed then had any one told me that in the years to come I would be the one to accord to Mr. Johnson the honor which is his just due, and to recognize the wisdom which he showed in rejecting my story of low life!

A truthful portrayal of life among the criminal and vicious classes would be as much out of place in the Century Magazine as one depicting the love of a widower for his own cousin, whom he took out to ride behind a horse with a record of 2.53, would have been in the old Ledger; and I am positive that such a thing will not occur until after the close of the present literary dynasty.

There is an excellent reason for this prohibition, too. There are no people in the world who have a greater horror of what they consider “low” or “vulgar” than those who are steeped in mediocrity, and who, in this country, form a large part of the reading public. In England they are known as the “lower middle classes,” and they exist in countless thousands; but they have a literature of their own—Ouida, the Family Herald, Ally Sloper’s ’Alf ’Oliday,—and writers like George Meredith and Mrs. Humphry Ward and George Du Maurier pay no attention to them or to their prejudices. Nor does it seem to me that these writers are as grievously hampered by consideration for the peachy cheek of the British young person as they claim to be.

The fact that Johnson was down on low life made a deep impression on me, not so much because of what, I must admit, is a most reasonable and proper prejudice, but because I soon found that every literary man of my acquaintance was fully aware of his feelings in the matter, and therefore took pains not to introduce into a story any scenes or characters which might serve to render the manuscript unsalable in the eyes of the Century editors; and as years rolled on I could not help noticing the effect which this and other likes and dislikes of this literary Gessler had in moulding the fiction of our day and generation. And it is because of this Century taboo, which had its origin in the Ledger office, by the way, that I know of hardly a single magazine writer of to-day who has made himself familiar with the great wealth of varied material which may be found in that section of New York which it is the custom to refer to vaguely as “the great east side.”

It was not very long after the receipt of the letter which thrust upon my bewildered senses a nebulous comprehension of Mr. Johnson’s influence and importance in the domain of letters that a fuller recognition of his omniscience was wrung from me, all-admiring, yet loath to believe. Mr. H. C. Bunner had written a story called “The Red Silk Handkerchief” and sent it to the Century office for approval. The story contained a graphic description of the flagging of a train to avert a disaster, in which occurred the following passage:

“... and he stood by the platform of the last car as the express stopped.

“There was a crowd around Horace in an instant. His head was whirling; but, in a dull way, he said what he had to say. An officious passenger, who would have explained it all to the conductor if the conductor had waited, took the deliverer in his arms—for the boy was near fainting—and enlightened the passengers who flocked around.

“Horace hung in his embrace, too deadly weak even to accept the offer of one of dozen flasks that were thrust at him.”

Now an ignorant layman will, I am bound, find nothing in the quoted sentences that could possibly give offence to the most sensitive reader; but it was precisely at the point where the quotation ends that the finely trained and ever-alert editorial sense of Mr. Johnson told him of the danger that lurked in the author’s apparently innocuous phrase.

“Hold on!” he cried; “can’t you make it two or three flasks instead of a dozen?”

Well did the keen-witted Johnson know that to many a serious minded gas-fitter or hay-maker the spectacle of a dozen evil-minded and evil-living men riding roughshod through the pages of a family periodical and over the feelings of its readers would be distasteful in the extreme, if not absolutely shocking. Two or three flasks would lend to the scene a delicate suggestion of the iniquity of the world, just enough to make them thank God that they were not as other men are; but a dozen was altogether too much for them, and Johnson was the man who knew it.

It is only fair to add that the author very properly refused to alter his manuscript, and the story stands, to-day, as it was originally written.

It was the flask episode that really opened my eyes to the peculiar conditions which encompassed the modern trade of letters, clogging the feet of the laborers thereof, and while making the easy declivities about Parnassus accessible to every one who could hold a pen, rendering its upper heights more difficult to reach than they ever were before. And it was the same episode which finally proved to me Mr. Johnson’s leadership in contemporaneous literature—a leadership which he has held from that day to this by sheer force of his intimate knowledge of the tastes, prejudices, and peculiarities of the vast army of readers which the Century Magazine has gathered unto itself, and still holds by the closest of ties, and will hold, in my opinion, so long as Mr. Johnson remains at the helm, with his pruning-hook in his hand, and reading, with clear, searching eyes, the innermost thoughts of his subscribers.

The present literary era has given us many things to be thankful for, chief among which should be mentioned the enormous advance in the art of illustration—a blessing which is shadowed only by the regretful knowledge that literature has not kept pace with her sister art. Indeed, too high praise cannot be given to the proprietors of the great monthlies for the liberality and good taste which they have shown in raising the pictorial standard of their publications to its present high plane, from which it commands the admiration of all right-minded people. And if we are living in the Johnsonian age of letters we are also living in the Frazeresque period of art, for I doubt if any one man has exercised a wider influence in the field of modern illustration than Mr. W. L. Fraser, the maker of the art department of the Century. Nor should we forget his associate, Mr. Drake.

To the present literary era, we are indebted, also, for the higher development of that peculiar form of fiction called the short story, the popularity of which has at least served to give employment to a large number of worthy people who would otherwise have been compelled to eke out an existence by humbler and more exhausting forms of labor. No sooner had the short-story fever taken possession of the magazine offices than there appeared from various corners of the earth men, women, and children, many of whom had never written anything before in their lives, but who now besieged the Franklin and Union Square strongholds, bearing in their inky hands manuscript which in many instances they were fortunate enough to dispose of, to the rage and wonder of those old-timers who, having learned their trade under Mr. Bonner and Dr. Holland, now found themselves too old to readily fall in with the new order of things.

Of this new brood a few were chosen, and among them were the writers of dialect stories, which enjoyed an astonishing vogue for several years, and are now, happily enough, losing ground. I think the banner writer of dialect stories of this period was a certain Mr. William McLellan, who contributed a number of unique specimens of his wares to Harper’s Monthly. He could spell more words wrong than any other writer I ever heard of and I have often wished that I could read one of his stories.

Some of these short-story marvels have been extremely successful, and now take rank as first-class writers of fiction. I would have a much higher regard for them, though, if they could write novels—not serials, but novels.

Among other notable products of the fecund Johnsonian age the future historian of American literature will dwell upon the Century war-papers, well calculated to extend the circulation of the magazine over vast areas in the South as well as the North where it had been almost unknown before; the Siberian experiences of Mr. George Kennan; autobiographies of celebrated men and women; and idyllic phases of New England life from the pen of the inimitable Mr. Gladden.

The Kennan articles were of enormous value, apart from their own intrinsic merit, because their purpose was the reform of certain abuses. We Americans are so fond of reform that we are always getting it in one shape or another, and the more we get of it the more we want; and these papers were aimed only at the Czar of Russia and his advisers—men who neither subscribe for nor advertise in American monthlies. I doubt if a proposition to undertake a crusade against plumbers and compel them to lower their prices would awaken a tidal wave of enthusiasm in the Century office.

CHAPTER VII.
WOMAN’S INFLUENCE IN THE JOHNSONIAN PERIOD.

It seems to me that so long as a literary man can hold a pen in his hand there is no danger of his going to the poorhouse; for when he becomes too old to give satisfaction as a reporter, or too prosy and stupid to write essays on “The Probable Outcome of the Briggs Controversy” for the religious journals, he can always find a purchaser for a series of Letters to a Young Man on the Threshold of Life, and the sillier the letters the greater will be their success.

I have read dozens of books of this sort, and have often wondered at the uniform ignorance and stupidity which characterized them. There was a time when I wondered who bought these books, for no young man on the threshold of life would be seen reading one of them. I know now that they are not written to suit the tastes of the young men themselves, but of the old grannies who will buy one at Christmas-time as a present for Bob or Tom or Bill.

They are compiled either by literary hacks, enfeebled clergymen, or women of limited intelligence, and they are artfully designed to ensnare the fancy of the simple-minded, the credulous, and the good. I have noticed that those which are plentifully supplied with texts from Holy Writ command the largest sale, provided, of course, the texts are printed in italics.

I believe that books of this description belong to what is known technically as the “awakening” class—that is to say, they are supposed to awaken a young man to a sense of his own spiritual degradation. I cannot answer for their effect on very young men, but I do know that they awaken nothing in my heart but feelings of uproarious hilarity; for I well remember how the merry Bohemians who enriched the literature of the Ledger age with their contributions turned many an honest dollar by means of these admonitory letters, and not one of these priceless essays but contained its solemn preachment on the advantages to be derived from the companionship of good, pure women. But never a word was uttered in regard to the bad influence of good women.

Indeed, I can fancy nothing that would have been less in harmony with a literary spirit which denied recognition to stepmothers, fast horses, and amatory cousins than a vivid bit of realism of that sort; and as for the succeeding age, was not the good Dr. Holland himself the author of the famous Timothy Titcomb Papers? It is even too bald a bit of truth for the more enlightened Johnsonian period in which we live. Nevertheless the recording angel has a heavy score rolled up against the sex which it was once the chivalrous fashion to liken to the clinging vine, but which, as some of us know, can clutch as well as cling—a sex which continues to distil the most deadly and enervating of intoxicants, the flattery of tongue and eye, by the same process that was known to Delilah and to Helen of Troy.

But although the latter-day process of distillation is undoubtedly the same that was employed in centuries long gone by the effects of the poison are by no means the same now that they were then. In the Homeric age it sent a man forth to do valiant if unnecessary deeds; but in the present era it slowly but surely robs the young writer of his originality, undermines his reputation, nips all healthy ambition in the bud, and leaves him a stranded wreck of whom men say contemptuously as they pass by: “Bad case of the Swelled Head.” It may happen that some more thoughtful of the passers-by will have the grace to put the blame where it belongs by adding: “That young fellow was doing very well two years ago, and we all thought he was going to amount to something; but he fell in with a lot of silly women who flattered him and told him he was the greatest writer in the world. They swelled his head so that he could not write at all, and now he’s of no use to himself or any one else.”

But although these poor stranded human wrecks may be encountered in every large community I have yet to find a writer of advice to young men with sufficient courage, veracity, and conscience to utter a word of warning against the poison to which so many owe their fall.

In order that I may make clear my meaning in regard to the evil influences of good women let us imagine the unheard-of case of a young man who actually reads one of these books of advice to young men on life’s threshold, and is sufficiently influenced by its teachings to seek the sort of female companionship which he is told will prove of such enduring benefit to him. This young man, we will say, is beginning his literary career in the very best possible way, as a reporter on a great morning newspaper. He is not a “journalist,” nor a compiler of “special stories” (which the city editor always takes special pains to crowd out), nor is he “writing brevier” or “doing syndicate work.” He is just a plain reporter of the common or garden kind; and very glad he is to be one, too, for he and his fellows know that the reporter wields the most influential pen in America in the present year of grace.

And every day this young man adds some new experience to the store of worldly knowledge which will be his sole capital in the profession which he has chosen. To-day the task of reporting the strike at the thread-mills gives him an insight into the condition of the working-classes such as was never possessed by the wiseacres who write so learnedly in the great quarterlies about the relation of labor to capital. To-morrow he will go down the Bay to interview some incoming foreign celebrity, and next week will find him in a distant city reporting a great criminal trial which engrosses the attention of the whole country. He is working hard and making a fair living, and, best of all, he is making steady progress every day in the profession of writing.

It is in the midst of this healthy, engrossing, and instructive life that he pauses to listen to the admonitory words of the Rev. Dr. Stuffe:

“Young man on life’s threshold, seek the companionship of good women. Go into the society of cultivated and thoughtful people. You will be all the better for it!”

Whereupon the young man arrays himself in the finest attire at his command and goes up-town to call on certain family friends whom he has not seen for some years past. Within a short time he finds himself a regular frequenter of receptions, kettledrums, and evening parties, with dinners looming up on the horizon. He meets a number of charming young women, and cannot help noticing that they prefer his society to that of the other young men whom they know. These other young men are richer, better dressed, and, in many instances, better looking than our young friend from Park Row, but what does all that count for in the face of the fact that he has often been behind the scenes at the Metropolitan Opera-house, and is personally acquainted with Ada Rehan or Ellen Terry?

He thinks that Dr. Stuffe was right when he advised him to go into society, and already he feels sure that he is deriving great benefit from it. But what he mistakes for a healthful stimulant is, in reality, the insidious poison against which the Reverend Stuffe has never a word of warning said; and, unless our young friend be strong enough to flee from it in time, he will find his feet straying from the rugged path which leads to true literary success, and which he has up to this moment been treading bravely and with ever-increasing self-confidence and knowledge.

“And so you’re really a literary man! How nice that must be! Do tell me what nom de plume you write under!” some lovely girl will say to him, and then he will answer meekly that he does not sign either his name or his nom de plume, because he is working on a daily paper—if he has a mind as strong as Daniel Webster’s he will say that he is a reporter—and then some of the light will fade out of the young girl’s deep-blue eyes, and she will say “Oh!” and perhaps ask him if he doesn’t think Mr. Janvier’s story about the dead Philadelphia cat the funniest thing that he’s seen in a long while. Then she will ask him compassionately why he does not write for the magazines like that delightful Mr. Inkhorn, who sometimes goes down on the Bowery with two detectives, and sits up as late as half-past eleven. Has he read Mr. Inkhorn’s story, “Little Willie: A Tale of Mush and Milk”? It’s perfectly delightful, and shows such a wonderful knowledge of New York!

At this point I would advise my young friend from Park Row to put cotton in his ears or turn the conversation into some other channel, because if the sweet young girl prattles on much longer he will find that her literary standards of good and bad are very different from those of his editor-in-chief, whom he has been trying so hard to please, and of the clever, hard-working and hard-thinking young men with whom he is associated in both work and play. If she can inspire him with a desire to please her, he will have cause to bitterly regret the day that he first sought her society in obedience to the suggestion of Dr. Stuffe; for to accomplish this he must put away the teachings of his editor-in-chief, who has learned four languages in order that he may understand his own, and whose later years have been devoted to the task of instilling in the minds of his subordinates a fitting reverence for the purity and splendor of the Anglo-Saxon tongue.

It is precious little that the pure, refined young girl cares about good English, and she would be a rare one of her kind if she did not prefer it splattered with hybrid French because it “sounds better.” She has a far higher regard for the author who signs his name to “The Paper-hanger’s Bride” in the Century, or “The Dish-washer’s Farewell” in the Ladies’ Home Journal, than she has for the reporter who, by sheer force of humor, pathos, and imagination, has raised some trivial city happening to the dignity of a column “story” which becomes a three days’ talk along Park Row.

That there are women who habitually judge literary matter strictly on its merits, and without regard to the quality of the paper on which it is printed, I will not deny—I am even willing to admit that there are women who will lead trumps at whist—but I most solemnly affirm that the average well-educated, clever reading woman of to-day believes in her secret heart that a magazine story possesses a higher degree of merit than a newspaper sketch because it appears in a magazine, and that the “literary man” who has succeeded in selling enough short stories to the monthlies to enable him to republish them in book form has won for himself a more imposing niche in the temple of fame than should be accorded to the late Mr. J. A. MacGahan, who was nothing but a newspaper reporter to the time of his death.

A few cases of Swelled Head resulting from the flattery of women may be mentioned here for the benefit of my imaginary young friend from Park Row, to whom they should serve as so many awful examples of what may happen to one who deserts the narrow and rugged path of honest literary endeavor for the easy-going drawing-rooms in which “faking” and even literary and artistic theft are looked upon with complacency and tolerance.

About fifteen years ago sundry poems, essays, and short stories, bearing a signature which is almost forgotten now, began to attract the attention of the critical, and before long their author came to be looked upon as one of the most promising and talented young writers in the city. Unfortunately for himself, however, his very cleverness and its remarkable precocity proved his ultimate ruin. He was a very young man when he emerged from his native commonplace obscurity and crept, almost unaided, to the very edge of the great white fierce light in whose rays the most ordinary of folks become famous.

And, having reached the outer edge of this brilliant disk of light, he leisurely sate himself down to rest, firmly believing that he was in the very center of it, and that the silly flattery of underbred and half-educated women, and some ridiculous puffery at the hands of time-serving reviewers and paragraphers, were the greenest bays of Parnassus. He became thoroughly satisfied with himself and with his work; and the Swelled Head assumes no more virulent or insidious form than that. He did not become an unpleasant, egotistical nuisance, as many people similarly afflicted do. I cannot remember that he talked very much about himself or his work; he simply agreed with himself that he was the greatest writer of the age, and that he had already achieved fame and glory of the highest sort.

That was not more than a dozen years ago, and at that time his name was on everybody’s lips as the “coming man” of the period. Ah me! how many of these “coming” men and women have come and gone along the outer edge of the great white light within my short memory!

In the past six years I have not seen anything from his pen nor heard him spoken of a dozen times. I saw him the other night on Third Avenue, and if the light from a huge sibilant electric lamp had not shone upon him much more vividly than the great white light of fame ever did, I would never have known him. Seedy, abject, repulsive, he seemed fitted for no rôle in life other than that of an “awful example” to accompany one whose profession it is to go about delivering lectures on the evil results of indulgence in Swelled Head.

In another case of Swelled Head which has come under my observation, the victim is a woman—rather an unusual thing, for a woman’s vanity is not, as a rule, as deep-seated as a man’s. This woman, whom I will call Margaret Mealy, and whose real name is well known to thousands of magazine readers, dwells in a pleasant inland town and has for a neighbor an old-time friend and fellow-writer named Henry Kornkrop. Both are graduates of the old Ledger school—many a Friday morning have they sat side by side on the poets’ bench in the outer office, watching the awful shadow of Robert Bonner moving to and fro behind the glass partition—and both have been successful, though in widely different ways.

Mrs. Mealy has made the tastes of mediocre people her life-study, and, as she has never for a single moment lost sight of the great literary principles which she acquired during the period of her apprenticeship, she has continued to keep herself in touch with editorial likes and dislikes, with the result that she is now a regular contributor to the leading magazines, and the author of various short stories and serials of such incredible stupidity that I often wonder what hypnotic or persuasive powers made it possible for her to dispose of them.

Her neighbor, Henry Kornkrop, is a literary worker of another stamp. He goes to work every morning at nine o’clock, and from that hour until noon the click of his type-writer does not cease for a single instant. Two hours more in the afternoon complete his day’s stint; and as his contract with his publishers calls for neither punctuation, paragraphs, nor capitals, he is able to turn out a stupendous quantity of fiction from one Christmas day to another. He writes over the name of “Lady Gwendoline Dunrivers,” and deals exclusively with aristocratic life and character. Many a young shop-girl going down-town in an early elevated train with the latest “Lady Gwendoline” in her hand has been carried past Grand Street and awakened with a start from her dream of Lord Cecil, with his tawny mustache and clear-blue eyes, to find herself at the Battery terminus of the road. There is strong meat in Henry Kornkrop’s work, and his publishers gladly buy every ream that he turns out. In one sense he leads an ideal literary life, with no editors to refuse his work or alter it to suit the tastes of their readers, no vulgar publicity, no adverse criticisms to wound his feelings, and, best of all, no pecuniary care; for the “Lady Gwendoline” romances bring him in not less than $10,000 a year, which is probably twice as much as Mrs. Mealy makes.

Of course neither of these writers turns out any decent work the year through, if we are to judge them by a respectable literary standard; but it is not easy to determine which of the two is the more culpable—Margaret Mealy, who puts gas-fitters to sleep, or Henry Kornkrop, who keeps dish-washers awake. I fancy, however, that there are few of my readers who will disagree with me in my opinion that, of the two, honest Henry Kornkrop is by far the more successful and prosperous. And yet Mrs. Mealy made up her mind a few years ago that she really could not afford to be on such familiar terms with the Kornkrops—not that Mrs. K. was not the very best of women, and Henry the most industrious of men—but simply because her position before the world as a literary woman made it necessary for her to be a little particular about her associates.

In other words, the silly flattery of young women in search of autographs, and of mendacious reviewers who have manuscript to dispose of, has been sufficient to upset the mental equilibrium of this most excellent woman and leave her a victim of the Swelled Head, pitied by all who know her, and by none more than by her old associate of the poets’ bench, Henry Kornkrop, the modest and gifted author of the “Lady Gwendoline” romances.

One more instance of Swelled Head and I am done. The case to which I refer is that of Mr. E. F. Benson, the author of Dodo, who has, I am credibly informed, been so overwhelmed with attentions from women of rank and fashion that his evenings are now fully occupied with social functions and he is unable to attend night-school. This is to be regretted, for Mr. Benson is by no means devoid of cleverness, and I am sure that in an institution of learning of the kind that I have named he would soon master such mysteries of syntax as the subjunctive mood, and at the same time vastly improve his style by constant study of such masterpieces of simple, direct English as, “Ho! the ox does go,” and “Lo! I do go up.”

CHAPTER VIII.
LITERATURE—PAWED AND UNPAWED; AND THE CROWN-PRINCE THEREOF.

“See here!” cried a friend of mine the other day, “you’re always crying down the magazines, but I’ll bet you couldn’t write a magazine story to save your neck!”

My dear boy, I never said I could write one—in fact, I am very sure I couldn’t; it’s all I can do to read them after the other people have written them. That is an infirmity which has, I am sure, interfered seriously with my labors as a critic—this inability to wade through everything that the magazine editors are kind enough to set before us. But I contrive to keep in touch with contemporary fiction by frequenting the Mercantile Library, where I can not only read and write undisturbed, but also take note of what others are reading and writing. And toward the close of each month I make it a point to arrive very early of a morning and take a superficial glance at the pages of the different periodicals, in order to gain an idea of the relative popularity of each one, and of the stories which they contain. When I find a story that is smeared with the grime of innumerable hands, or a magazine that has been torn almost to shreds by scores of eager readers, I retire to a corner and try to find out the cause of all the trouble.

But this labor-saving system, excellent as it is in many ways, has its defects; and so it happened that I came very near missing one of the most charming stories that I have ever found in the pages of a magazine.

One bleak autumnal morning not many years ago I paid one of my periodical early visits to the library, and had just finished my examination of the literary market when my eye happened to fall on the name of François Coppée printed in about the last place in the world that one would be apt to look for it—namely, in the table of contents of Harper’s Magazine. It was signed to a story called “The Rivals,” and although the pages of that story were neither torn by nervous feminine claws nor blackened by grimy hands I began to read it, and as I read New York slipped away from me, the wheezing of the asthmatic patrons of the library became inaudible to me, for I was in Paris with the young poet and his two loves. When I had finished the book I looked up and saw that I was still in the library, for there were the shelves full of what are termed the “leading periodicals of the day,” and two elderly ladies were racing across the room for the new number of Life.

And then in the fullness of my heart I gave thanks to the great firm of publishers that had dared to violate all the sacred traditions that have been handed down from the Bonnerian to the Johnsonian age of letters and print a story that could make me forget for half an hour that I had a thousand words of “humorous matter” to write before twelve o’clock.

It was sad to come back from the coulisses of the Vaudeville and find myself directly opposite the shelf containing the Chautauquan Magazine and within earshot of the rustling of Harper’s Bazar; but I turned to my work in a better spirit because of M. Coppée and the Harpers, and I have reason to believe that the quality of the “humorous matter” which I constructed that afternoon was superior in fibre and durability to the ordinary products of my hands. I know that a dealer to whom I occasionally brought a basketful of my wares gave me an order the very next day to serve him once a week regularly thereafter, and as he has been a steady and prompt-paying customer ever since I have special cause to feel grateful to the famous house of Harper for the literary stimulus which the story gave me.

I have already alluded to the fact that the pages on which “The Rivals” was printed were not torn and discolored like those containing other much-read and widely discussed romances. It was this circumstance which led me to reflect on the difficulties and discouragement which confront the editor whose ambition it is to give his subscribers fiction of the very best literary quality. In this instance the experiment had been fairly tried and yet at the end of the month the virgin purity of these pages was, to me at least, sadly significant of the fact that Coppée’s delightful work had not met with the appreciation which it deserved.

I did not, of course, lose sight of the fact that the story appealed almost exclusively to a class of people who keep their fingers clean (and have cleanly minds also), and that it was, therefore, not improbable that it had found more readers than the condition of its pages would indicate; but nevertheless I was forced to the reluctant admission that from a commercial point of view the publication of “The Rivals” had proved a failure; nor has the opinion which I formed then been upset by later observation and knowledge. All of which served to heighten my admiration for the enlightened policy which gave this unusual bit of fiction to the American public.

I said something of this sort to a friend of mine, who, although rather given to fault-finding, had to admit that the Harpers had done a praiseworthy and courageous thing in printing M. Coppée’s story. “Yes,” said my friend, rather grudgingly, “it was a big thing of Alden to buy that story; but if that story had been offered to them by an American they wouldn’t have touched it with a forty-foot pole.”

My friend was quite right, for if that story, or one like it, were offered in the literary market by an American writer, the editor to whom it was offered would know at once that it had been stolen, and would be perfectly justified in locking his office door and calling for the police. Coppée has simply told the story of a young poet beloved of two women, a shop-girl and an actress; and he has told it truthfully as well as artistically—so truthfully, in fact, that I shudder when I think of the number of people of the “Christian Endeavor” type who must have withdrawn their names from the Monthly’s subscription-list because of it. If I could be assured that the number of these wretched Philistines were far exceeded by that of the intelligent men and women who added their names because of this important step in the direction of true art, I would feel far more confident than I do now of a bright near future for American letters.

The very next day after that on which I read “The Rivals” I was aroused by a sudden agitation which spread through the reading-room of the quiet library in which I was at work. The table on which my books and papers were spread shook so that the thought of a possible earthquake flashed across my startled mind, and I looked up in time to see the young woman opposite to me drop the tattered remnants of Harper’s Bazar, from which she had just deciphered an intricate pattern, rush across the room, and pounce upon a periodical which had just been placed on its shelf by the librarian. If she had been a second later the three other women who approached at the same moment from three different parts of the room would have fought for this paper like ravening wolves.

The Christmas number of the Ladies’ Home Journal had arrived.

I do not know of any magazine which so truthfully reflects the literary tendency of the age as this extraordinary Philadelphia publication, and I am not surprised to learn, as I have on undisputed authority, that it has a larger circulation than any other journal of its class in this country. It is conducted by that gifted literary exploiter and brilliant romancer, Mr. E. W. Bok, the legitimate successor to Mr. Johnson, and the present crown-prince of American letters.

I took the trouble to examine the number which the librarian had removed, and found that it had been pawed perfectly black, while many of its pages were torn and frayed in a way that indicated that they had found a host of eager readers. Here was pawed literature with a vengeance, and so, after leaving the library that afternoon, I purchased a copy of the Christmas number, thrust it under my coat, and skulked home.

All that evening until well into the early hours of the new day, I sat with that marvelous literary production before me, eagerly devouring every line of its contents, and honestly admiring the number of high-priced advertisements which met my eye, and the high literary quality of many of them. When I finally pushed the Christmas number away and rose from my table it was with a feeling of enthusiasm tempered with awe for the many-sided genius that controlled and had devised this widely circulated and incomparable journal. I must confess, also, to a feeling of admiration tinged with envy that took possession of my soul as I read the serials to which were affixed the names of some of the most distinguished writers in America. I have spoken in an earlier chapter of the “good bad stuff” produced by my friend the poet, and in which he took such honest pride; and I would like nothing better than to ask him his opinion of the “bad bad stuff” which the acknowledged leaders of our national school of letters had unblushingly contributed, and for which, as I have since learned, they were paid wages that were commensurate with their shame. Now the author who writes a good story is entitled to his just mead of praise, but what shall we say of the author who succeeds in selling for a large sum the serial that he wrote during his sophomore year in college? I say, and I am sure my friend the practical poet will agree with me, that he ought to be the president of an industrial life-insurance company.

As for the literary huckster who succeeds in distending the circulation of an almost moribund weekly journal to unheard-of limits by the infusion of this and other equally bad bad stuff, I am at a loss for terms that will do fitting tribute to his ability, and must leave that duty for some more comprehensive reviewer of a future generation who will do full justice to the genius of our great contemporary in an exhaustive treatise on English Literature from Chaucer to Bok.

Although as yet only the heir apparent to the crown of letters, Mr. Bok has acquired an undeniable and far-reaching influence in the realm which he will one day be called upon to govern, and has strongly impressed his individuality on contemporaneous literature, in which respect his position is not unlike that of the Prince of Wales in England. Among the more noteworthy of the literary products which have added lustre to the period of his minority may be mentioned “Heart-to-Heart Talks about Pillow-shams”; “Why My Father Loved Muffins,” by Mamie Dickens; “Where the Tidies Blow”; “The Needs of a Canary,” by the Rev. Elijah Gas; and “How I Blow My Nose,” by the Countess of Aberdeen. Mr. Bok has also made a strong bid for the favor of the sex which is always gentle and fair by his vigorous championship of what is termed an “evening musicale,” an abomination which still flourishes in spite of the persistent and systematic efforts of strong, brave men to suppress it. A timely Christmas article on the subject, published about a year ago, was found to be almost illegible before it had been on the Mercantile Library shelves a fortnight. This article is by the wife of an eminent specialist in nervous diseases—it may be that she has an eye on her husband’s practice—and it contains elaborate instructions as to the best way of inflicting the evening musicale on peaceful communities. How to entrap the guests, what indigestibles to serve, how to prevent the men from escaping when the bass viol begins its deadly work, and how to make them believe they have had a pleasant time, are among the minutiæ treated in this invaluable essay.

It is by sheer force of tireless industry and a complete mastery of every detail of his prodigious literary enterprise that Mr. Bok has placed himself in the proud position which he occupies to-day. He is the acknowledged authority on such subjects as the bringing up of young girls, the care of infants, the cleansing of flannel garments, and the crocheting of door-mats. In the gentle art of tatting he has no superior, and has long held the medal as the champion light-weight tatter of America. In his leisure moments he “chats with Mrs. Burnett,” “spends evenings with Mark Twain,” and interviews the clever progeny of distinguished men in the interest of his widely circulated monthly.

The homely qualities to which I have alluded in the preceding paragraph have made Mr. Bok our crown-prince, but he will live in history as the discoverer of a new force in literary mechanics—a force which may, with justice, be compared to the sound-waves which have been the mainspring of Mr. Edison’s inventions, and one which is destined to produce results so far-reaching and important that the most acute literary observer is utterly unable to make any estimate of them.

The use of the names of distinguished men and women to lend interest to worthless or uninteresting articles on topics of current interest dates back to the most remote period of the world’s history, but it was Mr. Bok who discovered, during a temporary depression in the celebrity market, that a vast horde of their relations were available for literary purposes, and that there was not much greater “pull” in the name of a citizen who had won distinction in commerce, art, literature, in the pulpit or on the bench, than there was in those of his wife, his aunt, his sister, and his children even unto the third and fourth generation.

It was this discovery that led to the publication of the popular and apparently endless series of essays bearing such titles as “The Wives of Famous Pastors,” “Bright Daughters of Well-known Men,” “Proud Uncles of Promising Young Story-writers,” and “Invalid Aunts of Daring Athletes.” The masterpiece of these biographical batches was the one bearing the general head of “Faces We Seldom See,” and it was this one which established beyond all question or doubt the permanent worth and importance of Mr. Bok’s discovery. The faces of those whom we often see have been described in the public prints from time immemorial, but it was the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal who discovered the great commercial value that lurked in the faces of men and women who were absolutely unknown outside their own limited circles of friends.

Then the relations of the celebrities became writers on their own account, and straightway the pages of Mr. Bok’s invaluable magazine glistened with “How My Wife’s Great-uncle Wrote ‘Rip Van Winkle,’” by Peter Pointdexter; “My Childhood in the White House,” by Ruth McKee; “How Much Money My Uncle is Worth,” by Cornelius Waldorf Astorbilt: and “Recollections of R. B. Hayes,” by his ox and his ass.

Even a well-trained mind becomes stunned and bewildered in an attempt to estimate the extent to which this newly discovered force can be carried. The imagination can no more grasp it than it can grasp the idea of either space or eternity, and it is my firm belief that under the impetus already acquired in the Ladies’ Home Journal the hoofs of the relations of celebrities will go clattering down through the literature of centuries as yet unborn.

In the mind of a celebrity the prospect is one calculated to rob the grave of half its repose; nevertheless it must be a comfort to pass away in the great white light of fame, cheered by the thought that the stricken wife, the orphaned children, and the consumptive aunt are left with a perpetual source of income at their fingers’ ends.

A well-thumbed paragraph in a recent number of the Journal announces that Mr. Bok has trampled upon his diffident, sensitive nature to the extent of permitting “what he considers a very satisfactory portrait” of himself to be offered to his admirers at the low price of a quarter of a dollar apiece. This offer, which bears the significant heading “The Girl Who Loves Art,” is made with the express stipulation that intending purchasers shall not deepen the blush on the gifted editor’s cheek by sending their orders direct to the Home Journal office, but shall address them direct to the photographer, Mr. C. M. Gilbert, of 926 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia.

I desire to add that I reprint this generous proposition of my own free will and without either solicitation on the part of Mr. Bok or hope of reward from the photographer whose precious privilege it has been to transmit to the cabinet-sized cardboard the likeness of America’s crown-prince. I would not do this for Mr. Gilder, for Mr. Scribner, or for any of the Harpers. I would do it only for Mr. E. W. Bok.

CHAPTER IX.
CERTAIN THINGS WHICH A CONSCIENTIOUS LITERARY WORKER MAY FIND IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK.

Let us return to my imaginary young friend from Park Row, to whom I have referred in a previous chapter, and let us picture him at a small social gathering in the drawing-room of some clever and charming woman of fashion, of the kind that assiduously cultivate the society of men of art and letters because they like to hear the gossip of literature, the stage, and the studio “at first hand,” if I may use the term.

Our young friend is modest and well-bred, and, moreover, carries with him a certain breezy and intimate knowledge of the men and events of the day which fairly entitles him to a place of his own in what ought to be the most enjoyable of all circles of society. He is delighted with the young women whom he meets here in what his hostess fondly hopes will become a salon—how many New York women have had a similar ambition!—and yet he cannot understand why they pay so much attention to certain gentlemen who are present also, and whom he knows to be of very small account so far as the arts and letters are concerned.

Young Daubleigh is there, the centre of a breathless group, to whom he is bewailing the utter lack of all true art sense on the part of Americans, and the hideousness of New York, which, he declares, offers absolutely nothing to a true artist. Daubleigh never goes into society without a pocketful of art phrases, such as “au premier coup,” “he has found his true métier,” “the divine art of Velasquez,” and others of the same sort. Of course he is a great social favorite, and of course he has very high ideals of his art, and is apt to refer slightingly to artists who know how to draw as “mere illustrators”—a form of speech which does not somehow endear him to those who know that he ought to be at Cooper Union learning the rudiments of his calling.

Another guest, and a favorite one too, is the strangely gifted romancer who poses as a literary man because he has sold two sonnets and a short story to one of the magazines, and of whom it is related in an awestruck whisper that he once went through Mulberry Bend, disguised with green side-whiskers and under the protection of a Central Office detective—all this in search of what he calls “local color.”

Our young friend from Park Row spent two hours in Mulberry Bend the night before in search of a “story” for his paper, and has the hardihood to say so to the charming young girl beside him, adding that he felt as safe as if he had been at an organ recital. The next moment he realizes that he has made a mistake in trying to destroy any of the glamour that shines from the green whiskers and the detective. The conversation now turns upon the availability of New York as a field for the writer of fiction, and is ably sustained by a young gentleman who is known to be “literary,” although no one can say definitely what he has written. However, he is literary enough to have a place in this salon, and to take a leading part in the discussions which go on there. He is very decided in his views regarding literature, as distinguished from what he calls “mere newspaper scribbling,” and does not scruple to express his contempt for anything that is not printed either in a magazine or “between covers,” as he puts it in his careless, professional fashion. Like many a one of the gentler sex, he has been dazzled in early life by the glare from the supercalendered paper. It is now nearly two years since he first began to be a literary man, and he regards the progress that he has made during that period as extremely gratifying, for he has put himself on an excellent footing in three or four of the most delightful literary and artistic salons in the city, and confidently expects to have a story published in one of the leading monthlies by midsummer. And that story will be published, as I happen to know, as soon as he has made certain alterations suggested by the editor—taken out the strong scene between the banker’s daughter and the poor but impulsive suitor, and modified various sentences which in their present form might wound the susceptibilities of a large contingent of subscribers.

This promising young writer has been such a constant visitor to magazine offices since he first embarked on a literary career, and has associated so much with the junior members of the editorial staffs (or staves?), that his opinions are a reflex of theirs, and he is now thoroughly in accord with those with whom he is anxious to do business.

Therefore when he remarks, in that superior manner which insures for him the instant credulity of the women in the company, that it is not worth an author’s while to study the social structure of New York, he is right from his own point of view, and it ill becomes our young friend from Park Row to despise him for it. And when he goes on to say that our beloved city has no individuality of its own, and is permeated through and through with the awful flavor of commerce, while its society is nothing but a plutocracy, I would advise my young friend of the city department to draw him out and make careful notes of what he says about life and literature.

This young man of letters is merely echoing the opinions of those at whose feet he has sat, humbly and reverently acknowledging their literary supremacy, and fondly hoping that they will purchase his manuscript. He knows that Johnson does not like low life, just as Jack Moran knew that Bonner would not tolerate second marriages or fast horses; and so far as his own literary ambitions are concerned, a thorough knowledge of New York would prove about as useful to him as a familiarity with the customs and beliefs of the Mormons or the names of the Derby winners would have been to the old-time Ledger poets.

But the young reporter, who hears him with feelings of either amusement or contempt or indignation, as the case may be, has already seen enough of New York—it may be that he is able to compare it with foreign capitals—to know that there is an abundance of material within its limits which native writers of fiction have not only left untouched, but of whose very existence most of them are absolutely unaware. But it would be useless for him to say so in this company, for he who has just spoken so decisively is a “literary man,” whose work will one day be printed on the finest quality of paper and perhaps adorned with beautiful pictures. And besides, do not all the nice people live north of Washington Square?

Ah! those nice people and that supercalendered paper—what an influence they exert in our literary Vanity Fair!

Perhaps one of the young literary men will go on to say, in proof of his theory about the literary poverty of New York, that the magazines have already published a great many articles and stories about the Bowery and the east side, and have in fact quite covered the field without enriching the literature of the day to any very noticeable degree. All of which is perfectly true, but the results might have been different had the work been intrusted in each case to a writer who was familiar with the subject instead of to one whose only qualification was that he had mastered the art of writing matter suitable for magazines—or, in other words, “literature.” An exception to this rule, and a notable one too, was made in the case of Jacob A. Riis, who wrote some articles for Scribner’s Magazine a few years ago on the poor of New York, and who is known as the author of How the Other Half Lives and The Children of the Poor. Mr. Riis knows his subject thoroughly—he has been a police reporter for years—and his contributions are valuable because of the accuracy of the information which they contain, which is more than can be said of the work of some of the wiseacres and gifted story-writers who seem to stand so well in the estimation of the magazine managers.

But, fortunately enough, the truth is mighty, and must, in the long run, prevail, in literature as in other forms of art: and the enduring novel of New York will be written, not by the man who, knowing his audience of editors rather than his subject, is content with a thin coating of that literary varnish known as “local color,” but by this very young man from Park Row or Herald Square, to whom I take the liberty of addressing a few words of encouragement and advice. When this young man sits down to write that novel, it will be because he is so full of his subject, so thoroughly in sympathy with his characters—no matter whether he takes them from an opium-joint in Mott Street or a ball at Delmonico’s—and so familiar with the various influences which have shaped their destinies, that he will set about his task with the firm conviction that he has a story to tell to the world.

In that novel the “local color” will be found in the blood and bones: it will not be smeared over the outside surface with a flannel rag. And men and women will read the story and talk about it and think about it, just as they are reading and talking and thinking about “Trilby” now.

Did you ever hear any one talk about Mr. Du Maurier’s “local color”? I never did.

But it was for the best of reasons that the barbed-wire fence was stretched across the city just below Cooper Union, although it shut out from view a quarter of the town in which may be found a greater and more interesting variety of human life and customs than in any other region that I know of. Of course this literary quarantine was not effected for the benefit of men and women of clean, intelligent, cultivated minds, but to avoid giving offense to the half-educated and quarter-bred folks whose dislike for what they consider “low” and “vulgar” is only equaled by their admiration of all that is “genteel” and their impassioned interest in the doings of “carriage company.”

I have sometimes accompanied parties of sight-seers through what was to them an entirely unknown territory, south of the barbed-wire fence, and I have noticed in almost every instance that it was only the men and women of a high social and intellectual grade who showed any true interest in, or appreciation of, what they saw there. There have been others in these little expeditions who looked to me as if they stood in perpetual fear of running across some of their own relations, and one of these once gravely assured me that Hester Street was not at all “nice.”

Chinatown is to me a singularly attractive spot, because of its vivid colors, its theatre, joss-house, restaurants, and opium-joints—those mysterious dens in which the Occident and Orient are brought into the closest companionship, while the fumes of the burning “dope” cloy the senses, and outcasts from every clime—the Chinese highbinder jostling against the Broadway confidence man—smoke and drink side by side, talking the while with a looseness of tongue that would be impossible under any influence other than that of opium. Mr. William Norr, a New York reporter, has told us a great many interesting and curious things about the human types—Caucasian as well as Mongolian—to be found in this quarter, and his book, Stories from Chinatown, possesses the rare merit of being absolutely true in color, fact, and detail.

But there is something in this alien settlement that seems to me to possess a greater interest, a deeper significance, than the garish lights of the colored lanterns or the pungent smoke of the poppy-seed, and that is the new hybrid race that is growing to maturity in its streets and tenements. There are scores of these little half-breeds to be seen there, and one of them has just come prominently before the American public in the person of Mr. George Appo, the son of a Chinese murderer and an Irishwoman, and himself a pickpocket, green-goods operator, as well as one of the most entertaining and instructive of all the witnesses examined before the Lexow Committee.

The Chinese and Italians rub elbows in this corner of the town, and a single step will bring us into Mulberry Bend, bright with red handkerchiefs and teeming with the olive-skinned children of Italy. Nowhere in the whole city is there a stronger clan feeling than here—a feeling that manifests itself not only in the craft and ferocity of the vendetta, but also in a spirit which impels these poverty-stricken exiles to stand by one another in the hour of trouble. There is no better-paying property to be had than one of these Mulberry Street tenements, for it is seldom, indeed, that the Italian poor will permit one of their number to be turned into the street for want of a month’s rent.

The Jewish old-clothing quarter that lies close to the Five Points is near by. The “pullers-in,” as the sidewalk salesmen are termed in the vernacular of the trade, transact business with a ferocity that can be best likened to that of Siberian wolves; but over beyond Chatham Square lies the Hebrew burying-ground, an ancient patch of sacred soil which all the money in New York could not buy from the descendants of those whose ashes repose there.

A few short blocks north of this old landmark lies one of the most famous political districts in the town, one which is liable to become the pivotal point in an exciting and closely contested election. There is a saloon here on one of the side-streets which it may be worth your while to visit. It is a dark, uninviting place, and its interior, with its rows of liquor barrels and boxes and its throng of blear-eyed, tough-looking customers, suggests anything but wealth and power. Nevertheless the taciturn little Irishman whose name is over the door has grown rich here and is the Warwick of the district so far as the minor city offices are concerned. And it was to this rumshop, as the whole ward knows, that a President of the United States came in his carriage one Sunday morning not many years ago, to make sure of the fealty of its proprietor and pour the oil of patronage on the troubled political waters.

And furthermore it is related of this district boss—who stands in the same relation to his constituents that the Roman senator of old did to his clients—that once at the close of an election day of more than ordinary importance one of his lieutenants burst in upon him, as he sat with a few faithful henchmen in the back room of his saloon, and announced triumphantly that his candidate had carried a certain election district by a vote of one hundred and fifty-five to one. And at this intelligence the east-side Warwick swore a mighty oath, and, striking his clenched fist fiercely on the table before him, exclaimed: “What I want to know is the name of the wan sucker that voted agin us!”

And while you are strolling along the Bowery you may come across an oldish-looking man with a dyed or gray mustache and a suggestion of former rakishness in his seedy clothes and well-preserved silk hat—a man who seems to have outlived his calling, whatever it may have been, and to have been left high and dry with no intimate companionship save that of his own thoughts. It will pay you to get acquainted with this old man, for he belongs to a race which is fast disappearing, the race of old-time American gamblers, of which Bret Harte’s John Oakhurst is the best type to be found in our national fiction. He still survives in the West and South, but here in New York his place has been taken by the new brood of race-track plungers and Hebrew book-makers; and the faro-box from which he used to deal with deft fingers, and the lookout chair from which he was wont in the olden times to watch the progress of the game with quick, searching eyes and impassive face, know him no more.

If you are studying the different dialects of the town, you should make careful notes of this old man’s speech and of the peculiar way in which he uses the present tense in describing bygone happenings. Mr. H. L. Wilson has given us, in his excellent book of stories called Zig-zag Tales, the following delicious bit of dialect, which I quote because it well illustrates what I have said. The words are taken from the lips of the “lookout,” and are addressed in a cautious undertone to the faro-dealer:

“See his nobs there with the moniment of azures? I’m bettin’ chips to coppers that’s Short-card Pete. He’s had his mustache cut off, ’n’ he’s heavier ’n he was ten years ago. He tends bar in Noorleans, in ’68, fer Doc Nagle—ole Doc, you rec’lect—’n’ he works the boats a spell after that. See ’im one night play’n’ bank at Alf Hennesey’s, an’ he pulls out thirty-two solid thousan’; Slab McGarr was dealin’, ’nis duck here makes him turn over the box. See ’im ’nother time at San’tone, ’na little geeser works a sleeve holdout on ’im—one a these here ole-time tin businesses; you never see a purtier gun play ’n he makes—it goes, too; mebbe it was n’swif’! He’s a-pullin’ on that gang; get onto that chump shuffle, will you? Ain’t that a play fer yer life? He ain’t overlookin’ any bets.”

“What are you giving us?” is the contemptuous cry of my young friend from Park Row who has done me the honor to read what I have written. “I know all that about Chinatown and the politicians as well as you do.”

So you do, my young friend, and I have no doubt you know it a great deal better than I do; but I had a double motive in offering you the words of suggestion which you have taken the trouble to follow. In the first place, when the young literary man of limited achievement, referred to in an earlier part of this chapter, obtains an order for an article on “The Coast of Chatham Square,” he will probably come to you to find out where Chatham Square is and at what time they light the gas there: and I am sure you will be glad to help him to the full extent of your knowledge, although you may wonder why the order was given to him instead of to you. In the second place, although the whole of the east side is familiar ground to you, there are plenty of intelligent, well-informed men and women who know very little about what this city contains, and if you will read my next chapter you will learn of the impression which the tenement-house district made upon a certain distinguished gentleman who saw it recently for the first time.

CHAPTER X.
“HE TRUN UP BOTE HANDS!”

One summer evening not very long ago, I saw, to my intense surprise, Mr. Richard Watson Gilder crawl cautiously through the barbed-wire fence which was long ago stretched, with his sanction, across the city at Cooper Union. Once within the tabooed district, the distinguished poet and Century editor cast an apprehensive glance about him and then marched swiftly and resolutely down the Bowery. Late that night I caught another glimpse of him standing in the middle of one of the side-streets that lead to the East River, and gazing thoughtfully at the tops of the tall tenement-houses on either side of him.

I could not help wondering what strange errand had brought him to that crowded quarter of the town, for not many months before one of his own trusted subordinates had blandly informed me that there was nothing in New York to write about, excepting, of course, such phases of its social life as had been portrayed, more or less truthfully and vividly, in the pages of Mr. Gilder’s own magazine.

I was still marveling at the spectacle of the poet in search of facts when I came across one of my east-side acquaintances, who had seen and recognized the Century editor, and from him I learned that he was pursuing his studies of what is known in the magazine offices as “low life,” not that he might write about it or be capable of judging the manuscript of those who did write about it, but by virtue of his office on the Tenement-house Commission.

“He’s just been down Ludlow Street, an’ troo one o’ dem houses where de Jew sweaters is,” added my friend.

“And what did he say to it all?” I inquired.

“He trun up bote hands!” said the east-sider, earnestly.

I walked home that night weighed down with the import of what I had learned, and filled with solemn speculations regarding the effect which Mr. Gilder’s visit would have on American letters. I could picture to myself the hands that would be “trun up” in the Century office when the accomplished members of the editorial corps learned that their revered chief had actually ventured into the heart of a district which teems with an infinite variety of human life and lies but a scant mile to the south of the desk from which Mr. Johnson rules the literary world of this continent.

And I thought, also, of the excitement that would run through the ranks of the writers should Mr. Johnson, of course after solemn and secret communion with Mr. Gilder, announce officially that at twelve o’clock, noon, on the first day of the month, the firing of a gun, followed by the destruction of the barbed-wire fence, would throw open the long-forbidden low-life territory to poets, romancers, and dialectists of every degree. What a rush of literary boomers there would be to this new Oklahoma should this old barrier be torn down! I could not help smiling as I pictured to myself the strangely gifted American story-writers groping their way through picturesque and unfamiliar scenes, and listening in vain for the good old “bad man’s” dialect that has done duty in fiction ever since Thackeray visited this country, but which was swept away long since by the great flood-tide of German and Jewish immigration which has wrought so many changes in the life of the town. How many ink-stained hands would be “trun up” before the first day of exploration was done! How many celebrated delineators of New York life and character would lose themselves in their search, after dark, for “local color,” and be gathered in like lost children to be cared for by Matron Webb until rescued by their friends the next morning!

Still brooding over the enormous possibilities of the future, I stopped to rest and refresh myself in a modest and respectable little German beer-saloon, situated on the tabooed side of the barbed-wire fence—on the very border-land between low life and legitimate literary territory. It is an ordinary enough little place, with a bar and tables in front, and, in a space curtained off at the rear, a good-sized room often used for meetings and various forms of merrymaking. I never drop in for a glass of beer without thinking of a supper given in that back room a few years ago at which I was a guest; and on this particular night remembrance of that feast had a new significance, for it was blended with thoughts of Mr. Gilder’s journeyings. It was an actor who gave the supper—one of the most brilliant and talented of the many foreign entertainers who have visited our shores—and nearly every one of his guests had won some sort of artistic distinction. It is not the sort of a place that suggests luxurious feasting, but the supper which the worthy German and his wife set before us was, to me, a revelation of the resources of their national cookery. The occasion lingers in my memory, however, chiefly by reason of the charm and tact and brilliancy of the woman who sat in the place of honor—a woman whose name rang through Europe more than a quarter of a century ago as that of the heroine of one of the most sensational duels of modern times. Mr. Gilder has probably read about her in The Tragic Comedians, in which George Meredith has made her the principal character, and I am sure that if he—the Century editor, not Mr. Meredith—had looked in upon our little supper party that night, he would have “trun up bote hands,” in the full sense of that unique and expressive term.

Recollections of this feast brought to mind another which was given about two years ago fully half a mile to the south of the barbed-wire fence, and which is worthy of mention here because it taught me that some of the people bred in that region are vaguely conscious of a just claim that they have on the attention of story-writers and rather resent the fact that a place in our national literature has been denied them.

The feast to which I allude was given on the occasion of a great wedding in a quarter of the town which plays an important part in civic and national affairs on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November—one in which the trade of politics ranks as one of the learned professions—a quarter where events date from the reigns of the different police captains.

The bride was the daughter of a famous politician, and I am sure that in point of beauty and tasteful dress she might have passed muster at Tuxedo. She was tall, graceful, and very young—not more than seventeen. One could see traces of her Hebrew lineage in her exquisitely lovely face, and I am sure she was well dressed, because she wore nothing that in any way detracted from her rare beauty or was offensive to the eye.

She had been brought up near the corner of the Bowery and Hester Street, in the very centre of one of the most vicious and depraved quarters of the town; and as I talked with her that night she told me how most of her childhood had been spent playing with her little brothers and sisters in the garden which her father had built for them on the roof of the house in which they lived, and on the ground floor of which he kept the saloon which laid the foundations of his present political influence. She spoke simply and in good English, and one could easily see how carefully she had been shielded from all knowledge even of that which went on around her.

An extraordinary company had assembled to witness the ceremony and take part in the festivities which followed, and as I sat beside two brilliant, shrewd, worldly-wise Hebrews of my acquaintance we remarked that it would be a long while before we could expect to see another such gathering. The most important of the guests were those high in political authority or in the police department, men whose election districts are the modern prototype of the English “pocket boroughs” of the last century; while the humblest of them all, and the merriest as well, was the deaf-and-dumb boot-black of a down-town police court, who appeared in the unwonted splendor of a suit which he had hired especially for the occasion, and to which was attached a gorgeous plated watch-chain. “Dummy” had never been to dancing-school, but he was an adept in the art of sliding across the floor, and he showed his skill between the different sets, uttering unintelligible cries of delight and smiling blandly upon his acquaintances as he glided swiftly by them.

Several of the gentlemen present had “done time” in previous years, and others—John Y. McKane for example—have since then been “sent away.” I saw one guest wink pleasantly at a police captain who was standing near him and then slyly “lift” the watch from a friend’s pocket, merely to show that he had not lost his skill. A moment later he awakened a little innocent mirth by asking his unsuspecting friend what time it was.

I dare say that a great many of my readers imagine that at a festivity of this description “down on the east side” the men appear for the most part clad in the red shirts which were in vogue at the time of Thackeray’s visit to America, and which now exist only in the minds of those writers who are famous for the accuracy of their local color. As for the women, I have no doubt these same readers picture them in garments similar to those worn by the “tough girl” in Mr. Harrigan’s drama, nor would they be surprised to learn that there was a fight every twenty minutes.

For their special benefit I will explain that nearly every one of the men wore evening dress of the conventional pattern, and that the display of diamonds and costly gowns—many of which were tasteful as well—was a noteworthy one. There was an abundance of wine and strong drink for everybody, and a very thirsty company it was, too, but not a sign of trouble did I see the whole evening through. The truth of the matter is that to the majority of the men and women present a fight was a serious affair, and one not to be entered into lightly and unadvisedly.

For three hours I sat with my two Israelitish friends—a pool-room keeper and a dime-museum manager respectively—and talked about the people who passed and repassed before us, and I am bound to say that the conversation of a clever New York Jew of their type is almost always edifying and amusing.

“It’s a curious thing,” said one of my companions at last, “but I really believe that we three men at this table are the only ones in the whole room who have any sort of sense of the picturesqueness of this thing, or are onto the gang of people gathered together here. There’s probably not a soul in the room outside of ourselves but what imagines that this is just a plain, every-day sort of crowd and not one of the most extraordinary collections of human beings I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve been knocking round New York ever since I was knee-high. There are thousands of people giving up their good dust every week to go in and look at the freaks in my museum, and there’s not one of them that’s as interesting as dozens that we can see here to-night for nothing. Just look at that woman over there that all the politicians are bowing down to; and they’ve got a right to, too, for she’s a big power in the district and knows more about politics than Barney Rourke. They never dared pull her place when the police were making all those raids last month. Those diamonds she wears are worth ten thousand if they’re worth a cent. There’s a man who wouldn’t be here to-night if it wasn’t for the time they allow on a sentence for good behavior, and that fellow next him keeps a fence down in Elizabeth Street. There’s pretty near every class of New Yorkers represented here to-night except the fellows that write the stories in the magazines. Where’s Howells? I don’t see him anywhere around,” he exclaimed, ironically, rising from his chair as he spoke and peering curiously about. “Look under the table and see if he’s there taking notes. Oh yes, I read the magazines very often when I have time, and some of the things I find in them are mighty good; but when those literary ducks start in to describe New York, or at least this part of it—well, excuse me, I don’t want any of it. This would be a great place, though, for a story-writer to come to if he really wanted to learn anything about the town.”

I am perfectly sure that if Mr. Gilder had turned up at that wedding his hands would not have been the only ones “trun up” in honor of the visit. And I firmly believe that the visit of the Century editor to what is said to be the most densely populated square mile in the world will prove pregnant of great results, and may perhaps mark a distinct epoch in the history of letters.

On looking back over what I have written, it seems to me that I have devoted too much of my space to that portion of the city which lies below the barbed-wire fence; but I hope my transgression will be pardoned in view of the great significance of Mr. Gilder’s recent explorations and also of the fact that the region itself is so rich in literary material of the sort that a Victor Hugo or a Dickens would have seized upon with avidity. There are young men working in newspaper offices now who will one of these days draw true and vivid pictures of modern New York as it appears in the eyes and the brains of those who know it thoroughly, and very interesting fiction it will be, too. The late Mr. Mines (Felix Oldboy) and Mr. Thomas A. Janvier have written successfully and entertainingly of the town that our fathers and grandparents knew, but the book on New York of to-day has yet to be written, and I know of no one better qualified for the task than my young friend the reporter, whom I have personally addressed in preceding chapters.

It seems to me something like high treason to even hint of the possibility of a break in the present literary dynasty—an event which would be deplored by none more bitterly than by my loyal self. Mr. Johnson’s powers are still unimpaired, and his grasp on his pruning-hook is as firm as it was on the day that he suggested the reduction of the twelve flasks to two or three. I desire nothing more than that in history’s page my name shall brightly glow beside his as his Boswell. Mr. Bok has already shown such remarkable capacity for benign and progressive rule that we may look forward with a reasonable degree of confidence to his peaceful and undisputed accession to the throne, and a new impetus to the sale of his photographs, which are dirt-cheap at a quarter of a dollar.