The magazine in America

\^^?i^'.Vo:»vycyii

THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

I

T H E

1 r"rt itSTB »

CoUf-

•r H F--

General Ma^azinl
^""'"^^^vn Vc Hiprkai hrmicle,

KVirnbgt^, > **' ^^^^ >T..r all the Brttifi V\;muv.um ir >-!../
[To hf CtmtiniKd Moathly.]

All the eighteenth century magazines embellished their covers and
pages with copper-plates. Our first magazine, The General Magadne,
sported the three plumes of the Prince of Wales ; the American showed
a haughty and fat Indian leaning upon his club, whom a dapper
Frenchman was tempting with money from a war-chest while a virtuous
Englishman extended a Bible and charter

THE MAGAZINE
IN AMERICA

BY

ALGERNON TASSIN

WITH FRONTISPIECE

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1916

-^

%^

Copyright, 1915
By DODD, mead AND COMPANY

Copyright, 1916
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC

TO

ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE

a4351>2

i r..

PREFACE

These papers, for the most part published in The Book-
man, present an informal history of the magazine move-
ment in the United States, from its beginning down to
the close of the nineteenth century. The author has
not undertaken the business of the genuine historian. In
the few studies he has encountered of magazines of spe-
cial periods, he has found as many contradicted state-
ments of fact as an informed reader may discover in his
own pages. Many of the statistics of magazines have
been entirely lost, partly through contemporaneous in-
difference to such ephemera and partly because the persons
who knew the facts were willing to let them disappear.
This account seeks merely to arrange our magazines and
their tendencies in order, and to assemble such published
opinions about both as the author in his reading has found
interesting either in themselves or in their disagreement.
Perfectly fair-minded people unfortunately have at the
time little that is interesting to say and less occasion for
saying it. Only out of some fullness of the heart have
mouths spoken of matters which were mistakenly sup-
posed to be of small concern to the general public. Edi-
tors and proprietors notoriously put their best foot for-
ward, and avoid mention of derogatory items which com-
petitors and contributors are as eager to detach and
emphasise. As a consequence, the facts of the period are
to be found only by minute search and comparison of
sophisticated or biassed documents. The author has had
no opportunity to verify, sift, and weigh all the collectable
evidence — which is the duty of veritable history.

For such as it is, however, this running account of the
magazine in America has arranged for the first time the
widely scattered and submerged material which it pre-

PREFACE

sents, and sought to make a continuous picture of the in-
tellectual and literary movements of our country as ex-
pressed in its periodicals for one hundred and fifty years.
Of the modern magazines much that might be said has
been omitted, merely because it has not yet found its way
to print. With them by intention as with their ancestors
by necessity, the author has interviewed only the written
word — the spoken though perhaps quite as reliable is at
least less responsible. He has not rushed in where writers
fear to tread. To everything that has been printed, how-
ever, he has helped himself liberally. Aside from the
many authors, dead and living, whose reminiscences have
gone to the making of this volume, he owes thanks to
several surveys in specialised fields, chiefly for their valu-
able aid in orientation. These are Professor A. H.
Smyth's The Philadelphia Magazines, 1741-1850; Mr.
E. R. Rogers* Four Southern Magazines; Mr. W. B.
Cairns' Development of American Literature, 18 15-1833 ;
Mr. W. H. Venable's Beginnings of Literary Culture in
the Ohio Valley ; and Mr. H. E. Fleming's Magazines of
a Market-Metropolis. These have all supplied statistics.
But the maker of this mosaic frankly confesses that his
interest lies rather in hearing what people have thought
of themselves and of each other than in the absolute facts
at the bottom of their opinions ; and ventures to think that
in so indulging himself he gets a clearer idea, as- well as a
more colourful one, of the fundamental truth.

A.T.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I Eighteenth Century Magazines .... i

II The Making of the Boston Tradition . . 28

III Baked Beans and Brown Bread .... 55

IV Philadelphia, the Valley of Self-suffi-

cientness 85

V New York and the Making of a Metropolis 109
VI The Willowy Willis and the Piratical Poe

in New York 131

VII The Waves of the Atlantic 154

VIII South and West — Athenses That Might

Have Been 178

IX Putnam's and the New Journals of Opinion 205
X Harper's — The Converted Corsair . . . 232
XI Righteousness and Peace Have Missed Each

Other 256

XII Century Born Scribner's 287

XIII Some Magazine Notions Dead and Dying . 312

XIV The End of the Century 34Q

CHAPTER I

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MAGAZINES

In January, 1741, three days apart and in the small city
of Philadelphia, were published the first two magazines
of this country. These facts themselves make one sus-
pect cut-throat work. It is perhaps significant that the
stormy and colourful career of the magazine in America
began with a royal row.

One was published by Andrew Bradford, the other by
Benjamin Franklin. Their appearance had been preceded
by the usual announcements in the newspapers and by a
very unusual altercation. For Franklin claimed that the
idea and the plans of the magazine had been stolen from
him. Webbe, who had announced Bradford's, admitted
that Franklin had told him of the project but said this did
not restrain him from publishing one himself without Mr.
Franklin's leave. During the quarrel both Franklin and
Bradford accused each other of using their position of
Post Master to foster their private ends. Only three
numbers appeared of Bradford's magazine, the American
or a Monthly View; and only six numbers of Franklin's,
the General Magazine or Historical Chronicle. Franklin
in his first number ridiculed his competitor's ; but he seems
not to have been proud of his own, as no mention of it
occurs in his autobiography.

Between this and the end of the century there were at
least forty-five magazines started. Besides those ad-
dressed to a more general audience, they included a
musical magazine, a military, a German religious, and a
children's magazine. Thus, the sparsely settled new
States were decidedly over-exploited. When in 1787,
Mathew Carey requested advice about founding the
American Museum Jeremy Belknap wrote him from Bos-

2 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

ton : " Several atiempts have been made within my
memory both here and at the Southward to establish such
a repository of literature, but after a year or two they have
uniformly failed. To what other causes the failure may
be ascribed I will not say, but this appears to me to be
one, viz : the too frequent publication of them. We are
fond of imitating our European Brethren in their monthly
productions without considering the difference between
our Circumstances and theirs. Such a country as this
is not yet arrived at such a pass of improvement to keep
up one or two monthly vehicles of importance." How-
ever barren were some departments of literature in the
early days, then, magazines indicated at the outset their
eternal disposition to multiply faster than the traffic will
stand.

From a very early date editors had been keenly con-
scious of the need for variety. The New England Maga-
zine, 1758, price eight pence a number of sixty pages, gave
in an advertisement this description of its contents :

Containing and to Contain:

Old-fashioned writings and Select Essays,

Queer Notions, Useful Hints, Extracts from Plays;

Relations Wonderful and Psalm and Song,

Good Sense, Wit, Humour, Morals, all ding dong;

Poems and Speeches, Politicks, and News,

What Some will like and other Some refuse;

Births, Deaths, and Dreams, and Apparitions, Too;

With some Thing suited to each different Geu (gout?)

To Humour Him, and Her^ and Me, and You.

The editor of the Massachusetts Magazine was con-
stantly adding new departments, but insisted that all its
contributions should be of a popular nature. " It has
been hinted by some well-wishers that deeper researches
into the arcana of science, more especially the abstruser
parts of philosophy and the mathematics, would give the
magazine a celebrity with the learned. In reply we beg
leave to remark that the British Universal Magazine was
materially injured by an adherence to this plan; and

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MAGAZINES 3

America presents a more recent instance of a magazine
supported by a host of scholars which literally sunk be-
neath the impending weight of technical terms and the
pressure of amplified definitions.'' If they had not
hitherto consulted the desires of the fair sex sufficiently
or gratified the delicacy of their taste, they trusted to
compensate for their negligence in the future; and they
hoped at the same time that the scientifick sons of Provi-
dence and the accomplished seniors of Yale would deposit
their respective offerings at the shrine of Fame; and it
could be seen that the proceedings of Congress and the
Commonwealth had been detailed with all the amplitude
which prescribed limits would allow. The Nightingale
was establishing a department of Criticism which would
give candid and impartial accounts of all American publi-
cations. " The food which the editors served up has
been found to be disagreeable to some fastidious palates
and inadequate to supply the cravings of some insatiable
stomachs. Yet they do not conceive their dishes to be
filled with the mere whipt-syllabub of learning and the
flummery of the muses. The most hungry might have
found a solid beef stake of science to feast upon, and they
are sure the pepper of criticism and satire have been given
in abundance sufficient to prevent a nausea. Good
humour has always smiled at their table, and variety has
garnished the viands." Indeed, when one considers the
exceedingly heavy fare offered almost without exception
by the books and pamphlets of the day, the magazines
should have afforded a delightful treat. Political and
religious controversies were sedulously avoided by most.
All of them had their regular light essayists of the Bicker-
stafT lineage — the Gleaner, the Drone, the Babbler, the
Trifler, the Scribbler, Philobiblicus. The poetry some-
times constituted a fourth or a sixth of the issue, and
with a recklessness which would turn the modern editor
pale was collected in a department at the end of each
number. The chief function of poetry as a filler-up of
chinks left between more solid prose had not yet evolved.

4 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

Every magazine had its Pegasus, its Cabinet of Apollo,
its Seat of the Muses, its Parnassiad; even the most
prosaic had its Poetical Essays or its Poetical Provision.
Nor was the poetry all of the lofty variety of " An Ele-
gant Ode on the Mechanism of Man " ; there were lines
"To a Lady on Striking a Fly with Her Fan," or to
" The Fly On Being Let into a Lady's Chamber " ; and
there was much narrative verse, serious or jocose. Even
the Boston Magazine, 1784, six of the twelve original
members of which became the parents of the Massachu-
setts Historical Society by virtue of their design to publish
a Gazeteer of the State giving a sketch of every town in
the commonwealth, announced that though it would
rather be too grave than too sprightly and though it
hoped it would never be trifling or superficial or ludicrous,
it would apply itself to the publication of everything that
is curious and entertaining.

All the editors, too, were alive to the desirableness of
embellishing their magazines with " elegant copper-
plates." A frequent announcement runs, " As soon as a
number of Subscribers equal to the expence of this maga-
zine are procured, every number shall then be ornamented
with some pleasing representation." These were very
expensive, and in days when there were very few adver-
tisements (indeed, almost none at all in the monthlies,
except on the cover pages) they were a decided considera-
tion. Yet at a time when into the average household
never entered a picture of any sort, they must have given
great delight. The first volume of the Boston Magazine
contained twenty-seven illustrations; its plan was two
engravings and a piece of music to each number. The
Massachusetts Magazine tried for a time the experiment
of furnishing eight additional pages of letter press in lieu
of copper plate engravings, ** but the admirers of this
polite art earnestly called for their re-assumption." Thus
in addition to popularising literature, the early magazines
were popularising art also.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MAGAZINES 5

The prospectus of the New York Instructor, 1755,
might well have served for most.

The design of this paper is to communicate to the Publick
Select Pieces on the Social Duties, and such historical or Specu-
lative Remarks as may be thought useful to be collected from
the best English writers; which if read either in a Morning at
Tea, or after Dinner by the Younger Sort, cannot fail of leav-
ing a good effect upon the mind, as well as improving them in
their Reading and Morals. If any Getlemen of Taste will
please to recommend any particular Pieces, all due Regard
shall be paid to them in their Turn. And these collected into
One or more Volumes will be worth preserving, especially to
those who cannot readily come at the Originals. Occasional
News will sometimes be added likewise. N.B. No Contro-
versy of any kind will have Admittance. To be continued
Weekly (if suitable Encouragement). Price, Two Coppers.
Whoever pleases to preserve these Papers entire and will re-
turn them to the Printer at the end of the year shall have a
Copper a Piece for each.

Alas for the thrifty who saved their papers! It is
thought that only ten numbers were published.

Almost as frustrated as their appeal for subscriptions
was their demand for original pieces. The second
volume of the Massachusetts Magazine laments the want
of more originality. " Indulge us to observe that men of
learning in this country are not always blest with leisure.
Yet the Massachusetts Magazine can compare in point
of originality with its American brethren and transatlantic
cousins. There is no work of this kind in any quarter
of the globe which is totally original. A correspondence
has been established in Europe, and an agreeable inter-
change of literary good offices promises to be a happy
result." The second volume of the Boston Magazine
confesses that it began with high hopes of originality,
the first volume indeed having a third of its pieces
original. But the second volume has been compelled to
publish many extracts, which will, however, increase
learning, improve the morals, and mend the heart. The
editor is particularly obliged to the sons of Harvard for

6 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

their productions and he shall always be happy to have it
in his power to announce to the public the effusions of
their pens. The American Moral and Sentimental, New
York, 1797, printed for the editor next door to the Tea-
Water pump, was a type of a great many magazines which
did not essay the struggle for originality. This publica-
tion, as perhaps might be gathered from its name, reeks
with edification. The Philadelphia Magazine and Re-
view, 1799, thought that the desire for originality had
wrecked many ventures. " We are led to believe that
they failed for some other cause than the want of dis-
cernment or liberality in those to whom the editor looked
for support. For one publication of ours we receive
at least fiwt hundred from Great Britain ... yet we
shall always be glad to print any original verse or prose
or agreeable talk." Mathew Carey designed the Ameri-
can Museum in 1787 to fill a new niche. " Having long
observed in the various papers printed on this continent
a vast number of excellent and invaluable productions, I
have frequently regretted that the perishable nature of
the vehicles which contained them entailed oblivion on
them after a very confined period of usefulness and circu-
lation. The respectable character who now fills the presi-
dential chair of this commonwealth having expressed
the same sentiment a few months since, I conceived that
a publication designed to preserve the most valuable could
not fail to be highly useful and consequently among an
enlightened people to meet with encouragement.'* He
contemplated also a re-publication of many of the best
pamphlets prior to and during the war, with occasional
selections from European prints. But even this lofty
design had room for pieces of a more popular kind,
though, with the exception of some of the verse, none
were for entertainment merely. In the announcement
for volume two he said : " So far was public opinion
against it and so very confined were the expectations
formed of a work which professed to be void of origi-
nality and to be in some measure only a handmaiden to

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MAGAZINES 7

the newspapers, that at the appearance of the first number
there were not twenty subscribers."

The editors all felt that their mission was to educate
the people. " M " is writing to a magazine and accounts
for the defective literature of his native country by the
scarcity of books.

There is hardly a library in the United States, public or pri-
vate, which would enable a man to be thoroughly learned in any
one language. The public library of Philadelphia is a respect-
able one for its age and will probably in time exhibit a very-
large collection. The same may be said of the library belong-
ing to the University of Cambridge in Massachusetts. If I mis-
take not, however, they are both very defective, and the latter
particularly so, in modern publications. Nor are the deficiencies
of our public libraries by any means supplied by private collec-
tions, or by the enterprise and literary character of booksellers.
There is hardly a greater desideratum in the United States than
a bookseller who to a large capital in business would unite a
taste for literature, a zeal to promote it, and a disposition to
make the public as early as possible acquainted with every new
publication of value that is made either in Europe or America.
As it is, we seldom see a European publication here, unless it be
of a peculiarly popular cast or unless it be sent for by a gen-
tleman who has heard of its character. Thus you see, Mr. Edi-
tor, I view everything of this kind with cordial satisfaction and
cannot help flattering myself that the establishment of your
magazine will materially subserve the interest of letters and
science in America.

The tenor of another letter is the same.

It is with pleasure we observe the numerous literary institu-
tions in these States, happily calculated to disseminate a knowl-
edge of the Arts and Sciences. But very few of our Youth can
be educated in these seminaries, and though good policy may
forbid that any considerable number of them should receive a
collegiate education, it may, notwithstanding, be of essential
service to the community that our young men in general who
shall devote themselves to commerce and to mechanical and
agricultural employment should possess considerable degrees of
literature. A deficiency of learning hath often been very sensi-
bly regretted by many worthy characters in these States when
elevated to public and important offices; and frequently igno-
rance hath not only exposed them to ridicule but been injurious
to the interests of the public. We mention particularly a cir-

8 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

cumstance that exposed a very popular patriot in London a few
years past, to contempt and occasioned him to become a subject
of ridicule in the public papers of the metropolis. In an oration
he made at Guildhall, instead of speaking in the superlative de-
gree, which he wished to have done, through ignorance he made
use of the double comparative — more better.

This last appeared in the Christian's, Scholar's and
Farmer's Magazine, published By a Number of Gentle-
men in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. The title is a de-
lightful illustration of that breadth of aim which most
of our early magazines exhibited. It was the design of
this performance to promote religion, to diffuse knowl-
edge, and to aid the Husbandman in his very necessary
and important toil. The full title of the Massachusetts
Magazine was Monthly Museum of Knowledge and Ra-
tional Entertainment — Containing Poetry, Musick,
Biography, History, Physics, Geography, Morality, Criti-
cism, Philosophy, Mathematicks, Agriculture, Architec-
ture, Chemistry, Novels, Tales, Romances, Translations,
News, Marriages and Deaths, Meteorological Observa-
tions, etc., etc. But the desire to cover as wide a ground
and to give as much as possible for the money is perhaps
illustrated best by Mathew Carey's announcement that he
had procured a set of smaller types (his type, like that
of all the magazines, was already maddeningly minute)
better calculated for the purpose of his magazine; as
they would comprise one-third more matter than the for-
mer in the same number of pages !

" In America," ran the announcement of the Philadel-
phia Monthly Magazine, " periodical publications may
properly be termed the literature of the people. The state
of manufactures, agriculture, arts may as yet be deemed
in their infancy, and in them new discoveries and im-
provements are daily making. We solicit the aid of our
readers that these may become known. Medical Facts
and observations, Law Cases and Decisions, together with
the miscellaneous material which usually adorns a maga-
zine we intend to publish. Magazine poetry has usually

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MAGAZINES 9

been considered as synonymous with the most trivial and
imperfect attempts at verse-writing [in 1798!], but no
piece will be admitted which cannot lay claim to true
genius and poetic merit. Review of new publications will
proceed generally by extracts."

It is possible that each new editor, even with before
him examples of constant failure, hoped to make some
money (if he did, he spent it at once on enlargement),
and certainly he expected to pay expenses. But chiefly
he thought of himself as a torch-bearer. To popularise
literature in the States, where few books of literature
were read and almost none were published ; to disseminate
news of improved ways of doing things among people
who would never hear of them otherwise — this was their
high calling. Making all allowance for their stately and
diplomatic periods, it animates every line of their an-
nouncements.

Nor did either editors or contributors apparently have
any desire to exploit themselves. Anonymity was in
general the rule of the day. The editors of the Chris-
tian's, Scholar s and Farmer's sincerely regret that want
of leisure will oblige them to discontinue it. As not
literary fame but the benefit of mankind was the great
object of the editors in publishing this miscellany, they
beg leave still to conceal their names from public view.
" The imprinted seal of secrecy forbids the development
of names," announced the Massachusetts Magazine, " but
the late graduated sons of Harvard and Hanover will
pardon the well-founded presumption that our readers
are greatly indebted to many of them for the instructive
essay or the amusing tale." Most of the articles were
either unsigned or signed by fanciful names indicative of
the style of the writer. There were almost no hired
editors, they were often the printers and generally the
proprietors. Thomas Paine was an exception. He was
engaged by R. Aitken as editor of the Pennsylvania
Magazine in 1775 at a salary of twenty-five pounds a
year. The contract, says Isaiah Thomas, called for a

lo THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

certain quantity of original matter, but often he found it
difficult to prevail on Paine to comply with his engage-
ment. Aitken is responsible for the statement that Paine
would never write for him without a decanter of brandy
on the desk and the workmen waiting for the copy. The
first prominent appearance of Freneau was in the United
States Magazine with a metrical version of a psalm.
It was of course unsigned, and a footnote says it was
written " by a young gentleman to whom in the course
of this work we are greatly indebted.'* The Weekly
Magazine, begun in Philadelphia in 1898, introduces us^
to the first professional man of letters in America. It
was The Man at Home, by Charles Brockden Brown,
unsigned, and it ran through thirteen numbers. In the
second volume he began his first important novel, Arthur
Mervyn. Mathew Carey in the American Museum had
a list of notable contributors — Franklin, Dr. Rush, Fre-
neau, Trumbull, Humphreys, Francis Hopkinson, and
Governor Livingston. Most of these articles appeared
for the first time; and thus it is seen that Carey's boast
that he had provided a medium to the literary talent for
the country was well founded. He, alone of all the
editors, said that he rapidly accumulated material beyond
his needs.

In September, 1786, the Columbian Magazine or
Monthly Miscellany, was inaugurated by Mathew Carey
and four others. It was modelled upon the Gentleman's
Magazine and the London Magazine, and was decidedly
the most ambitious periodical project yet undertaken in
America. The expense of printing alone was said to be
one hundred pounds a month. In December Carey with-
drew, saying that he could not work with so many editors.
The preface to volume one announced that the great pur-
pose of the magazine was to communicate essays of
entertainment without sacrificing decency to wit, and to
disseminate, the works of science without sacrificing in-
trinsic utility to a critical consideration of style and com-
position ; and it indulged the pleasing and patriotic hope

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MAGAZINES ii

of advancing the best interests of society. Its obligations
to society the Columbian, in common with most of our
early magazines, took with extreme seriousness. " Os-
myn of Bassora, an Eastern Tale," it answered a corre-
spondent, " is prettily written, but to what end ? Unless
rendered subservient to the interests of virtue, composi-
tions of this kind are unworthy of attention. However
distinguished, they are but a splendid nothing." What
tales it published were patently edifying, as may be
guessed from their titles: Chariessa, or a Pattern for
the Sex; Angelico, or the Munificent Heiress; The
Danger of Sporting with Innocent Credulity. The
writer of Some Verses On Applying Pigeons to a Lady's
Feet When Dying is informed that the circumstance
is in their opinion very improper for a subject of gal-
lantry. Nor are they by any means content with matter
alone; form is to be regarded. Lavinia, Junior, is told
though her poem is replete with good sentiments, as a
poem it is not sufficiently correct and finished; however
disposed they might be to favour a young female pen
which seems to merit encouragement, the public eye will
make no allowances. The Western Tour is too much
like verse to be good prose and too prosaic to be anything
like a poem. The address to the Public affixed to volume
two reads as follows : " The completion of another year
furnishes the customary opportunity of rendering our
thanks to those who have contributed to support this
work by their subscriptions or to embellish it by the exer-
cise of their talents. If the public find no reason to be dis-
satisfied with the number or variety of the latter descrip-
tion, the proprietors will feel less disposition to lament
the insufficiency of the former. They have uniformly
declared that the emoluments which might well have been

I expected from their undertaking formed but a secondary
object; and in truth, as the account stands, after some-
thing more than two years of labour and expence, unless
they have succeeded in affording a rational entertainment
i^o their readers, they must suffer the mortification of a
I

12 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

defeat in every hope." Variety they had certainly
afforded: literary essays grave and light; The For-
esters, an American tale in several instalments portray-
ing the history of the country and of the Constitution;
also in instalments the History of the Late War, and the
biography of Governor Winthrop; many articles of in-
formation on improvements in agriculture and manu-
facture; regular departments of Historical Scraps, For-
eign and Domestic Intelligence, Law Budget, Literary
and Political Fables, Household Receipts, The Columbian
Parnassiad, Marriage and Death Announcements from
all the States, and Meteorological Observations. In May,
1789, the magazine gave an extended account of Wash-
ington's progress to New York and his receptions on the
way. For entertainment there are the usual letters to an
Old Bachelor and from Maiden Aunts to their' Nieces ;
a humorous description of the manners and fashions of
London, in a letter from a Citizen of America to his
correspondent in Philadelphia ; and letters on the state of
society in Philadelphia and the various pursuits of social
pleasure. This last is by The Trifler, who conducts a
regular department in a sprightly fashion.

This city, Mr. Trifler, differs very essentially from New York
in the great outlines of society. In Philadelphia there are sev-
eral classes of company — the cream, the new-milk, the skim-
milk, and the canaille (as I have heard them whimsically di-
vided) ; but in New York there are only the genteel and the vul-
gar. In the latter place every person whose manners and edu-
cation are above the vulgar, is entitled to rank with the genteel ;
but in the former all the modifications of birth, fortune, and pol-
itics are to be consulted in order to ascertain the upper circle of
acquaintance. The cream generally curdles into a small group
in the most eligible situation in the room; the new milk seems
floating between the wish to coalesce with the cream and to es-
cape from the skim-milk ; and the skim-milk in a fluent kind of
independence laughs at the anxiety of the new-milk and grows
sower upon the arrogance of the cream. Hence it is, sir, that
our concerts and assemblies have lost their charms — for the
superiority established on the one hand and the mortification
felt upon the other, seem to have produced the resolution, that

I

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MAGAZINES 13

never again shall the ears of cream and new-milk listen to the
same melody, or their feet caper in the same dance. Notwith-
standing these variances, however, each class closely imitates its
immediate superior; and from the conduct of one you may easily
conceive the conduct of all.

Florio has fretted himself into a fever that almost cost him his
life, because a modest taylor had made a yellow pair of breeches
decently large for his limbs, and had not carried the cape of
his coat as high as the crown of his hat. It is not within the
scope of my present subject to animadvert upon a fashion which
exposes some things that aught not to be seen and conceals
others which need not be hidden ; but I will mention en passant
that it is reported one part of the fashion was introduced by
an Irish gentleman and the other by an unfortunate adventurer
who wished to keep from public view the odious depredations
of the pillory. Of the female dresses it may be said that for-
ever changing they are still the same. Miss Becky Catastrophe,
a young lady of diminutive size, has quitted the ball room in
the extremest mortification because her bishop was not as large
as Mrs. McRump's, a matron whose natural swell might have
disclaimed the assistance of art; and Mrs. Palace has scarcely
excited so much envy by the elegance of her manners and the
brilliancy of her equipage as by her voluminous craw, which,
like the fortifications of Gibraltar, serves to keep everybody at
a distance, but then the difficulty of conveying provisions to the
garrison is equally great in both instances.

The preface to volume three reads : " The utility of a
comprehensive periodical miscellany as it tends to diffuse
knowledge among all ranks, has been acknowledged in
every government, but in America the importance of such
a work is extremely obvious. The literati are therefore
earnestly requested to favour this native production with
their communications, and it is hoped the public in general
will lend their names to the list of its supporters." The
increase of the latter under the new plan, they announce
gratefully, is considerable; and they have obtained a
circulation also in different parts of Europe and the West
Indies. The new plan, occasioned by their merger with
a projected magazine, brought them a new title. The
Universal Asylum and Columbian. This was issued
" By a Society of Gentlemen," whereas the previous
editor had been Dallas. Part of the latter's policy was

14 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

to report the debates of the State Convention; and the
Federalists, becoming annoyed at his attitude, finally with-
drew their subscriptions. Benjamin Rush had written to
Noah Webster (Mr. Albert Smyth tells us in his Phila-
delphia Magazines), "From the impudent conduct of
Mr. Dallas in misrepresenting the proceedings and
speeches in the Pennsylvania Convention, as well as from
his deficiency of matter, the Columbian Magazine of
which he is editor is in the decline." But most of its
readers did not agree with him. The pages had been
increased from fifty- four to sixty without additional
expense to the subscribers and not less than two copper-
plates published. An Impartial Review of American
Publications had been added, and the proprietors an-
nounced that they intended to make this a permanent basis
on which a more extensive review might be established.
At times a second edition was necessary, and the types
were reset at great expense. An appendix was published
containing the laws of the United States, and these with
the Political Register, it was hoped would extend the
usefulness of the magazine. It printed also many
authentic documents in its history of the Revolution,
which ran through several volumes.

In fact, the continued and increasing success of the
Columbian made it unique among American eighteenth
century magazines. Nor did it die, like most of them, of
starvation. It preferred suicide with honour. The num-
ber for January, 1792, they had increased to eighty pages
to make room for a report on manufactures. A note on
the cover read : " We fear it will not be in our power
to forward this work to some gentlemen in the interior
parts of the country unless Congress shall think it proper
to amend the post-of?ice bill so as to place monthly on
the same footing with daily or weekly publications."
Congress did not think proper, and at the end of that
year they announced their discontinuance. " The law
which charges for monthly publication the postage rate
on private letters or packages is a prohibition as injurious

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MAGAZINES 15

in its consequences as the principles on which it is founded
are partial and oppressive. The postal laws of Great
Britain, which transported magazines on the same terms
as newspapers, were continued in America for some
years; and the salutary effects were apparent in the
political and other useful information diffused among the
people. That this privilege should be wrested from them
so soon after their struggle for liberty and equal rights
is at once a subject for astonishment and regret. The
operation of this unequal and oppressive law having
rendered it impossible to convey this miscellany to their
numerous subscribers in the interior parts of this country
but at the expence of losing a great proportion of them
through a bad conveyance, they have determined to re-
linquish the undertaking and employ their time and
capital in a way which may be more conducive to their
private interest."

From the very first the magazines had cocked a dis-
dainful calculating eye on the woman-interest. Of the
twenty-three articles in a number of the General Maga-
zine ten are connected with parliamentary proceedings.
The others are religious, philosophical, or informational,
the lightest being a dialogue against ridiculing personal
defects. In the midst of all this comes oddly a package
of letters from a Mrs. Martha Harward, purporting to be
genuine and found after her decease. " The fate of the
writer," reads the head-line, " is a strong instance of the
violence of human passions when they get loose from the
government of reason and the restraints of religion."
The lines are a poignant cry in a humdrum world. On
the back of one incoherent sobbing letter is this super-
scription. ** To the most inhuman of his sex, W. P.
Read, Betrayer, read, pity one moment. But ever forgive
your Patty. For yours, come happiness or woe I ever
am. Could I have parted any other way, I for your dear
sake would. Impossible was it to live without your love.
Forgive, my dear, dear Creature. To Death, to all
Eternity must my soul adore her Billy. Forgive too

1 6 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

severe Reproaches. You could not love; oh, how could
such a wretch as I expect it. Adieu forever to your
wretched Darling Patty." Poor Patty! Excellent op-
portunity for sermonising as her letters afford, one feels
resentfully that they were made to suffer this last in-
dignity of all not so much to point a moral as to adorn a
tale — to add one touch of crimson colour to an otherwise
dull page.

So all along. With a dancing-master bow, derisively
de rigiieur, the editors make their compliments to ladies,
exploiting their sins and their follies and their vanities
while pretending to censure them — for the sake of the
human interest the long list of failures had shown was
indispensable. The Royal American, Boston, began life
in 1774, an exceptionally grave magazine, with such a
sense of fact, indeed, that a number was delayed a week
on account of the Meteorological Register and finally
printed with an explanation for its absence. But as time
went on it felt the need of popularising, and began to
insert letters from lorn or perplexed females. " Sir :
I am addressed by two gentlemen of equal merit but show
neither the least encouragement, and assure them I am
determined never to alter my present happy state of life.
But these, they say, are things of course, for all women
say the same. Pray, Sir, is it not a misfortune that a
woman's resolution carries no weight? and must those
who have fortitude enough suffer for the inconstancy of
the rest of the sex? By indulging this a place in your
magazine, I hope to put a stop to their pretensions. Your
obliged Humble Servant, Rosalinda." " Mr. Editor,
does not conjugal happiness immediately decrease, or does
the fondest husband * after matrimony's over Hold out
more than half a lover ' ? And is not this a considerable
objection against matrimony? In your next I expect an
answer. Yours, etc., Lucy." But Lucy never heard, for
there was no next. The magazine ended abruptly on
account of the Revolution. It is another of the few
magazines that did not die of starvation ; nor did it seem

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MAGAZINES 17

likely that it would have done so, for Isaiah Thomas, who
printed it for six months of its eleven, says it had a hand-
some list of subscribers. It had had a tempestuous
career. The prospectus was issued many months before
its first number, but the turbulent state of public affairs
delayed its appearance* and fretted its brief existence, and
the blockade of the port finally compelled it to suspend.

The first magazine that openly catered to women was
the Gentleman and Lady's Town and Country, Boston,
sold at Shakespear's Head. It appeared in 1784 and was
only a nine months' wonder. Its tone was rather brisk,
and its desire for a wider variety than had been obtained
before was somewhat unfortunately symbolised by its
several styles of type. Their wish was " to please rather
than to wound, woman the noblest work of God." In
the first number the editors present their most respectful
compliments and solicit the Candour of the public in
favour of the magazine which is now submitted to the
benevolent age. The embellishment of a frontispiece and
other plates they could not obtain, but take the liberty of
proffering a beautiful engraving from the design of an
excellent master to be bound up with the volume at the
close of the year. The list of Births, Deaths, and Mar-
riages, etc., will be procured and duly inserted from this
and the neighbouring towns. In the room of Meteoro-
logical Observations they flatter themselves to afford
something more agreeable to the general taste than the
account of snow-storms after the sky is serene or the
history of North Westers when the wind is South East.
A pleasing hope is indulged that the Learned and Ingeni-
ous will honour them with a valuable correspondence.
All pieces of merit will be carefully noticed, and those
which are refused neither blasted by indelicate censure nor
solemn criticism. The Ladies in particular are requested
to patronise this work by adding the elegant polish of
the Female Pencil, where purity of sentiment and impas-
sioned fancy are happily blended together.

The policy of this magazine was decidedly to pamper

i8 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

the ladies. Most of the tales are love-tales, and there are
many more than usual. Those traditional elegant em-
ployments of women, poetical enigmas and rebuses, are
conspicuous; and the department of Parnassian Blossoms
grew and waxed fat. Its essays show flattering attention
to the gentler kind. The Advantages of a Mutual Cor-
respondence Between the Two Sexes ; Desultory Thoughts
Upon the Utility of Encouraging a Degree of Self-
Complacency, Especially in Female Bosoms; Advice to
a Young Lady Concerning Marriage (wherein Leonora
is advised to emulate the example of Maria, whose
modesty will not permit her to attend more than one
ball a winter and even then accompanied by her hus-
band) ; Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial
Happiness, Addressed to Ladies (wherein they are
cautioned to read frequently the marriage service not
overlooking the word Obey, and to consider that the
person they are going to spend their days with is a man
not an angel, and not to dispute with him be the occa-
sion what it will). Interest was adroitly carried over
from month to month by letters and advertisements.
C. N. announces that he wants a wife who will agree
to his system of economy and is agreeable in her per-
son, " with such perfections as are necessary for my
circumstances, who will give up luxuries and propa-
gate love." Such a lady will favour him by giving him
notice in the next month's production. Julia, in reply,
says she is one of many prudent, discreet females, un-
married and as capable of propagating love as himself;
she desires, however, a description of his person in the
next number before advancing further. A. B. writes
that her husband left her shortly after the conjugal rites
were ended and, void to all humanity, took a second wife ;
she wants to know, since her husband married first, if
she can lawfully marry during his life; or if it is felony
in her, was it not in him also ?

Scarcely longer lived the second magazine which recog-
nised the sex in its title. This one, published in Philadel-

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MAGAZINES 19

phia in 1792, By a Literary Society, announced itself as
being entirely devoted to their affairs, and was called
the Lady's Magazine and Repository of Entertaining
Knowledge. The announcement is of unusual interest
in several ways.

The first volume of the Lady's Magazine is now submitted in
all deference to the perusal of the fair daughters of Columbia.
The extraordinary marks of applause with which the Ladies of
Philadelphia received the proposals for this work claims our
warmest acknowledgments. The female patronesses of litera-
ture while they discover an understanding in the fairest part of
intelligent creation to distinguish works of real merit from the
false glare of empty profession, at the same time also shed a
lustre on the amiable qualities which adorn the minds of the
fair. It is theirs to give ease to the weary traveller in the
rugged paths of science and soften the rigours of intense study ;
it is theirs to chace the diffidence of bashful merit and give real
dignity to the boldest thought. As to the reception this publi-
cation may meet with in the world of literature, we hope we are
secure from the attacks of envy or malevolence, since it is de-
voted to the fair sex. Every lover of the ladies will stand forth
as a champion in defence of a work peculiarly calculated for
the instruction and amusement of the lovely. It has been ob-
served that monthly magazines are so contracted that they leave
the reader in ignorance and suspence from one month to an-
other as to the sequel or winding up of an interesting piece.
It is proposed to have the Lady's Magazine published every six
months in a handsome large octavo volume of at least three
hundred pages, ornamented with an elegent frontispiece and
marble cover. It is presumed the above mode of publishing a
work of this nature will be preferred to a monthly one, as it
shall never be stuffed with that disgusting and worn-out ex-
pression to he continued. The sex in general may rely on the
editor's utmost endeavours to render it one of the most lively
and instructive publications now in circulation. Their corre-
spondence is respectfully requested in either poetry or prose.
The elegant productions of their pen have hitherto adorned the
most valuable libraries, and it is expected the females of Phila-
delphia are by no means deficient in those talents which have
immortalised the names of a Montague, a Craven, a More, and
a Seward in their inimitable writings. If the present work
meets with the encouragement we have reason to expect, it is
intended to adorn the succeeding volumes with an engraving to
each number, with the addition of the newest and most fashion-
able patterns of needlework for gowns, aprons, etc.

20 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

The frontispiece presents the Genius of the Ladies'
Magazine accompanied by the Genius of Emulation, who
carries in her hand a laurel crown, approaching Liberty
and submitting to her, kneeling, a copy of the Rights Of
Woman. But lest you may think you have in this poetic
allegory an early harbinger of the suffrage movement, let
us hasten to quote further from the announcement.
" Persons of erudition and learning have suggested to us
that a book of this kind will be universally recommended
in all boarding schools throughout the country — as it is
to contain everything requisite to disseminate the knowl-
edge of real life, portray virtue in the most amiable point
of view, inspire the Female Mind with a love of religion,
of patience, prudence, and fortitude. In short, whatever
tends to form the accomplished Woman, the Complete
Economist, and the greatest of all treasures, A Good
Wife."

The first number disclosed an adroitness worthy of
longer life than a year. A number of letters were pub-
lished. " The men have every access to books at college,
but our sex are kept at very short allowance by our par-
ents, who are afraid to give us improper books and do not
know what are or are not proper. Signed, A Multitude
of Subscribers." " We are of the opinion that you ought
frequently to give us articles that are calculated for gentle-
men; I would therefore advise you to omit many things
that are of the feminine kind. Signed, More Than One
Half Your Subscribers." Miranda writes that she is
tired of the continual reprehensions of woman's dress
and recommends that other subjects be found for censure
or satire. Matrona is glad to hear the follies and the
foibles of the sex will appear in their true colours, espe-
cially the modes of dress, which are becoming every day
more and more ridiculous. Mary, Lydia, and Rebecca
write that they have nothing in their library but old
musty Spectators and hope that they may hear of all the
new novels and plays. Hannah Motherly writes that
they must caution the fair against fiction. Simon Soberly

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MAGAZINES 21

and Tim Noodle write what you might expect of them.
These and similar letters the editor presents with an
intimation that every taste will be satisfied, and with dark
allusions to the farmer who tried to please every one in
his treatment of his ass.

There is a series called the Ladies* Friend (wherein
Emilia thinks aloud on bash fulness, conjugal affection,
benevolence, and the like) and also one called Letters
From a Brother To A Sister at Boarding School.
(Strangely prophetic of a more famous series in a much
later Philadelphia magazine, the burden of which is the
same.) Thus even in that newest of new things, a
woman's paper, there is nothing new under our sun.

In his preface to volume two of the American Museum
Mathew Carey wrote : ** After a careful examination of
the various shoals on which periodical publications have
been wrecked in this and other countries, I am in dread
of only one — which I am almost ashamed to intimate.
This shoal is a w^ant of due punctuality in paying the
subscriptions. These being small, each individual is but
too apt to suppose it a matter of great indifference
whether he pays his quota at the time appointed or in
six or twelve months afterwards. This is a great mis-
take. It is further to be observed that the expence of
sending twice or thrice or, as is often the case, four times
for the amount of a subscription, bears no small propor-
tion to the sum received.'' This was, indeed, one of the
chief reasons for wreckage. Whatever magazines sur-
vive the year return thanks, though often somewhat
hollowly, for increase of subscriptions but all call attention
(with a doughty diplomacy in which no note of weariness
is allowed to enter!) to the great number of old ones
remaining unpaid. The Massachusetts Magazine, having
weathered six volumes, regrets that the remissness of
their subscribers at a distance (together with the appre-
ciation of journey-work and the enhanced price of paper)
will necessitate them to omit publication for three months
aftei the completion of the present volume, to collect

2^ THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

outstanding debts and make plans for resuming publica-
tion on an improved plan. Isaiah Thomas inserts the
following notice in his Worcester Magazine — a weekly
" Containing Politicks, Miscellanies, Poetry, and News,'*
published 1 786-1 788 as a substitute for his newspaper,
the Spy, in order to avoid the tax on newspapers, which
he thought an improper restraint on the press.

Please to Read it! Somehow or other, many persons who
subscribe to newspapers and magazines never bother themselves
to make payment. When the Printer gives by way of advertise-
ment a general dun, they either think that they are not called
upon or whether they pay or not it will be of little consequence
as the debt is small, or they content themselves with thinking
that sometime or other they will call or send him the money
due,, or otherwise they will send him some articles of produce
to discharge their accounts. Thus by some means or other the
printer remains unpaid. He now requests All who are indebted
to him (Post- Riders are also desired to remember that they are
included in the word All) to come and settle with him. If
brought within three weeks from the date, he will receive the
following articles of produce in payment, viz.: Wood by the
load or cord. Butter, Cheese, Beef, Pork, Wheat Flour by the
Barrel, Rye and Indian Corn, Wheat, and Flax Seed. For all
these articles the market price will be paid. Those who now
neglect to pay him will not think themselves ill-used if their ac-
counts are lodged with a Magistrate.

The South Carolina Weekly Museum, a magazine of
thirty-two pages, took the unusual liberty of announcing
in stern accents on the completion of its first volume, in
1797, that it would not deviate from the rule of making
theirs altogether a Cash business. Their severity in this
respect did not de-humanise them in other ways, however,
for they announce also that the unavoidable delay in
getting out the first, the January, number arose because
the festive season had been celebrated by some of their
hands in a more liberal manner than usual ; and to make
up the deficiency they had added a supplement and would
at the end of six months present the public with an addi-
tional number. One of the favourite tricks to catch the
dilatory subscriber was the presentation of the seventh

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MAGAZINES ^3

number gratis on payment for the preceding six. The
attempt to make the subscriber pay half his year's sub-
scription on receipt of the first number never seems to
have succeeded. In one v^ay and another most of the
magazines echoed the New American published in 1758 at
Woodbridge, Nev^ Jersey, by Sylvanus Americanus.
" This number completing the first quarter, v^e earnestly
hope our kind subscribers v^ill now (agreeable to the
proposals) discharge their arrears to the Gentleman
who took in their subscriptions, that we may be enabled
to proceed in this expensive undertaking." As this maga-
zine was a very tidy little affair, the expense must have
been considerable; but in this case as in most of the
others the kind (or courteous or respectable or obliging
or generous) patrons remained adamant, and the editor
suspended.

Charles Brockden Brown, who seems always to have
had the magazine bee buzzing in his bonnet, wrote to
his brother some time before he started in 1799, the
New York Monthly, his first periodical : " Four hundred
subscribers will repay the annual expence of sixteen hun-
dred dollars. As soon as this number is obtained, the
printers will begin and trust to the punctual payment of
these for reimbursement. All above four hundred will
be a clear profit for me; one thousand subscribers will
provide $4,500 and deducting the annual expence will
leave $2,700." Thus it will be seen from this calculation
(which proved like that of the potter who carried the
tray on his head) that the expense of running a magazine
was not very great. At the end of the first volume of the
Philadelphia Monthly Magazine, 1798, the editor returns
thanks to his nine hundred subscribers, but hopes that a
more extensive circulation will allow him to engage men
of talent to help him, for the whole business of editing,
attending the press, and circulating the numbers is now
done by himself, Thomas Condie. The story was every-
where the same whether the editor could afford to get
any one to help him or not. Mathew Carey, in his auto-

24 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

biography, said of the American Museum, " I was much
attached to this work and had great reluctance to abandon
it, unproductive and vexatious as was the management
of it."

The gallant story is perhaps best told in the various
announcements of the New York Magazine which, begun
in 1790, had an exceptionally long career. This was a
publication of sixty-four pages, and George Washington
and John Adams headed the list of subscribers. The
preface to volume two hints at the well-known fact that
they could employ their press to more advantage in the
present state of pecuniary emoluments, but they will con-
tinue in the hope that they will derive a compensation
from the liberality of their fellow-citizens. The growing
opulence of the city induces them to believe that they will
one day meet the reward of their present labours.
Volume three announces that though the subscription is
still lacking, the magazine has thus far outlived any at-
tempts of the kind heretofore made in the city. Volume
four says that the history of printing could be challenged
for a single instance of persons willing to persevere in
a work whose profits were so very inadequate. Their
own particular interest and the profession of holding up
the Literary Reputation of this city are equally responsible
for the continuance. In the latter respect they have been
successful to a degree beyond expectancy. The typo-
graphical part has been executed in a manner that makes
them proud. Such engravings as have appeared have
been executed in as neat a manner as could be done on
this side of the Atlantic, the print is beautiful. Volume
six says it has often been remarked that literature receives
but a partial welcome in the United States, and with re-
spect to magazines the observation is trite that their
patrons are too few in number to render an undertaking
of that kind an object worthy of attention either as it
respects emolument or improvement. " It is impossible
to arrest the attention of those attached to the active
scene of business. In the pleasure with which we present

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MAGAZINES 25

this volume, we have only to regret that the number is
not so respectable as the class addressed." The next
volume is made to begin a new series, so that subscribers
may neither possess an incomplete work nor go to the
expense of procuring the six preceding volumes. These
considerations, they think, have withheld some new sub-
scribers. The proprietors have not heretofore secured
a reasonable compensation for printing, exclusive of the
labour of editing. The preface to the second volume of
the new series announces that the magazine has toiled
eight long years, but the harvests have been poor indeed.
" Shall every attempt of this nature desist in these
States ? Shall our country be stigmatised, odiously stig-
matised, with want of taste for literature? "

The appeal to patriotism is everywhere voiced by these
sturdy soldiers of a forlorn hope. The United States
in 1779 had announced that America must show that she
was able to cultivate the belles-lettres, even disconnected
with Great Britain, and disprove^the British jeer that the
colonies when separated from England would become
mere illiterate ourang-outangs. " Foreigners view works
of this nature as evidence of the literary character of our
city," implored the New York Magazine. " Shall we not
then exert ourselves to appear as respectable abroad as
we really are at home? Strangers generally refer their
decision of the state of learning to the number of original
compositions a place boasts. Though originality is not
an absolute requisite to the composition of a good maga-
zine, nevertheless it is a weighty consideration. Num-
bers of the Sons and Daughters of Columbia are well
qualified to shine in the walks of literature. Let each,
then, lend a helping hand." Even more vigorous appeals
were made in the name of local pride. " We believe it to
be pretty generally the case," said this magazine, " that
other periodicals of America receive considerable support
from neighbouring States, but such is not the case with
us. No one will ever doubt the ability of the city of New
York to support a monthly publication," it continues with

26 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

all the emphasis of uneasiness. The editor of the Ameri-
can in 1787 in announcing his discontinuance with the
twelfth number had said, " Business will require the pro-
prietor to leave the city immediately on the delivery of
this number, and whether the most flourishing city in
America will continue and support this periodical remains
yet to be determined." The Nightingale or A Melange
de Literature, Boston, 1796, in announcing a change in
its policy piped a shrill key : " We are sanguine that a
literary periodical can be supported in America. It has
been suggested that the inhabitants of Boston prefer
viewing the manifest of a ship's cargo to a lounge in the
library. Let it not be said that in the pursuit of gain.
Literature and the Muses are left at a distance, and that
a sordid lust for gold has banished every noble sentiment,
every mental delight from the bosoms of the avaricious
Bostonians. God forbid that any foe to our country ever
shall have reason to say that our native town is the resi-
dence of Ignorance, though it should be the emporium of
Plutus!"

One is profoundly impressed with the sporting blood
of the devoted band. They entered the arena and shouted
smilingly, " We who are about to die salute you ! "
They bade their fellows godspeed and, later, a grim
farewell. The Massachusetts Magazine said with its
fourth volume : " Four years' experience has partly
baffled the expectations of hope. The increase of sub-
scriptions has unfortunately fallen below anticipation.
Some part of the time alluded to another magazine re-
ceived a degree of continuance in this State, and pub-
lications of a similar nature were fostered in New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, Nova Scotia, etc. Death though the de-
stroyer of human hope often invigorates the confidence
of the living. The American Museum, Columbian
Asylum, New Jersey Repository, and Nova Scotia Magch
sine are now no more. Their passing shades move si-
lently along and beckon the Massachusetts Magazine to
follow. Fond of life and anticipating length of days,

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MAGAZINES 27

she bids them a tender adieu and presses forward to the
mark of the high calling of the Literati." Three years
later its preface announces that it will go on in spite of
difficulties. " As this is at present the only publication
of the kind in the States, we fondly hope it will receive
both literary and pecuniary assistance. Should it, how-
ever, finally share the fate of all other American publica-
tions of the kind, those who have been and still are in-
terested in its success will have at least the satisfaction
of reflecting that in comparison with the rest it died in a
good old age." From 1789 to 1796, it was indeed a
notable record.

CHAPTER II

THE MAKING OF THE BOSTON TRADITION

The Anthology began life with an insouciance scarcely
decorous in the future parent of the North American
Review, It is mildly disquieting when large coming
events refuse to cast their shadow before. You fear that
the world may be after all but a random affair. In one
way, however, it must be owned that a characteristic note
was sounded. The cover announced, " Edited by Syl-
vanus Per Se." But sprightliness, not to say flippancy,
awaited within. " Although we have the feeling of a
parent for the publication before us, yet it may be proper
to declare to the world that it is not indebted to us for
birth nor was it born in our house. We knew neither its
father nor its mother, nor hardly of its existence until
naked, hungry, and helpless it was brought and laid at our
door. In proportion as it engaged our care it won our
affection. We shall give to our charge expensive ad-
vantages, in order to make him extensively and per-
manently useful." The " we " of this editorial later de-
clared themselves to be " a society of gentlemen who have
undertaken the publication merely for their own amuse-
ment and for the diffusion of literary taste, and they
would be satisfied to defray expenses and have no desire
for remuneration ; the Anthology has never been a favour-
ite with the public at large, nor were they ambitious of
popularity, but the ablest pens of the country have
praised them and their highest ideal is the pleasing con-
sciousness of having done the State some service." This
is well on in the fifth volume, however, and the Olympian
accents of the future North American are now beginning
to shape themselves.

The first volume of the Monthly Anthology and Boston

MAKING OF THE BOSTON TRADITION 29

Review contained no such prescience. Though it had an
air of saving something uncommon (proceeding perhaps
from its professed indifference to remuneration) and
printed occasional Latin poems, you might look in vain
in the earlier numbers for any consciousness that it was a
carrier of destiny. Indeed, it still pursued the pedestrian
custom of publishing the month's marriages and births
and deaths of the city of Boston. And although a
translation of the Sanskrit Sakuntala ran through six
numbers, still Matilda desired Mr. Editor to print the
following verses, written by the intimate companion of
her early years, of which — though they were not written
to be published and she supposes will not bear criticising
— she desires a fairer and more desirable copy than she
can write herself. ( Fancy asking the parent of the North
Aniericam Review to become one's amanuensis !) Silvius
has a regular department of literary and social chat (a
cosiness which was sternly rebuked in the second genera-
tion) ; and there were the Literary Wanderer, The Re-
marker, The Family Physician, and The Botanist to but-
tonhole you monthly in a somewhat superior but still
neighbourly fashion. Yet already, in the second volume,
there was a faint premonition of that Nirvana which its
enemies (soured New Yorkers) maliciously hinted that
it had reached two-score years later. The editors dis-
missed the year with neither pride nor depression; the
work had amused many idle hours; they have endeav-
oured to diffuse an undefiled taste; if they had been at
times severe, it was because the disorders of American
literature were to be cured only by the lancet. But they
added an expression which by no stretch of the imagina-
tion can one picture the North American of the mid-
century employing — " we have endeavoured to add to the
general stock of innocent gaiety " ; and, also, they had be-
come worldly enough to confess satisfaction at seeing their
subscribers doubled within the year. Like all the editors
of our splendid-spirited early magazines, they took oc-
casion of the increase of subscription to enlarge; and,

30 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

unlike the rest, they had by this time a concrete and spe-
cific object in addition to their wider pubHc service.
All the surplus was to be applied to the support and in-
crease of a Public Library. There never was any sur-
plus ; in fact, the Anthology Club relinquished their pub-
lication at the end of the tenth volume, because the mem-
bers felt that they could lose money to better advantage,
but that did not prevent them from leaving another fine
memorial of their civic conscience in the shape of the Bos-
ton Athenaeum.

The Anthology, it is true, never quite achieved the
rotund voice, the makings of which it bequeathed to the
North American; but it is interesting to see the resonance
gathering strength in their yearly addresses. And even
in the beginning, it was thought sufficiently chesty by the
Emerald — which had its high ideals also, for " though
variety of subject was to be its sedulous endeavour, they
always stood willing to sacrifice it to elegance of expres-
sion, chastity of thought, and value of information."
There now exists no literary paper but the Anthology in
this place, it went on to say, and the gravity of its pages
would claim little that could be suitable to those of the
Emerald. The Anthology in 1811 would never have
dreamed of returning to the vertiginosity of 1805. In
that volume they regretted that while their predecessors
had been uniformly favourites of the ladies, they received
only frowns and neglect; but they had no intention of
wooing the sex with love-tales or commentaries on
fashion ; or acrostics and rebuses ; and furthermore their
phizzes were too hopelessly ugly to be moulded into a
simper or tortured into an ogle. Though patronage could
be increased by making their work popular or insipid, they
desire the praise only of those who relish manly thinking
and manly literature. Volume four says that the Review
is conducted under the conviction that public criticism
upon writers for the public does not in itself imply either
injustice or malevolence. " The respectable patronage
now given the Anthology is sufficient to encourage their

MAKING OF THE BOSTON TRADITION 31

perseverance; and they trust that the love of letters and
art will increase with the growing wealth of the country,
which fosters luxury unless restrained by literature and
taste. We may this year offer strictures on different
modes of education." From this last sentence it may be
gathered that the gait of the North American — that of
offering strictures — was now being struck. The sixth
volume establishes the stride quite distinctly. " The
facility with which the promises of editors are made at
the present day is exceeded only by the indifference with
which they are broken ; so we will make no promises be-
yond hoping that the Anthology will yet be the repository
of the sound literature of New England. We have found
that some publishers and editors have not scrupled at alter-
ing English republications ; and our reviewers will particu-
larly be on their guard against such liberties." In the
seventh volume the tone becomes slightly playful again,
but it is the Johnsonian playfulness of the conscious
dictator. " Seven years is a great age among the literary
ephemera of this country, and we have arrived at this
degree of maturity in spite of innumerable predictions to
the contrary. We almost flatter ourselves that our con-
stitution and temperament are more vigorous and that
our uncommon duration is not accidental, but is the evi-
dence of something sound in our stamina. We have
been accused of depreciating our own country and every-
thing indigenous. Owing to some glaring faults in our
scheme of widespread superficial education, we are
harassed with a class of authors more numerous here, in
proportion, than in any other country — worthless weeds
springing up prematurely, and their number is augmented
by those who have mistaken virtuous patriotic sentiments
for inspiration. These we have felt bound to contribute
our efforts to eradicate."

This complaint, howxver justified at the period, is the
badge of the high-toned. One cannot get so far back in
literature that he fails altogether to hear that there is
now a mob of gentlemen that write with ease. In Boston

32 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

even the Royal American had said in 1774, when, like
all the other magazines, it was constantly calling for copy :
" We all write nowadays, learned and unlearned ; we
write even though we cannot spell." The Anthology had
often regretted that some persons of wit and sentiment of
their acquaintance had not augmented their stock of en-
tertainment or knowledge, and that it had to support itself
on the unregulated contributions of a few literary men
who were pleased with the public's profit or pleasure in
their w-ritings but who had no extraordinary stimulus to
write. Though the broth was almost entirely their own,
they always felt that too many cooks were having a
hand in it. At last, in 181 1, they made this announce-
ment:

One of the greatest inconveniences we experience from
month to month is that which arises from the want of an editor
devoted to the work, whose literary reputation would in a
measure be at stake. Hitherto the receipts of the Anthology
have not enabled us to make such a provision. One of our
number has voluntarily assumed the responsibility of seeing the
work through the press ; and when the materials have not been
furnished to his hands, he has been obliged to make such hasty
selections, in order to complete the number of pages, as his
leisure amidst professional engagements would permit. For
this evil we have hopes of a speedy remedy, and if our hopes
are not disappointed, the Anthology will be placed under the
peculiar care of a gentleman whose learing, talents and taste
will enable him to make it all that its friends can desire.

This gentleman was apparently William Tudor, and it
was he who, at the end of the tenth volume, merged it
into the North American. Whatever the broth furnished
by the first number of this, it was not spoiled by too many
cooks, for Tudor wrote, with the exception of a poem,
every one of its one hundred and fifty pages. Begin-
ning life as a bi-monthly, it became a quarterly and then
a monthly. Perhaps this youthful preoccupation with
matters purely temporal is what prevents it now, in its
old age, from classing itself with those magazines which
take liberties with time throughout the year in order

MAKING OF THE BOSTON TRADITION 33

to get two Christmases into December. During its very
first year the editor, in answering a complaint of delay,
begged his distant subscribers to recollect that the number
does not appear until the middle of the month by which it
is dated, and even later. At first the new Americans
were like the old Anthologies. The departments of gen-
eral intelligence were retained, and even the practice re-
sumed of publishing those fascinating documents, meteor-
ological tables. Yet, though there were occasional
anecdotes, there were no chatty letters or social descrip-
tions and very little poetry. This last was not the editor's
fault, however, as he says he has been so seldom favoured
with poetical offerings that he rejects any with some
regret and hesitation, and later congratulates himself that
the department of Original Poetry is growing. But the
earlier volumes are marked by the gradual retirement of
the editor from public confidences; and on the seventh
volume by the rigid retirement of fact as well as fancy, in
the suppression of the departments of Poetry and In-
telligence. The former lasted long enough to get in
that trivial piece of work Thanatopsis, but not for a
long period was the North American to open its august
doors to any other poetical prattle. Already the reviews
were increasing in length and showed the tendency to
group several books into an article of fifty pages or more
on the British type, in which the books are but corpora
vilia — sloven and unhandsome corpses which arouse the
author's reflective remonstrance by coming between the
wind and his nobility. Tudor, from the beginning,
sought to emancipate the magazine from the somewhat
Bostonian tone of its parent, although his efforts toward a
general circulation were content with attempting to widen
the material rather than the subscription list. " I tried to
abstract myself," he wrote, " from the narrow prejudices
of locality, however I might feel them." An article in
the second volume lamented the literary delinquency of
America and its dependence on England — we have not
yet made an attempt toward a literature of our own, it

34 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

said. But Tudor, justly, wrote afterward, in his Miscel-
lanies :

The North American certainly shows that there Is a consid-
erable stock of literature already accumulated in the country,
when such a journal should have continued for several years
increasing in value and preserving itself from the bigoted sway
of any political or religious party.

Though Tudor reported growing patronage, the en-
terprise was supported by a club of gentlemen who sus-
tained the same relation to it as had the Anthology Club
to its monthly. For several years it was necessary for
them to dip into their pockets at their regular suppers
and dinners. In 1817 Jared Sparks, then a tutor at
Harvard, wrote to a friend :

It will doubtless be strange news to you to hear that I have
engaged to take charge of the North American Review after
the next number, when Mr. Tudor resigns. A certain number
of our most distinguished literary gentlemen have associated
themselves and agreed to furnish articles in their turn, and it is
on this condition only that I would engage in the affair.

The difficulties in the way of getting good articles and
of holding up benevolent gentlemen to their own good in-
tentions— says H. B. Adams in his Life of Jared
Sparks, which contains the fullest and most docu-
mentary account of the early years of the magazine —
began to dawn upon the young editor before his first
number was ready. In 18 19 Sparks went to Baltimore
and was succeeded by Edward T. Channing, who resigned
soon after to take a chair at Harvard (later editors found
no difficulty in holding down the two chairs at once) and
was followed by Edward Everett. Duyckinck says that
Dana was in line for the editorship but was considered
too unpopular, whereupon he resigned from the staff and
left the club. The departure of Sparks to Baltimore
was of great consequence to the magazine, for he per-
formed even more valuable service for it when absent
than when present. By his work among his new friends
and his constant correspondence with Channing and ,

I

MAKING OF THE BOSTON TRADITION 35

Everett he widened its influence and helped to make it
our first approximation to a national magazine. When he
returned in 1823 to conduct it again, it showed at once
the effects of his wider horizon; and his first important
articles were upon the colonisation movement and upon
Baltimore. Furthermore, he had been industriously ex-
tending the subscription list all the while he was away and
helping Channing and Everett to introduce business
methods in circulating the magazine — something which
Tudor had never even attempted. Once again editor, he
employed better business agents and established many
new local connections throughout the country, with the
result that its circulation rapidly increased.

The North American Review Club, continues Adams,
for several years controlled the policy of the magazine,
both editorial and financial.

Edward Everett wrote Sparks in 1820: "The North Amer-
ican Club voted to ask you to write a paper." T. Parsons
wrote Sparks in 1822: "I shall never write again for the
North American without being paid for it, and the question of
pay or not pay is now agitating the Club. None of the own-
ers of the book work but Everett and you." Everett, who had
rapidly conformed his magazine to the English type, wrote him
frankly in 182 1 : " Your remark against its want of American-
ism is just, but you must remember some things: First, you
cannot pour anything out of the vessel but what is in it. I am
obliged to depend on myself more than any other person, and
I must write that which will run fastest. I am ashamed of this,
but I cannot help it. Second, there is really a dearth of Ameri-
can topics: the American books are too poor to praise, and to
abuse them will not do. Third, the people round here, our most
numerous and oldest friends, have not the raging Americanism
that reigns in your quarter." J. G. Palfrey wrote Sparks in
1823: "Everett informs us that he has informed you that he
resigns the North American to you, on condition of your edit-
ing it in Boston, and on the same terms that he has done."

' With the advent of Sparks came not only a far more
substantial subscription list, but pay for the writers.
This was uniformly one dollar a page, and no copy thrown
in. " Every writer pays for his book like any other sub-

36 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

scriber," said Sparks. The remark illustrates not only
the definiteness of the new business management, but the
old idea that to see one's self in print was a solid com-
pensation. It was an idea that persisted many years
both with shaky and with stable magazines. But the new^
policy of paying their writers did not impede the maga-
zine's success.

*' For the last seven years," Sparks wrote Everett in 1828,
"the work has increased in value about $2,000 a year. I paid
for it $10,900. The first two years I had it I realised very
little. I then sold a quarter of it to Mr. Gray [for $4,000],
with the agreement that he should have out of the proceeds
$1,100 a year as publisher and I $2,200 a year as editor; and if
anything remained, it was to be divided according to the re-
spective value of our shares. The largest amount that I have
ever received in a year was $2,283 — this was my compensation
as editor and for the interest on the amount of my share, three-
quarters of the whole. The work was valued last May at
$20,705. If you are inclined to purchase one-quarter of it, you
shall have it for $5,000. I will then agree to receive as editor
$1,500, and Mr. Gray shall have $1,100 as publisher. The sur-
plus will be divided according to our respective shares, it being
understood that I shall be paid for what I write at the same
rate as yourself. The exact number of efficient subscribers I
cannot tell. I doubt whether it is more than 3,200. We shall
scarcely expect the same ratio of increase hereafter as hereto-
fore. The new journals that have been set on foot, and with
a considerable success, must in the nature of things, fill up
some of the channels into which our work would otherwise
run." Finally he sold his three-quarter interest to Alexander
Everett, in 1830, for $15,000. "I am not very light-hearted
about it," he wrote to one of his friends. " But I have sold it
for $9,100 more than I gave for it; and during the six years
that I owned it, I have actually realised from it $22,000."

Prescott, who from 1821 to 1833 contributed annually
an article to the magazine, came to the conclusion — says
Ticknor — that criticising the works of others is all but
worthless. Hence, the letter of his in 1837 may be
slightly prejudiced. " The last number of the North
American has found its way into our woods. I have only
glanced at it, but it looks uncommonly weak and water-

MAKING OF THE BOSTON TRADITION 37

ish. I suppose the paltry price the North pays (all it can
bear, too, I believe) will not command the variety of con-
tributions and from the highest sources, as with the Eng-
lish journals. For a' that, however, the old North is the
best periodical we ever had or, considering its resources,
are likely to have, for the present."

As Irving was our first writer to obtain success abroad,
so the North American was our first magazine to obtain
an international reputation. The Edinburgh Revieiv, in
noticing the Sketch Book, said :

It is the work of an American entirely bred and trained in
that country ; and it is the first American book, we rather think,
of any description, but certainly the first purely literary pro-
duction to which we could give the praise of being written
throughout with the greatest care and accuracy, and worked up
to great purity and beauty of diction on the model of the most
elegant and polished of our native writers. The American
genius has hitherto been defective in taste, certainly, rather
than in talent. While we are upon the subject of American
literature, we think ourselves called upon to state that we have
lately received two numbers of the North American Review,
or Miscellaneous Journal, published quarterly at Boston, which
appears to us to be the best and most promising production of
the press of that country that has ever come to our hands. It
is written with great spirit, learning and ability, on a great
variety of subjects; and abounds with profound and original
discussions on the most interesting topics. Though abundantly
patriotic, or rather national, there is nothing offensive or abso-
lutely unreasonable in the tone of its politics; and no very
reprehensible marks either of national partialities or antipa-
thies. The style is generally good, though with considerable
exceptions, and sins oftener from affectation than from ignor-
ance. But the work is of a powerful and masculine character,
and is decidedly superior to anything of the kind that existed
in Europe twenty years ago. It is a proud thing for us to see
Quarterly Reviews propagating bold truths and original specu-
lations in all quarters of the world; and when we grow old and
stupid ourselves, we hope still to be honoured in the talents and
merits of those heirs of our principles and children of our
example.

It is amusing to see that a little later, in 1826, Alexander
Everett was writing Sparks from Madrid : " Properly

38 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

managed and followed up with spirit, it ought in time to
take the place of the Edinburgh and Quarterly, which are
at present mostly job-work and have nearly lost the vital
spark that made them popular." He added that he
doubted whether the President of the United States had
a higher trust to be accountable for than the editor of the
North American. This has been a congenial view for
many editors of the magazine in its admirable career
since. But some people abroad derived from it, as
Everett implied, their only notion of American affairs.
In 1826 there was a regular sale of over one hundred
copies a month in London and twelve copies in remote
Calcutta. And it had already become as disturbing a
factor in one quarter as a President. For in 1824 it
received the first, and for many decades to come the only,
distinction of the kind ever accorded to an American
magazine — that of being prohibited. On account of
its anti-Bourbon spirit, France would not allow it to cross
her frontiers. How is this for the record of a ten-year-
old magazine which some persons at home were calling
unAmerican !

Reviewing its editors in its centenary number, the North
'American said that its great epochs were during the ad-
ministration of Edward Everett, of his brother Alexander
Everett, and of Lowell and Norton. Sparks had decid-
edly failed to equal his predecessor and its high reputa-
tion for strong and varied articles had fallen off, when in
1830 Alexander took it and for six years restored it to
the level which his brother had established. With Dr.
Palfrey in 1836 it became more distinctly a literary and
historical publication, and almost entirely relinquished its
political character. Before he gave up the reins to Pro-
fessor Francis Bowen, the charger had become a steady-
going hack, and almost all the important early contribu-
tors had passed beyond these voices. During the re-
spectable and apathetic administration of these two, you
would never have guessed, says the retrospect, that the
most active minds in New England were in a state of

MAKING OF THE BOSTON TRADITION 39

social and spiritual ferment. The grandfather's clock
was ticking drowsily when Dr. Peabody entered the sanc-
tum in 1853 and gave it a mild jolt. In his ten years he
succeeded in coaxing the magazine out of the Harvard
cloisters but did not venture to drive it as far as Main
Street. In i860 Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton laid
reluctant hands upon it and jogged it more decidedly, but
nevertheless with filial moderation. Lowell had written
in 1848, " Bo wen seems to regard me as the wit of his
Review, and I must keep up my character if I die for it."
This was about his article on Browning, for which, he
said, " I shall get twenty odd dollars on All-Fools-Day.''
Longfellow noted that new life had been infused into the
North American with the very first number under the new
editors; and every wTiter noted that the magazine had
departed from at least one of its cherished traditions, and
was willing to pay more than one dollar a page. Norton
purposed, gently but firmly, to achieve innovations.
** There is opportunity now," he wrote to a friend, " to
make the North American one of the means of develop-
ing the nation, of stimulating its better sense, of setting
before it and holding up to it its own ideal — at least of
securing expression for its clearest thought and most ac-
curate scholarship."

Scudder in summing up Lowell's connection with the
magazine writes:

It had for fifty years been the leading representative in
America of dignified scholarship and literature. At times it
had been spirited and aggressive, but for the most part it had
stood for rather elegant leisure and a somewhat remote criti-
cism. The publishers, hoping to reinstate it in authority, ap-
plied in 1863 to Lowell to take charge of it. He consented
with Norton as his assistant. " You have heard," wrote he to
Motley, " that Norton and I have undertaken to edit the North
American — a rather Sisyphian job, you will say. It wanted
three chief elements to make it successful. It wasn't thor-
oughly, that is, thickly and thinly loyal; it wasn't lively; and
it had no particular opinions on any particular subject. It was
an eminently safe periodical and accordingly was in great dan-
ger of running aground. It was an easy matter, of course, to

k

40 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

make it loyal — even to give it opinions (such as they were)
but to make it alive is more difficult. Perhaps the day of the
quarterlies is gone by, and those megatheria of letters may be
in the mere course of nature withdrawing to their last swamps
to die in peace. Anyhow, here we are with our megatherian
on our hands, and we must strive to find out what will fill his
huge belly, and keep him alive a little longer."

Yet though its new editors attempted to widen the
horizon of the magazine, and invited representative men
from all over the country to write for it and even extended
the invitation across the Atlantic, it still remained a some-
what local product. " In Cambridge where I went from
Venice to live after a brief sojourn in New York," says
Mr. Howells, " one was, as it were, domesticated with
the North American, for both the editors lived there, and
one was orally asked to do this paper or that. And by
and by when both Norton and Lowell went abroad, the
editorship began to fluctuate from one scholarly Cam-
bridge intelligence to another." And in spite of innova-
tions, it did not dream of bundling away its early nine-
teenth century ideal of the Edinburgh. When Longfel-
low looked over Cushing's Index to the North American,
he said, " It is like walking through a graveyard and
reading the inscriptions on the graves. So many familiar
names, so many old associations ! " And Mr. Howells
says that it " fondly realised its descent from the supreme
English quarterlies. It emulated the look of these in size
and shape, and if it had not the stiff covers, half of the
thickness of pasteboard, which enabled them to hold them-
selves upright on a shelf, the grey of its outside was of a
scholarly quiet, which richly satisfied." Scholarly and
dignified quiet was, however, ceasing to be the ideal else-
where in America. Even religious periodicals had long
since yielded to the literary demands of a democratic and
busy age for brevity and briskness. " The North Ameri-
can/' said Dr. H. M. Field, " was like the English quarter-
lies which it copied, very respectable and very dull." And
spruce young worldly journals like the Round Table wQvt

MAKING OF THE BOSTON TRADITION 41

even more caustic. Having little space at its disposal,
this paper naturally deemed brevity the soul of wit. It
said in 1869 :

We believe the quarterlies could be made more popular with-
out losing a wit in dignity and character. At least two of the
English quarterlies are now as eagerly looked for in cultivated
circles as is the last number of the Ledger by fascinated scul-
lions. The stupid Puritan fallacy that writing to be respecta-
ble must needs be dull has always affected most literary work
in this country, and the quarterlies have perhaps borne heavier
marks of it than other publications. Dreary essayists who
could not get a hearing in other countries have in the much
enduring columns of the quarterlies had their exceeding great
reward in being called scholarly and profound by nodding scio-
lists whose cue it is to pretend to like being bored. Our quar-
terlies are almost the synonyms for dulness and provincial
torpidity. The North American, admirable as have been some
of their numbers in point of solidity, instructiveness and per-
manent value, has suffered in this particular. If it can but
gather together a staff of writers who not only know things
but know how to say them, it may have a future of national
credit and importance.

Lowell himself seemed to feel how impossible it was
for mortal man to live up to the Boston tradition and its
palladium. In 1867 he wrote whimsically to Godkin:
" 'Tis the curse of an editor that he must be always right.
Ah, when I am once out of the North American Review,
won't I kick up my heels and be as ignorant as I please !
But beware of omniscience. There is death in that pot,
however it be with others." He had said it. The Boston
Tradition and its chief embodiment was dying of its own
omniscience. Until both consented not to know it all,
the mechanics of life might still be present but animation
was lacking. And that day was yet distant. But here,
for the present, must we leave the sempiternal North
American and turn to transitory things. They will come
and pass and must be dealt with in their own place, but it
will go on for all chapters.

" Conscious of inability, we dare not say that the
flowers of the Polyanthos shall be all indigenous," ran

I

42 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

the announcement in 1806 of this small and chubby maga-
zine of seventy-two pages, which might well have bor-
rowed from New York of just a decade before the title of
The Lady and Gentleman's Pocket Magazine of Literary
and Polite Amusement. It paid much attention to the
drama and the local theatre, and reviewed also the New
York and Philadelphia companies. It is curious and in-
structive to note how eagerly the magazines seized upon
the infant theatre as a topic likely to widen their appeal.
At the beginning of the century President D wight had
written in Travels in New England : " When the first
proposal was made to establish a theatre in this town, a
considerable number of the inhabitants eagerly engaged
in forwarding the design. Accordingly, a theatre was
built, and soon after that another. There is reason to
believe that the stage is now regarded with very general
indifference. One of the theatres has already been taken
down, and the other, it is said, is far from being crowded."
The same year that saw the Polyanthos bud marked the
introduction of the Emerald, which — Containing
Sketches of the Manners, Morals, Amusements of the
Age — flashed its corrective comment on the stage also.
" The drama has become a public amusement of prime im-
portance and there can be no doubt that much advantage
will accrue from checking its absurdity and rewarding
its merit." Thus, though President Dwight was doubt-
less stating a fact, doubtless also the wish was father to
the deduction that the pulling down of the second theatre
indicated that public interest in the stage was waning.
Rather was it an illustration of the perennial habit which
the theatre shares with the magazine of multiplying faster
than the audience. The Cabinet in 181 1 was at times al-
most a theatrical magazine, and showed that the exploita-
tion of the theatre as a business had increased as well as
the public interest. It devoted much space to George
Frederic Cooke, who had just arrived after sixteen nights
in New York, and took the occasion of some sharp prac-
tice in the matter of tickets to scold the Boston theatre

k

MAKING OF THE BOSTON TRADITION 43

roundly. " The company is miserably deficient, the
orchestra intolerable; the foreground of the stage is
hardly illuminated sufficiently to discern the face of a per-
former the distance of four boxes from the scene, the
smoke that arises from the most execrable oil makes
matters worse and * dims the ineffectual fire ' of the side
lights. The coldness of the house renders it dangerous
for ladies to venture thither at all, much more to appear
there dressed with taste, elegance and fashion. Nor are
the boxes fit for their reception, being neither washed nor
properly swept. The management, taking advantage of
the anxiety to see Mr. Cooke, forced the public to pur-
chase at an advanced price a ticket for a night he would
not perform if they would get places for the nights he
did." All the papers seemed to feel from the very start
of their theatrical comment that correcting the players
was a very ticklish matter ; though it appears to have been
genuinely appreciated that criticism of acting — even
when the general level of criticism of all kinds was vitu-
perative and personal — had fallen to disgraceful depths.
There was also some wholesome fear that the truculent
tribe would make a scene. Theatrical criticism, wrote
J. F. Buckingham, always called down curses on the head
of the author. In his magazine, the Ordeal, 1809, he
tried to lift the business into a higher zone. " The con-
ductors of the Theatrical Department will direct their
remarks to the apparent taste of the public and the merit
of the compositions rather than the defects of men
and women, whose secondary intellect and capricious-
ness of passion would reduce the dignity of criticism
to the clamorous ebullition of frivolous garrulity." This
booming sentence was but the conventional editorial man-
ner, for in his Memoirs he wrote quite humanly of his
theatrical criticisms in the Polyanthos: " They are all
my own. Some of them are severe, but I am not aware
that any of them are unjust. Mr. Poe, the father of the
late E. A. Poe, took offence at a remark on his wife's
acting and called at my house to ' chastise my imper-

44 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

tinence/ but went away without effecting his purpose."
Several times during his long and varied career, he notes
similar calls and announces, perhaps with pardonable
pride, similar results. In spite of several fracases with
both lawyers and actors, he went unlicked to a good
citizen's grave.

The announcement of the Ordeal is interesting.

At a time when the crisis in our public affairs is so alarming
as to threaten the very existence of the nation, it may well be
enquired of the editors what result they can expect but failure.
But the paramount necessity of securing our civil and political
existence should unite all honest men in an ardent effort to
exhibit to the view of the people the deformities which disgrace
the present administration of government, by tearing away the
curtain of hypocrisy under which they have long been con-
cealed. The strong connection which subsists in all good gov-
ernments between politics, religion, and literature inculcates the
necessity of a like exposure of their absurdities. The office of
the satirist, though ungrateful, is necessary; and satire will be
one of the engines which the editors of this publication will
employ to further their general design. Articles of serious dis-
cussion or general information shall have a general or implied
local application. The department of Poetry in every literary
journal in the United States has always been meagre of original
stamina or support, particularly in respect to satirical effusions.
As we shall have in view the censure of the ridiculous, as well
as the approbation of the dignified, we shall frequently have
recourse to foreign storehouses for weapons to overthrow the
adversaries of good sense. We call on our poetical friends to
help us scourge the absurd taste which prevails in the poetry
of the times. None will be considered as subscribers but such
as pay for one volume at the time of subscribing.

Here is a condensation of Buckingham's simple account
of his splendid work for the city of Boston:

My first attempt to amuse, instruct and edify the public was
the Polyanthos. The ungrateful or undiscerning public — not-
withstanding my expressed flattery of their taste and confidence
in their liberality — suffered it to wither and die at the end of
twenty months. Yet the attempt ought to have succeeded. The
engravings were not quite equal to those we meet now in maga-
zines [1852], but they were the best that could be obtained.
The portraits were accompanied with biographical notices.

MAKING OF THE BOSTON TRADITION 45

The difficulty of obtaining either was discouraging, but I should
have persevered if the subscription had been sufficient to pay
the cost, without regarding my own labour. The suspension
of the Polyanthos was a relief to my labour and an advantage
to my pocket; for the publication produced not enough to pay
the actual cost of paper, printing and engraving. Considering
that it was the first attempt in Boston (if not in the United
States) to publish a magazine with a regular series of portraits,
I do not feel that there is reason to be ashamed of my labour

— there have been many reasons to regret that I was foolish
and improvident enough to make the experiment. In 181 2 the
publication was resumed and two volumes issued of the original
size and form. These were succeeded by four volumes, octavo,
the contents of similar character. The biography and theat-
rical criticism were still for the most part, and unless when
otherwise acknowledged, my own. The Ordeal I began in
1809. The matter was chiefly political. The whole amount of
subscriptions fell short of the expense, and it was discontinued
at the end of six months.

I ventured in 181 7 to issue a prospectus of the New England
Galaxy and Masonic Magazine. Freemasonry was then in its
palmy days, and this was the first periodical masonic paper.
Notwithstanding the confident tone of my prospectus and salu-
tatory address, it was not without doubt and misgivings that I
proceeded in my undertaking. A wife and six children had no
other resource than my labour; and all apparatus was to be got
(if got at all) on credit, and of that I had none. Mrs. Susanna
Rowson was a highly valued correspondent. I am myself ac-
countable for all the trash " From the Shop of Pertinax Period
and Co.," and every original article, the authorship of which
is not acknowledged or indicated by a signature, was of my own
manufacture. The Galaxy, as may be inferred from my ad-
dress to its readers on the commencement of the second year,
had not met with entire approbation. As the circulation in-
creased, endeavours to stir up resentment against its freedom
of remark were multiplied. Criticisms on the operations of the
missionary societies, certain practices of the banks and brokers,
public lecturers and itinerant preachers and instructors, and the
proceedings of political caucuses received admonitory and
threatening letters, mostly anonymous. In its fourth year the
title Masonic Magasine was dropped, as it had proved one ob-
stacle in the way of its general circulation, but the interests of
the institution were still watched with fidelity. Our success
was becoming substantial, when in 1822 a prosecution for libel

— an occurrence which was to happen again four times, but
from which I suffered only anxiety and vexation and some loss

46 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

of money — led to a modification of the common law of libel.
Custom once imperiously, even tyrannically, imposed on editors
an annual tax in the shape of a New Year's address. The task
was always irksome from the difficulty of guiding thought to
a new channel and of giving to an old and hackneyed sentiment
new forms of expression. In 1828 I sold the Galaxy to Willard
Phillips and Theophilus Parsons, having conducted it over
eleven years, in order to devote my entire attention to the
Boston Daily Courier.

The New England Magazine is Buckingham's finest
monument in the magazine line. It was a publication
admirable for its day, and containing for ours not only
a wealth of indispensable historical material but a sur-
prising amount of good literature. Articles were at first
unsigned or signed only with initials. As time went on,
some full names appeared ; but the practice does not seem
to have justified itself in the editor's mind. Buckingham
began the magazine on account of his son, Edward. This
young man immediately made sure of the support of
several of the popular writers of the day, Edward Everett,
Hildreth, Hilliard, Hannah Gould, Frothingham. But
the persons who will now attract most attention — says
George Willis Cooke in the second New England Maga-
zine, which went to join its elder brother many years
after — were then known but little or not at all. These
were Longfellow, Whittier, Hawthorne, and Holmes.
Two papers of the Autocrat appeared here, and the re-
sumption of them in the Atlantic several decades later
showed only a maturer mellowing of the same method.
" The circulation has increased monthly," ran the an-
nouncement of the second volume, " though it is yet far
from being a source of pecuniary profit. It was intended
to embellish the magazine with a series of portraits, and
this intention it has been impossible to fulfil. There is
some difficulty in procuring original likenesses, and more
in obtaining correct copies of originals. The fastidious-
ness of individuals in two or three instances has frus-
trated our design, but with all these discouragements the
design will not be abandoned." The year saw the realisa-

MAKING OF THE BOSTON TRADITION 47

tion of that hope, but the next year marked the extinction
of another. In July, 1833, Edward Buckingham died.
An editorial announcement paid him a dignified and
touching tribute, and there was also a memorial poem.
This is a striking instance of the real bonds which existed
between the editors and the subscribers of the early maga-
zines. " The New England Magazine was the offspring
and the property of Edward Buckingham. In projecting
the work, the idea of making money was no part of the
consideration. The elder of the editors had previously
had sufficient experience to enable him to feel how uncer-
tain and delusive are all calculations of that sort. The
other needed a chance for improvement in the pleasanter
departments of literature. He for whom the magazine
was created and by whom it existed is no more. The
surviving editor feels that he cannot desert it now.'*

When he retired from the management, said Park
Benjamin, the papers became less general and didactic,
with the result of an increase in circulation. The new
editors were Dr. S. G. Howe and D. O. Sargent, both
of whom had been writing for its columns. Finally, at
the request of the proprietors, Park Benjamin, who had
been a constant contributor, became sole editor. The
Nezv England is the first magazine we have had occasion
to chronicle which from the beginning paid its writers.
At the end of its first year under the new management,
it said to its contributors : " The remuneration which we
have been able to extend is not, we are deeply conscious,
commensurate with your deserts; but the terms of one
dollar by the page of prose and double the sum for poetry,
is all that the magazine can afford ; and though lamentable
the confession, we must own that even with these rates
not one solitary penny is left to reward the editorial
labour at the close of the year. With the extension of
our subscription list, your compensation shall be increased
to two — yes, three dollars a page; and even then we
could wish it were more. We will look for our own
reward in the consciousness of having done something

48 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

to encourage American literature/* It is to be hoped that
Dr. Howe still continued to pay himself for his articles,
otherwise he would positively have lost money by assum-
ing the editorial chair. All honour to the New England!
In this, as in every other aspect of its professional activity,
it set from the start a high standard. It is one of the few
magazines in the long list whose untimely death may at
this distance be genuinely regretted.

It was not long before Park Benjamin issued his vale-
dictory. Although there were to be some years of fluctu-
ation in the traffic, he may be called the first in the
procession of editors and magazines heading toward
New York.

It could not be expected that a journal affording very limited
means of compensation to authors could attain a very high
standard of excellence. [Note that no sooner had the practice
begun than those rapacious writers started to bargain at once !
Ten years before they had been glad to write for the good of
the country and their own reputation.] It has presented from
month to month the best papers from writers who were gen-
erously content with a very inadequate remuneration. Authors
of celebrity, whose books are sure of a popular reward, are
vainly solicited to waste their efforts in the pages of a monthly
magazine. Could the American publishers afford, like the Eng-
lish, to pay handsomely for articles, we should soon see our
journals assuming a different character and vying successfully
with the best transatlantic productions. As the case stands, it
is unfair to make comparisons between the light literature of
Great Britain and the United States. There are few educated
men in this country who can yield themselves to the pursuits of
literature and the liberal studies. With the exception of those
whom fortune has placed beyond the necessity of exertion, there
are no authors by profession. When a poor man has attempted
to live by scholarship, he has been compelled to seek a resource
as instructor or lecturer or some such mind-wearying employ-
ment. I believe, however, that we shall soon see better days.
The worth of literary labour is beginning to be appreciated.
The magazine will hereafter be conducted under better aus-
pices. It will be united with another work of a similar kind in
New York, and be styled in future the American Monthly
Magazine.

This proved to be, it is true, but one of the long, long

MAKING OF THE BOSTON TRADITION 49

thoughts of a young man; yet, O Boston, Boston, how
often in the years to come wert thou to hear from high
places that westward the course of empire was taking its
way! Now, however, all unconscious of the worst blow
fate had in store for her — when the North American,
cradled in her bosom, was to prove sharper than a ser-
pent's tooth — she had set about, undeafened by the com-
mercial clamours of New York and Philadelphia, the
making of the Boston tradition.

Dr. Hale says the people of Boston took an interest in
what we should now call idealistic or sentimental enter-
prises, such as was not paralleled in what he knew of
other cities. In Boston, by a sort of natural law, the
prophets of new beliefs and new superstitions made ren-
dezvous. This local ferment, eager expectation, and
readiness for new things did not characterise Boston at
the beginning of the new century, and certainly, he adds,
does not characterise it to-day.

A picturesque place where one who was wise enough might
watch some of its currents, was the modest book-shop kept in
a private house by Miss Elizabeth Peabody. Somehow or other
she and her sisters — afterward Mrs. Horace Mann and Mrs.
Nathaniel Hawthorne — opened a " foreign circulating library "
in what was the front parlour. I am afraid that the subscrip-
tion to the library and the sales of books did not amount to
much. But what happened was this: If you had a vacant ten
minutes you went in there, for it was just in the middle of the
Boston of that time. Who was there that you did not meet
who was wide-awake and interested in the future? Perhaps
somebody told you that Margaret Fuller's conversation of that
week would be on the myth of Juno or the myth of Ceres, and
wouldn't you like to come round on Thursday evening? Or
somebody said that thus-and-so would be going on in prepara-
tion for Brook Farm. If you had that ten minutes and looked
in at 12 West Street, you were made sure, if you had not known
it before, that this world had a future and that very probably
it was true that the kingdom of God was at hand. I think the
Brook Farm people all made their regular headquarters at the
Foreign Circulating Library. I am afraid that the helter-
skelter in which everybody availed himself of its hospitalities
did not promote its pecuniary success.

50 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

This last sentence might have been written of the Dial,
the publication which this eager idealistic band projected
as the fountain-light of all their day. At no time in its
four years did its subscription list reach three hundred
names. Even the open-handed Miss Peabody, who was
quite inured to such behaviour from the Boston intel-
lectuals, complained at its being systematically loaned
from house to house. Mr. F. B. Sanborn says it died of
starvation, chiefly because it was ahead of the times ; but,
as Miss Peabody testified that it could have paid expenses
with five hundred subscribers, it died evidently of the
thrift of its admirers.

Mr. George Willis Cooke in the Journal of Speculative
Philosophy has written the most complete account of it.
As early as 1835, he says, Emerson wrote of an " organ
of a spiritual philosophy " which was to have been called
the Transcendentalist, or the Spiritual Inquirer. He
suggested to Carlyle, whom all his American enthusiasts
were urging to settle in America, that he take the editor-
ship. " We have some confidence," wrote Emerson (not
remembering what plain livers were Boston's highest
thinkers), "that it could be made to secure him a sup-
port." Out of the discussion over the proposed periodical
grew several meetings of what came to be known as the
Transcendentalist Club, a dozen people who desired a
more spiritual interpretation of religion. The talk was
large and leisurely and did not grow definite until 1839.
Margaret Fuller was selected for editor, and the first issue
was set for April, 1840. But only thirty subscribers had
appeared by June. Nevertheless, in July the Dial essayed
the outer air. The announcement ran :

We invite the attention of our countrymen to a new design.
With some reluctance the present editors of this work have
yielded themselves to the wishes of their friends, finding some-
thing sacred and not to be withstood in the importunity which
urged the production of a Journal in a new spirit. Many sin-
cere persons in New England reprobate that rigour of our
conventions of religion and education which is turning us to
Stone, which renounces hope, which looks only backward, which

MAKING OF THE BOSTON TRADITION 51

asks only such a future as the past, which suspects improve-
ment and holds nothing so much in horror as new views and
the dreams of youth. No one can converse much with different
classes of society in New England without remarking the
progress of a revolution. It is in every form a protest against
usage and a search for principles. If our Journal share the
impulse of the time, it cannot now prescribe its own course.
It cannot foretell in orderly propositions what it shall attempt.
Let it be one cheerful, rational voice amid the din of mourners
and polemics.

The editors for the first two years were Ripley and
Margaret Fuller. For her it was the principal event in
that literary career of hers which somehow did not come
off. Charles Taber Congdon thought, like every one else,
that she considered her own opinion conclusive and a little
resented any attempt to change it; and that she swayed
all around her by sheer force of her royal intellect. She
had physical peculiarities which were not pleasant, and
even Emerson confessed that she repelled him upon first
acquaintance. Later, Greeley wrote that he could never
agree with his guest about diet or about tea, of which she
drank great draughts. But arrogant and opinionated as
Margaret was, she wrote Emerson on her withdrawal that
his purpose would be to represent his own tastes and make
a good periodical, while hers had rather been to let all
kinds of people have freedom to say their say for better
or for worse. And she proved right ; for Emerson paid
far more attention to merely good writing, and for the
rest gave a voice only to those reforms he personally
sympathised with. The first number, says Cooke, rather
disappointed them all: Alcott wrote in his sententious
way, " It measures not the meridian but the morning
ray — the nations wait for the gnomon that shall mark
the broad noon." And later he wrote, " A fit organ for
such as myself is not yet, but is to be.*' Emerson con-
tented himself with writing to Carlyle : " It is not much
but it is better than anything we had." The intention
had been to pay Margaret two hundred dollars for the
editing, but the money did not materialise. As time went

52 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

on she found that her health would not bear the strain
of teaching and editing at the same time; and she saw
that it was in vain to hope any longer for a maintenance
from the paper, so that she might devote herself to her
pen. During the second year, too, the publishers failed ;
and it was only with difficulty that the editors secured
the small subscription list. Miss Peabody then under-
took the publishing, and even wrapped the numbers for
mailing. She wrote Emerson that she would first pay
the printer and then Margaret Fuller, — if after the latter
had received three hundred a year there was any left, she
would take the usual commission. But she succeeded,
says Cooke, no better than " that rascally firm who were
her predecessors."

Emerson recorded in his diary : *' I must settle the
question, it seems, of its life or death. I wish it to live,
but I do not wish to be its life, neither do I like to put
it in the hands of the Humanity and Reform men, be-
cause they trample on letters and poetry; nor in the
hands of scholars, for they are dead and dry." Later he
wrote Carlyle : " I had not the cruelty to kill it, and so
must answer with my own proper care and nursing for its
life. Perhaps it is a great folly in me, who have little
adroitness in turning out work. Lately at New York, I
found it to be to a certain class of men and women an
object of tenderness and religion." And yet it could not
muster its five hundred subscribers ! So all the thrift was
not Bostonian — perhaps this coterie had a neighbourhood
copy also. At the beginning of its third year, when
Emerson took charge, its subscribers numbered only two
hundred and twenty. Emerson's early publisher, James
Munroe, offered a better business management than it
had hitherto received and smaller expenses by reason of
its connection with his own firm ; but as a year's experi-
ence demonstrated that the expenses were greater and
that the commission for his management would have been
large enough even if they had been decreased, Emerson

MAKING OF THE BOSTON TRADITION 53

managed it himself for two years. It seems to have cost
him some hundreds of dollars.

Emerson as editor was much concerned not only with
good literature, but with liveliness and variety. " W. E.
Channing's Letters are very agreeable reading," he wrote
to Thoreau, " and their wisdom lightened by a vivacity
very rare in the Dial. I have a valuable manuscript —
a sea-voyage — from a new hand, which is all clear, good
sense, and I may make some of Lane's graver sheets give
way for this honest story." Thoreau wrote to Emerson :
" I think this is a noble number. It perspires thought and
feeling. I can speak of it now a little like a foreigner
[he had assisted Emerson in editing the paper in 1843] ;
and to me it is a long letter of encouragement and reproof,
and no doubt it is so to many another in the land. So
don't give up the ship." To such as accepted it at all,
says Cooke, Transcendentalism came as a gospel; and
the periodical was its voice. Emerson wrote Thoreau in
1843 : " The New Englander from New Haven angrily
affirms that the Did is not as good as the Bible. By all
these signs we infer that we make some figure in the
literary world though we are not as yet encouraged by a
swollen subscription list." In April, 1844, George Wil-
liam Curtis wrote to Dwight ; " The Dial stops. Is
it not like the going out of a star? Its place was so
unique in our literature! All who wrote and sang for
it were clothed in white garments ; and the work itself so
calm and collected, though springing from the same undis-
mayed hope which furthers all our best reforms. But the
intellectual worth of the times will be told in other ways,
though the Dial no longer reports the progress of the day."

Curtis had appeared there for the first time ; and so had
Thoreau, Dwight, Cranch, and Dana. For all its writers
it had been almost the first means of self-expression,
whether like Emerson and Alcott they had appeared be-
fore or not. The fervour of the writers, their air of
having something to say which outsiders could not appre-
ciate, their unconcern for facts and literary laws — all

54 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

these things, says Cooke, made it an object of ridicule
to those not in sympathy; and even to those who were,
for Cranch and James Freeman Clarke in Louisville
caricatured the extravagance and naivete of the Orphic
Sayings of Alcott, which were often as profound as
they were absurd. " How surprised would some of these
writers be," says Frothingham's Transcendentalism in
New England, " if they should now in their prosaic days
read what they wrote under the spell of that fine frenzy ! "
Much of his best writing in prose and verse Emerson
contributed to its pages ; and almost all its staff afterward
won distinction and a few fame seemingly permanent.
But in spite of their one hundred and thirty-six pages,
Carlyle thought the numbers had too little body; and
Brownson owned in the Boston Quarterly, while praising
it highly, that it lacked manliness ; and the Philistine press
called it a chaos of obscurity and nonsense, while the
religious press scented atheism. Perhaps Furness said
the best thing about it when he wrote to Emerson in
1852 : "I am attracted and repelled by all this talk and
speculation about things unseen and unseeable. How
continually does it degenerate into a wisdom of words,
and how hard it is to keep humble and self -forgetting.
It is a favourite idea of mine that the all-ministering
Providence gives us these speculations and theology and
religious forms, etc., etc., to occupy us and divert our
attention from the work going on within us, which our
self-conceit, if it meddles with it, is sure to spoil; just
as we rattle a bunch of keys before a baby when it is
being vaccinated."

Certainly, the Dial moved a large number of rare-fibred
spirits to express themselves in intangible words, and per-
haps one should be as philosophical about Transcendenta-
lism as David Harum was about fleas — a certain amount
is good for a dog, to keep him from brooding on the fact
that he is a dog. There is no knowing how much of his
fine mechanism Emerson would have meddled with other-
wise.

CHAPTER III

BAKED BEANS AND BROWN BREAD

Boston and even Boston periodicals, however, were
engaged in other things beside increasing her air-chambers
for the production of a stentorian voice. Most Boston-
ians were employed in the more profitable business of
making their living, and among its limited number of
readers most were more concerned with enlivening their
own existence than with what immortal thoughts they
might bequeath to posterity.

Boston and New England, which later admitted her
to be the centre she already considered herself, had
achieved about twenty-six magazines in the eighteenth
century, besides some so-called magazines which were in
reality only newspapers. Of the magazines, three went
down (if indeed they ever set sail beyond the prospectus)
without leaving so much as a ripple; of those with a
known voyage, thirteen hailed from Boston, one each
from Worcester, New Haven, Concord, N. H., Benning-
ton, Rutland, Fairhaven, Vt., and two from Hartford.
Three were going at once in 1743, '86, '95, '96; two at
once in 1744, '87, '89, '92, '93, '94, and 1800. Both
Hartford and New Haven had confident expectations of
becoming hubs themselves. It is perhaps unlikely that
the other small towns had such glorified visions. But
in those days of uncertain and impeded communication,
they saw no reason why they should transport by stage-
coach all of their divine draught from the fountain-head.
Why not be their own Rebeccas and dip from their native
well? "A number of gentlemen" of Middlebury, Ver-
mont, published 181 2-18 17, a Literary and Philosophical
Repertory. Doubtless, too, it was not to home-grown

55

56 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

vigour alone that we owe some of these magazines. Some
of their editors must have pioneered from Boston, bearing
their precious ointment along with their household goods.
Although he had little goods besides his youthful hose
well-saved, such a man was Joseph Dennie. He helped
to found at Walpole, New Hampshire, the Farmer's
Museum, a magazine which soon became so popular that
the little town had to provide it with a mail bag all to
itself, to start it on its lengthy journey as far as Nova
Scotia one way and Georgia the other. Dennie, born
in 1768, had left Boston because the law could not sup-
port him. *' There we behold a shoal of junior lawyers
keeping vacant offices,'* said he, " mere barber-shops
for chat which are never darkened by the shadow of
clients, — who must seek a precarious support from the
gaming table or else in mere desperation marry some girl
of fortune and be carried home by her to a father's house.
By accurate calculation I can live here one-third cheaper
than in any part of Massachusetts, and men of learning
in these wilds are rare. I cannot be respected in Boston
or its environs while I am poor and while that poverty
obliges me to wear a threadbare coat. Much stress is
laid there on externals, and unless the guinea is expended
at the tavern, unless the glossy vest is worn, characters
however amiable and knowing are sedulously shunned."
Nevertheless, he found that even in New Hampshire the
farmers lived more peacably than he could wish or settled
their own disputes. He drifted into the church, which
had been enchanted with his city accents and asked him
to read the service and a sermon for them on Sunday,
pledging him eighty pounds a year and to increase his
salary for ten years until it was doubled. But, thus
deflected for a moment, he was still intent on his early
ambition to practise and to write. " The revenues of the
Church in these infant Republics," he wrote, " are too
scanty to allure from an avowedly lucrative profession "
— which was quibbling, of course, not scribbHng — "a
young man whose ambition is daring." But while he

BAKED BEANS AND BROWN BREAD 57

was elocutionising on Sunday to the delighted rustics, he
was gaining some literary reputation also ; and at last he
collected his week-day diversions together and went to
Boston to see if he could dispose of them. There he
donned at once the glossy vest from which he had been
divorced over long for a youngster of his elegant tastes,
and immediately demonstrated that he had rightly guessed
the passport to Boston society.

A publisher, crafty in other ways it turned out, seeing
him the feasted darling of fashion, lured him to remain
and start a magazine on half profits. It was represented
that his share would be one hundred and fifty pounds a
year. The magazine was the Tablet (1795), a miscel-
laneous paper devoted to Belles Lettres, three dollars per
annum. " The favourite child," said Dennie, " after buf-
feting the billows of adverse fortune for thirteen short
weeks, sickened and died. If I had been in possession of
property, neither the waywardness of. the times nor the
dulness of the Bostonians would have repulsed the growth
of my miscellany" — a sentence which might have been
passed by Spectator itself. But the child had lived long
enough to father the man, and he determined that litera-
ture should be his calling. Once more casting aside his
brocaded vest, he set out for vestless parts. " In Walpole
there was a press conducted by a young man, and I was
determined to convince him that my pen could be useful.
Without saying a syllable respecting a stipend, I gave him
an essay on Wine and New Wine and called it the Lay
Preacher. It had been objected to my earliest composi-
tions that they were sprightly rather than moral. Ac-
cordingly, I thought I would exhibit truths in a plain dress
to the common people." The Farmer's Weekly Museum
was the paper, and he soon became such a successful editor
of it that to its title was added the Lay Preacher's Gazette.
So much attention did he attract to it that it was enabled
to publish more original literary compositions than any
magazine in the United States, and indeed was, in the
number of them, not equalled for a great many years to

58 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

come. The publisher of Walpole proved more able to
keep his word than the publisher of Boston, and paid him
the extraordinary sum (in cold cash) of one hundred
and ten pounds a year. This, combined with the ninety
pounds which he picked up practising law, permitted him
to don the glossy waistcoat again, before the ravished eyes
of the Walpole farmers, who were as much charmed with
his sartorial graces as had been the Charlestonian rustics
with his elocution. It is sad to note, however, that he
flowered seemingly at the expense of his root, for the
publisher in a year or so went bankrupt. Isaiah Thomas
bought the paper and retained Dennie as editor on the
somewhat curtailed wardrobe of four hundred dollars
a year. The paper is an excellent specimen of the tedious
rhetorical juggling which was once the ideal of our early
magazines of a certain type and which is now considered
futile by all save college pegasuses stretching their wings.
Pieces of " chaste humour " and " the choicest efforts
of the American Muse," and a department Colon and
Spondee were equally characteristic with the essays of
the Lay Preacher. They made up the greatest bid for
literary fame ever put forward by any New Hampshire
village; and while Dennie remained there, Philadelphia
and New York and Baltimore came knocking at its door,
all applicants for the brilliant editor who was hiding the
bushel under his candle.

Boston had been for a quarter of a century relaxing
its ascetic ideas, as became a growing port. Jean Pierre
Brissot in 1788, had been somewhat surprised not to find
it so triste as he had expected, and as for progressiveness
it compared very favourably with cities at home. " You
no longer meet here that Presbyterian austerity which
interdicted all pleasures, even that of walking. Music,
which their teachers formerly prescribed as a diabolic
art, begins to make part of their education ; in some houses
you hear the piano-forte. They publish a magazine here,
though the number of gazettes is very considerable. The
multiplicity of gazettes proves the activity of commerce

BAKED BEANS AND BROWN BREAD 59

and the taste for politics and news. Yet commerce occu-
pies all their ideas and absorbs all their speculations.
Thus you find few estimable works and few authors.
The expense of the first volume of the Memoirs of the
Academy of this town is not yet recovered; it is two
years since it appeared. You may judge that the arts,
except those that respect navigation, do not receive much
encouragement here. Let us not blame the Bostonians;
they think of the useful before procuring to themselves
the agreeable. Their streets are well illuminated at
night; while many ancient cities of Europe containing
proud monuments of art have never thought of preventing
the fatal effects of nocturnal darkness."

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, President
Dwight pronounced, in his unimpetuous accents, that
Boston was in many ways a superior town. " This is
the only large town within my knowledge in which schools
have been formed into a system. The number of private
schools is great. The literary societies are the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Antiquarian
Society, Massachusetts Historical, Boston Literary Soci-
ety, Massachusetts Agricultural, Boston Athenaeum. The
Boston Style is a phrase proverbially used throughout a
considerable part of this country to denote a florid, pom-
pous manner of writing, and has been thought by persons
at a distance to be the predominant Style of this region.
It cannot be denied that several publications written in
this manner have issued from the press here, and for a
time been much celebrated. Still it has never been true
that this mode of writing was either general in this town
or adopted by men of superior talents. The people in
this town are distinguished by their attachment to litera-
ture. Their pecuniary contributions to this object have
exceeded those of any city in this American Union.
There are proportionately many more liberally educated
men here than in New York, and far more than in any
other town in America."

Yet Philadelphia loudly pooh-poohed such claims.

6o THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

The prospectus of a magazine in 1800 moved a gentleman
of Philadelphia to utter this withering paragraph. " Lit-
erary projects have almost always proved abortive in
Boston. Many attempts have been made to establish
periodical works in that small town; but miscellaneous
readers ask in vain for a magazine or a review or a literary
journal in the capital of New England. The poverty of
the inhabitants is the probable cause of the deficiency.
But the hopes of authors like the desires of lovers are
not easily extinguished ; and a Mr. Hawkins, in the san-
guine spirit of a projector, adventures to expose himself
in the cold clemency of a commercial port. He proposes
the publication of a Monthly Magazine entitled the
Columbian Phenix, But from the dust and ashes
of its predecessor this Columbian Soarer will hardly
arise. The Bostonians will probably prefer as usual,
the perusal of some of their meagre and time-serving
newspapers, or rather that informing and witting work
called an advertisement."

The spiteful prediction proved true. The Columbian
Phenix and Boston Review, Forming a Compendium of
the Present State of Society, lived through one subscrip-
tion, and the editor did not call upon his personal friends
for another. These, he said, had been largely responsible
for the first, and the man of business and the miscel-
laneous reader whom he had hoped to attract never came.
Nevertheless, this faraway Mr. Hawkins must have pur-
sued his even tenor philosophically. He announced that
he had lived long enough to know that the editor who does
not promote the ambitions of individuals, flatter their
pride and avarice or gratify their hate, finds in general
but scanty support; and experience had shown him that
a man to derive pecuniary reward from his talents must
pamper the vices and follies of mankind. But he had —
whether for publication or otherwise — none of the con-
tempt for Boston which his brother editor in Philadel-
phia had, whether professionally or otherwise. The
reason why works of taste were so little supported in

BAKED BEANS AND BROWN BREAD 6i

America, was not due to poverty or stupidity but to cir-
cumstances peculiar to a young, growing nation. Yet
there is a critical period between infancy and manhood
in nations as well as individuals. ** Whatever we have
done in agriculture, in commerce, in politics, and in war ;
in the belles-lettres we have not yet passed this period.
Literature, well or ill-conducted, is the great engine by
which all civilised states must ultimately be supported or
overthrown."

The New England Quarterly (1802) echoed and re-
inforced this last statement. In a republic ignorance is
the worst of evils. New England had now stored up a
great deal of fat and it was high time she began to live
upon it. " Although the literary periodicals which have
lately issued from the Boston presses have been from
various causes discontinued, the editors conceive that the
inhabitants of New England are willing and able to sup-
port a magazine. Massachusetts and the neighbouring
states do not compose the Boeotia of America. What
has prevented literary publications from receiving merited
encouragement is not the dulness of the Public but its
pursuits and habits. Business and Politics have en-
grossed most of their time; and during an interesting
European War in which each of the belligerent parties
have wanted the commercial assistance of our neutral
and fertile nation and each has had its partisans among
our citizens, it could not be expected that the silent charms
of literature would attract the attention of our merchants
and politicians. The late war in Europe while it has
drawn our attention from scientific pursuits has brought
sufficient affluence into our country, to enable it to rise
to a higher grade in the scale of national literature. But
is New England to be engaged solely in agriculture and
commerce ? Are we to resemble Thebans and Dutchmen ?
Let it not be said that New England which is superior to
other parts of the United States in other points of com-
parison, is inferior in the most honourable respect, in
literature and arts and the sciences/'

62 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

During the three years run of the Boston Weekly
Magazine begun in 1802, it was honoured, says the vale-
dictory, " by upwards of fourteen thousand subscribers of
the most respectable characters in town and in all parts
of the country." There, the business office appears to
have been unusually active. The first number was sent
out to the inhabitants of Boston gratis, with the announce-
ment that the second would be delivered only to those
who " have signified a desire to encourage this infant
establishment " at a subscription price of two dollars per
annum. As if conscious that already was gathering in
the town that body of august voices which, practising its
vocalisation in the Anthology, was finally to trumpet its
basso prof undo in the North American, it sought while
there was yet time to cultivate the less resounding chords.

The magazine's motto was a blithe one, " To Soar aloft
on fancy's wing, and bathe in Heliconia's Spring; Cull
every flower with careful hand, and strew them o'er our
native land." This challenge of the Elysian Fields to
high Olympus was again flashed by the Emerald in 1806.
For only two years did this periodical protest the growing
gravity of the Anthology. It announced itself as Con-
taining Sketches of the Manners, Morals and Amusements
of the Age. We think the town, it said, wants to be
weeded of over-grown absurdity and folly and extrava-
gance; and like all such culturists from Spectator days
down, it took care not to weed too unremittingly lest it
find its occupation gone. One of its editorials in 1807
is of interest as showing that the making of magazines
remained for many years the chief artistic activity of
America. " Architecture is in some little degree ad-
vanced, but painting scarcely finds an amateur, and sculp-
ture is almost unknown. Yet it is not correct to attribute
an entire disregard to literature to the citizens of the
United States. Though the national literary character
stands not on the magnitude of individual exertion, it
points to the community at large for that general good
sense and correct information which gives respectability

BAKED BEANS AND BROWN BREAD 63

to all and eminence only to a few. It is in conformity
with general sentiments that periodical publications, with
various merits and success, have been numerous in the
United States." Indeed, but for these the country might
have been accused of that insensibility to literary appeal
which editors were always uneasily denying — more in
the hopeful salutatory, it is true, than in bidding farewell
to their hardly shepherded flock. " Cold neglect has so
frequently chilled the aroma of literary ambition," said
the Cabinet, A Repository of Polite Literature, in 181 1,
" that you may well ask why is another publication an-
nounced in Boston.^' This periodical devoted much space
to the drama, and sought to elevate it into a fashionable
function, freed from vulgarity. Of the eighteen maga-
zines listed by Isaiah Thomas in 18 10, seven are of
Boston, and of these two are religious. The rest with
the exception of the Anthology and the Bibliotheqiie Por-
traitive are of a lighter nature — the Omnium Gatherum,
the Mirror, and Something. The names of the last three
are sufficiently indicative of the casual quality of their
contents.

Boston literary producers seem to have been grouped
into two camps, the High-brows and the Low. The activ-
ities of the former were absorbed by the Anthology
and the religious periodicals. The Anthology Club was
composed of Liberal Congregationalists who were on the
road to Unitarianism, and of equally high-thinking lay-
men; and it was their magazine which focused, if it did
not establish, the close Boston connection between re-
ligious and critical literature which linked the two in
Boston periodicals for more than half a century. This,
with the historical and scientific spirits who had begun
early to group themselves into societies, formed the basis
for that air of self-conscious distinction which even at
the beginning of the century had become known as the
Boston culture. In 1876, Holmes wrote to Lowell:
** We Boston people are so bright and wide-awake and
have really been so much in advance of our fellow-bar-

64 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

barians with our Monthly Anthologies and "Atlantic
Monthlies and North American Reviews, that we have
been in danger of thinking our local scale was the abso-
lute one of excellence — forgetting that 212 Fahrenheit
is but 100 Centigrade.'^ But if Lowell, himself, stood
in some need of the roguish warning in 1876, no brahmin
in the first decade of the century ever dreamed of meas-
uring either hot air or cold by any other than the local
thermometer. Boston, too, was naturally the place where
the young plants from the Harvard nursery across the
river, first unfolded their green shoots to the atmosphere
of the outer world. It was an atmosphere scarcely less
artificial than the academic one — the college youth
merely continued across the Charles their philosophic and
bookish discussions and their college ideals and pedantic
playfulness, made scarcely aware in their passage that
they had crossed a rubicon.

In 1820, from February to July, some of these youths
printed in Boston an elegant little magazine called the
Club-Room. It was a debonnair pamphlet decidedly
composed for the cognoscenti. Among those who wrote
its unsigned articles were Prescott, Edward Everett, War-
ren, Gardiner, Parsons, Dexter, Ware. It was Prescott
who had suggested making into a periodical the papers
which had been read at their club. The price of this
elegant little pamphlet was forty-five cents. Its culture
was fairly represented by one of its moments of stately
unbending — a Latin poem entitled Julietta-Romeoni
and the introduction which went with it. " Club begs to
apologise to his fair readers for putting on these pedantic
airs and assures them he deliberated no less than five
minutes upon the expediency of talking Latin or of leaving
the pages wholly blank. He was finally determined by
the consideration, that to the greater part of the sex, one
would be quite as acceptable as the other — while to those
young ladies in training for Blue-Stockings, the former
would be of manifest advantage as a finish to their educa-

BAKED BEANS AND BROWN BREAD 65

tion in teaching them to construe Latin and compose
love-letters at the same time."

Longfellow was one of those youths who was writing
for the magazines even while at college. The American
Monthly of Philadelphia had printed some of his prose
and promised him an honorarium which he never got.
He turned hopefully to an editor nearer home — Theo-
philus Parsons, who conducted the semi-monthly United
States Literary Gazette begun in April, 1824 — but appar-
ently he was not, for his earlier contributions, even
promised an honorarium (word redolent of a high-class
distinction, conveying the delicate discrimination genteel
ladies observe between boarders and paying guests!).
He seems to have published several poems there before
he took the bull by the horns when he sent another batch.
Then Parsons wrote him : " In reply to the question
attached to them, I can only say that almost all the poetry
we print is sent us gratis, and that we have no general
rule or measure of repayment. But the beauty of your
poetry makes me wish to obtain your regular aid. Would
you be kind enough to let me know what mode or amount
of compensation you desire? For the prose we publish
we pay one dollar a column. Perhaps the best course
will be for you to supply me for a few numbers with both
prose and poetry. For all that is used you shall receive
a compensation which you shall think adequate. . . . The
North American Review does not seek for novelties so
much as a Gazette must." The next year, the new editor,
Mr. Carter, begged with due compliments a continuance
of contributions and hoped at no distant day to adopt
the Edinburgh Review price of a guinea a page, and
promised to " be as agreeable as possible." He said he
had made arrangements with Mr. Percival to contribute
a stated amount regularly, " if he does not disappoint us
as poets sometimes do. We shall then bring the two
American poets, as some of the newspapers call Bryant
and Percival, side by side. I think you had better let us

66 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

have three American poets." It is interesting to observe
that, on the scale of Longfellow's necessary expenditure
at college, a remuneration of one dollar a close column
from a semi-monthly which wanted him to write regu-
larly, was not bad. In 1825, the Library of Harvard
College cost the students just that sum per quarter, room-
rent was from thirty to fifty dollars a year, and board
from two to three dollars a week — his total expenses
for one year, he said, could be fairly calculated at one
hundred and eighty-four dollars. Thus, had the pub-
lishers of the Literary Gazette made the same arrange-
ment with him as with Bryant, he could more than have
paid his way through the college year. Bryant had told
Judge Parsons, when asked to name the remuneration
he expected, that he wanted two dollars apiece for his
poems ; but Cummings and Hilliard so appreciated him as
a contributor, that they offered him two hundred dollars
a year for an average of one hundred lines a month.
(His profits on his first book were not quite fifteen dol-
lars!) The periodical took Bryant's entire output during
his most prolific years, says Godwin. Never before had
so many good poems been contributed to one periodical
in so limited a space of time, he goes on, and their
poetry attracted so much attention that a volume was
made of it, which the North American Review pro-
nounced a signal event in our literary history. From
1823 to 1825 continued the United States Literary
Gazette, its terms five dollars a year. It aimed to be
bright and good but not too much so for human nature's
semi-monthly partaking. It said, with a side glance at
the North American Reviezv: *' Our numbers shall not
be filled with literary gossip, or articles which are not
to be understood and appreciated but with a degree of
labour almost equal to that required for their composition.
We have long seen and felt the need of such a work. We
shall try to communicate a distinct and accurate impres-
sion of the literary and intellectual condition and progress
of this country. No existing journal performs the uses

BAKED BEANS AND BROWN BREAD 67

of a General Review ; it will be a leading principle of the
Gazette to maintain this character, and to make it strictly
national/'

This was another of the attempts to secure a place be-
tween the larger Reviews and the more ephemeral produc-
tions of the day, which were for many years to engage
vainly the efforts of those Bostonians who wanted to
hear what was going on in the intellectual world without
being plunged anew, at the critical mention of every book,
into multitudinous seas of words upon the development
of the subject from the dawn of history or into the evolu-
tion of civilisation in general and of the subject often
not even in particular. If one looked for a criticism of
a new work in the North American, he found mostly
prolegomena and olla podrida; and a word to the wise
was considered insufficient. Even the dignified and com-
petent Journal of Philosophy and the Arts (1823-24),
though far less exhibitionistic, had made little attempt to
meet the more mundane half way. Nor did it specialise
on literature. Its function was to show the progress of
discovery in the sciences and the fine and useful arts in
Europe and America. It hoped, in beginning on the
second volume, that as Boston had herself almost met
the expenses of the first, it might attract in the future
some attention at a distance, although it had hitherto
failed to do so. The greater Boston had not yet begun,
however, and a magazine with so solid an appeal did
not secure beyond her borders the support it had hoped.
More successful in this respect, was the Boston Monthly,
begun the following year, 1825 ; but the brahmins, always
distrustful of mere entertainment however high, may
have slighted it at home, for it soon disappeared. Its
announcement was attractive; it sought to be a vehicle
chiefly for the diffusion of the products of our own
minds. " We warn away those who cannot relish home-
made bread and good roast beef, now and then a piece
of stall-fed, with a plumb-pudding ornamented with a
fresh plucked rose. On the table will be found no

68 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

stewed lampyres, fried mushrooms, fricasseed coots and
wild fowl whose exquisite flavour arises from the process
of decay. We wall not be as grave as Quakers, but among
our correspondents shall number no Lady Snearwells.
Being long easier to purchase literature than to raise
or manufacture it, we became acquainted with every little
tell-tale writer of England while our own native talent
was neglected. It requires only the genial ray of a just
and liberal patronage to bring it forth and make it flourish.
But as to our own immediate affairs — it must be dis-
tinctly understood that we cannot pursue our own labours
without a prompt remuneration for them; and the ex-
penses of our establishment are not trivial. Our principal
reliance for the first year was on Boston; but we are
happy to state we have found numerous friends through-
out the Commonwealth. We must pay a passing compli-
ment to Maine, who has been generous in her subscrip-
tions and liberal in her communications. She has a
reading community."

There are several allusions in the magazines of the
decade to the unexpected intellectual awakening of Maine.
One speculates if it were symptomatic of the growing
taste for the forbidden fruits of another unpuritanical
pursuit. Samuel Longfellow notes in the life of his
brother that in 1820 the natives of Portland exhibited
that dexterity in evading prohibitions for which they have
since become famous. Theatrical performances being
against the law, the sporting element of the staid little
town achieved a masterpiece worthy of the generation
which had been brought up on the canny slogan Trust
in God but keep your powder dry. At a concert of
vocal and instrumental music, there were played between
the parts gratis, a three act play called The Point of
Honor, and the three act farce Katherine and Petru-
chio. Boston, herself, — so soon to form the avuncular
habit of escorting the younger generation to the circus
for educational purposes merely — was to establish its
best-supported theatre by a similar device, and lure the

BAKED BEANS AND BROWN BREAD 69

devout beyond the stuffed birds of the spacious lobby of
the Boston Museum into the perilous precincts beyond.
There are people still alive whose parents took them as
children to the Museum when they would never have
dreamed of going to any other theatre from which the
devil had not been exorcised. Stuffy vestibule of the
Boston Museum, with your mouldy and dingy cases of
commonplace curios to be encountered in many a shop
window in the streets outside, what a symbol of the pleas-
ing hypocrisies of Puritanism you lived to become!
Boston culture was many years, however, in hitting upon
some justification for reading merely for pleasure. For
many years no magazine tainted with mere entertainment
could gain a permanent foothold in Boston. Gazettes
might so disport themselves without sin, but a monthly
journal, never ! Neither culture nor religious controversy
left her reading public any time for such low pursuits;
and both were to look askance — the former ruefully and
the latter bitterly — upon the sprightly Dr. Holmes, when
ten years later he frittered away talents which might have
been directed to the good of .humanity in his two instal-
ments of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table for the
New England. Holmes, securely set within the circle of
the elect, might have leavened Boston in spite of herself,
but for his long absence from the periodical field. In
1834 he wrote to John Sargent from Paris that his medi-
cal studies prevented him from contributing to the maga-
zine. To another he wrote, " I have entirely relinquished
the business of writing for journals." A half dozen
years after he left college, he practically laid down his
pen. When he took it up again for the Atlantic Monthly,
he found that Boston had got rid of enough of its literary
snobbishness to treat entertaining trifles with tolerance,
but he still encountered opposition from the religious
branch of cultured readers, who accused him of lending
a lofty name to vicious relaxations of thought.

But even to Holmes in his youthful days, there clung
some of the Boston notion of showy swagger to any

70 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

public print which chattered brightly about matters
frankly unedifying. In 1828 he wrote : " I have seen and
read a good many numbers of the Yankee, and certainly
it is an entertaining paper. * I ' is a man of some talent
but you cannot deny that he is one of the most egotistical,
impudent, conceited fellows that ever lived. Indeed, I
believe that his paper owes half its popularity to the
singular audacity and effrontery of its editor." How
were young men to maintain the well-known Boston su-
premacy if they were not nurtured on deep draughts of
ambrosia? Had the adolescent Holmes never been con-
vinced of the Boston supremacy at home, he blushingly
owned it abroad. From Paris in 1834, he wrote, " If
I should class the young men who have been out here from
our three great cities, I should say that I consider that
Boston went first, Philadelphia second, and after a long,
long interval comes limping in New York." Yet already
had the Boston Literary Gazette, praised though it had
been by the North American, been obliged to amalgamate
with the New York Literary Gazette in order to exist;
and soon there were to be amalgamations which, as in
the New England itself, even removed the editorial chair
from the sacred city. The Nevu England, little dreaming
that its day of ignominy was already fixed, conceded the
superior mountain peaks of the Knickerbocker school,
but serenely maintained that in Boston a higher level of
culture w.as diffused than elsewhere to be found in
America. This was probably true for the scanty audience
of her magazines and the general average of their contri-
butions; and had not most of her brightest minds been
feverishly engaged in religious controversy, there would
probably have been much less disparity in the mountain
ranges also. But souls desperately engaged amid many
claimants in reading their title clear to heavenly man-
sions, had little eyes for the innocent brightness of the
new-born day. Thus, in spite of many attempts to pro-
duce a lighter and more miscellaneous journal, the North
American still remained the only lasting monument of a

BAKED BEANS AND BROWN BREAD 71

strictly literary type ; and though Boston was endearingly
termed the Literary Emporium by fond youngsters, it
bought precious Httle of their wares.

Meantime, too, the meagre audience for a less exalted
literature was lessened by a succession of reprint periodi-
cals. The Atheneum or Spirit of the English Magazines,
1825, published forty pages twice a month. The reprint
magazines then and later could always make out a good
case for themselves. " The articles of the Atheneum are
not the first feeble efforts of young and inexperienced
writers but are by men of cultivated intellect. Although,
therefore, we cannot recommend our work to public
patronage as a production of American writers and on
that ground claim a support from the patriotism of the
community, we can recommend it as a production of
writers whose location in another part of the world is
not a sufficient objection to their writings as long as they
possess a quality of such paramount importance as that
of intrinsic merit. We are by no means unfavourable
to * the encouraging and patronising of American genius '
but we do not think in order to do this it is necessary to
banish from the country all except American works."
This magazine ran for four years, and was succeeded by
the Banished Briton and Neptunian, by the Anglo-Ameri-
can, and by other reprints which in spite of their wide
choice in material and its inexpensiveness, could not
maintain themselves until in 1844, E. Littell started the
Living Age, which struck an enduring root. Its fruitage
upon our library shelves occupies more space than any
other magazine but the North American.

These magazines provoked indignant though imper-
sonal rejoinders from the " patriotic " periodicals ; but
they could afford the luxury of dignified silence as they
saw the home-born products struggle each through a
year or two and die at last of starvation. Some publica-
tions sought to take the middle ground which Harpers
held so successfully two decades later and which both
the Atlantic and the Century began to take but immedi-

^2 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

ately forsook as no longer necessary to their success.
They tried to maintain an American character while avail-
ing themselves of English material. Interesting for this
reason and others, is the announcement of the American
Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, m
1834. " During the last few years the increase and multi-
plication of magazines and periodicals of every character
has been without a parallel. Yet some of them are
strikingly defective in one respect — the subjects of which
they treat are almost exclusively of foreign growth, and
on that account alone, of little or no value to nine-tenths
of their readers. The object of the American Magazine
shall be to correct this defect and describe subjects,
scenes, places, and persons to be found in our own fine
and native country. It has appeared to us strange that
such a work has not been heretofore undertaken. We
shall not exclude anything valuable of European origin,
but the work shall be professedly on American subjects.
The engravings with which the work shall be embellished
will be of the first order. Several of the gentlemen in-
terested in the magazine are themselves engravers and
have contributed in no small degree to bring that beautiful
though long-neglected art to the high point of perfection
which it has attained in this country." The American
was profusely illustrated, to be sure, but with architectural
and zoological and statistical subjects rather than with
those of artistic intention; yet it very well fulfilled its
purpose to present native topics and is a mine of interest-
ing material.

With the American Monthly, 1829, entered into Boston
life one of our most showy literary figures and one who
remained for fifteen years the most popular in America,
and was until his death our best-paid magazinist.
" When the picturesque Willis was a young and already
famous man," says Holmes, " he was something between
a remembrance of Count D'Orsay and an anticipation of
Oscar Wilde. Lowell was a schoolboy, Emerson unheard
of, Longfellow not yet conspicuous, and Whittier just

BAKED BEANS AND BROWN BREAD 73

beginning to make his way against writers better edu-
cated." Not so dashing and splendid a personality as he
was shortly to become after he had received the London
hall-mark, young Willis was still quite a blade when he
set up an editorial chair in Boston just two years after
his sober father had begun there that most successful
and long-lived of young people's periodicals, the Youth's
Companion. From boyhood he had been successful. A
classmate of his at New Haven, quotes Mr. H. A. Beers
in his Life, testifies that he had taken while at college
many prizes in outside literary competitions. " It was
then customary for the editors of weekly and monthly
periodicals who ordinarily paid their contributors nothing,
to stimulate Columbia's infant muse by an annual burst
of generosity in the shape of a prize for the best poem
they had printed during the year." When he came to
Boston from New Haven, he was both Jack and Master
of all literary trades. " The editor is a young man," he
announced with that competent briskness and cosmopoli-
tanism of tone which stayed by him through life, " but
he trusts that with the promised assistance of several able
writers and an entire devotion on his part, the Monthly
may be found worthy of the patronage it solicits. The
Monthly is intended to resemble as nearly as possible the
London New Monthly edited by Thomas Campbell.
There is a call for a magazine of the literary character
it proposes. The two leading Reviews of this country
are published but seldom and are confined to the heavier
branches of literature and science; and though there are
lighter periodicals of very considerable merit, there is a
wide interval between the two. Payment in advance
($5.00 a year) is required for the following reasons.
The expenses of a new establishment make it desirable
and proper. In Europe periodical works are paid for
either in advance or when each number is taken. This
practice is fast gaining in America, and it is hoped may
become universal. In that case, the little debts which
are so often troublesome to subscribers, and so discourag-

74 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

ing and sometimes ruinous to publishers, are not suffered
to exist." Among the several able writers who had
promised assistance were young Appleton and Motley,
both students at Harvard; and the devotion he himself
promised he made good at the rate of from thirty to forty
pages every month of tales, essays, and reviews. Al-
though he said he was the only editor in the country who
paid anything for verse, he announced that he could not
pay as much as the English magazines for contributions.
" The difficulty of transmission over such an immense
country and the comparatively small proportion of literary
readers limit our circulation to a thousand or two at the
farthest." But literary Boston, though mildly captivated
by this engaging person, was not in the habit of paying
in advance or even taking single copies regularly on such
hard terms; and after two years and a half Willis shook
the dust of the ungrateful town from his shoes and made
tracks for New York with his magazine, which he amalga-
mated with the New York Mirror in 183 1. " The mines
of Golconda," he said afterwards, " would not tempt me
to return and live in Boston." When he resumed his
editorial work in New York, he had learned that the way
to keep a publication alive was not to pay " not much "
but to pay nothing at all, except to his own editorial staff ;
and he said so with the utmost frankness. The circula-
tion of New York magazines like those of Boston was
largely local, but those Bostonians who stumbled across
the Mirror must have comforted themselves for their
growing fear of metropolitan eminence by the consoling
thought that it was reflecting many of its editor's articles
which had first seen light in their own American Monthly.
Willis in his large amount of writing for the Boston
magazine had contributed to it a social smartness and
fashionable tone which, when he specialised on polite
subjects in his New York publications, soon gained him
recognition as arbiter of elegance. After a decade of
the usual failures to float light-reading in Boston, was
projected a magazine which frankly styled itself a Reposi-

BAKED BEANS AND BROWN BREAD 75

tory of Literature and Fashion, in the endeavour to cap-
ture some of the phenomenal success of Godeys in Phila-
delphia,— which might, indeed, have stolen from Boston
the source of its success, — Mrs. Hale, once editor of the
Ladies Magazine. This new periodical was the Boston
Miscellany, edited by Nathan Hale, Junior. It scandal-
ised the academicians by featuring fashions as well as
literature. This, of course, was nothing new, but Boston
cared to feel — in spite of ample demonstration to the
contrary — that she had outgrown the necessities of her
Colonial literary struggles. Yet even the Atheneum
which got all its material for nothing and charged five
dollars a year, had helped itself along with coloured
fashion-plates as well as engravings. Nathan raged at
the ignominious clog of fashions which dangled from the
hind leg of his soaring steed, yet it is probable that on
account of it his Pegasus was permitted to continue its
flight to the middle of the second year. The son of a
literary family, he started out with high ideals. " Who
is that Hale Jr. that sent me the Boston Miscellany f
Mrs. Stowe w^ote to her husband from Cincinnati^ ** and
will he keep his word with me? His offers are very
liberal — twenty dollars for three pages of not very close
print. Is he to be depended on? If so, it is the best
offer I have received yet.'' Lowell got fifteen dollars
a poem from it when Graham was paying him ten.
Edward Everett Hale upon it and his father's Monthly
Review with occasional nibbles of the North American,
sharpened his literary eye-teeth. " When I left college.
Dr. Palfrey asked me, very kindly, to furnish some
articles for the North American, which he then edited;
and these must be my first magazine articles. In Janu-
ary, 1 84 1, my father began the publication of the Monthly
Chronicle of Events, Discoveries, Improvements and
Opinions and continued it for three years. In the end
of '41 my brother Nathan was made editor of the Boston
Miscellany and I was a sort of Man Friday on his staff
also. Short stories, proof sheets, an occasional poem

ye THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

written up to the one engraving of the month — every
thing I was called on to lay a hand to and did as well
as I could." The announcement of the paper struck
a somewhat high and vague note. "Of the large demand
in our country for an elegant literature, the number and
circulation of the already established magazines furnishes
at least some indication. It is a late day to undertake
any defence of what is called light-reading — it has de-
fended itself. It needs no wild belief in the glories or
the truth of the ideal at the expense of the real to bid us
enjoy and cultivate an acquaintance with artificial lives."
For the latter part of the community it intended to have
two copper-plates a number, a coloured page of Paris
Fashions, and a piece of music. Neatly bridging the
chasm between the paying artificial and the unprofitable
ideal were such signed contributors as Lowell, Edward
Everett, C. F. Hoffman, W. W. Story, T. W. Parsons,
N. P. Willis, Fields, Hawthorne, and Poe. Lowell wrote
many poems in by no means his lightest vein and contri-
buted some critical work which would have been caviar to
any miscellany whatever, to say nothing of one which
eschewed the scholar's midnight lamp. " The appear-
ance of an article on the Old English Dramatists in a
Miscellany of Literature and Fashion," said that journal,
" seems at first sight as much out of place as Thor's
hammer among a set of jeweller's tools or Roland's two-
handed sword on the thigh of a volunteer captain on
parade day." Lowell himself seems to have felt its incon-
gruity and regarded the appearance of the criticisms
mainly as a cheap and convenient way of reprinting the
best scenes and passages. In November, 1841, he wrote:
" The magazine is published this morning. The figure
on the cover with wings, etc., is intended, saith the artist,
to portray the Genius of Literature. But how any man
in his senses could set forth such a fat, comfortable look-
ing fellow as the vera effigies of what is hungriest, leanest,
empty-pursiest, and without-a-centiest on earth I am at
a loss to say." This was two months before the New

BAKED BEANS AND BROWN BREAD ^^

Year's reckoning when he wrote that he thought he might
safely calculate on earning four hundred dollars by his
pen the coming twelve month, which would be enough
to support him.

Before that year ended, Lowell issued the prospectus
of a magazine of his own. As the editors, Lowell and
Robert Carter, were the proprietors as well, they scorned
the succour of the Fashion Plates and Fashion articles
which had so chafed the literary editor of the Miscellany,
and which had after all proved unable to keep the periodi-
cal afloat. Lowell's poor health compelled him slightly
to anticipate the destined failure of his magazine in a
short time. It numbered among its literary supporters,
Hawthorne, Parsons, Dwight, Poe; but its financial
supporters were' not forthcoming. Poe in New York
praised the magazine highly, as he usually did any maga-
zine when it was printing him; and it highly deserved
his praise, as most of the magazines did not. The
Pioneer chose its name because it intended to push farther
into an undiscovered country from whose bourne no
traveller had yet returned — to seek to create and embody
a national literature by awakening a national conscious-
ness. " When I was beginning life," wrote Lowell many
years later, " we had no national unity, and the only kind
of unity we had was in New England but it was a pro-
vincial kind." In the five years he had been writing,
he had found an audience in the magazines of Philadel-
phia and New York, and thus he had a wider field of
vision than most dyed-in-the-wool Bostonians. Yet he
had more of the Boston scorn than should have been
possessed by a young man who had seen in three cities
that compromise was the only law of life in the magazine
world. " The contents of each number will be entirely
Original and will consist of articles chiefly from Ameri-
can authors of the highest reputation. Its object is to
furnish the intelligent and reflecting portion of the Read-
ing Public with a rational substitute for the enormous
quantity of thrice diluted trash in the shape of namby-

78 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

pamby love tales and sketches which is monthly poured
out to them by many of our popular magazines, — and
to offer instead thereof, a healthy and manly Periodical
Literature whose perusal will not necessarily involve a
loss of time and a deterioration of every moral and in-
tellectual faculty."

On the starvation of the Pioneer three months later,
the field was again left open to what Lowell called the
trashy monthlies and the weeklies ; and it was again dem-
onstrated in Boston that the reflecting part of the Read-
ing Public would not buy lighter literature. They found
all the room for reflection they cared for in the pages of
the North American, which disdained lightness, and in the
religious periodicals, which not only did not disdain it but
admitted as good quality of it as was published in most
magazines especially devoted to it. Moreover, there
were weeklies and news-sheets constantly appearing which
did the same thing. All of these re-printed as they
pleased, with or without acknowledgment, any tid-bit they
had discovered in the magazines. Their literary page was
scissored impartially from all exchanges, and chestnuts
were plucked systematically from the fire that the maga-
zines had taken so much trouble and risk to build and
keep going. There was small incentive for any house-
hold to take in a periodical devoted to light literature when
it could get gratis with its news and its politics as much
of the best light literature as it could digest. For new
literary material, the papers paid as a rule nothing what-
ever; and most of our writers began to publish in that
way. Lucy Larcom asked five dollars from Sartain's
Magazine, but she was sending poems to the National Era
at the same time without asking or expecting remunera-
tion. A few years later, the weeklies were quite generally
paying popular writers by the column for their work,
and in another generation they and the newspapers some-
times featured literary leads at fabulous prices. In 1868,
Mrs. Stowe wrote Mrs. Fields about Old Town Folks
(the copy for which Fields had been vainly endeavouring

BAKED BEANS ANH BROWN BREAD 79

to extract for her, although she had been paid in advance
so that she might concentrate all her efforts upon it) :
" It would be greatly for my pecuniary interest to get it
done before the first of September, because I have an of-
fer of eight thousand dollars for the newspaper use of the
story I am planning to write afterward.'* But this glad
day was not yet.

With competition, then, from news and political and
religious papers plentifully besprinkled with literature,
monthly periodicals devoted to the latter could not long
exist. As true in 1845 ^^ in 1835 were the words of the
Boston Pearl. " We beg to say that in our humble opin-
ion no monthly magazine exists in this land which can
be said to be exceedingly creditable to the country." It
might have made an exception of the New England, but
for some reason, probably personal, it had little liking for
that meritorious magazine and lost few chances of saying
so. " We are told that puffing is the order of the day,"
it said editorially, " and that the New England eschews
such a course. But the non-puffing character of the New
England is not quite attained yet — for we pronounce it
the most notorious reservoir of puffs in the country."
The Pearl published a weekly review of the theatre and
a musical department which also furnished original com-
positions. But in spite of numbering Whittier, John
Neal, Tuckerman, Pike, Longfellow, Mrs. Stephens, and
Mrs. Sigourney among its contributors, and in spite of
publishing poems of sometimes very considerable length
(one of fifty Childe Harold stanzas, for instance) it did
not aspire to nor was it accorded the dignity of letters to
which any monthly periodical might lay claim by the sole
title of its less frequent appearance. The North Ameri-
can, which wore the highest crown of all, was still a
quarterly. The pert stand of the Pearl in the matter of
subscriptions would alone show how remote it was from
the loftiness of the true literary spirit. It, at times, pub-
lished a list of delinquents and threatened to stereotype
the persistent offenders !

8o THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

When the Dial ran down in 1844 because its ardent sup-
porters practised not wisely but too well the plain living
they preached, and borrowed rather than bought, the
Harbinger of Brook Farm became its successor in 1845.
The same spirit informed it and the same people wrote for
it. Its editors were Ripley, Dana, and Dwight; and
among the contributors were Clarke, Curtis, Channing,
and Cranch. Edited in a less temperamental manner and
managed with better business skill, it outlived the social
experiment of which it was the organ ; and when Brook
Farm was abandoned, it was still strong enough to scrab-
ble two years for its living in the streets of New York.
The Harbinger was almost as endeared to its readers as
the Dial had been. The great civilising work of Clarke in
the West was equalled in a more specialised way by that of
Dwight in Boston. There he issued in 1852 the first num-
ber of Dwight' s Journal of Music, destined to perform
a great cultural mission. It was to give an honest report,
week by week, "of what we hear and feel and in our poor
way understand of the great world of music. Music has
made rapid progress within the last fifteen and even the
last ten years. It requires a regular bulletin. Very con-
fused, crude, heterogeneous is this sudden musical activ-
ity in a young utilitarian people. It needs a faithful,
severe, friendly voice to point out steadfastly the models
of the true, the ever beautiful, the divine." The periodi-
cal continued in various sizes for over thirty years, and
its farewell was attended by a tribute greater than any
other American periodical had ever received. In 1880,
the year before it closed its long and honourable career
during which its editor had consistently refused to allow
it to be published in the interests of any music house (a
unique record), it was tendered a testimonial concert by
the musicians of its native city which it had done so
much to make the foremost musical centre of America.
But the six thousand dollars they raised were insufficient
to keep it going in the face of competition from musical

BAKED BEANS AND BROWN BREAD 8i

journals whose fortunes were watched over by interested
firms.

It is rather ironic to find that after all of Boston's
attempts in the first half of the century to sustain a mis-
cellany which should equal in stability the North Ameri-
can Review and secure, as it had secured, some favour-
able European mention, destiny had reserved the latter
boon, though not the former, to the Lozvell Offering.
What had been denied to Dennie, to Tudor, to Bucking-
ham, to Emerson, to Lowell as editors, was bestowed, and
in the most public and flattering manner, upon the mill-
girls of Lowell! Also, its circulation, though limited,
was probably wider than any of the Boston magazines of
the half-century period. Aside from the unique and mov-
ing nature of its appeal, there is something particularly en-
gaging about this candid human document. Never before
had a periodical written as its valedictory, " It has sup-
ported itself and has supported us, and very likely better
than we should have supported ourselves in any other
way." It was a magazine of thirty one-column pages,
price six and a half cents. On the first copy was the an-
nouncement '^ This number wholly written by Females
employed in the Mills/' In order to combat the prejudice
against female editors and publishers, it was thought best
that the enterprise be endorsed by some of the leading men
of the city. There are no longer any Females ; and one
supposes the anti-suffragists might counter gloomily
" And no mill girls who can publish a magazine either T"
Yet on second thoughts, even an anti-suffragist could
hardly take a periodical composed and printed by even
pre-historic mill-girls as an argument that woman's place
is the home. Flushed with its success, the magazine
adorned its plain cover with a vignette, and explained it
thus : " To represent the New England school-^girl, of
which the factories are made up, standing near a bee-
hive, emblem of industry and intelligence, and in the back-
ground the Yankee school-house, church, and factory."

82 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

The motto was The Worm on Earth May Look up to the
Star. " But this rather abject sentiment," writes Har-
riet Robinson, '* was changed finally to Is Saul among the
Prophets? It may be said that at one time its fame
caused the mill-girls to be considered very desirable for
wives. In answer to many doubting Thomases the editor
said : ' The articles are all written by factory-girls and
ive do not revise them. We have taken less liberty with
them than editors usually take.' " Perhaps it was because
of this lack of editorial interference that within the space
of three years' time seven books had been published by its
contributors. Lucy Larcom wrote for it, and says that
on the advice of the editor she summoned up enough cour-
age to demand payment for a poem submitted to a maga-
zine of the outer world. The North American in its
stately way indorsed the Lowell Offering and said that it
was probably exciting more attention in England than any
other American publication. There, Harriet Martineau
had eagerly pounced upon it as propaganda for her revolu-
tionary idea that working hands might have thinking
brains which the country would be better for cultivating ;
Dickens said in his American Notes that it would com-
pare advantageously with a great many English annuals.
In France, George Sand glowed with this message from
the new world that a factory need not stifle mental and
emotional energy; and Thiers actually carried it into the
Chamber of Deputies as an exhibit of the possibilities of
working women under a Republican government.

The Lowell Offering was, however, but the daintiest of
rapier thrusts in comparison to the bludgeon which was in
pickle for the Boston high-brows. The Hub had refused
to support a magazine of light literature, and the gods, as
if in retribution, were to make her the protesting parent of
the popular illustrated weekly in America. Recall, if you
will, the shudder of culture at illustrations even of the
better sort, and you will see that this was a heavy blow.
The cradle of the North American, the country's longest
lived and most dignified publication, was to be desecrated

BAKED BEANS AND BROWN BREAD 83

by a bouncing and tattooed infant which made not the
least pretensions whatever to literature in the Boston
sense, and yet sprang almost at once into Boston's most
profitable periodical. Gleason's, afterwards Ballou's
Pictorial, fell away just as far as her shameless name be-
tokens from the standard of the Tradition. Its pictures
were multitudinous for that day and would be many for
ours. They illustrated not only its wildly romantic tales
and serials but topics of the day also. Gleason's was not
even good enough to be embalmed in history, ungener-
ously derided like the Ledger by the prominent writers
whom it paid better than any other periodical. The his-
torian cannot discover that it even shocked the sober re-
ligious papers by any pyrotechnics, as did the Ledger
when it captured Beecher, for instance. It was only hope-
lessly and fatly bourgeois. Nor was its great financial
success in its native town the sole thorn it planted in her
side. To have given birth to a Pictorial was bad enough
for a well-connected matron, but even with this affliction
Boston had not sufficiently atoned for her sin of scorn-
ful indifTerence to all but ambrosia. The builder of the
Boston tradition became the grandmother of a brood of
pictorials, and thus was the means of debauching the taste
of all America with pictures. For on deacon's staff was
a young Englishman named Carter, who perceived that
the old idea of just enough pictures to float the text was
a back number, and that one would get more profitable
returns if he figured upon just enough text to float the
pictures. This young man came to New York, and,
changing his name (possibly to bury completely his Bos-
ton past), started in 1855 Frank Leslie's Illustrated News-
paper. And upon the money which he harvested during
the Civil War, through his field correspondents accom-
panied by artists, he committed misdemeanour after mis-
demeanour. He became a " pictorial " factory, and the
national influence of his ten illustrated papers and maga-
zines proved really frightful (viewed with the eyes of the
Boston Tradition). Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly

84 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

(1876) lived up for almost a quarter of a century to its
epithet. And by that time Boston had grown less proud
of her attitude, and realised that she was getting a little
stiff in the joints.

CHAPTER IV

PHILADELPHIA, THE VALLEY OF SELF-SUFFICIENTNESS

" Dissect ridicule and you will find envy," saith the sage.
The pedigree of the stock joke about Philadelphia should
comfort that city for adding to the gaiety of comic week-
lies and vaudeville monologues. It dates back to the time
when she was easily first in the sisterhood of cities. Bos-
ton and New York, smarting at her greater culture and
social development, took refuge in a contemptuous sniff;
and New York sniffed the louder because she had more
reason to be jealous.

Yet, of all human mechanisms, that which is known as
" saving the face " is most constantly on the job; and the
transparent gibe began to have real point as it came of
age. For when Philadelphia grew conscious that her
supremacy was dwindling, she in her turn sought to sup-
port her chagrin by adopting that buttressed complacency
for which she is now notorious. At the beginning of the
century Neal, in an English magazine, jealously referred
to her natives as " mutton-headed Athenians," but he
knew in his soul that Philadelphia had the right to call
herself the Athens of America. Later, Irving said the
Philadelphians did nothing but pun, and a little later still,
Longfellow said they did nothing but dance. Toward
the end of the fifty-year period which this chapter covers,
Lowell, with no jealousy whatever (although he had come
to Philadelphia because Boston couldn't support him),
termed the city a provincial valley of self-sufficientness
and contentment. Leland, returning from Europe in
1842 to his birthplace, said there was no city in the
world of which so little evil could be said and so much
good, yet of which so few ever spoke with enthusiasm.

Ss

86 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

Its inhabitants were all well bathed, well clad, well behaved,
all with exactly the same ideas and the same ideals. A degree
of refinement was everywhere perceptible, and they were so
fond of flowers that I once ascertained by careful enquiry that
in most respectable families there was annually much more
money expended for bouquets than for books. When a Phila-
delphian gave a dinner or supper his great care was to see
that everything on the table was as good or perfect as possible.
I had been accustomed to first considering what should be placed
around it on chairs as the main item.

Nevertheless, in spite of them all and in spite of the
undeniable smugness which Philadelphia had now
achieved, she published and read more books than either
of her sisters. During the first half of the century there
were at least one hundred and sixteen Philadelphia maga-
zines. Of these in general, only two items can here be
noted. As early as 1805 she had tried to float the first
theatrical magazine in America, and within the decade
she repeated the attempt five times. In 1824 she kept
twelve magazines going at once, three literary, four re-
ligious, three medical, and two political. And though
Boston had snatched the fillet from her brow, and only
within her household was heard any longer the boast that
she was the American Athens, she was still centre of cul-
ture enough to inaugurate and centre of practicality
enough to maintain the three most successful magazines
— artistically or financially or both — of the entire period.
Thus if she had become the Tomlinson of cities, it was to
some purpose. In them she did more to encourage
" light literature " in America than Boston, who had
seized the sceptre in 181 5, or New York, who soon began
to clamour for it.

From up Boston way, in 1789, the American Addison
came to the American Athens ; and with his coming Phila-
delphia knew her treble supremacy complete. The seat
of government, of society, and of the arts (or, as the
original Friends might have put it, the world and the
flesh and the Devil), she had in all respects her heart's
desire. And Joseph Dennie, who was Secretary to the

VALLEY OF SELF-SUFFICIENTNESS 87

Department of State, the brilliant centre of her coterie of
fashion, and as Oliver Oldschool the founder of her Port
Folio, summed up in his one person all three. Here is a
picture of the famous man, as Buckingham saw him when
a printer's devil in his northern editorial sanctum : " A
pea-green coat, white vest, nankin small-clothes, white
silk stockings, pumps with silver buckles, which covered
at least half his foot. His small-clothes were tied at the
knees with ribbon of the same colour in double bows, the
end reaching down to the ankles. His hair in front was
well loaded with pomatum, craped and powdered; the
ear-locks had undergone the same process; behind, his
natural hair was augmented by a large queue, which, en-
rolled in some yards of black ribbon, reached half way
down his back." This was, if you please, his simple
working costume and in provincial New England. Fancy
how his brave vibration glittered free when he really
spread himself among his peers in Philadelphia, home of
wealth and fashion and courtly refuge of many titled
foreign exiles! But well for him that the table-loving
metropolis was hospitable, and thus he could economise
in other ways, for as secretary his salary of one thousand
dollars only just equalled his earnings in Walpole, New
Hampshire.

" He contributed to chasten the morals and to refine
the taste of the nation," inscribed J. Q. Adams upon his
tombstone. An Addisonian in life, you see, in death they
were not divided. Where is it fled, that stately and
heavy Addisonian ideal? Can one imagine the familiar
epitaph ever being chiselled again? Refine the taste of
the comparatively refined, the Port Folio certainly did

— Josiah Quincy said it was far and away the best
American periodical and quite as good as any English one

— but the unrefined saw very little of it. Established in
1 80 1, on its fourth birthday it had raised its price to six
dollars — a strapping sum for the Philadelphia yeoman.
But, a thoroughly high-class magazine, it would have been
caviare to the general. The middle class, when it came

88 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

their way, foamed at its lack of patriotism. It unspar-
ingly condemned what in America was bad and bump-
tious ; it did not feel that America had created all at once
an entirely new set of values j it admitted Thomas Moore
and Alexander Wilson (visitors in Philadelphia) direct
to its columns, instead of stealing them by reprint, as any
patriotic American magazine should have done. Seeing
these several treacheries, what self-respecting American
would have cared how much it had extolled the art of
Benjamin West and sought a market for him; or that
it praised ardently the native products it could praise ; or
that it attacked the reviewers and magazine-makers of
Great Britain (even when their cadences were most Addi-
sonian ! ) for " the fastidious arrogance with which they
treat the genius and intellect of this country," and said
it was only equalled by their profound ignorance of the
situation ; or that it attacked American critics for " enter-
ing into a conspiracy to exterminate American poetry "?
In short, refusing to praise Americans because they were
Americans and blame Britons because they were Britons,
it ran counter to native prejudice, as other unpatriotic
Americans have done since ; and if it leaned too much to
the English side, one must not forget the Addisonian pull
and the fact that to many an old-school gentleman like
Dennie, Noah Webster's proposition of a Columbian
Dictionary seemed impious. " Let it be called Noah's
Ark," he stormed, " full of its foul and unclean things ! "
When the old gentleman — our second professional
man of letters — departed the Philadelphia coterie he had
so handsomely graced and the heady new world he had
so stubbornly striven to hold to Addisonian ideals, the
momentum he had given his elegant magazine lasted
for some years. In fact, even after it had begun to
take in sail it was an unconscionable while a-dying. No
sooner had it climbed to what Dennie would have thought
the high top-gallant of his joy — being extensively copied
by the London Monthly — than it was ready to decline.
In 1820 it was attempting in vain to arouse the sleep-

VALLEY OF SELF-SUFFICIENTNESS 89

ing citizens with a Cassandra call that New York and
Boston were threatening their supremacy. Up to that
time her contributors had numbered every person of
literary consequence within her border; now the traitors
and ingrates were sending their wares to New York!
As for that upstart city, one of its urchins, Salmagundi,
had even dared to sit and grin in public at the three-
cornered hat and the breeches of the Last Leaf. " One
of the editors of the Port Folio/' snickered the saucebox,
" has been discharged for writing common sense." In
1823 the magazine was feeling bitterly its fluttering pulse.
" The last volume contains very few communications
from any friend to us and to our cause. In the days of
our first predecessors such was the number and zeal of
contributors that the editor was obliged to exchange the
labour of composition for that of selection." Indeed,
that year had seen little but European reprints — neither
its courage nor its choice, but its necessity in being old.
Until 1827 it paced its banquet-hall deserted; then, with
the queue of its courtly founder, it went to a postponed
but dignified interment.

It was in 1838 that Poe moved to Philadelphia and
arranged to write for the Gentlemen's Magazine. This
had been founded the preceding year by William E. Bur-
ton, the actor, who seems to have mounted his hobby-
horse gaily and with no more serious purpose than taking
a fling with his literary tastes and his own pleasant but
occasional pen. Poe became at once his chief contributor,
and before the second year was up his editor. The finan-
cial arrangement seems to have been more or less of Poe's
own making; and when he afterward complained of it
he not only forgot this fact, but the important additional
one that his fixed salary of ten dollars a week demanded
but two hours work a day, and the arrangement especially
contemplated giving him ample leisure to write at his
regular rates for the magazine and for other periodi-
cals also. When Poe had first applied to him, Burton
wrote :

90 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

The expenses of this magazine are already wofully heavy;
more so than my circulation warrants. I am certain that my
expenditure exceeds that of any publication now extant, includ-
ing the monthlies which are double in price. Competition is
high — new claimants are daily arising. I am, therefore, com-
pelled to give expensive plates, thicker paper and better print-
ing than my antagonists, or allow them to win the goal. My
contributors cost me something handsome, and the losses upon
credit, exchange, etc., are becoming frequent and serious. I
mention this list of difficulties as some slight reason why I do
not close with your offer, which is indubitably liberal, without
delay.

Burton thus looked upon Poe in the light of a luxury
which he feared he could not afford, as he himself up to
this time had been editor of his own magazine. The new
editor at once demonstrated his value, however, and for
awhile everything was satisfactory. But at the end of
six months his besetting sin got the better of him once
more and began to diminish his efficiency. Burton ap-
pears to have treated him with the friendliest considera-
tion, although another besetting sin of Poe's was landing
the magazine into difficulties. " You must get rid of
your avowed ill-feelings toward your brother-authors,"
wrote Burton. " You see, I speak plainly — indeed, I
cannot speak otherwise. Several of my friends, hearing
of our connection, have warned me of your uncalled-for
severity in criticism." But though Poe somewhat
mended his ways in the one respect, he did not in the
other. Burton returned to the city one day to find the
number still unfinished after the regular date of publica-
tion and Poe incapacitated. When the same thing oc-
curred again, Poe was dismissed. Burton resumed the
editorial chair. But in this case, as in several others,
Poe could look back upon his departure from a magazine
as the beginning of a wane in its popularity. Like Mr.
By- Ends in Pilgrim's Progress, he often had the luck
to jump in his conclusions with the times. Not long
afterward. Burton asked George Graham to buy his
magazine and said he wanted to raise money for his new

VALLEY OF SELF-SUFFICIENTNESS 91

theatre. He had run it for four years and was now
finding it encroach too much upon his acting. It had
just thirty-five hundred subscribers, and he would sell
it for that number of dollars. Graham was running a
magazine called The Casket on fifteen hundred sub-
scribers. He united the two, and the five thousand
subscribers found their good-will desired for a new maga-
zine entitled Grahmns. Fortune smiled upon the union
and blessed it with riches and honour, if not with length
of days. In a comparatively short time it had reached
a circulation of over thirty thousand, an unprecedented
popularity; and at the beginning of its second year, in
1842, Greeley printed in the Tribune that it was already
one of the best magazines of the country and that in
refusing its pages to puerile love-stories, maudlin senti-
ment and stupid verse it had elevated the standard of
periodical literature.

Park Benjamin wrote to Graham when he was starting
out, " I think I could get Longfellow to write an occa-
sional poem for you at twenty dollars; he asks twenty-
five." Graham had immediately set about building up
his circulation by publishing the best writers in the
country; and though he was not the first editor to pay
as much as he could afford, he soon became the first to
make a habit of paying well. " I shall be happy to re-
ceive stories at twenty-five dollars and poetry at ten
dollars per article," he wrote to Frances Osgood as early
as 1843. To the principal contributors he was paying
as high as twelve dollars a page. Though these prices
had been beaten by the New York Knickerbocker, the
average contributors to that periodical paid dearly for it
and the new writers habitually received no money what-
ever. Peterson told Mrs. Osgood in 1844 that two
dollars a page and five dollars a poem were the regular
Philadelphia rates for all publishers but Graham.
Though Poe was not necessarily sincere in his published
criticism of contemporary periodicals in the New World
in 1843, he told the plain truth when he said: "The

92 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

most popular of all the magazines is that published by
Mr. Graham, who is a practical business man and a friend
to men of talents of every cast. Every article which he
prints is liberally paid for, and he has the honour of
patronising a larger number of eminent writers in prose
and verse than any other publisher in the country."
Bryant, in his private correspondence in 1842, several
times marvelled at the " vastness " of its circulation.
Indeed, the success of the newer style of publications —
Graham's, Godey's, and the Ladies' Companion —
seemed to him disquieting, in spite of the fact that our
best writers were appearing in all three. He may
have thought, as did Mrs. Stowe, that poets and essayists
should not elbow their way among coloured fashion-
plates. Graham appears to have tried for awhile to
conduct the editorial and the business departments of his
magazine both at once, but the exactions of the latter
proved too much for him. " I sometimes wish," he wrote
to Mrs. Osgood in 1843, "that I had gone on quietly
in my little law office, using my pen modestly as a writer
for a few years more, instead of embarking on the stormy
sea of publishing heart and — I sometimes fear — soul.
I do not fancy I should have made much more, but I
fancy I should have had more moments of delight than
can be possibly stolen from the bustle of an active and
successful business life. Do you know that among my
forty thousand readers there are but few, and among
several score of agents there are none, who do not think
a publisher bound to answer all their impertinence, as
well as to furnish them books for their money ? " In
less than a year Graham decided that he could not serve
God and mammon at the same time, and decided to call
Poe — who seems to have been recommended to his at-
tention by Burton, in spite of their two mishaps — to the
exclusive service of the former.

If one may venture to carry out this somewhat startling
figure of speech, it can be added that Poe was no sooner
installed than he sought to purge the temple of its money-

VALLEY OF SELF-SUFFICIENTNESS 93*

changers. Although he showed an excellent head for
business, it did not seem to occur to him, any more than
to Bryant or Mrs. Stowe, that it may have been the
money-changers who so swelled the congregation. He
wrote Thomas much later that his reason for resigning
from Graham's was " disgust with the namby-pamby
character of the magazine; I allude to the contemptible
pictures, fashion-plates, music and love-tales." The
salary, too, did not pay him, he said, for the labour he was
forced to bestow. When he was seeking to interest
Anthon in his own project of a magazine, he wrote :

In about eighteen months after I became editor of Graham's
its circulation increased from about five thousand to no less
than fifty thousand [which was decidedly stretching it at both
ends !] — astonishing as this may appear. It is now two years
since I left it, and the number is not more than twenty-five
thousand. In three years it will be extinct. The nature of this
journal was such that even its fifty thousand subscribers could
not make it very profitable. Its price was three dollars, but
not only were its expenses immense, owing to the employment
of absurd steel plates and other extravagances, which tell not
at all, but recourse was had to innumerable agents who received
it at a discount of no less than fifty per cent, and whose frequent
dishonesty occasioned enormous loss.

Graham testifies that Poe was an admirable editor.
Poe's weakness may have been the cause of their separa-
tion, but it is more likely to have been the quarrel which
Graham avers. At any rate, their relations remained
friendly. Graham accepted a story from him in New
York, for which Poe asked and was paid fifty-two dollars.
As the story was unpublished for a year, the author asked
and received permission to submit it for a prize of one
hundred dollars ofifered by the Dollar Magazine of Phila-
delphia. The story was The Gold Bug, and it won
the competition. In March, 1850, Graham printed an
open letter to Willis defending Poe against Griswold's
biography. He said : " For more than eighteen months
I saw him almost daily, much of the time writing or con-
versing at the same desk, and he was always punctual

94 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

and unwearied in his industry and the soul of honour
in all his transactions. This, of course, was in his better
days; but even after his habits had changed there was
no literary man to whom I would more readily advance
money for labour to be done." Not content with this,
Graham afterward printed a mordant letter to Griswold
himself.

For a short while after Poe's departure the magazine
was run by Ann Stephens and Peterson together — or,
at least, she allowed her name to be used. This presents
an interesting discrimination quite worthy in its subtlety
of the most genteel of modern anti-suffragists. Mrs.
Stephens had tried her hand at running several magazines
and considered it ladylike employment, but an editorial
position on a newspaper (even a Sunday supplement)
was unsexing. She once wrote to Griswold that she had
been made ill by the cruel rumour that she had become
editor of the Sunday News. It had so wounded her
that if she were not compelled to write for her daily
bread she would never put pen to paper again. " I feel
indignant that any member of the press should believe
me capable of accepting a situation proper only for the
other sex ; and no one knows how keenly I feel anything
calculated to represent me as unwomanly." Neverthe-
less, she did not shrink at driving a very masculine bar-
gain, if Poe's statement in that firebrand article of his on
the New York Literati was true. In spite of announce-
ments, he affirmed she had nothing to do with the editing
of Graham's, of the Ladies' Companion, or of Peterson's.
In the days when the sex was first entering the business
field, the incompatibilities of the Old woman and the
New engendered in the distracted minds of those ladies
who were thus seeking to be twins some charming
sophistries.

But — whatever anti-suffragist ladies may persuade
themselves — sophistries are not solely feminine. Here
is one of the masculine gender. Said the United States
Gazette in 1845 :

VALLEY OF SELF-SUFFICIENTNESS 95

We perceive that our neighbours Godey and Graham have
both taken out a copyright for their respective magazines. This
is rather new, but on looking at the matter carefully we think
it is entirely correct. The articles in each cost, we suppose,
from three hundred dollars to five hundred dollars. These are
frequently taken out bodily, and before the magazines reach
half their subscribers their contents have been made familiar
to the community through the daily or weekly papers. Not to
give offence to anybody, we will state a fact: Graham gave us
fifty dollars for a story, and we published the same article al-
most as soon as it appeared in the magazine. We, of course,
asked permission.

The abuse was a very extensive one. " It is no doubt
gratifying to a publisher to have liberal extracts made
from his work," wrote another conscientious editor, " but
credit to the magazines is often omitted by newspapers."
Even the chief victims of the practice did not, for a long
time, dream of questioning it. Apparently, they thought,
despite the inconvenience and loss occasioned by it, the
most they had a right to demand was credit for the re-
printed article. In one of Godey's numbers is this edi-
torial statement : " Nearly one-half of our book for
the ensuing month was copied into one of the weekly
papers some ten days before we were ready to publish.
We had sent an early copy of our work to our editor,
then absent, who placed it in the hands of the gentleman
pubHsher to have an article of poetry copied in his paper.
He copied nearly one-half of the contents." Perhaps
even the Baltimore Visitor would have thought this
stretching too far the courtesy of the trade, but it would
have objected to the subterfuge rather than the thing
itself. It expressed its opinion of this new high-handed
act of self-protection very tartly: "It pains us to see
that Mr. Godey has resorted to the narrowly selfish course
of taking out a copyright for his book. He will rue it
bitterly. Think of this insulting proposition: *We
have no objection to any paper copying any story from
our magazine, if they will not do it until the succeeding
number is published/ Wonderful liberality, Mr. Godey,

96 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

toward that department of the press to which you are
more or less indebted for a handsome fortune ! "
Poe wrote at the time in his Broadway Journal:

It is really difficult to see how any one can, in conscience,
object to such a course on the part of Messrs. Godey and Gra-
ham. It has long been the custom among newspapers, the
weeklies especially, to copy magazine articles in full and circu-
late them all over the country — sometimes in advance of the
magazines themselves. To such an extent had their piracy been
carried that many magazine subscribers had ceased to be such,
because they could procure all that was valuable from the news-
papers very little later, and often at less cost.

It was in November, 1842, that Poe left Graham's.
The next important occupant of the chair was Rufus
Griswold, about whose character and competence existed
in that day as in this such vehement difference of opinion.
Certainly, many admirable people of his day admired him ;
and few persons, says Leland, ever possessed more en-
thusiastic or steadily devoted friends. There were those
who maintained, with Greeley, that nobody had ever so
drawn to an American magazine all the talent of the
country. Irving was the only important man who never
wrote for it, and that was apparently because the Knicker-
bocker had arranged for all the work which he was
willing to publish in this way. " Our October number is
very good," wrote Griswold to Fields, " with Bryant,
Cooper, Longfellow, Hoffman; in November we have
Longfellow, Cooper, Bryant, R. H. Dana, Sr., Tucker-
man, Hoffman, Osgood." So many names of the first
magnitude constantly shone in Graham's that the maga-
zine seems to have been the first to give point to the
unending controversy of fame versus merit. This had
not arisen in the case of the equally brilliant Knicker-
bocker, for their pages were always open to nice young
authors who would write for nothing. Half a dozen
years later, when both Graham's and the Knickerbocker
were desperately trying to live up to their past, Kimball
in New York wrote to young Leland in Philadelphia:

VALLEY OF SELF-SUFFICIENTNESS 97

" Come over to New York. It is better to have the
influence with a periodical which gratuitous contributions
will bring, rather than the money which you might re-
ceive for them." But Leland, who was getting five dol-
lars a page, " when the publishers want me at all," was
not at the time willing to write for nothing, unless he
did it (as shortly happened) in an editorial capacity. But
these days for Graham's were yet distant, and in 1843
Hawthorne was writing to Griswold : " I am advised
that the publishers of magazines consider it desirable to
attach writers exclusively to their own establishments
and will pay at a higher rate for such monopoly. If
this be the case, I should make no difficulty in forswearing
all other periodicals for a specified time — and so much
the more readily on account of the safety of your maga-
zine in a financial point of view." But then, as now, the
big guns sometimes failed to go off. The magazine had
quite a run on Cooper, and published his Lives of the
Naval Commanders and a serial story. Graham said the
eighteen hundred dollars he paid for the latter might as
well have been thrown into the sea, for it never brought
him a new subscriber. " I am not surprised at what
you say concerning Graham's and Godey's," wrote P. P.
Cooke to Griswold in 1847, in answer to a letter the
contents of which may be surmised. " Magazine articles
derive nine-tenths of their pecuniary value to publishers
from the known and famous names attached to them.
Longfellow's worst poem, however a chance effort of
mine might excel it, would be vastly more valuable to
Graham than anything I could send him. Before hearing
of the prize-poem method of getting supplies, these were
my views on the subject, and I expected very little from
the magazines pecuniarily." Graham's was not doing
so well now; and Greeley — who was trying to find a
market for a new writer, Thoreau, for whom Margaret
Fuller had asked his interest — found him slow pay, and
after waiting a year drew on him for the money. *' If
you choose to publish this," wrote Greeley in 1846, " and

98 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

pay as much as you pay others for right good prose,
where you are not buying the name." The price, which
both Griswold and Greeley called liberal, was seventy-five
dollars -^ for an essay which formed the leading article
for tv/o numbers.

Although Poe said that Griswold left the magazine in
disgrace, he continued to act off and on as its assistant
editor for years. Graham, evidently feeling with his
diminishing revenues that he could no longer afford an
editor-in-chief, resumed active charge, assisted by E. P.
Whipple to do the editorial reviews. Bayard Taylor and
Leland came into the office later. Graham gave it up
about 1855, ^^^ four years later it sought to revive its
existence under the new name of the American Monthly.
Thus Poe's amiable prophecy of its extinction within three
years after he had ceased to guide its fortunes was almost
a decade out of the way. On Griswold's death, Leland,
who was then editor, printed in the magazine that under
his care and direction it first achieved a high literary tone
and acquired authority. Nor could Poe have convinced
Leland, as he so easily convinced himself, that Griswold's
management had anything to do with the decline in its
fortunes. That it did steadily decline after Poe's de-
parture is true, although Poe's statement that it at once
lost half its subscription list was eminently Poe-like.
By the time Leland took it the circulation had become
almost nothing, and the new editor succeeded in forcing
it up to seventeen thousand. In his autobiography he
said:

I filled It recklessly with all or any kind of literary matter
as best I could, little or nothing being allowed for contribu-
tions. For this I received fifty dollars a month. When I finally
left it, the proprietors were eighteen months in arrears and tried
to evade payment. Finally they agreed to pay me in monthly
instalments, and fulfilled the engagement. While editing it I
had one day a space to fill. In a hurry I knocked off " Hans
Breitmann's Party." I gave it no thought whatever. Clark
republished it soon after in the Knickerbocker, saying that it
was evidently by me. I wrote in those days a vast number of

VALLEY OF SELF-SUFFICIENTNESS 99

such anonymous drolleries, many of them, I dare say, quite
as good, in Graham's Magazine and the Weekly Bulletin, but
I took no heed of them. They were probably appropriated in
due time by the authors of " Beautiful Snow."

Indeed, Leland seems habitually to have equalled
Tudor's feat with the first number of the North Ameri-
can; for, besides his literary contributions, the various
editorial departments had now so stretched out as to
occupy the major portion of the magazine. The Monthly
Summary and the Review on Fashions were voluminous ;
and the Editor's Table was decidedly of the extension
variety, leaf after leaf being inserted each month.

Wrote Graham's in 1844:

It has become the fashion among a certain set, a very small
one, to sneer at the " light " magazines — as if the literature of
a young and growing nation must be heavy to be good, or
would be popular if it were. The light magazines are but so
many wings of a young people panting for a literature of their
own. They are training a host of young writers and creating,
an army of readers, who are urging on a happier day. We do
not despair, if we live, of seeing a high-toned magazine with
fifty thousand readers, or of publishing it, and without the aid
of pictures; but the man who expects it now is a quarter of a
century ahead of his time, a fellow with his eyes shut, dream-
ing of a heaven which he has no ability to assist in creating.
We have satisfied ourselves in our attempt to make Graham's
the best of its class, and the highest even in literary reputation
of any American magazine, and shall gradually blend with the
lighter character of the work as much of the useful as may be
deemed prudent. It is perhaps true that the popular magazines
of the day are too much devoted to the merely ornamental;
and the department of Our Portrait Gallery, with biographies
of our own writers and naval heroes, must be hailed as a re-
lief as well as a good omen. We believe the day is not far
distant when the pioneers in the lighter magazine may be able
to modify much the character of their magazines. There can
be no doubt that as taste improves and extends, the public will
be content with one or two exquisite original engravings worth
a dozen copies of stale prints. If the elegant original works
we have now in hand are properly appreciated, we shall adopt
at once the plan of having all our pictures painted expressly
for this magazine. In the meanwhile — gentlemen critics —

100 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

remember that ours is a magazine of art as well as literature;
and that we are furthering the interests of a large number of
artists as well as writers, and judge us accordingly.

The policy of gradually diminishing the number of
engravings in favour of a few original ones evidently
proved a mistake. In 1848 they announced that they
v^ould revive the original splendour of the pictorial de-
partment, though every attempt v^ould be made to keep
it from degenerating into the picture-book for children
v^hich the magazines of feebler aims had become. In
1852 occurs this editorial comment:

One of the magazines mentions the astonishing sum of five
hundred dollars as designed ta be spent upon the illustrations
of each number. We have published many a number on which
we have expended four times that sum without any parade
about it. The printing and paper of one of our steel plates cost
over that sum always, to say nothing of the original cost of the
engraving, which is from one to two hundred dollars.

In a sketch of George Graham, with his portrait, in
July, 1850, Charles J. Peterson said:

He infused a new spirit into magazines. The monthlies had
been filled with second-hand British stories or indifferently writ-
ten original tales; while their poetry, except what was taken
from well-known authors, was such " as both gods and men ab-
hor " ; the illustrations were few and indifferent. Its fresh-
ness, beauty and ability at once placed it before all others in
popular favour. Success from the start allowed him to per-
severe in increasing its literary and pictorial excellence. No
sooner were Longfellow, Bryant, Cooper discovered to be per-
manent contributors than thousands who had heretofore looked
with contempt on American monthlies hastened to subscribe.
The benefit thus done to popular literature cannot be calcu-
lated. It will be long, perhaps, before any one man will have it
in his power to do again as much.

In 1844 the magazine was advertising that the best
American writers were almost all of them publishing in
Graham's exclusively. The next year Lowell wrote to
a friend from Philadelphia, where he was living — even
if very simply — chiefly on his contributions to the maga-

VALLEY OF SELF-Sllf J?.ICIEirrMSS loi

zine : " Graham has grown fat, an evidence of his suc-
cess. He lives in one of the finest houses in Arch Street
and keeps his own carriage." By the latter part of 1848,
however, scarcely one of the well-known names advertised
on the title-page as the principal contributors appeared
within — although the list still included very respectable
names and Poe was contributing monthly " Marginalia."
George Graham announced during the year that a series
of misfortunes had deprived him of any proprietary
interest, and that the present publishers had treated him
liberally :

From two not very profitable magazines, Graham's sprung at
once into boundless popularity and circulation. Had I not in
an evil hour forgotten my own true interests and devoted that
capital and interest to another interest, which should have been
exclusively confined to this magazine, I should to-day not be
writing this notice. What a daring enterprise in business can
do, I have already shown in Graham's and the North American
(a newspaper). And, alas! I have also shown what folly can
do, when business is forgotten. But I can yet show the world
that he who started life with but eight dollars in his pocket and
has run such a career as mine is hard to be put down.

It was announced that year that Bayard Taylor would
assist in the editorial department. This youngster had
written in 1843 that his highest ambition was to appear
in Graham's. Now, five years afterward, one of the new
owners went over to New York to propose that he manage
the magazine. Taylor regarded the opportunity as an
exceptionally fine one : " He offers me the situation at
a thousand a year, promise of increase in a year or two,
and perfect liberty to write for any other periodical. I
will have a fine office to myself, and the work will only
occupy three to four hours daily. I have consulted with
Greeley and Willis, who advise me to go." He was also
to write an article a month, receiving extra pay for it.
" How shall I leave this mighty city of New York? " he
wrote to another friend. " Philadelphia is merely an
immense provincial town; here is the metropolis of a
continent." He need not have worried, however, as the

102 . THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

involved business affairs of the magazine were so ar-
ranged in the end that he became editor in name only,
and, an absentee, merely contributed a little more fre-
quently. In 185 1 Graham regained control of the maga-
zine, and before the end of the year thanked his friends
for rallying to him and allowing him to guide his shat-
tered bark into harbour once more. But in spite of as-
surances of great increases in subscriptions, there were
decided evidences of scrimping. The brisk editorial tone
of former days was much reinforced. About 1852 the
department Small Talk became not only prominent by
elongation, but by the adoption of a lively button-holing
style of casual comment on things in general and the
excellence of Graham's in particular that seems startlingly
modern. Thus ever, in the magazine world, voices
heighten as they take their flight !

Graham's and Godey's are linked f orevermore by Haw-
thorne in the House of Seven Gables. Here he mentions
them as if they were the two principal magazines of
America. Contemporary estimation linked them also in
blame as well as praise. Briggs wrote Lowell that he
had always misunderstood Poe, " from thinking him one
of the Graham and Godey species." Readers thought
of them together, because of their similar run on steel
engravings and fashion-plates. And last — but not least
— writers bracketted them in red letters as sure and good
pay. When Willis was about to start a magazine of his
own he wrote :

Adieu to the third sign of the Zodiac ! Adieu, O Gemini !
Adieu, Godey and Graham! Most liberal of paymasters, most
gentle of taskmasters, pashaws of innumerable tales, adieu !
Pleasant has been our correspondence ! Pleasant the occasional
meetings in your city of Phil-gemini, Phil-Graham and Godey.
Adieu to our captivity in magazine land. The messenger which
you sent us that it was time to write was not more punctual
than the golden echo to our compliance. We may look back
from the land of promise, as the Israelites hankered after the
flesh-pots of Egypt — but we shall return no more ! Cling to

VALLEY OF SELF-SUFFICIENTNESS 103

our hand at parting, and wish us well on our own-hooktivity.
We leave you reluctantly.

But, alas! inseparable in life, in deaths they were very
much divided. Long, long after Graham's had breathed
its last did the most successful of Philadelphia magazines
continue to boast " the greatest circulation in the world."
In the attic of what boy and girl was there not a pile of
old Godey'sf Into what wondering eyes now grown dim
with age did not the hydrocephalic and high-lighted heads
which spattered its raven-black steel engravings spring,
as though they would leap from the page ? Who has not
shaped his childish dream of high romance out of its
wooden-limbed cavaliers and its swan-necked ladies
dripping with draperies? Well might Godey, whose
voice was hoarse proclaiming his own modesty, style
himself a national institution. Begun in 1830, it united
in 1837 with the decorous Ladies' Magazine of Boston,
which had started two years earlier; and the editor of
that periodical, Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, moved south-
ward with the editorial chair.

She was amply worth the transportation. Continuing
for forty years the editor of the literary department, she
advocated the higher education of women and other re-
forms, yet shocked no mater familias by her tactful pro-
gressiveness. Writer of plays and cook-books; mother
alike of Thanksgiving Day and Mary's Little Lamb; one
foot on land as completer of the Bunker Hill monument
and one on sea as founder of the Seamen's Aid Society ;
to one thing was she constant her whole life long — to
render the Lady's Book " the guiding star of female
education, the beacon-light of refined taste, pure morals,
and practical wisdom." Assisted in the beginning by
"the good and gifted Mrs. Sigourney," she saw to it
that nothing having the slightest appearance of indelicacy
was ever admitted to these pages. Every month she
contributed a moral sentimental essay on the duties and
the privileges of the sex, quite admirable in its genre and

104 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

for its age — Victorian in its accents, yet progressive
and human in its spirit. Her publisher announced that
she had shone in every species of writing, and all dis-
tinguished by the chastity, morality and sympathy v^hich
she had put into them. There never lived a more ideal
president of a Mother's Congress. In i860 Godey an-
nounced : " We do not publish a mere story-book. We
seek to enlighten and instruct v^omankind. Mothers take
it for their daughters, v^hose mothers took it for them.
It is an heirloom in families. If mere stories are w^ant-
ing, outraging Munchausen, you must subscribe to some
other publication. Those articles of fiction we do publish
have all a moral tendency, and won't suit the readers of
The Ensanguined Dagger, The Perils of a Housemaid or
The Benevolent Pirate of the Gulf."

Moral tendency they had, indeed — according to the
Victorian definition. Happiness ever awaited virtue, and
though heaviness might endure for a night, joy came with
the milkman. Already a changed taste was appearing
when, in i860, Howells wrote of their incredible insipid-
ity. Dear Mrs. Hale, what would she have thought had
she lived to see not only taste change, but morality also !
Judge of her consternation had the sad fate awaited her
which came two decades later to the mother of that
sweet child Elsie Dinsmore — who lived to hear her off-
spring termed an of^cious brat hurling her golden texts
in a very orgy of exhibitionism at every handy passer-by.
Blessed are the dead who die in time !

Mrs. Hale took the literary control and managed her
editorial department. There were other departments
besides — Arm Chair, Literary Notices, Centre-Table
Gossip, Health, and Fashions. " How often must we
say that Mrs. Hale is not the Fashion Editor," the Arm
Chair was frequently scolding. The Fashion Editor took
orders for making the hair of loved ones into beautiful
bracelets and pins ; and she would buy bonnets and man-
tillas for you, and even hinted at more extensive shopping
on certain interesting occasions. As the magazine pub-

VALLEY OF SELF-SUFFICIENTNESS 105

lished instructions for drawing, it agreed to furnish for
a small consideration the proper pencils. The " sociable
air "of Godey's was widely commented upon. They
printed many flattering letters from correspondents (a
quaint custom, which might well be revived!). As early
as 1847 there was a series of articles on Model Cottages,
with pictures and ground plans (and what Mansard and
Swiss horrors they were!). In 1849 they offered a
handsome bouquet for the best essay from the pen of
some fair correspondent on a subject which had of late
been all-absorbing, " What Becomes of the Pins? " The
" family air " of Godey^s might be crystallised by Mrs.
Hale's announcement in 1846 of the death of Mr. Godey's
mother. " The numerous readers of the Lady's Book,
who may have regretted its delay for several months past,
will now understand the painful nature of those duties
which engrossed the proprietor, and their kind hearts
will sympathise with the sorrows of an only son." Dear
Mrs. Hale! it is difficult to picture her in anything but
black silk, with a fall of lace at the sleeves and at the
slightly surpliced neck — a veritable Lucy J. Hayes in
her white sanctum.

But while she was speaking in her soft and edifying
accents, Godey was sounding the first strident note of
modern magazine advertising. There are few contem-
porary magazines which more insistently proclaim their
own perfections. Godey had an impressive way of re-
ferring to his magazine as The Book. He certainly
quoted it to serve his own purpose. He was always pre-
dicting that the next number would surpass all records,
and admitting the succeeding month that he had guessed
right. Perhaps the first American slogan was ** What
Will Godey Do Next ! " It was a chanticleer call, making
up in noise and punctuality for what it lacked in variety.
Sometimes he juggled the notes a bit. " Why don't our
contemporaries originate something? Why always fol-
low in our track ? " The charge was always being sub-
stantiated by something like this, in 1845 : " When we

io6 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

adopted, some two years since, the wave rule around and
through our page, the pages of every magazine in the
country were thus altered immediately. Indeed, a maga-
zine in a neighbouring city copied our pages so exact
that we would defy any person to tell the difference be-
tween the two, excepting in the reading matter. And,
lo ! the London World of Fashion has also appeared in our
late dress. Worse than this, a respectable five-dollar
magazine (Godey's was three dollars, or two for five
dollars, or five for ten dollars, or eight for fifteen dol-
lars) copies on its cover the announcement for 1845, only
altering the title and price of the work ! " Said Godey
proudly in 1839:

You will find in no English magazine such a store of entertain-
ment. We were the first to introduce the system of calling forth
the slumbering talent of our country by offering an equivalent
for the efforts of genius. Our subscription list now doubles the
list of any other magazine in America. A few years ago the
Lady's Book had not an original article in its columns, with but
eight steel plates per annum and four plates of fashion on cop-
per; now it is entirely original and includes the first names of
the day, and its embellishments surpass any other magazine of
double the price. Nor must our readers suppose we have ex-
hausted our stock of contributions from our lady writers. All
accounts not settled during the year will be taxed an additional
fifty cents at the end of it. If we must wait, we must be paid
for it. By Jupiter, this shall not be revoked!

You cannot imagine Mrs. Hale saying " by Jupiter."
Nor can you imagine her gentle heart otherwise than
grieving over a series of very unladylike critiques by
Poe, which must have rejoiced the stomach of Godey.
So great was the demand for the first instalment of the
Literati of New York that they reprinted it in the next
number. Poe was at that time running on a shoestring
the Broadway Journal, and he had many scores to settle.
The series involved the Lady's Book in some very unlady-
like proceedings. Dr. Thomas Dunn English resented
Poe's attack on him, and retaliated with a statement in
the New York Mirror. Poe dipped his pen in the prussic

I

VALLEY OF SELF-SUFFICIENTNESS 107

acid which Lowell said often served him for ink and
indicted a rejoinder. This even the shrewd and com-
mercial Gcdey refused to print; and all of Mrs. Hale's
laces must have sighed with relief as she sat down at her
desk to breathe her monthly message of peace and love.
Mrs. Hale adhered to the time-honoured custom of
announcing accepted contributions; and she requested
contributors to keep copies, as she could not undertake
to send back rejected articles. "If the writers do not
find their contributions noticed within three months, they
are rejected." At other times would come this significant
notice. " We have been looking over our collection of
original poetry. Some of these articles have been on
hand so long that their authors may have forgotten them
or given them to some other publications. We hope the
latter." Therefore, the following announcement may
not come as a surprise : " We want it distinctly under-
stood that, unless by previous understanding to that effect,
no articles published in this magazine will be paid for.
Young writers and those who have not acquired a literary
reputation must remember that the mere insertion of their
articles in the Lady's Book is quite a compensation in
itself. It is useless for them to ask what price we pay;
it would be better to ask if we will insert their produc-
tions." Yet the funeral-baked meats of these youthful
rejected writers were sliced up at will to furnish forth
the Editor's Table. Mrs. Hale, like most editors of the
time, coolly carved out the good morsels to garnish her
own feast. In fact, the Table seems to have been devised
in the beginning for this thrifty hash of viands, which,
like the ^gg of the meek curate, were " excellent in spots."
It must have given the verdant authors a peculiar mixture
of exasperation and solace to behold themselves thus
willy-nilly minced up into a salad. The extensive prac-
tice affords an excellent illustration of the papal editorial
attitude of the early days — an attitude not entirely with-
out its influence over our own. After all, these times
were not so long ago; and United States congressmen

io8 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

and publishers were not the only ones who had confused
notions of literary property. Authors themselves seemed
to be genuinely surprised when an editor — as a New
York paper said pointedly of one who had gone into
bankruptcy through his '' generosity " — paid for some-
thing he could get for nothing. It is amusing to see
magazines which confessedly remunerated only their
prominent contributors constantly trumpeting their open-
handedness. And when, as with the Lady's Book, they
found it profitable to exploit women's work, their blasts
might have aroused sleeping chivalry itself, secure within
its Dark Tower.

" I sometimes think," said the Editor's Table in 1842,
" that the Lady's Book owes much of its unparalleled
success to the blessings which the poor of our sex who
are benefited by its publication are constantly calling
down upon it. Not to reckon the host of female writers,
who are promptly paid, there are, besides, more than one
hundred females who depend for their daily bread on
the money they receive from colouring the plates of
fashions, stitching, doing up the work, and so on." And
again : " We were the first to bring the happiest produc-
tions of the female mind home to the myriad of firesides.
This January number is entirely the production of lady
writers, and with the exception of the poem of the cele-
brated Miss Joanna Baillie, from the pens of American
ladies." They got out a number of this sort frequently.
The signed contributors were of that forgotten galaxy
of ladies — Mrs. Embury, Mrs. Seba Smith, Mrs. Ellet,
Mrs. Osgood — whose sentimental voices were sometimes
raised shrilly at each other, and whose little hands occa-
sionally sought to tear out each other's eyes. The literary
harem was maintained on very limited rations ; and think
of all the apprentice female pens rhyming and essaying
for nothing, awaiting their chance to squeeze in and de-
mand their share of the crumbs that fell from the master's
table. It behooved the fortunate inmates to watch each
other narrowly for indications of waning charms.

CHAPTER V

NEW YORK AND THE MAKING OF A METROPOLIS

"I AM satisfied," wrote Benjamin Rush in 1799, "the
ratio of intellect is as twenty to one and of knowledge
one hundred to one, in these States compared with what
they were before the American Revolution/' This was
the year that Charles Brockden Brown thought both were
ripe enough to create in New York City a demand for a
purely literary journal. .The Monthly Magazine and
American Review had been a long-cherished plan. It
languished and dwindled until in 1801 it was rebaptised
into a momentary resuscitation, the American Review
and Literary Journal.

Juliet might persuade herself there was nothing in a
name, but the proprietors of American magazines — like
the proprietors of American theatres — seem always to
have reasoned differently. Since the beginning they have
sought to hoodwink their hoodo, in the manner of the
landlord who hoped to lay his unprofitable ghost by
putting up another sign on his inn. In Brown's case,
as in all similar shifts in the magazine world, the expedi-
ent proved unsuccessful. A magazine that changes its
name in hopes of bettering its condition should remember
the old counsel to brides, and change the letter also. As
long as this remained the same, there was no sufficient
public for Brown's magazine. At the century's very be-
ginning, and in New York City, neither intellect nor
knowledge was present in sufficient quantity to support
a periodical consisting entirely of reviews, reports of
foreign works, and a literary journal. It was just an-
other one of those magnificent and foolish undertakings
of which we have seen so many ; " yet by the bones about
the wayside we have come into our own. "

109

no THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

The " vision '* of the pioneer, Brown shared with the
rest; and he stated it in a dignified announcement free
from verbiage and the already stereotyped diplomacies
of the trade :

The American people are perhaps more distinguished than
those of Europe by an universal attention to the active and
lucrative pursuits of life. This habit has grown out of the ne-
cessities of their situation. Some European critics hold our
pretensions in contempt, and many among ourselves seem in-
clined to degrade our countrymen below the common level. It
is only the gradual influence of time that will generate and con-
tinue a race of artists and authors purely indigenous and who
may vie with those of Europe. This period is, probably, at no
great distance; and no means seem better calculated to hasten
so desirable an event than those of literary repositories. It is
from the want of a clear and comprehensive survey of our
literary products that we are in a great measure to ascribe the
censures of foreign cities. The plan of a Review, so new in
America, has had many prejudices and obstacles to surmount.
It was thought that young American writers would not bear
criticism and must be treated with peculiar indulgence. Experi-
ence has proved this objection to be without foundation. How
far those who have executed the department of criticism are
qualified for the undertaking, the public have it in their power
to decide. Their purpose has been not so much to exhibit their
own opinions as the spirit and the manner of the author. It is
not probable that any individual can be found who with the
requisite ability and inclination has leisure and perseverance
enough, successfully to conduct a work of this kind. Depend-
ing then as it must do on persons of various pursuits and differ-
ent political sentiments, it is not surprising that occasional dif-
ference of opinion should appear. Original essays we confi-
dently hope for, but no promises are given.

In the last-mentioned hope, as in all the others, he
was destined to disappointment. He had been obliged
to furnish almost the entire contents of the earlier maga-
zine ; it was the same with this and with its successor, the
Literary Magazine and American Register, established
in Philadelphia in 1803. This third of his gallant, pre-
mature endeavours struck, in the more intellectual soil
of the latter city, roots hardly sufificient to suck up a five
years' subsistence. But even there he ran his engine at

THE MAKING OF A METROPOLIS iir

one-man power. In 1804 he wrote to his brother:
" You will find but a single communication in this num-
ber — all the rest of the original prose I have been obliged
to supply myself, for which I am sorry, for the sake of
the credit of the work as well as of my own ease. The
whole original department of July I have been obliged
to spin out of my own brain. You will probably find
it, of consequence, very dull.'*

A letter he had written his brother from New York in
1800 mentions other difificulties. " Yesterday the due
number of copies of number three of the magazine was
put on board the stage for your city, where I hope they
have seasonably arrived. This once the printers have
been tolerably punctual and hereafter I have reason to
think they will be regular. Book-making, as you observe,
is the dullest of trades, and the utmost that any American
can look for in his native country is to be reimbursed for
his unavoidable expenses. The salability of my works
will much depend upon their popularity in England."
Perhaps he would have lost faith in his vision if he could
have foreseen that a half century later his chief successor
in New York would still be fighting desperately — to fall
at last — the same foe, if under a new face. Said the
Knickerbocker in an article on Leland in 1856: " Apart
from the editors of newspapers, where shall we find a
body of men, however innumerous, who can earn their
daily bread by their pen alone? We are filled with
shame and indignation at the legislative stupidity which
offers a few miserable types of American professional
litterateur as victims to the niggardly reprinting of a
rival literature." The main situation had not altered
much, even if a book could count upon wider distribu-
tion than in the eleven cities where Brown had agents.
" As collection of small sums is difficult and expensive,
those who reside at a distance from Boston, Hartford,
New Haven, Albany, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond,
Alexandria, Norfolk, Charleston, and Savannah, where
numbers are sold, will kindly designate some person in

112 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

their town as agent to receive and pay for their copies.'*
This difficulty and others caused Brown to turn his maga-
zine into a quarterly at fifty cents a number. " The thin
population of the United States renders it impossible to
procure sufficient support from any one city, and the
dispersed situation of readers, the embarrassments attend-
ing the diffusion of copies over a wide extent of country,
and the obstacles to a prompt collection of the small sums
which so cheap a publication demanded, are, it is pre-
sumed, satisfactory reasons for altering the publication
so as to diminish these inconveniences."

In spite of all shifts, however, his thoroughly creditable
and well-arranged review went down. There was not
enough public for its purely intellectual appeal. All
European travellers of the period agreed that Americans
were inordinately devoted to making money, and the
Scotch Mackenzie said that the descendants of the Dutch
particularly were avaricious. Those people in New York,
too, that might have had leisure and inclination to improve
their minds, spent all their time out of the counting-house
in social pleasures. The little Dutch town, said Felix de
Beaujour, was the only one in America which had a really
continental quality — the others were English or West
Indian. Close-fisted these Dutchmen might be, but they
were very fond of gaieties; and very hospitable in enter-
tainment at their own homes. A resident of Philadelphia
remarked in 1806 that there were fewer taverns fre-
quented by the genteel than in his own city, and strangers
received far more attention. Most of the energy which
cultivated New Yorkers could spare from business went
out in maintaining a round of social pleasures, strictly
after business hours. The only people who cared about
reading, they naturally seized eagerly upon a kind which,
so far from taking time from their social pursuits, added
a zest to them. Rarely has a more delightful morning
dawned in a gay, gossipy little world than January 24,
1807, when the first number of Salmagundi appeared.

"It's object," wrote Paulding, "was to ridicule the

THE MAKING OF A METROPOLIS 113

follies and foibles of the fashionable world. Though we
had not anticipated anything beyond a local circulation,
the work extended throughout the United States and
acquired great popularity. It was, I believe, the first of
its kind in the country ; produced numerous smaller pub-
lications, none of which, however, extended beyond a
few numbers; and formed somewhat of an era in our
literature. It reached two volumes, and we could have
continued it indefinitely; but the publisher, with that
liberality so characteristic of these modern Maecenases,
declined to concede to us a share of the profits, which had
become considerable.'' Yet it seems to have been dis-
tinctly understood in the beginning that Longworth, the
publisher, in assuming all the risks, would assume the
profits also. " We have nothing to do with the pecuniary
concerns of this paper," ran the editorial announcement
in the first number ; " its success will yield us neither
pride nor profit, nor will its failure occasion to us either
loss or mortification." The authors, indeed, could not
have calculated on the paper's doing more than pay ex-
penses — well-nigh universal experience would have
taught them to expect even less. When Longworth sug-
gested, fairly enough, that they take out a copyright,
they had answered that it was not worth while. Conse-
quently Longworth was quite within his rights when,
having taken it out himself in addition to the initial risk,
he refused to share his profits with them. But he seems
at least to have begun to do so, for the three authors
received from him one hundred dollars apiece. It may
well be that as they saw the profits unexpectedly mounting
up, they took an attitude which the publisher felt some
justification in resenting. The immediate cause of their
abrupt retirement on the twentieth number was his ad-
vancing the price to one shilling. Paulding calculated
that he and Irving had enriched their publisher by ten
thousand dollars when the copyright expired in 1822.

The success of Salmagundi at the time was quite enough
to turn the head of any publisher who had in the teeth of

114 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

experience handsomely undertaken to assume all risks,
and of authors who flew afterward on fire to hear such
rich reprisals were so nigh and yet not theirs. Eight
hundred copies of the fourth issue sold on the day of
publication in a town of eighty thousand inhabitants was
electrifying. At first it was to have been published —
like the Philistine almost a century later — " every once
in a while," but in the first flush of triumph it became
a weekly. Though it moderated its pace later, it con-
tinued to show all competitors Atalanta's heels — espe-
cially its " next-door neighbour, Town," which soon
dropped out of the running. The waggish impertinence,
buoyant and bland, of the mysterious trio, Launcelot
Langstaff, Anthony Evergreen, and William Wizard,
decidedly caught on. It was a new thing for authors to
take themselves so lightly (their levity possibly being
occasioned by the comforting knowledge that Longworth
was footing the bills). " The paper on which this work
will be printed is that held in highest estimation by young
ladies for buckling up their hair," read the announcement.
Imitations, as Paulding said, shot up everywhere.
Though most of them withered overnight, the neat droll-
eries of the original remained for a long while the
aspiration of every young writer. Why not, indeed,
since Irving was the only American who had as yet cap-
tured the coveted London approbation ? " We had a
Dennie," said the Philadelphia Critic censoriously in 1820,
" yet his classical elegance has not availed to preserve
his countrymen from being intoxicated by the quaintness
and affectation of the Salmagundi school." But Beatrice
Ironside, the sprightly editress of the Baltimore Observer,
snapped her fingers at the earlier Addisonian tradition
of Dennie with as much delight as the rest of her country-
men. The modified type was more suitable to the cen-
tury. " Although our city readers have most probably
generally seen Salmagundi/* she wrote, " yet we cannot
forbear extracting the following ludicrous and admirable
description. We were almost apprehensive that the wit

THE MAKING OF A METROPOLIS 115

which sparkled with such continual brilliancy in the first
numbers would have too soon wasted fire, but we are
delighted to find the fifth number even perhaps surpasses
those which preceded it, and that the genius and satirical
talents of the facetious editors appear to be as inexhausti-
ble as the subjects which call them forth/'

In 1 8 19 Paulding made an attempt to resuscitate Sal-
magundi while Irving was in Europe. A letter to him
in 1820 tells the story.

Hearing last winter that you had finally declined coming
home and finding my leisure time a little heavy, I set to work
and prepared several numbers of a continuation of our old joint
production. At that time and subsequently, I was entirely ig-
norant that you contemplated anything of the kind [in the
Sketch Book]. But for an accidental delay, my first number
would have got the start of yours. As it happened, however,
it has the appearance of taking the field against you, which
neither my head nor my heart will sanction. I believe my work
has not done you any harm in the way of rivalship, for it has
been soundly abused by many persons and compared with the
first part with many degrading expressions. It has sold toler-
ably, but I shall discontinue it shortly.

Paulding was always disposed to rate their youthful
venture much higher than did Irving. " I know you
consider old Sal as a sort of saucy flippant trollope not
worth fathering," he wrote. Saucy she might well be —
the only American magazine who retired with flags flying
in the very midst of her triumphs. Had Father Knicker-
bocker, who came along twenty-five years later, taken
her breezy tip, his voyage would have been more graceful.

" The dapper little town of the Dutch days," said the
Knickerbocker making its opening speech, " has bloated
into the big metropolis. The object of our magazine is
to represent life and letters as existing here, not to
assume their regulation. In literature, young, fresh, and
unhackneyed as Americafis are, we are already, by some
strange fatuity, grievously given to twaddle." About
ten years before Bryant had written the same thing to
Dana concerning his magazine, the Review and Athe-

ii6 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

nceum. " It is true, as you say, that there is a want of
literary entertainment in our journal. But as to the
multitude of clever men here who might furnish it, let me
say that we have some clever men here, to be sure, but
they are naughtily given to instructing the world, to eluci-
dating political economy and jurisprudence, etc. They
seem to think it a sort of disgrace to be entertaining.
Since the time of Salmagundi the city has grown exceed-
ingly grave and addicted to soHd speculations. Paulding
sometimes writes for our magazine, and we pick up the
rest of it as well as we can." This, then, was the ideal
of the Knickerbocker — to avoid heavy twaddle and to
seek to entertain, as would a courtly gentleman at his
own table. When in 1862 it had escaped for the moment
the many calamities that threatened bankruptcy, it per-
mitted itself in thanking its new friends a little retro-
spect of its honourable history. " People were ' a little
aristocratic ' then — it was the tone. Knick held up
its head with the best of them ; the old gentleman always
kept good company and scorned the canaille. Well, he
found friends in those later darkened days. It is not
always enough to get your money's worth in mere paper
and names. Pray remember that every magazine has its
peculiar subtle influence. He who reads Knick breathes
the American tone for thirty years, and renders himself
liable of being suspected to be a gentleman through long
habit and association." And years after it had descended
into rest, Leland wrote endearingly in a similar strain,
from the midst of more successful magazines of a later
day, " There was never anything quite like the Knicker-
bocker and there never will be again. It required a
sunny, genial, social atmosphere, such as we had before
the war and never after ; an easy writing of gay and culti-
vated men for one another, and not painfully elaborating

jocosities as in . But never mind. It sparkled

through its summer time, and oh, how its readers loved it !
I sometimes think that I would like to hunt up the old
title-plate with Diedrich Knickerbocker and his pipe,

THE MAKING OF A METROPOLIS 117

and issue it again every month to a few dozen subscribers
who loved quaint odds and ends, till I too should pass
away."

Everything was done, from the beginning, to increase
this atmosphere. An early number regretted that the
important ground once occupied by the London Gentle-
man's when it made itself the medium through which
gentlemen of taste or science communicated with each
other, had been abandoned by modern periodicals. It
would always be happy to have its readers exchange
views with each other. The Editor's Table, where it
chatted at ease over everything in particular and nothing
in general, was its glory. Besides this, the editor had
gossip with readers and correspondents and remarked
upon the various contributions. The last-named practice
had been slowly making its way, and it won a permanent
if equivocal place in the editorial heart. Probably no
modern editor would care to examine the logic of it.
Bryant had written to Dana in accepting a contribution
for the Review and Athenceum, " You will appear in com-
pany with Mr. Halleck. The poem entitled Marco
Bozzaris is a very beautiful thing. Anderson was so
delighted with it that he could not forbear adding the
expression of his admiration at the end of the poem. I
have my doubts whether it is not better to let the poetry
of magazines commend itself to the reader by its own
excellence." The Knickerbocker, though subscribers
were always praising its Table as the chief and peculiar
attraction, seemed never to have thought of departing
from the fine print in which it had been the modest
fashion to clothe editorial utterance. Possibly it typified
the still small voice of the sleepless monitor. " So in-
teresting a part of your magazine ought not to appear
in such diminutive type," protested one diplomatic corre-
spondent. Following the fashion, too, the type always
grew smaller as the Table lengthened from month to
month. Even the most voracious guest must have found
twenty-six pages of well-nigh invisible print trying. But

ii8 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

minute as it was, the very vanishing point was achieved
in the monthly extracts from rejected articles. Perhaps
this was also a symbol. Such type nowadays has taken
its last stand, for the ordinary God-fearing citizen, in the
franker torture-chamber of oculists. In i860 Editor's
Table began to publish a retrospect of their contribu-
tors. It was a war measure and the magazine was being
starved out, but the history was one Which justified self-
satisfaction. The extracts from their editorial corre-
spondence, too, included all of America's well-known
names and many English ones. Their Ollapodiana, they
said, had proved the most popular series of papers they
had ever published.

These were written by Willis Clark, brother of the
editor, upon whose death, in 1841, the Table had a four-
page article. The announcement of his connection with
the magazine in 1834 is an interesting item. " The edi-
tor's labours will be shared with his brother, whose resi-
dence in Philadelphia will oppose no obstacle to a regular
division and execution of the duties pertaining to the
work, the mail being so prompt as to render the connec-
tion entirely practicable. Philadelphia correspondents,
or of towns to the south and west of that city, will write
to him (post-paid always)." When Poe attacked the
Knickerbocker in 1843, he said that the only redeeming
quality of the editor was that he was the brother of the
late Willis Clark. The genial fertile author of Ollapo-
diana, indeed, exactly realised Bryant's ideal of a maga-
zine man. " I suspect we shall be sorely tried to get
matter for the miscellaneous department," he had written
Dana in 1826 on launching his magazine. " A talent for
such articles is quite rare in this country, and particu-
larly in this city. There are many who can give grave,
sensible discussions on subjects of general utility, but
few who can write an interesting or diverting article for
miscellany." It is amusing to recall that New York
once confessed that it had to go to Philadelphia for the
light, gay chatter which should keep people awake.

THE MAKING OF A METROPOLIS 119

A very brilliant start had the magazine, but its able
inaugurator gave up the editorship in less than a year on
account of failing health. To him and his successor
Poe thus paid his respects in his article, the New York
Literati. " Mr. Charles Fenno Hoffman was the origi-
nal editor of the Knickerbocker, and gave it while under
his control a tone and character the weight of which may
be best estimated by the consideration that the work re-
ceived an impetus which has enabled it to bear on alive,
though tottering, month after month, under Mr. Lewis
Gaylord Clark. He subsequently owned and edited the
American Monthly, one of the best journals we have
ever had; and for a year conducted the New York
Mirror/' Nevertheless, in spite of Poe's animosity,
Clark conducted the tottering steps of the magazine for
twenty years and for about half that time at least gave
it a success undreamed of by its earlier editor. " By all
means cultivate the Knickerbocker/' wrote Bridge to
Hawthorne, seeking to find an opening. " For one's
name to appear there is an introduction.'* A young
writer, however, effected an introduction to the reader
far less readily than to the editor. For some time
his articles seem to have been modestly signed " By
a New Contributor." For the most part, only the
better-known names appeared. These immediately gave
the magazine prestige. On the financial side, the num-
ber of copies had by the middle of the third year
grown from five hundred to over four thousand. " With
proper encouragement American periodicals will soon sur-
pass those of England," the editor permitted himself to
remark in 1837, surveying his increasing success. Sev-
eral obstacles lay in the way, however. The chief was
that old bogey, the unpaid subscription. " Instead of
purchasing our magazines as in England," the dying
Port Folio had said bitterly in 1820, " we subscribe for
them." Knickerbocker had, in the past two years alone,
lost over five thousand dollars. Appealing in 1837 to
delinquent subscribers, it begged to point out that maga-

120 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

zines, unlike newspapers, had little or no advertising to
help defray expenses. One hundred and seven voluntary
subscriptions had come in last month, they recorded
proudly; but the editor could not have failed to reflect
that subscribers often dodged the main issue. Again,
the business management of the magazine sometimes did
not keep faith. After Knickerbocker had begun under
the most flattering auspices, the unprincipled manage-
ment of the original proprietor soon disgusted the public ;
and the new proprietor had slowly to win back their
confidence again. Agents,- too, swindled both public and
management. As with Graham's and Godey's, there was
the increasing complaint on the part of distant sub-
scribers that their numbers reached them late in the
month, and after they had read the best articles in the
journals. Early in 1840, they would try the plan of
mailing every copy, the most distant first, before the first
day of the month, on which day they would promptly
serve their city readers. The plan seems to have been
unsuccessful in frustrating the newspapers, however, and
at the close of 1840 they announced that they would
secure for their articles the protection of copyright.

The easy appropriation of their articles by foreign
prints was by no means so exasperating. After all, to
have become successful enough to be black-mailed has
been a fortifying reflection to many a self-made man;
and a grievance which can be profitably aired has de-
cidedly good points. It was impressive to be able to
complain each month that an article of the month before
had been lifted in England, even without acknowledg-
ment or " with numerous mutilations and interpolations
suitable to the meridian of London." In 1836 is re-
corded with a complacent purr that no less than nine
distinct articles of theirs, each inserted as original, had
appeared in one number of the London Ladies' Cabinet
of Fashion; in 1840 " Old Knick is growing cosmopoli-
tan— several of our articles have appeared in French
and German magazines." The year before there had

1

THE MAKING OF A METROPOLIS 121

been much swagger in their fine scorn of Bentley's when
it announced that '* arrangements had been made for the
appearance of the Crayon Papers simuhaneously with
their appearance in the United States." Bentley's, of
course, had done nothing of the sort, but what would
you? — success had its penalties and poor Bentley's its
predicaments.

Knick had been very proud of capturing Irving at last.
At the close of its first year, it had regretted that the
illustrious editor of Knickerbocker's History had not
honoured the magazine, the name of which was the
greatest compliment America had ever paid to his genius.
It was in March, 1839, that Irving engaged to contribute
monthly to its pages, for two thousand dollars a year in
stated instalments, " I am tired of writing volumes," he
said as he made his bow. " They do not afford exactly
the relief I require as I grow old. I have thought there-
fore of securing to myself a snug corner in some periodi-
cal where I might loll at my ease in my elbow chair and
chat sociably on any chance subject that might pop into
my brain." The task of writing every month proved
irksome to him, however, and — says Pierre Irving —
the returns were less prompt than he had anticipated.
But his good will to the magazine and to Lewis Clark
induced him to continue his connection for two years.

In 1843 Poe ran amuck among the magazines in a style
which was amazing even for him. He printed in the
New World of March eleventh an article which Knicker-
bocker announced the following month it had rejected.
It seems likely, says Griswold caustically, that he had
subsequently somewhat altered his remarks upon that
magazine, as he could scarcely have expected them to
assert that their own glory had forever departed and that
the principal cause of its melancholy decline might be
traced to its peculiar and unappreciated editor, Lewis
Clark. " The present condition of this periodical is
that of a poorly cooked-up concern, a huge, handsome-
looking body, but without a soul. The sooner it dies the

122 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

better it will be for the proprietors ; but if they will secure
an able and efficient editor, we doubt not that it might be
placed in the noble station it once occupied. Neither do
we like the nominal editor of Graham's Magazine. A
pretty good compiler, he possesses too many of the
peculiar characteristics of Mr. Lewis Clark. He is
wholly unfit, either by intellect or character, to occupy
the editorial chair."

In 1862 the magazine announced that it had passed
unto a new proprietor. It confessed to the public that
it had many times been in sore straits. " Sooth to say,
friends, it would have been little to the credit of America
if a periodical which had been made glorious at one time
or another by all the great writers of America, and' ever
maintained a high-toned, refined and moral standard, so
that it was emphatically the magazine for a gentleman,
should die for want of friends." Later in the same year
it asserted that immediately after the change the circula-
tion had nearly trebled, in consequence of the fresh array
of talent attracted to it, notwithstanding the severe pres-
sure of the times. Of this change Leland wrote in 1861
in his memoirs : " The old Knickerbocker had been for
a long time running down to absolutely nothing. Its
new purchaser endeavoured to galvanise it into life. Its
sober grey-blue cover was changed to orange. Mr. Clark
left it to my sorrow; but there was no help for it, for
there was not a penny to pay him. [Clark had received
a salary and divided the profits as joint-proprietor.] I
consented to edit it, for I had an idea. This was to make
it promptly a strong Republican monthly, which was
utterly opposed to all of Mr. Clark's ideas. The financial
depression in the North at this time was terrible. I
prophesied editorially a prosperity close at hand such
as no one ever dreamed of, and I advocated emancipation
of slaves as a war measure only and without any regard
to philanthropy. As publishing such views in the Knick-
erbocker was like pouring the wildest of new wine into the
weakest of old bottles, the proprietor resolved at once to

THE MAKING OF A METROPOLIS 123

establish in Boston a political monthly to be called the
Continental, to be devoted to this view of the situation.
It was the only political magazine devoted to the Repub-
lican cause published during the war. It was often said
that its bold course hastened by several months the
emancipation of the slaves by Abraham Lincoln."

" There is always a warmth of feeling awakened when
we look upon its neat lilac cover," had said the United
States Gazette in 1845. One may imagine Knick turning
orange for very shame to be thus ungenteelly hustled
into the turmoil of the street. The old gentleman leaning
upon his stick in the comfortable Dutch chair was
fashioned for looking out of the window with the eyes
of a contemplative philosopher. To make him an active
politician was something like turning Colonel Carter into
a ward heeler. " The time is past in this town," had
said Philip Hone, another representative of Knicker-
bocker culture two decades before, " when a gentleman
can afford to run for mayor." With Knick, the political
career thus thrust upon him in his over-ripe old age,
meant his speedy departure from the world. But even in
dying he managed a graceful appearance. His name and
the familiar vignette remained for some months after
1864 upon the title page of the American Monthly, and
so he slipped unperceived from a rough world which no
longer held to the ancient ideals.

That Poe should have written an article discussing in
such a tone the leading magazines of the day; that he
should insert therein an attack upon the editor who had
just rejected it; that any periodical should have been
willing to publish it — each is a glimpse into the editorial
urbanities of the time. The press was generally held to
be a legitimate vehicle for the venting of personal spite.
Another glimpse into the manners and morals of the New
York printing world is afforded in Leland's memoirs.

Frank Leslie, who had been with me on Barnum's, was now
(i860) publishing half a dozen periodicals and newspapers, and
offered me a fair price to give him my mornings. There was

124 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

much rather shady, shaky Bohemianism about the frequenters
of our sanctum. When the war broke out and Frank LesUe
found that he no longer required my services, he paid my due,
which was far in arrears, in his usual manner — that is, by
orders on advertisers for goods which I did not want and for
which I was charged double prices. Alexander Cummings had
a very ingenious method of " shaving," when obliged to pay his
debts. His friend, Simon Cameron, had a bank — the Middle-
ton — which if not a very wild cat was far from being tame, as
its notes were always five or ten per cent, below par, to our
loss — for we were always paid in Middleton. I have often
known the clerk to take a handful of notes at par and send out
to buy Middleton wherewith to pay me. I am sorry to say
that such tricks were universal among the very great majority
of proprietors with whom I had dealings. To " do " the em-
ployes to the utmost was considered a matter of course, espe-
cially when the one employed was a " literary fellow " of any
kind or an artist. . . . Heaven knows I worked hard enough on
Barnum's Illustrated News, and, what was a great deal to boast
of in those days, never profited one cent beyond free tickets to
plays, which I had little time to use. I had great temptations
to write up certain speculative enterprises and never accepted
one. My pay was simply despicably small [he was the sole
literary editor], and there were editors in New York who for
less work earned ten times my salary. When I returned to
Philadelphia after my year in New York I had become familiar-
ised with characteristic phases of American life and manners;
but my father thought I had gone through a severe mill with
rather doubtful characters.

But aside from these time-honoured accompaniments
of the business side of the production of literature, there
were spiritual by-products no less inevitable to a literary
factory. The journalistic world of New York had begun
to dig a wide gulf between itself and the Boeotian cities
of Philadelphia and Boston. How else should it read
its title clear? Fired by tales of returning sojourners
in London and Paris, the town had learned what goes to
the making of a metropolis. For a metropolis two items
were indispensable — Bohemia within and " provinces '*
without. When duty whispered low thou must, the youth
replied I can. Blushing for its callowness, it set about
the job forthwith. It swaggered and posed and thought
itself as devilish as any sophomore that ever coaxed a

THE MAKING OF A METROPOLIS 125

moustache. Its sedulous Bohemianism of the cellarage
variety shocked or bored the youthful immigrants from
soberer North and West hastening for draughts from the
fountain-head. There were several dashing strangers to
set the pace for the home talent. " Frank Forester "
was one of them — an Englishman compact of natural
and cultivated eccentricities, author of picturesque histori-
cal novels very successful in their day, and editor of the
American Monthly. He suited his action to his word
in a manner that was satis fyingly typical — especially
when he committed suicide at a banquet he had spread
for his friends. This was not that American Monthly
(by no means first or last of the name) which the young
Park Benjamin had come from Boston to edit, bursting
from the cocoon of the New England magazine. After a
five-years career — during which the editor had estab-
lished his metropolitanism by adopting the cut and thrust
of Poe's critical tactics — it had been gathered to its
fathers in 1838, long before the Knickerbocker dreamt of
reincarnating under its title. Poor Knick! All uncon-
scious of the irony its latter end would afford the remark,
it had dismissed its younger rival with a courtly word of
valedictory. " We regretted when it mingled politics with
literature. It is in vain to wed the two in this country —
a divorce is sure to succeed."

Scarcely less than Bohemianism,* however, did cockney-
ism prove congenial to the taste of the New York literati.
After all, the higher halo of a metropolis is its circlet of
"provinces." While Boston was quietly annexing all
New England, New York had begun to label the outer
world provincial. In 1841 Knick with its kindly superior
smile had patted the North American Review upon its
massive back, as it quoted some paragraphs which had
been fortunate enough to meet with approbation. " We
take pleasure in introducing it to the public proper in con-
tradistinction to a small but select circle of readers in Bos-
ton and elsewhere." And of the first number of the Dial,
it remarked indulgently: ** There are good thoughts

126 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

here, but they are smothered in words, words. * If your
meats are good, what is the use of disguising them ? '
said a Yankee to a chef at Paris. * For my part I should
like to know what I eat.' Four pails of water to a turnip
does not make an edifying soup." In 1844 Maria White
wrote to Briggs, who was starting the Broadway Journal:
" Both James and myself feel greatly interested in your
journal, in spite of its proposed name. James told me
to express his horror to you at the cockneyism of such a
title. The Broadway Chronicle chronicles the thoughts
and feelings of Broadway, not those of the New England
people, whom you seem willing to receive somewhat
from."

But in the metropolis, on Bohemians and cockneys as
on gentlemen, there rested an unaccountable blight. New
York could not even support her scholars, as Boston and
Philadelphia had done.

The shifts and turns of the Literary Review, founded
in 1822, the first literary periodical of pronounced merit
since Brown's day, are typical of their scrabble for a liv-
ing. R. C. Sands was its chief contributor. In 1824 the
Atlantic Magazine was started and he was made editor.
An amalgamation of the two starvelings was proposed in
1826, and the New York Review and Athencoum emerged
from the melting pot. Bryant and Sands were the edi-
tors and had " the co-operation of several gentlemen,
amply qualified to furnish the departments of Intelligence,
Poetry, and Fiction." Bryant wrote to Dana : " My
salary is $1,000; no great sum to be sure, but it is twice
what I got by my practice in the country. The business
of sitting in judgment on books as they come out is not
the literary employment most to my taste, nor that for
which I am best fitted, but it affords me for the present
a certain compensation, which is a matter of some conse-
quence to a poor devil like myself." But he was counting
his chickens before the hatching. His quarter ownership
and his $500 a year salary never amounted to that, and
the prospective increase in real money never arrived.

THE MAKING OF A METROPOLIS 127

Nor was what he had " certain." Two more magazines
the Review absorbed in its attempt to secure a New York
public, and then the four-in-one migrated to Boston in
hope of food; and here in speedy oblivion the five went
down together. " Compared with the ample dimensions
and vivacious contents of our later periodicals," says
Parke Godwin, " it was but a meagre and dull affair. It
wanted distinctiveness, perhaps aggressiveness of charac-
ter. Its disquisitions were heavy. It was no doubt as
good as any of its contemporaries, even the North Ameri-
can, on which it was modelled. In respect to poetry, it
surpassed them all. Two subjects were given prominence
in the prose department which greatly needed coddling,
the Fine Arts and the Italian Opera."

Sedgwick had written of the editor of the Atlantic
Magazine: " Bliss and White, his publishers, are liberal
gentlemen; they pay him $500 a year and authorise an
expenditure of $500 more." A first-class magazine for
a thousand a year! The proprietors evidently counted
upon the editor and " communications " furnishing the
body of each number. This could, at a pinch, have been
counted upon for several decades to come ; and very often
it was, whether editors were promised a salary and had
a financial interest or not, and whether they got their
salary when they had been promised it. The two editors
of ArctiiniSj started in 1841, wrote almost all the early
articles. This was the next notable attempt after
Bryant's to make New York support a purely literary
magazine. '^ Arcturus" wrote Lowell, " is as transcen-
dental as Gotham can be."

Its sub-title was a Journal of Books and Opinions, and
it was edited by Cornelius Mathews and Evert Duyckinck.
It died as modestly as it was born. " The late James
Smith in one of his humorous sketches said his hero
was accustomed to lie like the prospectus of a new maga-
zine," said they reticently as they began. At the end
of the first year, the publisher still assured them there
was enough in the pouch to pay travelling expenses, but

128 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

before another year the hopeful journey was ended. The
magazine was an elegant one, and it left an impression
deeper than many of much longer life. Poe agreed with
Dana that in many respects it was decidedly the best ever
published in this country.

" It was on the whole too good to enjoy extensive popularity,
although I am here using an equivocal phrase, for a better jour-
nal might have been far more acceptable to the public. It was
excessively tasteful, but this character applies more to its ex-
ternal or mechanical appearance than to its essential qualities.
Unhappily, magazines and other similar publications are in the
beginning judged chiefly by externals. People saw Arcturus
looking very much like other works which had failed through
notorious dulness, although admitted as arbitri elegantiarum in
all points of what is termed taste or decorum; and they had no
patience to examine further. It cannot be said that it wanted
force. It was deficient in power of expression, and this defi-
ciency is to be attributed mainly to the exceeding brevity of its
articles — a brevity that degenerated into mere paragraphism
precluding dissertation or argument. The magazine had in fact
some of the worst or most inconvenient features of a weekly
literary newspaper. The mannerism to which I refer seems to
have had its source in undue admiration and consequent imi-
tation of the Spectator.

But Duyckinck thought he saw ultimate success m the
very item which Poe deemed responsible for its failure;
and five years later, in 1847, he established the Literary
World, a weekly. It lasted until 1853. E. P. Whipple
wrote Griswold that the new journal was better than
anything we had had before; and that it would, if it
succeeded and cut loose from all sectional and personal
predilections, be a valuable aid to American literature.
William Allen Butler wrote of it after Duyckinck's death :
'* The experience of a purely literary journal, dependent
on its own merits and not on the patronage of a publish-
ing house, and appealing rather to the sympathies than
to the needs of that very small portion of the public which
took satisfaction in a weekly presentation of the progress
of ideas without reference to their own party politics,
religious denomination, their craving for continuous fie-

THE MAKING OF A METROPOLIS 129

tlon, or their preference for woodcuts and caricatures,
was not encouraging."

The religious and Hterary periodical had been a very
important early phenomenon in America. Samuel Os-
good could not understand why such a publication, at
least, had been unable to get a firm foothold in a com-
munity so orthodox and theological. The Literary and
Theological Review and the New York Review had both
of them signally failed, while in Boston the Christian
Disciple begun in 181 3 and becoming the Christian Exam-
iner in 1824 had kept flying the standard of liberal schol-
arship for a long and vital career. Possibly, he specu-
lated, it was because Boston confided to it all new and
debatable opinions. Certain it is that when later this
paper based its hopes less upon liberal thought and sought
refuge in more conventionally theological New York it
went down after a few years' struggle in 1869.

The strange blight seemed to rest upon magazines of
the entire period. Not only did very promising native
infants peak and die, but older children who had been
fairly hardy at home lost their individuality when they
were taken to New York and attempted to acquire
metropolitan dash and vim — which, after all, failed to
harden them sufficiently to thrive on a starvation diet.
Perhaps it was in some cases a rush of Bohemianism to
the head; perhaps in others cockneyism produced a gal-
loping consumption. Perhaps, as Poe thought with
Arcturus, it was Spectatorism and dry-rot. But Samuel
Osgood thought he was pronouncing a high eulogy upon
Duyckinck when he said that that editor clung closely
to the old English standards of culture and went in
stoutly for a New York school that should be a full
match at least for the rising New England literature:
he meant Arcturus to be the bright and particular star
of New York culture, and New York culture was Irving
with his modified Addison. From 181 5 to the beginning
of the Knickerbocker in 1832 there were at least thirty
New York magazines, not one of which even for a short

130 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

while flourished. " For years before we started," said
that magazine in 1833, " ^^w York had no periodical
of any kind. Now we have four, not to mention others
in embryo or rumour." But the second crop was like
the first — almost all withered in metropolitan soil.
And Philadelphia, with neither Bohemia nor provinces,
kept chuckling to herself.

CHAPTER VI

THE WILLOWY WILLIS AND THE PIRATICAL POE
IN NEW YORK

The New York Mirror, into which Willis merged the
Boston American Monthly, had been begun in 1823 by
Morris and Woodworth. Samuel Woodworth is quoted
daily by people who never heard his name, the author of
a strain almost as familiar as Home Sweet Home. The
lyrist of the Old Oaken Bucket had in 1812, as one of
a " society of gentlemen," made an unsuccessful attempt
to conduct a Swedenborgian magazine, the Halcyon
Luminary, combining Swedenborg with polite literature.
It may have been their song-writing that brought these
two gentlemen together, for in 1823 Morris was a very
handsomely paid balladist, getting fifty dollars for any
song he wrote, cash before delivery; and it may have
been the latter's worldliness which whirled them apart,
for in 1825, Morris wrote Briar Cliff, a drama, for
which he received the extraordinary sum of thirty-five
hundred dollars. Only a year was Woodworth con-
nected with the Mirror, and then Morris held it up to the
town alone. For twenty years it conspicuously con-
tributed to the literary, dramatic and artistic interests of
New York. With all their jibing at the metropolis for
her unsuccessful attempts in founding journals, neither
Boston nor Philadelphia could show a literary weekly un-
connected with a religious organisation, of anything like
its longevity ; and its temporary failure in 1842 was owing
not to diminished vitality but to a series of wide-spread
financial disasters.

It was in 1831 that Willis, disappointed in the tight
purses of Boston culture, decided to take his dolls and
leave home. ** The apprenticeship which he had served

131

132 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

for two years in Boston," says R. H. Stoddard in his
Recollections, " made him a master workman by the time
he joined the staff of the New York Mirror. Its editors
cast about for ways and means to increase its circulation
and enlarge its narrow bank-account, and it was resolved
over an oyster supper at the plebeian Delmonico's of that
day, that Willis should travel abroad and write letters
home. The moderate fortune of five hundred dollars
was somehow scraped together and his passage was taken.
He was to write fifty letters for five hundred dollars —
upon which sum he would be expected to maintain himself
like a gentleman in the capitals of Europe. His Pencil-
lings By the Way were so popular that they were copied
from the Mirror into hundreds of city and country
journals." For four years he wrote weekly letters at
ten dollars each. In January, 1839, Hawthorne promised
Morris to furnish five stories for the Mirror.

For only one year did the Mirror remain darkened,
and then, reburnished, it again reflected metropolitan life
as the New Mirror. In 1844 it became a daily, the
Evening Mirror, and in this shape lasted for two years
longer. But in all its triplicate forms its light had been
about the same. Its last change of name and issue, like
the second, had not been made with the usual motive
of pumping life into the moribund. Morris and Willis
announced, in September, 1844, that they had been driven
out of the field of weekly journalism by the United States
Post Office. The Mirror, being stitched, could not be
mailed at newspaper rates but was taxed at the caprice of
postmasters from two to fifteen cents a copy; and this
more than doubled the price to country readers and
killed the mail subscription. To avoid this, the editors
had decided to publish every day.

Protests against postal regulations had arisen ever
since the press had been officially admitted to the mails
and before then, when it had been admitted unofficially.
When the service was established by the Government, it
had refused to handle printed matter. The postmaster,

WILLOWY WILLIS AND PIRATICAL POE 133

less stern, was in the habit of sending the newspaper on
with the mails for nothing; and consequently when the
bags were full he let them wait over. This occasioned
many complaints — the mail was always late enough in
any case, since the post never travelled at night. In
1790 there were seventy-five post-offices in the country,
almost three times as many as there had been in 1776;
and five years later there were four hundred and fifty-
three. The tremendous rate of increase kept necessitating
reorganisation of the system; and the Government, seeing
that the riders were carrying the newspapers anyway, de-
cided to get some revenue out of it. Consequently, news-
papers were made mail matter in 1792. Having had their
transportation for nothing, merely at the cost of in-
expensive complaints on the part of subscribers at the
delays under the old system, the newspapers naturally
protested. They were alarmed, too, lest their circulation
would be greatly cut down under the new law — particu-
larly as this also allowed Congressmen to frank letters
of information to their districts. The new law, however,
did not harm the newspapers but worked hardship to
the magazines, which it did not allow to enter the mails
on the same footing with daily or weekly papers. The
Columbian, at the end of 1792, announced that it could
no longer exist under the oppression of paying letter
rates, and the American Museum was discontinued also.
In 1794 the postage rate on a single newspaper within
its own State was reduced to one cent, and the regulation
for other printed matter was somewhat ameliorated.
When the size of the mail and the mode of conveyance
would permit, magazines and pamphlets might be taken
at the rate of one cent a sheet for fifty miles or less,
half as much more for the next fifty, and for ten cents
when the distance was over one hundred miles. This
for magazines, which were invariably unable to collect
their subscriptions at home, was something of a mockery.
Nor, however limited their subscribers in number, did any
of the superior magazines have only a local circulation.

134 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

The National Magazine published at Richmond in 1799
had returned thanks in the second number for an order
of fifty-five copies from Georgia and sixty-six from Con-
necticut. It apologised for the delay in getting out this
number, although a semi-quarterly, because of the time
necessary to secure correspondencies and communications
from so wide an area. Beginning with ninety-six octavo
pages, it ended as a weekly quarto pamphlet of twelve
pages, printed in the District of Columbia for convenience
of transportation. The publisher announced that he had
been led to take this step because of the difficulty in
distributing so large a number — in the back countries
sometimes months elapsed before it was received, and the
publication was so bulky that it was refused admittance
to the mail except on the main line, and even there it had
been very unwelcome. " The year 1804," says Mr. Mc-
Masters, " may be taken arbitrarily as the beginning of
a new epoch in the history of magazine enterprise. The
opening of the mail to books and packages enabled the
magazine publishers to find a larger class of general read-
ers and also a large class whose interests were centred on
a common object or profession. Then, for the first time,
magazines devoted to particular interests began to appear
in quick succession. Medicine, theology, law, were, of
course, the three professions thus exploited. The Ameri-
can Law Journal, of Baltimore, in 1809, the second in the
English language, was the first native product of the
new law in the Legal profession." The few specialised
theological and medical magazines which had a struggling
existence before this date had depended on local patron-
age ; but doctors in the large cities had more money than
lawyers, and the theological magazines appealed of course
to laymen also. Even an American Musical magazine
had, in New Haven, tried for a year to gain a foothold
in 1786.

The slowness of the mails was shown in the Post
Master General's answer to the petitions that snowed him
under in 181 1 and continued to pelt him for three years

WILLOWY WILLIS AND PIRATICAL POE 135

(and, indeed, in a steady though milder fashion until
1830) . They were petitions that the opening of the post-
offices for the assortment of mail during one hour on
Sunday — not during divine service — be stopped. He
said that if this v^as done, letters w^ould be delayed five
days between Boston and New Orleans, three days be-
tween Washington and New Orleans, and two days be-
tween Washington and St. Louis; and that since travel-
lers would patronise lines which did not carry the mails
and were not held up on Sunday, it would end in letters
being carried, as formerly, by private hands. Nor were
lengthy delays by any means over when coaches went out
and railroads came in. In the National Era of Wash-
ington in 1850 occurs this item: "The Eastern and
Western mails last week failed to reach this place at
the proper time, every other day. If this happened on
the great routes leading directly to this city, what must
be the condition of things in other parts of the country.
And when we recollect that a failure to connect at certain
points may delay mail matter from three to seven days,
certainly some of our subscribers will hardly wonder at
the irregularity with which they receive their paper. At
some points, we are apprised by correspondents that we
have nearly lost all our subscribers in consequence of
these inexcusable irregularities." Between proprietors-
who found it unprofitable to publish a magazine on ac-
count of the postal regulations and subscribers who found
it unprofitable to take from a distance weekly periodicals
which might also be long staled before delivery, the editor
had more foes to face than his chief enemy, the delin-
quent, of whom he was always complaining.

But to return to Willis, the conversion of whose Mirror
from a weekly to a daily has occasioned this long digres-
sion. When he came back from his first long absence
abroad, he took up the editorial function he had not held
since he left Boston; and at the same time established
the Corsair. This paper he did not intend to compete,
except incidentally, wdth the Mirror — it was to exist

13S THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

entirely on foreign plunder, chiefly English. It was
meant to share some of the goodly pickings with other
weeklies, like Brother Jonathan and the New World,
which were gorging a fat crop with English grain. Nor,
fume as he might at the absence of the international
copyright which allowed and compelled him to do this,
was Willis as oblivious as other editors of similar publica-
tions to the moral right of English authors to some
foreign revenue from their works. For, while in Lon-
don, he had engaged Thackeray to write for it at five
dollars a close column. The Corsair was scuttled by
those land-rats, unpaid subscriptions, during his second
trip abroad ; and it was after his return that the Mirror
was changed to a daily. The final failure of this seems
to have been due to a temporary break-down of its
energetic young editor. Willis was in the odd predica-
ment of having to balance the demands of his handsome
exchequer against those of his paternal pride in the suc-
cess of his paper. He could hardly afford to write for
himself. Even in 1841 Godey was paying him at the
rate of fifty dollars for four close-printed pages, thought
by most people to be the largest sum a magazine could
ever pay; in 1842 he was writing an article a month
for four separate magazines and receiving one hundred
dollars for each. To turn from such lucrative business to
grinding out material for his own pages, may have weekly
caused him a conflict of emotions that would have worn
out even a jauntier man. And to bid farewell to such
golden harvests for the uncertain destiny of the Home
Journal in 1847 (started also by Morris in 1845, ^s the
National Press) was the acme of rash self-denial. But
the Home Journal rewarded his third adventure in pa-
ternity, for it proved a great pecuniary success as well as
a literary one. It also set out to be the organ of the
" town," and with for editor a Petronius who had eager
reception in the most exclusive circles, it resplendently
succeeded. Furthermore, it did not as a rule pay any-
thing for outside contributions and frankly said so. It

WILLOWY WILLIS AND PIRATICAL POE 137

paid its own editorial staff, and no one else. Willis
had found that it was no use trying to be quixotic under
the hard conditions of the pursuit of literature in America.
Possibly he did not try very hard, although he was as
righteously indignant as any at the law which fostered
such conditions. He had surmounted them by the hardest
kind of industry, and others must do the same. If
youngsters waxed wrathy at his cool appropriation of
their wares when they were unknown and his cool dis-
missal of them when they were able to claim some com-
pensation, he pleasantly reminded them how recently
the magazine had reiterated that it did not pay for contri-
butions. In 1846 he wrote to a youngster in the first
stage : " As to writing for the magazines, that is very
nearly done for as a matter of profit. The competition
for notoriety alone gives the editors more than they
can use. You could not sell a piece of poetry now in
America. The literary avenues are all overcrowded, and
you cannot live by the pen, except as a drudge to a news-
paper."

More picturesque and almost as assured in physical
bearing as was Willis in social dictation, was his brother
editor in so many ventures. General Morris. " There
was something imposing and impressive in his personal
appearance," says Stoddard. " He had a broad-padded
chest and a bulky waist whose amplitude of girth was en-
circled by a military belt, which supported the long and
dangerous weapon that dangled from it." Yet famili-
arity breeds contempt even with the girth of a general
thus encircled, and Willis had the temerity to quarrel
with this gentleman because during an absence, his co-
editor had made free with his commas — a righteous rage
which Holmes could well sympathise with. And in the
quarrel the pen of Willis proved mightier than the sword
of Morris. Mr. Charles Taber Congdon has in his
Reminiscences an appreciation of the man who for years
was our top-notcher as a successful man of letters.
" Willis never had anything to do with politics, probably

138 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

he did not know much about them ; but his editorial work
did a good deal to correct the somewhat savage and coarse
style of the prevailing journalism of the period. [Nor
was the savagery confined to style alone. The dashing
John Daniel, assistant editor of the Richmond Examiner
about 1848, had fought nine pistol duels on account of
his brilliant partisan attacks in his paper.] If the matter
of his articles had been as good as the manner and if he
had not principally confined himself to evanescent topics,
he would have made a fame equal to that of Addison or
Washington Irving. But he could write about hats and
coats, parties and receptions, and all manner of fashion-
able tweedledum and tweedledee. He was intensely ego-
tistical, but then it was always in a graceful and well-bred
way. He was unmistakably foppish in his work; but
somehow you could not help feeling there was a degree
of manliness under it all, and here and there a great
cropping out of common sense. He had in a large
measure that best faculty of a journalist ; he knew what
people would like to read. He was lied about and
libelled, but it never seemed very much to disturb his
equanimity."

As Willis had expended his youthful energies upon his
American Monthly in Boston, so young Park Benjamin
after vainly endeavouring to keep afloat the New England
in that city had come to the metropolis to recoup his for-
tunes with the American Monthly of New York. On it
he spent what little of his patrimony the Boston maw
had not devoured. After its failure, he joined the New
Yorker with Greeley. This had appeared in 1834 and
planned to combine literature, politics, statistics, and
general intelligence. Greeley said in his farewell address
in 1 84 1, as he merged the paper into the Weekly Tribune,
that at times he had been aided in the literary department
by gentlemen of decided talent and eminence — Park
Benjamin and Hoffman and Griswold — but at others
the entire conduct had rested with him ; and he said also
that delinquent subscribers owed him ten thousand dol-

WILLOWY WILLIS AND PIRATICAL POE 139

lars. Then Benjamin joined Epes Sargent with the
New World, begun in 1835. " This was, I think," says
Stoddard, *' the first paper of the kind ever published in
New York, and was admirable for what it was and what
it was intended to be ; namely, the speediest and cheapest
reprint of the most popular British authors." It re-
published English magazine literature wholesale, it is true,
yet Stoddard's statement is by no means fair, as it had
also many original departments conducted by prominent
writers. It would have to be speedy, indeed, to compete
with certain of the publishers. Marcus Butler of Harpers
wrote Griswold in 1836: " Bulwer's drama is not in
yet ; we expect it every day — we have our cases filled
and all the quads and italics in the office collected to-
gether, ready for the contest as soon as we receive the
copy. We executed the entire work of Lucien Bonaparte
and published it in forty hours after wx received the
copy, and sold it at three shillings. We did not leave the
office from Tuesday noon until Wednesday morning at
nine. I am pretty well used up, I assure you."

The success of the Neiv World led to many cheaper
similar enterprises which had for a time a marked effect
on the book-trade. The mammoth pages of the paper
were a compromise between the largest printing press
and the lowest postal rate, which still reckoned by the
sheet. " I have written to Park Benjamin to send you
his new paper, a monstrous sheet, full of all that is going
on here ; by far the best paper I see," wrote Longfellow
in 1840 to a foreign correspondent. " I wrote immedi-
ately to New York about your letters from Rome, but
not to the Knickerbocker, because it has been in trouble
and not able to pay anybody. I wrote to Sargent. After
some delay, I got an answer showing that nobody pays
nowadays. * The fact is that all our publishers, whether
of books or periodicals, are desperately poor at present ;
money is not to be had.' And this is very true. You
have no idea of the state of things. My publisher
[Colman] has failed. Most publishers will not look at

140 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

a book. Clark writes me that the Knickerbocker^ that is,
the business part of it — will be in new hands. He has
not paid me for three years. Poor fellow, he has had
a hard time, and been almost desperate, I fear." Stod-
dard says that while there was certainly no money in the
Knickerbocker for its contributors, its jaunty editor man-
aged to live out of it and live well, his enemies said ; for
if cash was not abundant with him, credit was — and
what could a happy-go-lucky fellow want besides an
abundance of credit? In 1840, Park Benjamin wrote to
Longfellow : " Your ballad ' The Wreck of the Hes-
perus ' is grand. Enclosed are twenty-five dollars, the
sum you mentioned for it, paid by the proprietors of the
New World, in which glorious paper it will resplendently
coruscate on Saturday next. Of all American journals,
the New World is alone worthy to contain it." For
some time to come, Benjamin and Samuel Ward acted
as brokers to the Cambridge poet, who, in his gentle way
had all the New England horror of commerce and all the
New England desire to benefit thereby, so long as such
shocking debasement of the muse had to be. He was a
firm believer in the sacred dictum that you may lead
Pegasus to water, but you should not make him drink.
In 1837 comes this amusing item in his letters. " Willis
is writing a tragedy to order for Miss Clifton, who gives
him a thousand dollars. I can hardly tell you how sorry
I am for this. Why not order a dozen as well as one? "
But austere as was the creed of the cult, Longfellow was
never unhuman enough to refuse the large prices which
his friends had bargained for — even when his poems
were printed in the New York Ledger. In 1841 be-
tween him and his two friendly brokers the mails were
busy. " I had no sooner sealed and sent my last, with
Endymion asleep under its leaves," he wrote to Ward
iin September, " than who should come in but Park
Benjamin himself ! I told him what I had done, whereat
he expressed great grief; and to console him, I promised
to write you and cry, Stop that poem! If, therefore,

WILLOWY WILLIS AND PIRATICAL POE 141

it is not already in the paws of Arctiirus or the claws of
Old Nick, you may send it to Benjamin." In November,
he wrote: "A letter from Park Benjamin to-day. He
wants two poems (orders two pair of boots!) and offers
twenty dollars each. If you have not disposed of Charles
River, send it to him. If you have, send one of the
others." Later the same month, comes a little mix-up in
the three-handed partnership. " O' Sullivan is to have
the God's Acre [for the Democratic Review']. That is
right; and now all will doubtless flow on harmoniously.
Benjamin has doubtless been in some perplexity between
my negotiations with him and yours." Park wrote to
the poet, thus ideally poetising within an enchanted garden
so near and yet so far from the vulgar mart, that he had
sold the Goblet of Life and the River Charles for
forty dollars. He had not taken them himself because he
did not particularly like them and because the New World
had just entered into costly arrangements for a corre-
spondence in England. He asked Longfellow to furnish
an occasional prose article and poem for Graham's, " of
which Poe is one editor. It is by far the best of this
class of periodicals and will pay liberally and punctually."
Earlier in the year, Poe himself had asked Longfellow
for something each month, " length and subject a discre-
tion. In respect to terms, we would gladly offer you
carte blanche; and the periods of payment should also
be made to suit yourself." Longfellow had then de-
clined, on account of preoccupation with other work.
Constant dripping wears away even crystal, however,
and the services of Benjamin coupled with his praise of
the Philadelphia magazine seemed to have conquered the
poet at last. In 1843 he wrote a letter which throws
some light on the cost of those illustrations and " em-
bellishments " which were always moving the dignified
and unembellished magazines to tears or jeers. " In the
next number of Graham's is an unlikeness of me — a
ridiculous caricature. As soon as it was sent to me I
wrote Graham to have it suppressed, but too late. It

142 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

was printed and had cost him some five hundred dollars
and he was not wiUing to lose so much money. You
will be amused and perhaps a little vexed afterward,
when you see what a picture is distributed over the coun-
try, to the number of forty thousand, as my portrait."
In 1844 he wrote to an editor, " My engagements with
Mr. Graham [to write exclusively for him] prevent me
from taking any part in your proposed magazine."

Griswold said the Democratic Review in 1837 had
become the most successful political magazine in the
country. It had had a somewhat significant history in
its journey toward literature. As long as its material
had been all gratuitous, it remained extremely partisan
in both contributions and readers; when it paid for
articles, it published a better grade of material and was
read by both parties alike. Whig writers, noting both
of these phenomena, overcame their prejudices and con-
tributed. When Brownson merged the Boston Quarterly
Review into the Democratic, he told his subscribers that
they would obtain as much matter for five dollars as he
had furnished them for twelve or fifteen. " Five years'
experience has attended the editor, and his brilliant suc-
cess justifies our estimation of his worth and ability. In
addition to his own essays, it is enriched by contributions
from the first literary men in the country. As organ
of the Democratic party it has, of course, a decided
political character, but it is a magazine and devoted prin-
cipally to general literature. In it, we intend publishing
our general system of philosophy and metaphysics. It
stands already at the head of the monthly magazines in
this country. If anything could make us not regret
parting with our own Review, it is that we are to aid in
a work so respectable and be in some measure also united
with a man, scholar, and politician whom we so highly
esteem as its accomplished and independent editor."

The dilution of the fiery liquor of its earlier partisan-
ship may not have proceeded from their disappointment
in being awarded the government printing in Washing-

WILLOWY WILLIS AND PIRATICAL POE 143

tori. They had naturally counted on receiving so paltry
an amount of it as to cover their risks at least, in accord-
ance with the time-honoured practice in Washington of
giving it to political friends. But at any rate when they
resumed publication in 1840 after their failure, and moved
to New York, they had larger journalistic aims. Lowell,
that year when he hoped to make his four hundred dol-
lars all told, had arranged with O' Sullivan for ten or
fifteen dollars a poem. That same year, 1842, O'Sulli-
van was writing to Griswold that he had in spite of his
large circulation sustained heavy losses " from inexperi-
ence, dishonest agents, widely extended credit in the sub-
scriptions, and the depreciation and irregularity of the
currency in which they received payment, which was
often at fifty per cent, discount." And the following
year Thoreau said that he had knocked vainly at the
door of the magazine. " Were it not for its ultraism in
politics," said Poe that year, " we should regard the
Democratic Review the most valuable journal of the day.
Its editor is a man of fine matter-of-fact talents, and a
good political writer though not a brilliant one. The
principal contributors are Brownson, the new-light philos-
opher, Bancroft, Whittier, Bryant, Hawthorne, and Miss
Sedgwick. The department of criticism is conducted in
a candid, sensible and upright manner. Besides the no-
tices of new books accompanying each number, it
generally contains two or three elaborate reviews, which
make it an agreeable work for a man of letters. And
as to its embellishments ( for everything must be pictured
into the world nowadays !) we consider them of the most
truly valuable kind, being accurate and well-executed por-
traits of eminent men. Most highly, indeed, do we
esteem the Democratic Review, and take it all in all, we
acknowledge only three as its superiors in any country;
namely, Tait's Magazine, Fraser, and Blackwood, and
these it will fully equal when it has the advantage of their
experience."

It was not until 1845 that the Whigs had a Review of

144 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

their own. And to the attractions of party loyalty it
added substantial payment — more than its finances
would bear, it said in the fourth volume, though in their
opinion inadequate enough, but still in the aggregate a
larger sum than any other periodical had paid for its
contributions. Colton's American Review (1845-1850),
at least the third New Yorker of that name, was a digni-
fied and able journal of the statelier sort, as became a
five dollar publication. Its idea of the mission of letters
was a high one. " Our literature has never been suffi-
ciently in earnest. It has been too much the product of
light moments. We confess to an almost total distrust
of the judgments of critical work in America; and a
sea of trash seems rapidly swallowing up the delicate
perception and calm thought both of critics and people."
Its idea of nationality in our literature was likewise a
high one. " A very considerable class of persons have
the same opinion of our own that the German people have
of English genius. The English, said Goethe, never
think. Now, we hold our own good minds equal to the
best of these days. It is a common error to suppose that
great advances in arts, letters and philosophy are made
by the isolated labour of a few astonishing individuals;
it is the people from whom they spring that have made
the advance possible. The conduct of the literary de-
partment of the Review presents difficulties which will
not be overcome until a change takes place in public
opinion in regard to the comparative merits of foreign
and American intellects." In both of these Reviews the
political articles were pronounced enough, but you could
not have told from the abundant literary articles and the
verse which one of them you were reading. They had
not been edited with a purpose, as had been the National
Review at the beginning of the century.

Handsome praise from Poe was his tribute to the
Democratic; and, as with every magazine that he praised
or blamed, it must be taken with suspicion and at the
same time with the knowledge that more than any other

WILLOWY WILLIS AND PIRATICAL POE 145

magazinist of the period his judgment, if it could be
properly disencumbered of its personal prejudice, was of
value. Poe's New York dates, in spite of the amount
of biographical attention he has received, share the con-
fusion of the entire shifty period. He joined the staff
of the New York Quarterly in 1837 and continued there
the ferocity of his earlier critical work on the Messenger.
In 1838 he moved to Philadelphia and returned to New
York in 1844. First, he became sub-editor and critic on
the Mirror. Here WilHs praised his industry and
fidelity. During his time on the Mirror he published
The Raven in the American Review, for which he
got ten dollars. It was in 1841 that he praised this
magazine on Godey's. " It is now commencing its second
year; and I can say from my own personal knowledge
that its circulation exceeds two thousand — it is probably
about two thousand five hundred. So marked and imme-
diate a success has never been attained by any of our
five dollar magazines with the exception of the Southern
Literary Messenger, which in the course of nineteen
months (subsequent to the seventh from its commence-
ment) attained a circulation of rather more than five
thousand.'* These months marked, of course, the dura-
tion of Poe's connection with the journal.

He left the Mirror in 1845 to assist on the just started
Broadway Journal. The chief editor of this was C. F.
Briggs. " We have chosen the name," ran the first edi-
torial, " because it is indicative of the spirit which we
intend shall characterise our paper. Broadway is con-
fessedly the first street in the first city of the New World.
As Paris is France and London, England ; so is Broadway,
New York. And New York is fast becoming, if she
be not already, America ; in spite of South Carolina and
Boston. We shall do what we can to render it in some
degree worthy of the name we have given it. We shall
endeavour to make it entirely original, and instead of the
effete vapours of English magazines, which have here-
tofore been the chief filling of our weekly journals, give

146 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

such homely thoughts as may be generated among us.'*
Maria Lowell wrote Briggs that James was shocked at
the title, and James's feelings may be gathered from a
letter he had written Briggs the year before. " New
York letters are becoming very fashionable. You
Gothamites strain hard to attain a metropolitan character,
but I think if you felt very metropolitan you would not
be showing it on all occasions. I see that the exponent
of your city, the Herald, speaks of the Philadelphia papers
as * the provincial press ! ' '' Regarding Brigg's new ven-
ture came this letter in 1845. " I received this morning
two numbers of your Broadway Journal, and am in haste
to tell you how much I like it. As to the arrangement
you propose [Briggs had written " Poe writes for me at
the rate of one dollar a column. If you will do so, I
shall esteem it a capital bargain "], I know not what to
say. In spite of your surmise, I am so Httle in the habit
of measuring what I do by dollars and cents that nothing
is harder for me than to set a value on my wares. I
know nothing of your ability, and I should certainly steer
by that if I were better informed. For Columbus I
should expect more than for prose. But I had a thousand
times rather give it to you (as it would be my natural
impulse to do) than think you had paid me more for it
than you could easily afford. All I ask for is enough for
necessaries. Graham will no doubt give me (as he has
done) thirty dollars for a poem. The Anti-Slavery
Friends pay me five dollars for a leader to their paper,
making ten dollars a month while I am here." This was
in Philadelphia and the paper was the Freeman. The
next month he wrote : " I do not know whether to be
glad or sorry that you have associated Poe and Watson
with you as editors. I do not know the last; the first
certainly is able ; but I think there should never be more
than one editor with any proprietary control over the
paper. Its individuality is not generally so well pre-
served.''

In July, the paper went under the sole charge of Poe.

WILLOWY WILLIS AND PIRATICAL POE 147

He bought it from Briggs for fifty dollars — on a note
signed by Greeley, who paid it in the end. In August,
Lowell wrote to Briggs : " Poe, I am afraid, is wholly
lacking in that element of manhood which, for want of
a better name, we call character. As I prognosticated,
I have made him my enemy by doing him a service. In
the last Broadway Journal he has accused me of plagi-
arism, and misquoted Wordsworth to sustain the charge.
He wishes to kick down the ladder by which he rose.
He is welcome. Now, how can I expect to be understood,
much more to have my poetry understood, by such a man
as Poe? I cannot understand the meanness of men.
They seem to trace everything to selfishness. Why,

B actually asked Carter how much Poe paid me for

writing my notice of him in Graham's. Did such base-
ness ever enter the head of man?" During his editor-
ship, Poe wrote a large portion of the Journal himself,
and some of his stories appeared in it, notably the Tell
Tale Heart. But he was not able financially to keep
the breath of life in it. One of Stoddard's recollections
is of this time. Stoddard called upon him at his house,
not finding him at the ofBce, and was received with great
courtliness and told that the Ode on a Grecian Flute —
Stoddard's first poem — would be published next week.
Next week's issue had this notice, " To the author of the
Lines on the Grecian Flute; we fear that we have mis-
laid the poem." A week later came this notice : " We
doubt the originality of the Grecian Flute, for the reason
that it is too good at some points to be so bad at others.
Unless the author can reassure us, we decline it." Stod-
dard called to reassure. " Poe started and glared at me
and shouted * You lie, damn you ! Get out of here, or I'll
throw you out ! ' " " The Bells," says Stoddard, " was
sold thrice and paid for every time; Annabel Lee was
sold twice, and was printed by Griswold before it could ap-
pear either in Sartain's or the Southern Literary Messen-
ger.'' Thomas Dunn English wrote that Poe had no
sense of right and wrong whenever need or resentment

148 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

provoked him, and could no more be held responsible for
many things he did than could a lunatic or an idiot. He
adds that the poor fellow rarely received five hundred dol-
lars a year for his work — so his need was as constant as
his resentment.

As Poe had lied about or had unfortunate business deal-
ings with almost every literary personage in New York
and many of its magazines, the uproar that was created by
an article of his signed " L '' in the New World March
4th, 1843, can be imagined. It set out to survey the maga-
zines. The most prominent, he said, were the Demo-
cratic Review, the Knickerbocker, Graham's, Lady's Book,
Sargents, Pioneer, Lady's Companion, Southern Messen-
ger. The first he praised highly, as we have seen; the
second he dismissed as a poor ruin of former greatness ;
the third and fourth — Philadelphia magazines — he
treated with indulgent gentleness and some pity; the
Southern Literary Messenger had diffused more valuable
information throughout the Union than any other literary
work for the past five years, but alas, its honest, worthy,
and hard-working originator was no more, and he trusted
that an able editor would speedily be employed to secure
to it its former high standing. The resuscitation of
Knickerbocker and the preservation of the Southern
might both have been secured, one conceives, by an editor
near at hand whom Poe could name if pressed. The
editor of Sargent's came in for almost as much savage
derision as Lewis Clark of Knickerbocker. The editor
of the Lady's Companion, which Thoreau had just been
saying was the only magazine that paid him, had the
presumption to be a foreigner, and the journal he edited
was a receptacle of nonsense from first to last, of picture
nonsense, fashion nonsense, poetical nonsense, and prose
nonsense — a work of no beneficial influence whatever,
which ought to be annihilated.

" In speaking of the mass of matter in the above-
mentioned periodicals, it can only be designated as senti-
mental, love-sick, or fashionable stories and unmeaning

WILLOWY WILLIS AND PIRATICAL POE 149

rhymes. Who can deny that an exceedingly bad influence
is exerted by our magazine literature? Thousands of
articles are published which instead of instructing the
youthful mind * please with a rattle, tickle with a straw ' ;
instead of instilling a sound morality, they inculcate a
neglect of everything that is valuable; instead of making
the poor contented with their condition, they descant
upon the luxury of fashion and wealth, causing a thousand
hearts bitterly to ache for an imaginary want. Is not
this kind of literature a nuisance? Let every man who
believes that the tendency of this literature is bad, refrain
from purchasing the magazines which publish it. As to
those who tax their brains to produce this literature, let
them enjoy their only legitimate reward — the flattery
of fools, foolish young men and foolish young women.
Let every person who acknowledges such men as Ingra-
ham and Willis (Willis we mean as he is now — not as
he was formerly) and such women as Helen Berkeley
and all their followers — let all such people, we say, be
laughed at for their taste. The light literature of our
present day, particularly as disseminated in our fashion-
able magazines, is almost without a single redeeming
quality."

This general verdict time has confirmed. And though
Poe was the last one to throw stones at an editor who
himself filled most of his magazine, or reprinted articles
that he had used elsewhere, or who was reduced to shifty
practices through poverty and greed, or who praised good
markets ; or even at authors who turned out meaningless
rhymes by the wholesale or were specialists in the style
of fiction they had helped to create ; although he was, in
short, a rebel consistent in nothing save rebellion — he
was the most energetic and achieving protestant of his
time in a cause which the next decade set about more
wisely and temperately to carry.

The best summing up of the Willis and Poe period is
found in an English magazine article in 1848. It was
written by Charles Astor Bristed, a New Yorker and a

150 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

writer for American magazines, who was what few New
York writers of the period were, a cosmopolitan with a
point of view limited neither to America nor to Broad-
way. It was a comment somewhat different from one
that had appeared in the Derbyshire Courier in 1835,
" One peculiar difference between our periodicals and
those of America is this — ours are always dear and
sometimes indifferent: across the Atlantic they are al-
ways cheap and usually good." From Bristed's lively,
forceful, and just article some paragraphs may be quoted
as fit pendant for Poe's.

"Of American reviews and magazines British readers
very seldom hear anything. This is certainly not owing
to the scarcity of these productions for they are as
numerous in comparison as the newspaper, have a very
respectable circulation (in many cases forty thousand)
and that at the not remarkably low price of four or five
dollars. Nor is it due to the fact that their topics are
exclusively local, for there is scarcely a subject under
heaven which they do not treat; and a European might
derive some very startling information from them. The
Democratic Review, for example, has a habit of predict-
ing twice or thrice a year that England is on the point
of exploding utterly and going off into absolute chaos.
* Perhaps,' interrupts an impatient non-admirer of things
American generally, * they are not worth hearing about ! '
And this suggestion is not so far from truth as it is from
politeness.

" In examining the causes of the inferiority of Amerir-
can periodical literature, the most readily assignable and
generally applicable is that its contributions are mostly
unpaid. It is pretty safe to enunciate as a general rule
that when you want a good thing you must pay for it.
Now, the reprint of English magazines can be sold for
two dollars per annum, whereas a properly supported
home magazine cannot be afforded for less than four or
five. Hence, no one will embark a large capital in so
doubtful an undertaking; and periodical editorship is

WILLOWY WILLIS AND PIRATICAL POE 151

generally a last resource or a desperate speculation. One
of the leading magazines in New York — perhaps on
the whole the most respectable and best conducted — was
started with a borrowed capital of three hundred dollars.
The proprietors of a magazine should have a fair sum in
hand to begin with, to secure the services of able and
eminent men to make a good start. At the same time,
the editor finds at his disposal a most tempting array (so
far as quantity and variety are concerned) of gratuitous
contributions. For there is in America a mob of men
and women who write with ease. The system of compo-
sitions and orations at school and college makes them
* writers ' before they know how to read and gives them
a manner before they can have acquired matter. Most
of these people are sufficiently paid by the glory of ap-
pearing in print. The specific evils of this system of
providing material are that it prevents an editor from
standing on a proper footing toward his contributors,
who feel that they are doing a charitable, patronising, or
at least a very friendly act in contributing ; and it stands
in the way of honest criticism, for he who cannot pay
in dollars must pay in flattery. Other influences con-
spire to pervert and impede criticism. Very few of the
American periodical writers, professed or occasional, are
liberally educated. The popular education tends to plati-
tude and commonplace. Their reading is chiefly of new
books, a most uncritical style of reading. The demo-
cratic influence moulds all men to think unlike, and Mrs.
Grundy is a very important estate in the republic. Then
there are very powerful interests all ready to take offence
and cry out. The strongest editor is afraid of some of
these. One great aim of an American magazine is to
tread on nobody's toes, or as their circulars phrase it ' to
contain nothing which shall offend the most fastidious.'
Accordingly, nearly all the magazines and reviews profess
and practice political neutrality; and the two or three
exceptions depend almost entirely on their political articles
and partisan circulation. We know one editor who

rs2' THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

is continually apologising to his subscribers and one
half of his correspondents for what the other half
write.

" Another enemy of true criticism in America is pro-
vincialism. The country is parcelled out in small cliques,
who settle things in their own way in their own particu-
lar districts. Thus, there are shining lights in Boston
who are * small potatoes ' in New York, and * most re-
markable * men in the West whom no one has remarked in
the East. Sometimes, indeed, these cliques contrive to
ramify and extend their influence by a regular system
of * tickle me and I'll tickle you,' which there is not even
an endeavour to conceal. For instance, when the classi-
cal lion of a certain clique had been favourably reviewed
by a gentleman in another city, whose opinion was sup-
posed to be worth something, the periodical organ of the
clique publicly expressed its thanks for the favour, and
in return dug up a buried novel of the critic's and did
its best to resuscitate it by a vigorous puff. The excep-
tions to indiscriminate praise in American reviewing
usually spring from private misunderstandings. Two
literateurs on a magazine quarrel, one of them is kicked
out of doors, and then they begin to criticise each other's
writings. And the consequence is that it is next to im-
possible to pass an unfavourable opinion upon anything
without having personal motives attributed to you.
When an author is condemned, the first step is to find out
the writer of the review and assail him on personal
grounds. Also, there are often disputes about unsettled
accounts, which have an awkward tendency to influence
the subsequent critical and editorial opinions of both
parties.

" Such are some of the causes which militate against
the attainment of high standard in American periodical
literature. For some years it went on very swimmingly
on credit, but it is doubtful if the experiment could be
successfully repeated. Since it is plain that the republi-

WILLOWY WILLIS AND PIRATICAL POE 153

cation of English magazines must interfere with the home
article, the passing of an International Copyright law
would be the greatest benefit which could be conferred on
American periodical literature."

CHAPTER VII

THE WAVES OF THE ATLANTIC

It is difficult at first glance to see why the Boston literati
almost to a man should have despaired of establishing
there a first-class all-round literary magazine. What
Leland said when he was residing there in 1862, its bril-
liant circle at the brightest, could have been said with
equal truth at any time in the previous twenty years.
Leland had lived in several European capitals and in
Philadelphia and New York; and was thus an expert
witness for the defence. Moreover, he did not particu-
larly care for Boston — which makes his testimony all
the stronger. " In the very general respect manifested
in all circles in Boston for culture and knowledge in
every form, it is certainly equalled by no city on earth."
This being the case, why then did the projector of a first-
class magazine — publisher or author — invariably fear
that such a community would fail to support it ?

Leland's next sentence may afford a clue. " Every
stranger has a verdict or judgment passed on him, he is
numbered and labelled at once, and it is really wonderful
how in a few days the whole town knows of it." Culti-
vated Boston was a village community: it was always
foregathering at various meeting-places and swapping
opinions. And it had the thrifty village habit of passing
its books around also. It distinctly believed in neighbour-
hood copies. Emerson — who remembered with chagrin
that he couldn't find five hundred buyers for the Dial in
spite of all the eager discussion about it — might have
been thinking of this when he wrote in 1850 that a New
England magazine was an impossible problem. Well
might Higginson, on a lecture tour in the West, record

154

THE WAVES OF THE ATLANTIC 155

in 1867 his amazement at the support given to the New
England magazine which was at last successfully estab-
lished. " I have heard of a little town in northern Iowa
where there were fifty houses and twenty-five copies of
the Atlantic/' That was not the sort of thing he was
accustomed to: people were far more neighbourly in
Cambridge and Boston.

Fifteen years before the Atlantic was begun, Lowell
had attempted to do much the same sort of thing in the
Pioneer; the immediate occasion of its suspension was
Lowell's breakdown with eye-strain, but starvation had
already set in. Three years before that, in 1839, Haw-
thorne had written Longfellow, " I saw Mr. Sparks some
time since and he said that you were thinking of a literary
paper. Why not? Your name would go a great way
toward insuring its success; and it is intolerable that
there should not be a single belles-lettres journal in New
England." Cultivated New England was too busy mak-
ing contributions to every cause in Christendom to sup-
port the " embodiment of the national literature " it was
always complacently talking about.

Thus the canny projector of the Atlantic in allowing
it to be considered as the organ of the anti-slavery party,
sought to enlist not only ready pens but reluctant pennies.
He was hitching his star to a wagon. Boston had tried
the purely literary " periodical " and failed to float it even
when buoyed up with fashion-plates. It would now see
what a double-header might do. Says Scudder's Lowell :

Its founders did not conceal their intention to make it a po-
litical magazine. It bore as its sub-head a title it has never re-
linquished, " A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics." But
the magazine did not become, as it might in lesser hands, a mere
propaganda of reform or the organ of a political party; neither
did it assume an air of philosophical absenteeism. The space
given to the discussion of affairs was not considerable, but the
subjects were chosen with deliberation and treated with a good
deal more than newspaper care. They were intended to have
the incisiveness of brilliant newspaper work and a breadth not
to be looked for in a newspaper.

!I56 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

In this age of magazines, wrote J. T. Trowbridge, it is
difficult to imagine the interest excited by the advent of
the long-expected Atlantic. Colonel Higginson says it
was really planned in 1853, t>ut was stayed four years by
the business failure of J. P.- Jewett and Company, who
were to have been its publishers.

The present editor of the magazine says that the whole
plan of it was originated by the " editor who never was
the editor," Francis H. Underwood, and but for the
failure of the projected publishers he would have enjoyed
the full credit for the enterprise. At the failure and the
consequent collapse of the plan, Lowell wrote him, " I
think this Mr. Jew-it ought to be — that something ought
to be done to him, but for that matter, nearly all book-
sellers stand in the same condemnation." Underwood
now entered the counting-room of Phillips, Sampson and
Company. In the meantime, through all the years of its
frustration, the idea had been slowly growing, " Why
should not Boston have a Monthly of her own ? " Boston
felt — all the more because she showed it in no other way
— her inferiority in this respect to her rivals New York
and Philadelphia. Each of these barbarian cities had a
trinity of graces — Philadelphia with Graham's, Godey's,
and Sartain's (although the Boston literati thought them
all vapourish and simpering). New York with the hoary
Knickerbocker, and the adolescent Harper's and Put-
nam's — while Boston, the centre of American literature,
did not possess and had really never possessed a magazine
of her own which could be agreeable for her best writers
and at the same time appeal to popular support. But
Underwood began now to develop a surprising social pop-
ularity (for a business clerk) among the Cambridge-Bos-
ton literary group; and with the idea of his magazine
always in mind he set to work to become a mediator be-
tween this group and his new firm, which was already
identified with some of Boston's best literary interests.
Sampson had died about 1852, and the other partner of

THE WAVES OF THE ATLANTIC 157

Phillips in 1857 was William Lee, who had been for many
years the senior partner in Lee and Shepard.
Here let Scudder's Lowell take up the story :

Philh'ps had the practical man's distrust of new enterprises
suggested by authors, and a temperament calculated to chill en-
thusiasm. Underwood, reader for the firm, had already re-
ceived a pledge of support from Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes,
and others ; and he represented strongly to Lee the possibility of
the magazine which should start out with a staff of such emi-
nent writers. Phillips having been won over, plans were rap-
idly pushed. Phillips wrote a letter to his niece telling her of
the dinner he gave to talk the project over. " We sat down at
three p. m. and rose at eight. The time occupied was longer by
about four hours and thirty minutes than I am in the habit of
consuming in that kind of occupation, but it was the richest
time intellectually by all odds that I have ever had. The exact
arrangement of the table was as follows :

Mr. Underwood

Cabot Lowell

Motley Holmes

Longfellow Emerson

Phillips

Each one is known alike on both sides of the Atlantic and is

read beyond the limits of the English language. Though I say

it as shouldn't, it was the proudest day of my life."

Nevertheless, the cautious Mr. Phillips would not make
up his mind until he had seen Mrs. Stowe, who was at
that moment in England. He had unbounded admira-
tion for her ; and they had been for some years on exceed-
ingly friendly terms. She rarely came to town without
calling upon him, although she did not extend her cordial-
ity to every one in the house. Though it was Jewett who
had taken the risk of publishing Uncle Tom's Cabin —
indeed, put the idea into her head while it was running as
a serial — and on the other hand Phillips had declined it
when she had offered it to him, she had, on receiving an
intimation that Phillips would not decline a second book
from her (a lady who had sold three thousand copies on
the day of publication!), gladly given him in 1854 Sunny
Memories, and in 1856 Dred. Now she conferred at once

158 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

upon the project her doubly distinguished support, and
promised to write for the magazine. Underwood after-
ward told Arthur Oilman that she was the last straw that
had broken the back of the camel's prudence — only of
course he did not put it so flippantly. It remained to give
the magazine a name, now that it had at last a local habita-
tion; and the christening was neatly accomplished by
Holmes.

But the first number was after all delayed. For in the
great financial panic of 1857 (the worst the country had
seen for just twenty years) the firm almost went under;
and the narrow escape justified to the band of eager writ-
ers what had seemed the excessive caution of Phillips.
The first number appeared at last in October, calling itself
November. The death of Phillips two years after and
the break up of the firm severed the connection of its
founder, Underwood, with the magazine. The editorship
had been given to Lowell, at a salary of two thousand five
hundred dollars with six dollars a page for his own con-
tributions. This and the regular rate for other contribu-
tions was on a scale more liberal than had ever been heard
of before.

When Scudder became editor of the Atlantic in 1890,
Lowell wrote him, " There are now twenty people who
can write English where there was one then.'* But there
were a great many more than could find a steady market ;
and it is no wonder that writers whose only dependence
for a livelihood rested upon magazines were always
clamouring to found them. " It is safe to say,'* reflects
Scudder, " that few prominent writers in America, Long-
fellow and Cooper being the chief exceptions, failed to
dream of launching a magazine ; and the initiative in al-
most all the cases of important magazines has been taken
by the author rather than the publisher." The hungry
New England authors appropriated the new one with
avidity. " I am glad if you like the Atlantic" Emerson
wrote Furness in January, 1858. " We hope when it shall
be better. One would think it would be easy to find good

THE WAVES OF THE ATLANTIC 159

criticism, but the department is hard to fill. Then what
1 call the Zoroastrian element, which I think essential to a
good American journal. Lord Bacon would * note as de-
ficient ! ' And I believe further that we have not yet had
a single correspondent from Philadelphia. I hope we
shall yet supply all these deficiencies."

The Atlantic Club (though it never actually existed as
such) gathered the contributors together under the
auspices of the publishers during the first months of strong
interest; and Phillips had presumably other red-letter
evenings or rather afternoons in his life, now drawing
to a close. But gradually some of the contributors felt
their feast of pure culture impaired by the presence of
mundane persons like publishers, and more exclusive din-
ners were given. Colonel Higginson speaks of one amus-
ingly in Cheerful Yesterdays. " The most notable of
the monthly dinners was held at the Revere House on the
occasion of Mrs. Stowe's projected departure for Europe.
It was the only one to which ladies were invited, and the
invitation was accepted with a good deal of hesitation
by Mrs. Stowe, and with a distinct guarantee that no wine
should be furnished. Other feminine contributors were
invited, but for various reasons none appeared except
Mrs. Stowe and Harriet Prescott. The dinner was a
very awkward one until wine, surreptitiously ordered, en-
livened things a bit. Dr. and Mrs. Stowe told Whittier
afterward that while the company was very distinguished
the conversation was not what they had been led to ex-
pect." This may be readily appreciated when it is known
that Lowell discoursed to Mrs. Stowe on the superiority
of Tom Jones to all other novels, while Holmes dem-
onstrated to Dr. Stowe that profane swearing really
originated in the pulpit. Poor Mrs. Stowe ! To sit at a
table where wine and Tom Jones were alike dis-
cussed! After such faithlessness and such tactlessness,
no wonder it took the Atlantic thirty years to summon up
its courage to invite women again !

A few weeks after the death of Phillips in 1859, the

i6o THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

firm suspended payment. Its enormous stock of books
and sheets and plates was sold at auction in the autumn,
and Trowbridge says that he was shifted, scrip and scrip-
page, to a New York house. Fortunately the Atlantic
fell into good hands, he goes on, those of Ticknor and
Fields; it is interesting to note that it was a project of
the elder and, one would have supposed, more conserva-
tive member, while it was opposed by the junior, whose
literary tastes and associations with authors would have
seemed likely to render him the more earnest of the two
in its favour. The price, ten thousand dollars, looked
formidably large for those days, and Mr. Fields deemed
it too hazardous an undertaking. If he had been on the
ground he might have thought differently; but he was
abroad. At all events, the senior's courage and sound
judgment were abundantly vindicated. So far, Trow-
bridge ; and Scudder, too, says that after many plans for
the future of the magazine and much competition of the
publishers, Ticknor and Fields bought it. But although
Scudder made one in the procession of Atlantic editors,
still the following story — narrated many years after-
ward in the magazine itself — seems too circumstantial to
be inaccurate :

Governor Rice was the assignee of the original publishers of
the Atlantic, and he sent letters to a dozen different publishers
telling them that he should sell it to the highest bidder, whose
offer should be received by noon on a certain day. The day
arrived, and not one bid had come. Mr. Rice walked over to
the office of Ticknor and Fields and said to Mr. Ticknor, " I
have not yet received your bid for the Atlantic." " No," re-
plied the publisher, " and you will not, for we don't care to un-
dertake the responsibility of the venture." In point of fact, the
risk was not great, for the circulation stood at that time at
thirty thousand copies. Mr. Rice pointed to the clock on the
Old South, and it was after half-past eleven. " I am about to
go to my office to open the bids," said he, " and I am sure Ticknor
and Fields will be sorry if I find none there from them." Tick-
nor was apparently immovable, Fields was in Europe. Mr.
Rice continued his appeal, and the hands of the Old South clock
their way. At five minutes to twelve Ticknor turned to his
desk, wrote a line, sealed it, and handed it to the Governor. Mr.

THE WAVES OF THE ATLANTIC i6i

Rice carried it to his office and solemnly proceeded to open it.
It was the only bid, and the sum mentioned was twelve thousand
dollars. Mr. Rice went at once to Mr. Ticknor and said, " The
Atlantic is yours." Mr. Ticknor was startled and replied,
" Pray let no one know what I bid, for all my friends would
think me crazy I "

" I may say," wrote Lowell to Norton, " that I think
it is just the best arrangement possible. Whether T. will
want me or not is another question. I suppose he will
think that Fields will make a good editor, besides saving
the salary [which was now three thousand dollars] ; and
F. may think so too. In certain respects he would, as the
dining editor for example, to look after authors when they
come to Boston and the like. I shall be quite satisfied,
anyhow — though the salary is a convenience." Later,
he wrote Emerson : " I saw Ticknor yesterday, and he
says he wants the magazine to go on as it has gone. I
never talked so long with him before, and the impression
he gave was that of a man very shrewd in business after
it is once in train, but very inert at judgment. I rather
think Fields is captain when at home."

When Fields returned, he took the helm. Times were
so threatening that the firm seems to have concluded that
the salary was, as Lowell had anticipated, an item. " On
the business side of editorship, at least," says Higginson,
" it was a great relief when Fields was in the chair, and
the junior publisher reglly proved a much better editor
in other ways. For one thing, being publisher, he had a
free hand in paying for articles; and he raised prices
steadily. He first introduced the practice of paying on
acceptance, though he always said that it defeated his
object. Instead of quieting the impatience of contribu-
tors for publication, it increased it. He had a virtue
which I have never known in any other editor or pub-
lisher, that of volunteering to advance money on pros-
pective articles yet to be written. I have also known
him to increase the amount paid, on finding that an author
particularly needed the money, especially if it were the

i62l THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

case of a woman. He was capable of being influenced
by argument, and was really the only editor I have ever
encountered I could move for an instant by any cajoling;
editors being as a rule a race made of adamant, as they
should be."

" In i860 our literary centre was in Boston," wrote
Howells in Literary Friends, " wherever it is or is not
at present. The claim of the commercial metropolis to
literary primacy had passed with the perishing of inanition
of Putnam's magazine, for Knickerbocker's was decrepit
and doting, and Harper's was not yet distinctly literary.
Philadelphia was now counting for nothing, its publica-
tions having become really incredible in their insipidity.
In Boston, every ambitious young writer was eager to
enter his name with the chosen among the contributors
of the Atlantic Monthly, and in the list of Ticknor and
Fields, who were literary publishers in a sense such as the
business world has known nowhere else before or since.
Their imprint was a warrant of quality to the reader and
of immortality to the author." With the establishment
of her magazine, Boston stood at last in the eyes of New
York and Philadelphia as she had long stood — not with-
out reason — in her own. She was supreme.

Aldrich was one of the ambitious young writers
Howells speaks about. He might have been content with
his success in New York, for at the ripe age of twenty
he was sub-editor under Willis of the Home Journal, and
was at the same time literary adviser for the publishing
house of Perby and Jackson. On first entering Fields's
offices in the Corner Bookstore, he says in Ponkapog
Papers, he saw the editor's memorandum book open on the
table and observed certain items within. (Doubtless he
was careful to keep his own memorandum book closed
when he became editor!) " Don't forget to mail R. W.

E. his contract — Don't forget O. W. H.'s proofs "

Whereupon the cheeky youngster added an item of his
own, " Don't forget to accept T. B. A.'s poem," and fled.
The poem was accepted, paid for, and never printed, says

THE WAVES OF THE ATLANTIC 163

Aldrich ; and adds, " It was a real kindness." One won-
ders if, when he came to occupy the editorial chair, he was
as kind to the author of another poem with the manifest
destiny of which another intruder interfered. When he
took the editorship upon Mr. Howells's resignation in
1881, says Professor Perry, he had the comforts — both
before and since his time considered too Capuan for an
Atlantic editor in office hours — of a pipe and a red setter.
Once the setter ate a sonnet. " How should he know it
was doggerel ? " exclaimed Aldrich admiringly. But
there was no joke intended when about this time he gaily
wrote to Bayard Taylor of his Ponkapog farm, careless
of coming slang and quoting the laughter-loving Gail
Hamilton, " I am twenty miles from my lemon — the
Atlantic Monthly/'

Mr. Howells thus tells of his first entrance into the
sanctum of the Atlantic.

My business relations at that time were with another house,
but all my literary affiliations were with Ticknor and Fields;
and it was the Old Corner Bookstore that drew my heart as
soon as I had replenished my pocket in Cornhill. It very
quickly happened that when I was shown into Mr. Fields's little
room at the back of the store, he had just got the magazine
sheets of a poem of mine from the Cambridge printers. [The
poem, by the way, had been printed with an unfortunate error;
and though it meant the wasting of a sheet in the entire edition.
Fields recalled it.] He introduced me to Mr. Ticknor, who
asked me whether I had been paid for it. I confessed that I
had not. And then he got out a chamois-leather bag and took
from it five half-eagles in gold and laid them on the green top of
the desk in much the shape and of much the size of the Great
Bear. I have never since felt myself paid so lavishly for any
literary work, though I had more for a single piece than the
twenty-five dollars that dazzled me in this constellation. The
publisher seemed aware of the poetic nature of the transaction.
" I always think it pleasant to have it in gold," he said.

The success of the Atlantic made the firm amorous of
other magazine adventures, and flirtations ensued which,
in the end, brought about the departure of their first love
to another household. An important one of these was a

i'64 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

few years' dalliance with that venerable spinster, the
North American.

Lowell wrote to Fields in 1864, " It's a great compli-
ment you pay me, that whenever I have fairly begun to
edit a journal, you should buy it." Lowell and Norton
had for a while been attempting to revive the magazine,
which, though it had regained its literary distinction un-
der Dr. Peabody, had still remained aloof not only from
the world but from prosperity. The new editors were
bringing it nearer to the former but not to the latter when
Osgood decided to lend to the task the machinery of a
large publishing house. " Under Lowell and Norton,"
says Scudder, " its scholarship though equally distinctive
was more exact, and its breadth of view much enlarged ;
it was a striking example of how a magazine may at once
be lifted to a higher level without being compelled to
turn a somersault. Norton took the labouring oar in
editing, and Lowell yielded, as with the Atlantic, to the
temptation to shirk the drudgery of editing." Neither
the editors nor the publishers perceived, however, the
salient fact — that the day of the quarterly was done.
Mr. Howells wrote of the Lowell-Norton administration
before the Osgood period : " The Review could have
suffered nothing at their hands except that mysterious
injury which comes of being made too good ; but it is cer-
tain that it did not prosper, and I remember one of its
publishers saying Here was the horse and carriage which
he could have kept if he had not chosen to keep a Review."
In spite of Osgood, it still remained an expensive vehicle.
" Though he was a generous spirit," says Mr. Howells,
" he was not inclined to more than the sacrifice of a horse
and carriage on the shrine of the Review.'' He sold it,
and rock-ribbed as she was, the sale shook New England.
For the new owner of the maiden haled her from the
study to the mart and from Boston to Beelzebub !

" The war was nearing its close," says Trowbridge,
" when Fields invited my co-operation in establishing a
new * illustrated magazine for boys and girls.' " It was

i

THE WAVES OF THE ATLANTIC 165

called Oar Young Folks, and was a financial success from
the start. Trowbridge, Gail Hamilton, and Lucy Lar-
com were the editors. " I became manager in 1870. The
firm at that time, under its new name of Fields, Osgood
and Company, occupied a spacious store and chambers
at 124 Tremont Street. The house had a lunch-room
with a generously served table, at which publishers and the
various editors met, and such contributors and book-
authors as happened to be about were often welcomed."
Aldrich had, in 1865, become editor of the third periodical
of the house. Every Saturday, and Mr. Howells was now
assistant to Fields on the Atlantic. " As I recall those
pleasant rooms," wrote a contributor to the Atlantic, " it
seems as though they were always full of sunshine.
There could not be greyness or dulness with Mr. Fields,
Mr. Aldrich, and Mr. Osgood in possession, and the con-
stant visitor, who, the chances were, would be wise or
witty or both. I think clouds and rain began to come
when Mr. Fields retired. From the pleasant quarters in
Tremont Street the house moved to Winthrop Square,
and never again till it reached Park Street did it know
the comforts of home, so to speak — it had only business
offices."

Thus was Mr. Howells installed as assistant to Fields.

The whole affair was conducted by Fields with his unfailing
tact and kindness, but it could not be kept from me that the
qualification I had as practical printer for the work was most
valued and that as a proof-reader I was expected to make it
avail on the side of economy. Our proof-reading was some-
thing almost fearfully scrupulous and perfect. It would not
do to say how many of the first American writers owed their
correctness in print to the zeal of our proof-reading, but I may
say that there were very few who did not owe something. As
for the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, her syntax was such a
snare to her that it sometimes needed the combined skill of all
the proof-readers and the assistant editor to extricate her. I
look back now with respectful amazement at my proficiency in
the detecting the errors of the great as well as the little.

Mrs. Stowe herself used to say that she left her verbs

i'66 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

and nominatives to be brought together by her publisher ;
and it must be owned that it never ruffled her in the least.
She would be the last one of all the immortals to regret
it, if Mr. Howells had ventured into details.

When he went to Boston to assist in editing the At-
lantic, all its contributors were New Englanders and
dwelt in the region roundabout — " except for those New
England men and women living in the splendid exile of
New York.'* Thus it may be seen that Mr. Howells was
already — or thinks he was — casting a wishful eye back
to the metropolis ; and when he returned whence he had
come he was to utter that famous gibe which still makes
Boston snort. But if from the inner shrine of the
Atlantic editorial room came treachery, from the same
room a little later came atonement. It was in 1865 that
Aldrich took up his permanent Boston residence as editor
of Every Saturday. Within a short time Aldrich was
writing Bayard Taylor, " I miss my few dear friends in
New York — but that is all. There is a finer intellectual
atmosphere here than in our city. The people of Boston
are full-blooded readers, appreciative, trained. The
humblest man of letters here has a position which he
doesn't have in New York. To be known as an able
writer is to have the choicest society opened to you. A
knight of the quill here is supposed necessarily to be a
gentleman. In New York — he's a Bohemian! Out-
side of his personal friends he has no standing." This
last Mr. Howells had said also, but still his roue heart
perversely sang " Better fifty years of Europe thaaa cycle
of Cathay." And the coarser siren kept on beckoning
him until he took the cotton from his ears. Not so Al-
drich. " Though I am not Boston, I am Boston-plated,"
he began to say. Later we find him writing to Stedman,
echoing (or was it anticipating?) almost the very essence
and structure of his predecessor's cavil. " In the six
years I have been here I have found seven or eight hearts
so full of noble things that there is no room in them for
such trifles as envy and conceit and insincerity. I didn't

THE WAVES OF THE ATLANTIC 167

find more than two or three such hearts in New York,
and I lived there fifteen years. It was an excellent school
for me — to get out of! I wonder that I got out of it
with my English tolerably correct." But the final amends
were yet to come. Mr. George Gary Eggleston in his
Recollections of a Varied Life says that he made Al-
drich the offer for Bryant of the literary editorship of the
New York Evening Post. This position the old gentle-
man considered the very highest literary crown America
had to offer. Aldrich wrote back that he knew it was in
every way to be coveted, and added, " But what, my dear
Eggleston, can the paper offer to compensate one for hav-
ing to live in New York ? " And thus, finally, was Bos-
ton avenged!

But to return to Mr. Howells's account of his un-
splendid expatriation in the colder light of the Northern
frontier ! " The editors had been eager to discover any
outlying literature," he says, " but very little good writ-
ing was done beyond the borders of New England. The
literary theories we accepted were Boston theories, the
criticism we valued was Boston criticism. New England
has now ceased to be a nation in itself, but that was some-
thing like a national literature and Ticknor and Fields
embodied New England literature. James R. Osgood,
who became afterward the head of the house, forecast in
his bold enterprise the change from a New England to
an American literary situation."

But just about this time Stedman in New York was
writing Taylor : " The Boston house, naturally, drive
apace every steed that wins a heat. But when a man's
pace is slow, though sure, they don't make much of him
unless he is * in their midst.' (That phrase is bad Eng-
lish.) They never ask me for anything, and have de-
clined what little I have sent them. I have this week hit
upon a magnificent subject, but when done, I shall not
have the courage to send it to the Atlantic. Besides, I
don't want it to appear in the late spring, and I do want
the money for it ; and Scrihne/s, Harper's or the Galaxy

i68 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

will use it at once and pay me double what Boston would."
So there were two sides to this matter. The letter also
shows that J. T. F. had not yet begun, in all cases at
least, to pay on acceptance — but possibly that was only
his little trick to discourage New Yorkers !

New Yorkers were, at any rate, beginning to feel that
they were not being treated with reciprocity. They had
been complaining for years of the Yankeeisation of their
own periodicals, and now the chief literary magazine of
the country was taking on the aspect of a closed shop.
" Nearly the whole Atlantic force are permanent or sum-
mer residents," said a Newport newspaper proudly in
1866. Yet the elect of the whole country was support-
ing the magazine, grumbled New York, or it wouldn't
have been able to get along. " It was so strange to dip
down in these little Western towns and find an audience
all ready and always readers of the Atlantic, so glad to
see me," wrote Higginson on his lecture-tour. " I have
just realised what a clientele the magazine has." The
Atlantic had become a national institution, it is true, but
its pillars were all Bostonians. And New Yorkers began
gleefully to prognosticate the usual results of inbreeding.
But the magazine went serenely on its mission of localis-
ing America; it even Bostoned Bret Harte! Its inten-
tion was to plant a Bunker Hill monument in every remote
hamlet. It became the fashion to smile at the Boston-
esqueness of the Atlantic. The city smiled itself, but with
fond maternal joy. Twenty years afterward, about 1892,
Mr. John Adams Thayer summed up the whole matter.
He had an idea (nobody asked him to have it!) of pok-
ing up the Atlantic: he tried it and came back to New
York feeling as Mrs. Partington must have felt when
she tried to sweep it out with a broom. " A great pub-
lishing house was behind it, with a list of books of
famous old-time authors as well as newer favourites. As
a business proposition for the book end, the idea was
sound if, as I planned, the magazine could be increased
from its small circulation of less than twenty-five thou-

THE WAVES OF THE ATLANTIC 169

sand copies up into the hundred thousands. [Mr. Thayer
had learned to talk thus big in the office of the Ladies'
Home Journal in sleepy Philadelphia.] To do this the
Atlantic would have to be materially changed and illus-
trated. [The italics are the affrighted scribe's.] The
delightful gentleman who has been for so many years the
head of the old house was interested, but to change the
magazine in any way — never ! It was Boston."

In the long meanwhile, however, some other things had
not gone on unchanged. " In 1874," says Trowbridge,
" the proverbial thunderbolt out of a clear sky struck
the publishing house. The sky was not so clear as it had
seemed to many of us who were enjoying the fancied
security of that hospitable roof. Mr. Fields retired from
the firm in 1871 and Mr. J. R. Osgood (who, like Mr.
Fields, had risen from the ranks in business) became head
of the house. He was able, honourable, large-hearted but
aggressive and self-confident; and under his leadership
the concern assumed enterprises involving hazards which
the other's more conservative judgment could hardly have
sanctioned. Of these, I remember most about Every
Saturday, which began and ran some time as a modest
reprint of selections from foreign periodicals ; but which
the new firm changed to a large illustrated sheet, designed
to rival Harper's Weekly in popular favour."

" Long before this reaches you," Aldrich wrote to
Bayard Taylor, " you will have heard of the miserable
changes that have taken place in the Corner Bookstore.
Scribner and Company have bought and swallowed our
Young Folks, and the Atlantic and Every Saturday be-
long to Houghton. [This was Hurd and Houghton,
which later united with J. R. Osgood and Company.]
Howells has gone with the Atlantic permanently, I fancy;
and I am to edit Every Saturday for one year, and then
I am on the town. After being so closely connected with
Osgood for nearly nine years, you may imagine that I
feel as if I had been cut adrift."

Thus was New York avenged and Boston might have

170 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

called to her as Cassius to the spirit of Caesar, " Even by
the sword that killed thee." For Stedman says that Os-
good told him that if he had followed his suggestion and
established an Atlantic Weekly in New York instead of
trying to outdo Harper's Weekly by making a pictorial of
Every Saturday it would have saved him one hundred
and twenty-five thousand dollars. To Bayard Taylor,
Stedman wrote as follows :

You have noticed the remarkable changes in the ownership
of the Atlantic and Every Saturday. Probably I was the only
writer not surprised by them. You know it has long been one
of my theories that the sceptre would come back from Boston
to New York after a time, just as it did from Edinburgh to
London. The metropolis, many-sided, all-embracing, is the
true centre; and the provincial genius of the elder Boston
writers has raised up no successors. Two years ago I saw the
time was close at hand, cut loose (mostly) from the Atlantic,
and have thrown all my advice, influence, work, in favour of
the " coming monthly," Scrihner's. This entirely apart for my
abiding friendship for my publisher Osgood. The Atlantic has
steadily declined, despite the most friendly and extended Trib-
une aid, for several years past in authority and circulation. The
contrary process has obtained in New York. Literary society
here, also, is becoming knit together, rich, catholic — a veritable
power.

Yet of the Atlantic it may still be said, as was once
thundered of Massachusetts, " There she stands ! "

The record of Longfellow's connection with the At-
lantic is meagre. On April 29, 1857, he writes:
" Lowell was here last evening to interest me in a new
magazine. I told him I would write for it if I wrote for
any magazine." A week later he notes that he attended
the famous dinner of which Phillips speaks, " to talk
about the new magazine he wishes to establish. It will
no doubt be done ; though I am not so eager about it as the
rest." In 1859 he wrote: "The Atlantic flourishes.
Holmes is in full blast at his Breakfast-Table. Dined
with the Atlantic Club. The Atlantic is not the Saturday,
though many members belong to both. They are the
writers for the Atlantic Monthly — Dined with the At-

THE WAVES OF THE ATLANTIC 171

lantic Club at the Revere. Mrs. Stowe was there with
a green wreath on her head, which I thought very becom-
ing. Also Miss Prescott, who wrote the story In a
Cellar. One of the publishers of the magazine is a good
teller of funny stories." In 1866: "Here is our good
Fields frightened at the length of the Dante letters. I
confess it is a quality of food not adapted to the great
mass of magazine readers. But I trust the Atlantic has
some judicious readers who like to have some timber in
the building and not all clapboards." In 1871 he wrote
to Fields : " I come back to my old wish and intention
of leaving the magazine when you do."

No American author has ever been more a part of a
magazine than Holmes was a part of the Atlantic. Mr.
Howells said that Holmes " made the magazine ; " it may
be added that, in a certain way, the magazine made him.
Underwood wrote years afterward in the old Scrihner's
that the literary success of the magazine was due to
Holmes more than to any other man ; the Autocrat, said
he, was the only entirely new creation in its pages, and
readers always turned to it first; excepting the Noctes
Ambrosianae of John Wilson, no series of papers on
either side of the ocean secured such attention during the
entire century. After the Autocrat came the Professor
and the Poet and the novels. With two or three unim-
portant exceptions. Holmes never afterward wrote for
another m^agazine. In 1870 he wrote Fields, " You have
now plenty of young blood for the Atlantic, and it is a
question with me whether others cannot do better for you
than I can. My preference, I do not hesitate to say, is
for the Atlantic;'' in 1890 he wrote Mr. Houghton that
he did not wish to listen to any outside temptations,
" even when they come in so attractive a form as that of
the Forum/' But not only did the Atlantic publish most
of his work, it had given him his second wind. He had
really abandoned writing when Lowell said he would ac-
cept the editorship, though it ought to go to Holmes,
only on condition that O. W. H. be the first contributor

172 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

engaged. Without the magazine we should have had no
Breakfast Table. " I, who felt myself outside of the
charmed circle drawn around the scholars and poets of
Cambridge and Concord, wondered somewhat when Mr.
Lowell insisted upon my becoming a contributor. I
looked at the old Portfolio and said to myself, ' Too late !
too late ! ' But Lowell woke me from a kind of literary
lethargy in which I was half slumbering, to call me to ac-
tive service." In 1879 at the breakfast given him by the
Atlantic, he said that Lowell was the cause of his writing
the Autocrat and that any pleasure his writings had given
could be added to Lowell's own noble contributions to our
literature. But the Breakfast Table series gave much be-
sides pleasure. Even now one may catch in remote rural
communities the ground-swell of the storm they made
in conventionally devout minds. Much water has flowed
under bridges since the Breakfast Table fluttered the
orthodox by the impious food it was serving up and the
Guardian Angel cost the Atlantic a wholesale loss
of subscribers on account of its atheism. Holmes wrote
to Motley in 1861 : "But oh! such a belabouring as I
have had from the so-called ' evangelical ' press, for the
last two or three years almost without intermission!
There must be a great deal of weakness and rottenness,
when such extreme bitterness is called out by such a good-
natured person as I can claim to be in print."

Earlier in the same letter he says : " The magazine
which you helped to give a start to has prospered, since
its transfer to Ticknor and Fields. I suppose they
may make something directly by it, and, as an adver-
tising medium, it is a source of great indirect benefit
to them. No doubt you will like to hear in a few
words about its small affairs. I suppose I have made
more money and reputation out of it than anybody
else, on the whole. I have written more than anybody
else, at any rate. Miss Prescott's stories have made her
quite a name. Wentworth Higginson's articles have also

THE WAVES OF THE ATLANTIC 173

been very popular. Lowell's critical articles and political
ones are always full of point, but he has been too busy
as editor to write a great deal. As for the reputations
that were totites faites, I don't know that they have gained
or lost a great deal by what their owners have done for
the Atlantic.'' In 1879 the magazine gave him a birthday
breakfast, on December 3d, " as of August 29th," writes
he quaintly ; " and every one of any account came or re-
gretted." In a letter to Mr. Howells complimenting him
upon his management of this affair, Holmes said : " You
have brought us an outside element which Boston needed
and have assimilated all that Boston could do for you (if
you can be said to have needed anything) so completely
that it seems as if you had cheated some native Esau out
of his birthright." And finally, in 1885 — the whirligig
of time just reversing the earlier situation — he wrote
thus to Lowell : " Calling on Mr. Houghton this morn-
ing on business of my own, he expressed the strongest
wish that you could be induced to write for the Atlantic.
I told him that I supposed you had received or would re-
ceive liberal offers from the New York periodicals. He
does not want to bid against other publishers ; but, to use
his own language, it would not be money that would
stand in the way of your writing for the Atlantic. How
much he or others would pay you I do not know. ["I
have just had an offer," Lowell wrote to Gilder in 1890,
" of a thousand dollars for a short paper of reminis-
cences!" In 1876 he had written to Robert Carter that
a newspaper had asked him for his Fourth of July Ode,
apparently as a gift. " I can't afford to give it away.
The Atlantic — to which I have promised what I may
write — will pay me $300 for it." From this it will be
seen that Lowell's market-rate, on his return from the
Court of St. James, had suffered a sea-change.] But I
do know that Mr. Houghton has treated me very liberally,
that he is an exact man of business, that he takes a pride
in the Atlantic, which I suppose in a literary point of

174 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

view is recognised as the first of the monthHes, and that
he is very anxious to see you again in the pages of the
old magazine you launched so long ago."

But if O. W. H. had by his contributions whistled up
a storm of protest from his more orthodox readers, Mrs.
Stowe in 1869 lashed the whole English-speaking world
into a veritable simoon. To the mind of the younger
generation the Atlantic may carry no such tempestuous
associations — there are, possibly, those who look upon it
as a harnessed and fireside force, in comparison with
later magazines more avowedly volcanic. Maybe it has
simmered down since then or we have simmered up. But,
at the time, no one ever caused more world-wide ripples
than Mrs. Stowe when she threw a stone into the sedate
Atlantic (when it wasn't looking). Here are some of the
documents in the case.

Mrs. Stowe to Holmes: Lady Byron told me, with almost
the solemnity of a death-bed confession, the history which I
have embodied in an article to appear in the Atlantic Monthly.
I have been induced to prepare it by the run which the Guiccioli
book is having, which is from first to last an unsparing attack
on Lady Byron's memory by Lord Byron's mistress. When
you have read my article I want, not your advice as to whether
the main facts shall be told, for on this point I am so resolved
that I frankly say advice would do me no good. But you might
help me with your delicacy and insight; to make the manner
of telling more perfect, and I want to do it as wisely and well
as such story can be told. — Holmes to Mrs. Stowe: In the
midst of all the wild and irrelevant talk about the article, I felt
as if there was little to say until the first fury of the storm had
blown over. . . . That Lady Byron believed and told you the
story will not be questioned by any but fools and malignants.
... It is to be expected that public opinion will be more or
less divided as to the expediency of this revelation, — Holmes to
Motley: The first thing I naturally recur to is the Byron arti-
cle. In your letter of August 4th you say there will be a row
about it. Hasn't there been ! Great as I expected the excite-
ment to be, it far exceeded anything I had anticipated. The
prevailing feeling was that of disbelief of the facts. The gen-
eral opinion was strongly adverse to the action of Mrs. Stowe.
The poor woman, who, of course, meant to do what she thought
an act of supreme justice, has been abused as a hyena, a ghoul,

THE WAVES OF THE ATLANTIC 175

and by every name and in every form, by the baser sort of
papers. The tone of the leading ones has been generally severe,
but not brutal. I might have felt very badly about it, if I had
had any responsibility in counselling Mrs. S. to publish, but
she had made up her mind finally an'd had her article in type
before I heard or knew anything of it.

Holmes says that Mr. Fields was absent in Europe, and
his sub-editor, fearing to lose Mrs. Stowe as a contributor
altogether, assented to her request to print the Byron
paper. This looks as if the subject of Mrs. Stowe's fu-
ture contributions had come up in the interview when the
propriety of the article was questioned. That Mrs.
Stowe was prepared to go any length may be gathered
from the facts that Lady Byron's story contained no evi-
dence whatever — it was only an inference, and was un-
supported except by Lady Byron's word; and that she
ventured, without further confirmation, to rest the case
upon a story she had heard thirteen years before; and
had held in abeyance until the publication of the Guiccioli
Memoirs and an article on them in Blackwood's had
stung her to action. " At first I thought the world's peo-
ple had lost their senses," Mrs. Stowe wrote raptly, of
the storm her article made ; but she went serenely on the
tenor of her way. " She always spoke and behaved,"
wrote Mrs. Fields in loving indulgence, "as if she recog-
nised herself to be an instrument breathed upon by the
Divine Spirit." And this unquestionably simplifies con-
duct.

Considering that Mrs. Stowe's influence more than that
of any other person had inaugurated the Atlantic and that
its second editor and publisher was so great a champion
of the cause of woman, the attitude of the magazine to-
ward its female contributors in the matter of dinners was
rather remarkable. The Atlantic was always feeding
itself, but its ladies were not even allowed in at dessert.
Lowell, it is remembered, once declined a poem of Mrs.
Howe's with the assertion that no woman could write a
poem. He said, however, he would gladly accept a prose

176 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

article; and this would have seemed lamentable to Haw-
thorne, to whom " all ink-stained women were detestable."
The latter had written to Ticknor in 1854 from abroad :

America is now wholly given over to a d d mob of scrib-
bling women, and I should have no chance of success while the
public taste is occupied with their trash. But I have since been
reading Ruth Hall and I must say I enjoyed it a good deal.
The woman writes as if the Devil were in her; and that is the
only condition under which a woman ever writes anything worth
reading. Generally women write like emasculated men, and
are only to be distinguished from male authors by greater fee-
bleness and folly; but when they throw off the restraints of
decency and come before the public stark naked, as it were,
then their books are sure to possess character and value. Can
you tell me anything about this Fanny Fern? If you meet her,
I wish you would let her know how much I admire her.

But times had greatly changed during Hawthorne's
day, and were to change still more. Boston, which had
been horrified when Mrs. Howe first attended a woman's
rights convention, had now so long cradled the Woman's
Journal that outlying cynics muttered darkly at the whole-
sale conversion of her blue-stockings into bloomers. But
though the feminist movement had now manifestly begun,
the double standard of morality as to public dinners still
existed; and equal suffrage for women at the table was
thought to mean the banishment of those twin vices, wine
and tobacco. When the magazine was sixteen years old
and passed to its present publishers, a very large dinner ^
was given, — but no ladies were invited. The next great \
Atlantic dinner was on the occasion of Whittier's seventi-
eth birthday, in 1877; but no ladies were bidden to be
present at " the most notable company ever gathered to-
gether in this country within four walls." The dinner
for this lifelong woman's suffragist was for men only.
But there was a slight indication that the embargo was
to be lifted — for a few ladies were indulgently admitted
after the meal was over, to help applaud the speeches.
This proved to be the entering wedge. For it happened
that some ultimate outpost and last relay of civilisation,

THE WAVES OF THE ATLANTIC 177

Michigan or farther, published on the subject a gay article
at which Boston smiled but her heart was sad. Mrs.
Stowe, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Gail Hamilton, Helen
Hunt, Rebecca Harding Davis — brilliant pens that had
contributed to make the Atlantic what it was — all figured
in the scandalous work of lese majeste as bitterly protest-
ing against their exclusion. An admonition from Loch-
invar has ever been intolerable to Boston — and Mr.
Houghton saw the error of his inherited way. At his
next feast there was no sex-line drawn. He had learned
the lesson which Boston herself first began to teach
awakening America, that a sex-line is a danger line.
One-third of the one hundred guests at the Holmes break-
fast were ladies; and Mr. Houghton made a sheepish
apology. He said that he had always wanted them but
had been too bashful to ask them before. And his next
feast was in honour of a lady! But this lady, Mrs.
Stowe, had to wait until her seventieth birthday for the
Atlantic to make the amende honour able for its masculine
misbehaviour at its first dinner to which ladies were in-
vited.

CHAPTER VIII

SOUTH AND WEST — ATHENSES THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

The activity of the little towns in publishing magazines
dt the beginning of the nineteenth century was only paral-
leled toward its close by the countless imitations of the
Chap Book. And for the same reason. Their propri-
etors wanted to express themselves and had no other way
to do it. In this ^-espect the early crop of editors was
not as mistaken as the later, it is true, but the recorders
of their aspirations were as brief. Few things are more
surprising in the history of our magazines than the num-
ber of inconspicuous villages which attempted even am-
bitious ones. So it had been in New England, and in the
Middle States ; so it was in the Southern States ; and so
it was to be in the West. No one guessed, in a new and
rapidly growing district, which way the cat was going to
jump. Any village courthouse might some morning find
itself an Acropolis; and the printer a place side by side
with Franklin and Thomas among the achieving pioneers !
The States were full of such visionary villages, and of
printers who willingly if not gladly went down into their
own pockets for the cost of publication.

The first magazine in Maryland, in 1798, was such an
acorn from which an oak was to have grown. In the
course of two months, said the proprietor in closing, we
will resume in the form of a monthly if five hundred
subscribers can be procured. But where could so many
be found in Frederick Town? The editor of The Hive,
published in the village of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, might
have informed the editor of The Key that their towns
were too near together for each to become an Athens,
and that Lancaster was clearly marked for the favoured

178

ATHENSES THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 179

one. The Child of Pallas, Devoted mostly to Belles-
Lettres, published in Baltimore in 1800, guessed better
than either of them as to the future greatness of its
dwelling-place, but the growth proved commercial rather
than spiritual (as an Athenian might say). Sparks, in
his article on Baltimore in the North American, 1825,
which practically introduced the city to the North, said
that the enterprising spirit of its people was much more
energetic in its combined and continued action than that
of any other city of the United States. But though the
centre of Roman Catholic wealth and culture (so much
so that the Metropolitan, a Catholic monthly, styles her
in 1830 the Rome of America), Beatrice Ironside thought
she cared more for her pocket than her mind and her
soul. The editor of The Companion (a mere man !) had
given up his hopeless struggle for five hundred subscrib-
ers, but Beatrice, who had been his assistant, announced
that she would continue the journal herself under the
name of The Observer. (Note how the gentle intimacy
of the former title gives way to the emotionless alertness
of the latter — can this be a forecast of feminism?)
Beatrice the energetic thus taps Baltimore over its acqui-
line nose with her lively pen :

Oh, that mine enemy were editor of a Baltimore Miscellany,
and were he anything less than iron, how quickly would all my
wrongs be avenged. The attempt of a female to promote the
cause of taste, literature, and morals would, it should seem,
have been cherished with respect and forwarded with assistance
and encouragement. But alas ! luckless Dame, not long were
the illusions of thy fancy to deceive thee. Do the sheets of the
Observer contain only dissertations on morality and selections
from the best authors, however judicious, every one exclaims
how dull, how insupportable; on the other hand, does Beatrice
endeavour to enliven the page by using the arm of ridicule to
combat folly, a thousand divinities suppose themselves pointed
at. Every illustration of character that Beatrice has used has,
by the folly of some and the black malignity of others, been ap-
propriated to persons far from her imagination. If Beatrice
refuses to embellish the Observer with the sublimities of the
sons of the dullest of dull prose who forcibly scramble up Par-

i8o THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

nassus, they become her sworn and inveterate enemies. Thus
is poor Beatrice assailed in every quarter; every weapon is
raised against her, except wit ; and of that, Heaven be praised,
she has no very heavy cause of complaint. Oh, that mine
enemy were editor to a miscellany in the liberal, the enlight-
ened, the polished city of Baltimore ! ! !

Yet, in spite of this delightful Beatrice, Baltimore was
for the first quarter of the century the only literary-
centre, such as it was, south of Philadelphia. During
that period it published at least twelve magazines; and
it had a literary club, The Delphian, which issued a
periodical, the Red Book, and numbered among its mem-
bers Neal, Sparks, John Pierpont, Francis Scott Key,
and William Wirt; and, lastly, it made the Athenian
attempt which distinguished, at one time or another, all
the Northern triplicate of cities — that of capturing
every household by an attractive union of politics and
fashion-plates. Thus it had decided claims to recogni-
tion. Its chief enduring claim, however, was of so
pedestrian a nature that it has generally been overlooked.
Yet Niks' Weekly Register ^vas an extraordinary achieve-
ment. It was published from 1811 to 1849! Once, in
the prime of its long life, it migrated to Washington for
three years; and it retired to Philadelphia for a nice
quiet place to die in (and during its final year there it
was only half alive, since its animation was suspended for
three months of that period!). "Containing political,
historical, geographical, scientifical, statistical^ economi-
cal, and biographical documents, essays, and facts, to-
gether with notices of the arts and manufactures and a
record of the events of the times " — you would scarcely
suppose that its editor would have found the spare
moments for a series of humorous essays entitled Quill
Driving (although you may guess the title was not en-
tirely an inspiration) and a book of importance on the
Principles and Acts of the Revolution. So important
did his generation find the Weekly Register that a General

ATHENSES THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN i8i

Index to the first twelve volumes was published in t8i8;
and so valuable did a succeeding generation find it as a
contribution to American history, that it reprinted the
first thirty-two volumes. Well might two American
towns be named in honour of the father of so monumental
a record! Beatrice Ironside ceased to issue a weekly
repertory of original and selected essays in verse and
prose ere Niles could record her as one of the events of
the times, but the year 1806-07 glitters more brightly for
the scribe who places this wreath on her unknown brow
than all the period covered so painstakingly by his stu-
pendous register. Did she make much ado about nothing
when she smartly berated Benjamin Bickerstafif, for say-
ing that the sun of The Observer had set when he left its
pages in a huff — he, the oracle of most of the little misses
of the town? Opera-boufTe Boadicea amongst those for-
gotten beaux and belles, and first of editresses, hail!
Not many stars in your pamphlet era were dancing like
that one under which you were born.

Thirty years after in time, and a whole century in
style, another Southern woman followed her example.
But Mrs. Anne Royall inaugurated a new kind of
paper — the Town Topics of its year — when she estab-
lished a weekly devoted to gossip of the sayings and
doings of men and women of her day. It was not in-
appropriately named The Huntress, and Washington af-
forded her an abundance of prey. So relentlessly did she
stalk it that John Quincy Adams called her " the virago-
errant in enchanted armour," the latter part of the phrase
referring doubtless to the immunity which chivalry was
fancied to dictate. No fire-eater fought any duels with
Mrs. Royall, it is true ; but, on the other hand, while her
censure was no more vindictive and personal than was
most men's of the time, her praise had a saccharinity
which would have stumped even the most grandiloquent
masculine pen.

When you went farther South than Baltimore and

i82 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

Washington, you jumped all at once into another civilisa-
tion. It was that of a landed aristocracy, says Professor
Baskerville.

The settlers lived far apart, and the many rivers allowed
them even to dispense to a great extent v^ith roads. To the
private schools at rich gentlemen's houses the poor seldom
had access, and a free school system did not exist. So the
newspaper, the next great educating power, found uncongenial
soil in the Southern Colonies. Literature was thought to be
undertaken only by those who had been a failure in law, poli-
tics, or the Church. All over the South, even in the smaller
towns, were coteries of men and women who lived in an atmos-
phere of wit and learning; but the eighteenth century reigned
supreme, and artificially vitiated everything.

In 1834, an article in the Charleston Southern Review
sought to account for Southern literary sterility by the
imperfect education of the people. In Colonial times
Charleston had been a world by itself, and even now it
seemed immeasurably remote. " An awful retribution
hangs over the Boston book-sellers," wrote Samuel Gil-
man to Sparks in 1824, " for their vile neglect of sending
periodical publications to Charleston. We never get them
till more than a month after their publication." An-
other Charlestonian wrote him : " I will readily under-
take to procure for you the works which may appear in
this State and Georgia. You are aware that our press
is a very sterile one. Of periodical publications we have
one, the Southern Christian Register, an Episcopalian
magazine." But considering the scantiness of her read-
ing public, the Charleston press was only comparatively
sterile. Indeed, she had been derisively called by less
ambitious neighbours the graveyard of magazines. To
this jest she could afford to reply calmly that in order
to die one must first have been born. At any rate she
had brought forth at least ten first-class magazines, and
also the one professional man of letters in the South —
even if poverty had obliged him, patriotic as he was, to
send most of his goods to the North, where they could
afford to pay for them. William Gilmore Simms was

ATHENSES THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 183

connected with over half these attempts. The Cosmo-
politan, An Occasional proved to deserve its epithet, and
the Magnolia or Southern Appalachian struck no roots;
but the Southern Reviezv, in 1828, dragged its slow
length along for four years. It was perhaps the most
perfect example America afforded of that scholarly con-
tempt for popular demand which the English reviews
had set native classicists to admiring. The men are not
living who have read it throughout, but such as have
emerged from its covers come up gasping their surprise
that an unsettled and isolated district could have been
thought capable of producing in sufficient numbers the
savants who would have found such fare palatable.
Even the stately North American had not ventured to be
so exclusively classical or scientific. Nor did the South-
ern Review make, apparently, the slightest attempt to
secure general attention. Enough for it that able schol-
ars all over the South were deeply interested in the
subscriptions they received in return for their valuable
articles ! But in spite of their thus highly paid services,
Legare, its editor for two years, had often to furnish half
the contents. Consequently, when he went to represent
the country at Brussels, the magazine collapsed.

In 1845 Simm's Southern and Western Monthly issued
twelve numbers, filled for the most part by the proprietor,
and was important enough to get itself purchased by the
Literary Messenger of Richmond. In 1849 he became
editor of the Southern Quarterly Reznew, which, es-
tablished in 1842 in New Orleans, had moved to Charles-
ton. This magazine was founded " to protect the rights
if our Southern soil from invasion and to promote the
Luse of learning, arts and literature among us. But
iside from its political creed it would have none other —
ibove all it would express no theological opinion."
Nevertheless, though Charleston held as hotly to this
creed as New Orleans, the review had run down; and
on account of his great local reputation Simms was en-
gaged to revive it at a salary of one thousand a year.

i84 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

Though Simms was not an apostle of its creed, he was
for a time successful in floating it. " In two years,"
says Professor Trent, " he had made a very respectable
publication out of a worthless one, comparing not un-
favourably with its Boston contemporary. He got almost
none of his salary, but from paying nothing to his con-
tributors he advanced to the almost unheard of extrava-
gance of paying the best of them a dollar a page. It is
true that the publishers often dishonoured the drafts
drawn on them by eager contributors, but still some pay-
ments were made. He himself got part of his salary in
the free printing of his books and pamphlets. He used
his social acquaintance to enlarge the subscription list."
Thus altogether, he was a very valuable editor, espe-
cially if he himself wrote for nothing. But as he was
writing novels, articles for other magazines, an intermin-
able correspondence, and lecturing from city to city like
any modern Chautauquan during the seven years of his
editorship, it does not seem as if even his very remark-
able energy could have found much time for contributing
to its pages. In 1854, the year before he relinquished it,
he said it had readers in every State and in the three great
European capitals. It lasted only one year after his
departure, but its demise was assisted by a fever and a
fire.

Long before this, however, a former associate editor
had doubled on the tracks of the magazine and founded
one of his own in New Orleans. Its literary interest was
confessedly secondary to ** defending the rights and de-
veloping the resources of the West, the South, and the
Southwest.'' The Commercial Review, 1846, had learned
from the Quarterly how few were the Southern readers
for an exclusively literary periodical ; nevertheless it kept
literature always well in sight. After many struggles,
De Bow was able to announce in the sixth, volume the
largest circulation and the strongest influence in the South.
But this did not interfere with a temporary suspension
or his tortuous progress through no less than six New

ATHENSES THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 185

Series. His experience found an indignant voice in 1855,
" Is it not a notorious fact that every Southern author,
editor, or compiler who has had the temerity to try the
experiment of appealing to that dernier resort, Southern
patronage, has been compelled to pay the piper of his
patriotism. How generously we continue to patronise
Harper and Blackwood, Godey and Graham, and the
quarterlies of the North, while the Southern Quarterly
is in the very act of breathing its last gasp and De Bow's
Monthly reduced to appeal for its just dues." Still
De Bozv's, more successful than its neighbour, not only
maintained the spark of life by continuous gasping, but
actually began to find the process salutary. The year
before the war saw it flourishing; but the next year much
diminished the advertising it had built up, and the scarcity
of paper compelled a smaller type. In 1853 the proprie-
tor had been appointed head of the Census Department
in Washington, and had for eighteen months edited the
periodical from there. He thought he could do the same
thing from the Rebel capital when he moved there on
service for the new government. But at last the sturdy
proprietor was unable to make both ends meet, in a geo-
graphical and a pecuniary sense as well, and he yielded
to fate. Immediately after the war he bobbed up in-
domitably with another New Series, but the old war-
horse was now making his last charge ; and his periodical
soon gave up the fight for literature and became entirely
commercial.

He, like the other editors of the South, was seeking
valorously to do the impossible — to create a sufficient
reading public out of an uneducated people. The three
magazines described had the largest circle of readers to
be reached, they gave a voice to the best writers of the
South, and they had great part in moulding the issues
that ended in war. There was abundant literary activ-
ity, if only there had been some market for it. Even
in the decade before the war there were seventeen maga-
zines started, and Russell's added another to the long

i86 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

procession in Charleston alone. The editors, however,
could scarcely live on each other's patronage ; readers were
widely dispersed under the plantation system; and even
had the periodicals been readable to others than those
stimulated by motives of local patriotism, Northern people
were not paying money to hear that the North under the
farce of the Union — as even so unimpassioned a periodi-
cal as the Southern Quarterly said — " threatens to crush
us beneath its unholy power."

It was largely because the Southern Literary Messenger
was less sectional that it became the most successful maga-
zine of the South. But, like the others, it got only
starvation diet at home. In the fourth number — as we
read in Minor's admirable digest of its files — the editor
admits some of the contents are not up to the standard,
but his aim is to call forth the undeveloped talents of the
Southern people; yet he is compelled to announce that
he has received more complimentary notice in the North
than in the South outside his own State. The number
of contributions and contributors from the North is
striking. The second proprietor asserted at once that it
was not intended to make the work local, but it should
never cease to be Southern ; and a home enterprise should
have home support. The Messenger in its twenty-first
year informed its friends that it had now become the
oldest living periodical except the Knickerbocker, which
was its senior by but six months; yet for years past it
had met with the most meagre patronage, and unless its
means were enlarged must perish. It notes in 1858 that
Putnam's spiteful Monthly had gone where the woodbine
twineth, but the rising Atlantic is decidedly anti-Southern.
The next year the editor says that the Messenger has
been much less sectional in its literary works than the
Northern magazines and that it has been just and im-
partial to Northern writers. As Mrs. Sigourney had
written for the very first number, so Donald G. Alitchell
and Thomas Bailey Aldrich had graced the latest ones.

The accusation of sectionalism, of course, was rife on

ATHENSES THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 187

both sides. It could not have been otherwise in the later
years. But Richmond had begun it early. The National
Magazine, 1799-1800, had said: " Sixty-six subscribers
from Connecticut leads us into the region of wonders.
This is the State which sends to Congress seven of the
most bullying servile satellites that tremble at the nod
of John Adams. It looks as if the people of Connecticut
were beginning to think for themselves." Yet " the dis-
gusting New England assumption of all the decency and
all the talent " which Poe said was rampant in Griswold's
Poets and Poetry of America is, at this distance, difficult
to perceive. Talent was not abundant in the then ante-
bellum literature of the South, but when it was to be dis-
cerned by eyes that had no reason to be unduly inquisitive
it did not go unrecognised — as Simms and Poe and
Augusta Evans could vouch. Not unrepresentative in
its temperate tone was this notice in the Boston American
Magazine of Useful Knowledge, 1834:

We were surprised to find the last Southern Literary Messen-
ger charging Mr. Bancroft with great mistakes in his History
of the United States. The editor, who appears an able writer,
even insinuates that they are designed. It cannot be admitted
that Mr. Bancroft deliberately misstated facts, but that the
editor is more fully acquainted with the history oi Virginia is
not improbable. We were sorry to see this disposition and hope
it will not be indulged. Errors and mistakes ought, indeed, to
be corrected ; but even this should be done in a kind rather than
in a harsh manner. Sectional or party feelings among literary
men in different parts of the Union would be deeply deplored
by every patriot, and we think by every high-minded scholar.
We have had enough of this sort of warfare with England for
fifty years past. We hope that nothing of the sort will arise be-
tween the scholars and writers in different sections here.

But if the periodical was more readable because less
sectional, and being so had some support, however slight,
from the North, the chief reason for its success was that
Thomas White, its founder, was a thoroughly practical
man both in the printing and the business offices. When
he inaugurated it in 1834, he announced himself only

i88 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

printer and proprietor, and said that he would engage an
editor when he could. His editorial work was done by
others, at first gratuitously. R. H. Stoddard wrote :

The first number consisted of thirty-two double column octavo
pages, and its subscription price was five dollars. I am not
prepared to say it was worse than the average of its time, but
it was pretty bad. Two months passed before the second ap-
peared, and it could hardly be said to be superior to its prede-
cessor. The third number, which was extended to sixty-four
pages, was instructive if not entertaining. By whatever stand-
ard it was measured it was a failure. Mr. White had not been
sustained by the leading writers of America further than by
their good wishes, for not one of them had contributed a line to
the luckless periodical.

It bettered its promise, however, and in another year
every one in the North had heard of its existence. White
lived to manage it nine years. From 1847 to i860 John
R. Thompson conducted it. The next year it began to
pull out the Editor's Table in a way long since discovered
to be symptomatic, but Augusta Evans kept up interest
by her Beulah. The editor formally committed the
periodical to secession and urged Virginia to follow suit.
That it should have continued at all during the war is
testimony to the vitality which had enabled it to starve
for so long a period. The growing depreciation of
money raised the price to five dollars (Thompson had re-
duced it to three), then to eight, ten, and fifteen. Four
double numbers were issued to make up for deficiencies ;
a monthly record of the war filled many pages, but the
magazine was forced to grow more and more eclectic.
Finally, in 1865, without notice, it abandoned its magnifi-
cent struggle. It had fought a good fight if it had not
finished its course. No magazine but the North Ameri-
can had yet lived so long as this thirty-year-old veteran,
which weathered starvation to fall in actual battle at
last. None had struggled with more adverse conditions ;
none had so well or so lastingly preserved its tradition.

It is said that " Horseshoe Robinson '* Kennedy, of j
Baltimore, called White's attention to Poe. He had beei

ATHENSES THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 189

a most popular contributor to the first volume, and with
the second became assistant editor. He got out just
twelve numbers. " Before the end of the spring," says
Minor, " the Knickerbocker and the Mirror had refused
to exchange with the Messenger on account of his crit-
iques. Even home papers began to speak of Poe's
' queerities ' and the * regular cutting and slashing ' of
his notices; and Poe had well begun his lifelong offen-
sive." In January, 1837, there is a notice that " Mr.
Poe's attention having been called in another direction,
he will decline with the present number the editorial duties
of the Messenger, but he will continue to furnish its
columns with the effusions of his vigorous and popular
pen." One of White's letters to Poe shows that it was
his intemperance which severed his connection, but White
seems to have been genuinely sorry to part with him and
to have conducted the affair with all delicacy. He spoke
highly of him in print, and he gave Poe a puff on his
becoming editor of Burton's. Poe did not contribute
until 1844, and the next year it was announced that he
would again write critical articles.

With his stories and his criticisms during the meagre
two years of his connection with the magazine, Poe was
certainly able to reflect that, as at no time in her previous
literary history, he had put Richmond on the map. But
the letter he wrote to Anthon when projecting the Stylus
was somewhat flamboyant. " I had joined the Mes-
senger, as you know, then in its second year, with seven
hundred subscribers; and the general outcry was that
because a magazine had never succeeded south of the
Potomac, therefore a magazine never could succeed. Yet
in spite of this and the wretched taste of the proprietor,
which hampered and controlled me at all points, I in-
creased the circulation in fifteen months to five thousand
five hundred subscribers, paying an annual profit of ten
thousand dollars when I left it." White would have
been interested to find out where this enormous sum of
money was going. In 1840 he was writing Griswold:

I90 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

"If you choose to give me your labours for one dollar
and fifty cents a page Bourgeois type and two dollars for
Minion, go ahead. And even at these rates, my dear
friend, you will have to be most patient with me. In-
deed, you will be obliged to suffer me to take my own
time to pay this pittance." Had John R. Thompson
known of this colossal increase in the subscription list
due to the noise Poe was making in the North, perhaps
he would not have complained so bitterly in a letter to
Griswold that Southern literature could not succeed there.
"The Messenger is almost gone," he said in 185 1.
" Four years of hard labour find me in debt, my small
patrimony exhausted." Yet the periodical had a greater
literary reputation under him than under Poe, even if it
did not elicit so much lively comment. Apparently,
though without him it would not have bulked so large
in contemporary mention, Poe neither made nor broke
the Literary Messenger,

In 1835 James Freeman Clarke wrote to Emerson from
Cincinnati, " I send you the prospectus of a magazine
which we are about getting under way, and which we
mean to make the leading Western periodical. We in-
tend to combine literature and other matters with religion,
and make it generally attractive. We intend that it shall
be Western in its character, and as free from merely
conventional restrictions as may be."

This was the Western Messenger, of which he shortly
became editor ; and it then moved to Louisville so that he
could have an eye on his pulpit and his periodical at the
same time. In spite of many misgivings that his eye
should be single unto the former, he remained editor until
his departure for Boston ; and then the magazine migrated
to its new editor, Channing, back in its first home; and
travelled no more until it joined the choir invisible in
1841. Curiously enough, no paper could have been more
Bostonian than this which Clarke intended should be
Western. For the conventional restrictions he wished to
free it from were the same as those condemned by

ATHENSES THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 191

Emerson when contemplating his " organ of spiritual
philosophy." Largely supported by Eastern Unitarians,
in it the Transcendental movement which hung fire in
Cambridge for five years found its first public voice;
and, parent of the Dial, it expired soon after it had
plucked its best feathers for its offspring. Emerson first
appeared in print there ; Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret
Fuller contributed , and its editors and assistants and eight
others of its writers betook themselves to the Eastern
messenger as the Western showed signs of running down.
But it is worthy of remark that those transcendentalists
that had sojourned in the West thought that some of the
Eastern ecstasies were a little too rarefied for intelligi-
bility. It is also noteworthy that in spite of its constant
struggles with practical demands, the Western Messenger ,
though a voice crying in the wilderness, lasted about two
years longer than the Eastern evangel. As few of the
denizens of the Ohio Valley could have fathomed what
the Messenger was driving at, it seems likely that most
of its readers really bought it — which is more than can
be said of the other. Both were distinguished by much
original and stimulative writing of rare excellence.
Distinctive, also, like everything transcendental, was
Dial number two — which took the name (with unshod
feet and hushed breath) some six years after Emerson's
had ceased to measure the sunshine. It was grandchild
of the Western Messenger, and also the extra-mural work
of a minister. To it flocked the elder dialists with
Emerson and Frothingham, although the editor himself
contributed most of the pages. But let Moncure D.
Conway tell his own story :

My theological and philosophical heresies reported in the Ohio
journals excited discussion far and near, and a magazine became
inevitable. In January, i860, it appeared; the Dial, a monthly
magazine for literature, philosophy, and religion. It was well
received, had a large subscription list — the Jews especially in-
teresting themselves. I was cheered by letters, and one brought
me William Dean Howells. He noticed it in the Ohio State

192 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

Journal, and said, "Until now Boston has been the only place
in the land where the inalienable right to think what you please
has been practised and upheld. If Cincinnati can place herself
beside Boston on this serene eminence, she will accomplish a
thing nobler than pork, sublimer than Catawba, more magnifi-
cent than Pike's Opera House. It numbers among its contribu-
tors some of the most distinguished thinkers of New England,
and it seeks to bring out all the thinkers of the West." The
Dial at the end of the first year was really slain by the Civil
War several months in advance of its outbreak. We could not
continue literary and philosophical discussions, and the war of
pens and words between the anti-slavery people and the Union-
ists who proposed pacification. Should the time arrive when
the West is interested in its intellectual and religious history,
the Dial will be found a fair mirror of the movements of
thought in that period of extraordinary generous seeking.

Period, indeed, of extraordinary generous seeking.
It was in the journals of the Middle West that the anti-
slavery agitation found its widest public utterance.
Clarke in the first number of the Messenger had quoted
twelve pages from W. S. Channing's Slavery, and con-
demned both that system and the principles of the Aboli-
tionists. On the destruction of the printing-press of
Lovejoy at Alton, Illinois, and his death at the hands of
the mob, he wrote passionately, " Abolitionism, its folly
and its mischief, is not now the question. The question
is of American freedom, of liberty of thought and speech,
of the freedom of the press." That freedom was no-
where so maintained as in the Ohio Valley. For reasons
of policy the Eastern periodicals were barred to discus-
sion of slavery. Even " on the serene eminence " of
Boston, Lydia Maria Child and Julia Ward Howe were
made to feel chill disapproval. The former had been
systematically frozen out of the monthly press because
of her views. " Life is growing too earnest with me to
admit of my writing pretty stories," she wrote to Gris-
wold, " and thus the effect of unpopularity is no incon-
venience to me." The North American decidedly dis-
couraged articles about slavery; the Knickerbocker
printed only such views as were shared by gentlemen

ATHENSES THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 193

everywhere; the editor of Graham's wrote Longfellow
in 1842 that the word slavery was never allowed to appear
in a Philadelphia periodical, and that the publisher ob-
jected to have even the name of his new book, Poems
on Slavery, appear in the pages. Except in periodicals
founded by the Abolitionists, and which were read
only by Abolitionists, there was little freedom of the
press in the popular sense. Such as existed was cradled
in the Ohio Valley, perhaps more than elsewhere. The
Richmond Examiner, the most famous Southern journal,
was unique — North or South — for printing views
which were not its own or might cost it subscribers. It
gave extracts from the anti-slavery writers, especially
Theodore Parker. Its freedom, by the way, was more
praiseworthy than its logic, for it reconciled slavery with
the most radical democracy on the ingenious ground that
the blacks were not strictly human beings.

Professor Stowe had written to his wife in 1840:
" The little magazine (the Souvenir) goes ahead finely.
You have it in your power by means of it to form the
mind of the West for the coming generation." The task
was peculiarly congenial to Mrs. Stowe, of course, but
it was an ideal that actuated all the magazines of the
West. In 1850 she wrote to him: "I can earn four
hundred dollars a year by writing, but I don't want to
feel that I must, and when weary with teaching the
children and tending the baby and buying provisions and
mending the dresses and darning stockings, sit down and
write a piece for some paper." She had met Dr. Gamaliel
Bailey when he and James Birney started the earliest anti-
slavery paper in the West, the Cincinnati Philanthropist.
Three times there his printing office had been sacked by
a mob, but he issued the paper regularly. He was selected
to direct a new Abolitionist organ in Washington, and
he carried to the National Era ( 1847-1860) the spirit of
extraordinary generous seeking he had found in Cincin-
nati when he moved there from Baltimore. Mrs. Stowe
wrote him in 1852 that she was planning a story that

194 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

might run through several numbers. He applied for it
at once and she began to send off weekly instalments of
Uncle Tom's Cabin. The year's work brought her
three hundred dollars. Dr. Bailey issued his periodical
to subscribers on, apparently, a strictly cash basis.
" Every paper is stopped at the beginning of each year
where the subscription is not forwarded in advance," ran
the announcement. Such barks had been heard before
with no bites behind them, but the National Era seems to
have meant what it said. In 1850 they were happy to
announce as an occasional contributor, Nathaniel Haw-
thorne, lately secured as a writer for Blackwoods. " He
has favoured us with an article, which we now hold back
for a week or two, only for the sake of those of our sub-
scribers who under our terms have been cut off, but will
doubtless speedily renew." The article was The Great
Stone Face, presumably that for which the author wrote
Griswold that Bailey had offered him one hundred dollars.
The National Era of course, like every other periodical,
got most of its contents for nothing, but to even its head
liners it could not afford to pay so much later. Dr.
Bailey wrote Gail Hamilton in 1856 that for two years
he had been compelled to be rigidly economical. "If
you can afford to wait, I will on the first week of next
December," he said in February, " send you a remittance
of fifty dollars, for which you may send me whatever you
please in your best style of prose sketches at any time
between this and then." When the time came he paid her,
but said that his misfortunes still continued and he would
be unable to make any offer for the future. The year
after his sudden death Mrs. Bailey conducted the periodi-
cal, but was forced to discontinue for lack of money —
though none of the receipts, she said, had gone even to
the support of her family. De Bow in New Orleans
had sunk his private means and lived on twenty cents a
day to start his magazine. Mrs. Bailey, delicately nur-
tured, suffered privation to continue her husband's. The
one was for slavery, the other against; and both were

ATHENSES THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 195

passionately desirous of bettering their world. Dr.
Bailey was in one respect wiser than his corresponding-
editor, Whittier ; at least one cannot imagine his Northern
associate planning the astute social campaign which Con-
way tells about:

Dr. and Mrs. Gamaliel Bailey of the National Era had estab-
lished in Washington a brilUant salon. At their soirees there
were always distinguished guests from abroad, and Grace Green-
wood was on these occasions quite equal to any of those French
dames whose salons have become historic. The Bailey enter-
tainments were of more importance in furthering anti-slavery
sentiment in Washington than has been appreciated. The anti-
slavery Senators were rarely met there, with the exception of
Hale ; but their ladies often came. Nothing in Washington was
more brilliant. The serious force and learning characteristic
of the National Era could hardly prepare one to find in Dr.
Bailey the elegant and polished gentleman that he was. He was
the last man that one might imagine facing the mob that de-
stroyed his printing press in Cincinnati. I do not wonder that
the mob gathered for similar violence in Washington had
quailed before his benign countenance and calm good-natured
address to them. Mrs. Bailey, a tall, graceful, and intellectual
woman, possessed all the nerve necessary to pass through these
ordeals, while at the same time her apparent role was that of
introducing young ladies into Washington society and shining
as the centre of a refined social circle.

This social quality they had had plenty of opportunity
to exhibit in Cincinnati. Conway thought it in 1856,
when he went there, the most cultivated of the Western
cities. " Thanks to a third of the population being Ger-
man, music flourished more than in any other city except
Boston; there was a grand opera house which annually
gave several weeks of opera or operatic concerts. Soci-
ety was gay and its famous masquerade balls were as
brilliant as those of Europe. Whitelaw Reid, Don Piatt,
and Murat Halstead were writers on its distinguished
daily press." By that time, too, it had made good its
early-uttered claim to the title of Athens of the West
in a longer list of short periodicals than any other city
but its three Athenian predecessors. It had begun with
the Literary Cadet, which had merged into the Western

I

196 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

Spy, but both of these young hopefuls died early. They
both struck a bugle note, however, which could scarcely
have been duplicated in any of the Atlantic magazines
of the time; and for the equal of that clear blast of
mingled youth fulness and sophistication one would have
to go back to the mushroom efforts of the Colonial and
Revolutionary periods. It proved to be the Western
tone. Crude as it was at its worst, it never lost that
clarion ring which is the property of all new movements
conscious of their destiny to supersede the old.

Mr. W. H. Venable has made a specialised survey of
the periodicals of the Ohio Valley. The first adventure
entirely literary in Cincinnati was the Literary Gazette,
1824. " This is the age of magazines, even sceptics must
confess it; where is the town of much renown that has
not one to bless it?" wrote one of the contributors to
the opening number. The editor lamented, however, that
his readers must part with the year and the Gazette to-
gether; thus was furnished one more instance of the
futility of all hopes founded on the anticipated encourage-
ment of those intellectual exertions which contribute to
soften and adorn life among a people whose highest
ambition would seem to be exhausted in acquiring the
means of support. The editor, like Clarke and Conway
and others of a later harvest, drew on his personal ac-
quaintance East, for we find in the magazine three poems
of his boyhood's friend, Fitz Greene Halleck. In 1827
Flint's Western Monthly Review was more successful,
and lasted for three years. " We are a scribbling and a
forth-putting people," said the Editor's Address.
" Little as they have dreamed the fact in the Atlantic
country, we have our thousand orators and poets." Like
the other three Athenses, Cincinnati tried to catch with
honey those households whose men remained impervious
to the attractions of solider fare. The motto of the
Western Lady's Book, 1840, was so rash in its blandish-
ments that the periodical could not survive the first num-
ber — " The Stability of Our Republic and the Virtue

ATHENSES THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 197

of Her Institutions is with the Ladies." Another of the
same name followed ten years later, and almost rounded
out a decade. In the beginning, under the name of the
Western, its masculinity was not more diluted than usual ;
but caught like all American editors by the golden lure
of Godey's, the proprietor announced that because of the
liberal patronage of the ladies it would become more
exclusively a lady's book by introducing fashion-plates
and music. The introduction of the latter was ever the
stamp of the ultra refinement of the fair sex. Perhaps
it was in this case meant to mollify the weaker of the
weaker sex by a possession all their own, since they
shared the fashion-plates with their stronger sisters.
They might easily have taken umbrage at the attention
given the latter — for " by special arrangement with the
proprietor," Mrs. E. A. Aldrich, having suspended her
woman's rights paper, the Genius of Liberty, wrote eight
or ten pages a month advocating her savage views. In
the " Fashions " the lion and the lamb could lie down
together, but certainly no one who demanded the ballot-
box would be expected to dally with the pianoforte.
This policy of all things to all women was worthy of a
longer shift. By far the most extensive and expensive
literary journal was the Ladies' Repository and Gather-
ings of the West, says Mr. Venable. (Whither have such
titles fled and on what frontier will ever again exist the
psychology that brought them forth in pain and heavi-
ness?) "Started nine years before the first number
of Harper's, it was almost the only Western magazine
that was well-backed and supported. It was managed by
the Methodist Book Concern but was conducted in a
liberal spirit from 1841 to 1876. Designed to furnish
reading particularly acceptable to women and the family
circle and at first abounding with heavy advice to females,
it immeasurably and unceasingly belectured and relegated
misses, maids, and matrons to their sphere." Never-
theless, it fostered female writing and it often paid in
cash — both of them quite surprising in the Methodist

198 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

Book Concern. The Parlour Magadne, which would
doubtless have called itself a Lady's Book had not the
title been filled at the moment, was also conducted on^
rather austere lines at first. The edita/ had no intention
of debauching any parlours by admitting sentimental
romances. Alice Gary came back from New York to
infuse the slightest touch of worldliness in it, but she soon
returned. The Parlour Magazine dragged along wood-
enly for two years, its new romances being as edifying
as its old articles against them, and finally married in 1855
the West American Monthly, of which union it died at j
once. Two other Cincinnati periodicals come in for brief ^
mention. Both of them scorned the obvious feminine
bid, it is true, but their chief claim to be mentioned here
is that they so well typify the Westerness that gave them
birth. In 1847 Coates Kinney, the author of that famous
lyric, The Rain on the Roof, was assistant editor of
The Genius of the West. The other editor had trouble
with the proprietor and set up a rival journal. The New
Western, the Original Genius of the West. It soon went
out, however, and the other Genius burned alone for five
volumes. Then, second characteristic of these Western
periodicals, all of its good contributors went to the sea-
board and left it without any oil in its lamp. These were
the Gary girls, Wallace, Whitelaw Reid, and Howells —
eastward the course of the Inspired took its way.

The chief furtherer of the cause of periodical literature
in the West was W. D. Gallagher. He did not, it is true,
start so many magazines as did L. A. Hine, who set four
of them going in six years, but he staved off his creditors
longer in each case. Hine had plenty of ideals but never
enough cash to last the year out. Gallagher was responsi-
ble for but three, and all cut a dash except the first — the
Western Minerva, started in 1824. He was sixteen years
old when this Minerva sprang forth mature from his
head, and he was writing verses for the Literary Gazette
signed, not Jove, but " Julia." When he began the Gin- ^
cinnati Mirror in 1832, he was guaranteed a salary. But

ATHENSES THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 199

it never paid its way in spite of its extensive circulation
(what a pity some of those honest Jews of Swine-sin-
naughty — as a famous parody dubbed it — didn't rally
to his support as they did to Conway's !) ; and the guaran-
tee amounted to what it usually did in such cases. The
paper lasted, however, four years. " Many of the Mir-
ror's articles have received a circulation unsurpassed by
any other contemporaneous literary journal," said he in
valedictory, " and yet we have been forced to abdicate
the tripod. Simply because of the delinquency of those
who have subscribed. There are due to us several thou-
sands of dollars. It now remains for our subscribers to
say whether we shall sacrifice only our time and labour
or whether we shall suffer a pecuniary loss too." The
subscribers cheerfully acquiesced in the latter alternative.
After its death he received calls to edit, one after the
other, two magazines beginning with the inevitable
" Western." Three years later he began the Hesperian.
He said in his opening speech that his ten years' exer-
tions in behalf of Western literature had been fruitless
to himself of everything but experience, yet he finds cour-
age to make one more attempt, because he is convinced
that there is throughout the whole West a great demand
and a growing necessity for it. The Hesperian was im-
portant and had some important contributors. But Gal-
lagher, who had been willing to starve when he had noth-
ing, was now tempted to eat when he could, and betook
himself to a mere newspaper at a liberal salary for the
rest of his days. The paper, like all newspapers, had
a somewhat pretentious literary department, but not large
enough to endanger his salary. This defection from
the cause of pure literature should be forgiven in Gal-
lagher. The Hesperian' s publisher exhibited the grossest
remissness and most culpable mismanagement, he says;
and it is to be remembered in his favour that he was so
patriotic that he even refused the requests of Eastern
publishers when they came at last. It is amusing to note
that when the Southern Literary Messenger reviewed his

i

20O THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

first book of poems in 1838 it regretted the volume had
not been published in one of the Atlantic cities. " How
natural it is to condemn a book unread that has the im-
print of a country town." This from that arrogant
Athenian hamlet of the South to a city which was not
only the Athens of the West but a pork-metropolis as
well!

Yet for many years Lexington, Kentucky, had run
her a close race as Athens. The seat of the Transylvania
University, during the War of 181 2, she had the right
long before that to be called a literary centre. As early
as 1803 she had maintained for one whole year the
Medley or Monthly Miscellany, In 18 19 she ran for
two years the Western Review, which chided the mor-
als of Don Juan and chortled with delight over Ivanhoe
quite in the same way as its Eastern brothers, if a good
four months later. The most important part of its con-
tents, says Mr. Venable, was a series of authentic narra-
tives of conflicts with the Indians. " Gentlemen who
are not in the habit of writing for the public, and who are
not even accustomed to composition of any sort, are
still solicited to communicate, in the plainest manner, the
facts within their knowledge," the far-sighted editor had
stated in the opening number. This and its predecessor
were the first literary magazines west of the Alleghanies,
but when Lexington's third came along in 1829 there
were competitors. The Literary Messenger and Clarke
made Louisville known to the North just as the Southern
Messenger and Poe had made Richmond known; and
George D. Prentice was almost the first in that brilliant
procession of personal editors which made the West
famous and of which Colonel Watterson, in the same
city, is now the last survivor.

Other towns which threatened to set up as Athenses
but were nipped in the bud were Knoxville and Rogers-
ville in Tennessee and New Richmond and Lebanon in
Ohio, with one magazine each. Mount Pleasant and
Oxford, Ohio, had two; and so had Vandalia, Illinois.

ATHENSES THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 201

The activity of the entire region is shown by the fact that
out of three hundred and fifty-nine newspapers published
in 18 1 3, Kentucky had seventeen, Ohio had fourteen, and
Tennessee had six. Of these magazines only the Van-
dalia ones can be noticed. The Illinois Magazine, con-
ducted by Judge Hall, said that paper shipped from Pitts-
burgh in November did not arrive until April. Mr. W.
B. Cairns quotes from the Department of Literary Intel-
ligence in one of the numbers : " We have not a great
deal to say under this head, because new books are not re-
markably abundant in Vandalia. Nor do we expect to be
able at any time to throw much light upon the passing
events of the literary world. But we intend to pick up
all we can." The Western Monthly, conducted by the
same editor, boasted thirty-seven contributors, all but
three from its own side of the mountains. Among its
" highly gifted females " was Harriet Beecher. Her first
literary work won the prize of fifty dollars which this en-
terprising editor offered in 1833. Gallagher's Cincinnati
Mirror and Ladies' Parterre said of it, "A New England
sketch by Miss Beecher of this city is written with great
sprightliness, humour, and pathos." Before i860 at least
ninety magazines devoted wholly or in part to general
literature had appeared in the region watered by the Ohio
and its tributaries.

As for Chicago, she had had a baker's dozen. Her
first newspaper had been set up when the mail was carried
on horseback once a week to her five hundred head of
population — fit beginning for a city that by the end of
the century had achieved at least two hundred and fifty-
eight periodicals, about eighty of which were of maga-
zine rank. And almost before she outgrew her first
picket-fence she was indulging in weekly literature, the
Gem of the Prairie — fit forecast of her literary spirit.
For this proved even more aggressively Western than
the spirit of Charleston had proved Southern; and
" prairie " or " Western " or " Chicago " dominated the
title of almost every one of its successors. Mr. H. S.

I

202 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

Fleming in Magazines of a Market Metropolis has re-
viewed her career in detail. The sea-board periodicals
began to come West about the middle of the century, and
it was perhaps sufficient to drive even a more modest
town into aggressiveness to behold their utter oblivious-
ness to any country not East of the Alleghenies. Like
their Charleston brethren, Chicago editors burned to re-
port their cause aright to the exclusive East ; and like all
the pioneers, both new and old, they strove earnestly
to create a literature and disdained the aid of mere com-
mercialism and even of common-sense. The Civil War
in splitting the country into North and South, somewhat
obliterated the frontier between East and West ; and after
the war Chicago began a long struggle for metropolitan-
ism in literature. But in spite of the newer vision of her
editors, the wonder-story of her commercial prosperity
intensified her local spirit. The strident note of it, how-
ever, appeared more in their tone than in her patronage.
The Lakeside Monthly (1869), Mr. Fleming tells us,
chided Western writers for looking with unbecoming awe
upon Eastern reputations, yet was uneasily anxious to
demonstrate that the " Western " in the magazine it had
just absorbed would not portend any restriction in aim
and scope. The distinctively literary character of this
magazine approximated the Atlantic — whose title it had
doubtless intended to suggest. It at least succeeded in
making Eastern editors for the first time turn some at-
tention to Western subjects and seek Western writers.
Also, it demonstrated its kinship with the foremost
Eastern periodicals by getting itself annexed to a publish-
ing house. It lived through the fire, and long enough
to receive a proposal of consolidation from Scribner's-
Century. But like Cassius, it preferred death to creeping
between the legs of a colossus, and found an honourable
grave in 1874.

Though literary attention it had received from the
arrogant East, the first Chicago magazine to gain popu-
lar subscription, either at home or outside, was the Little

i

ATHENSES THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 203

Corporal, a children's magazine which got such extraor-
dinary foothold that it even disquieted that elderly
Boston millionaire, the Youths' Companion (still pursuing
its career, just as though Harper's Young People and the
Argosy had not successively announced that it was im-
possible to create a new audience every four years!).
Apparently, the reason for the success of the Little
Corporal and that of the Chicago Ledger, a family story
paper modelled after Bonner's, was that each forgot to
be Western. Like the Southern, the Western magazines
entirely over-estimated local patriotism. The first Chi-
cago author to acquire national reputation did so by his
laughter at Chicago's mixture of idealism and crudity;
the wreath on the cover of Eugene Field's Culture's
Garland was a wreath of sausages, and the sub-title
of the book was " Being Memoranda of the Gradual
Rise of Literature, Music, and Society in Chicago and
Other Western Ganglia." At the beginning of the last
decade in the century, Chicago started America, a weekly
which paid enormous prices for national reputations ; yet
its circulation during its brief career remained chiefly
Western. Not until the city step-mothered the Chap
Book, did she establish a periodical, says Mr. Fleming,
which gave the manager of the Western News Company
any reason to change his dictum " Put a New York date
line on it or the West will not take it." When the
Chap Book ended its unique and international career
(during which it had been so lofty about the entire
American literary output that all the leading publishers
refused to advertise in it) it transferred its good will to
the Dial, which since 1880 had reviewed books and
literary matters in a dignified and conservative way.

America had paid Bret Harte five hundred dollars for
his dialect poem, Jim. San Francisco achieved the na-
tional fame of a literary centre for which Chicago had
vainly yearned. This had come about by no means be-
cause it was less aggressively Western but rather because
it happened to possess, along with the men, more disting-

204 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

tive and picturesque features, and its local colour was not
the familiar crimson of the slaughter house but had the
aureate glint of which the world knows all too little.
San Francisco had not so persistently striven for literary
distinction as had Chicago, and her one golden hour of it
caught and left her almost unaware. She had begun,
however, with the same aesthetic intentions. " San Fran-
cisco is only five years old," said Putnam's in April, 1854,
" yet it supports two or three theatres, an opera, a
monthly magazine, an Academy of Science, thirteen daily
papers, and we don't know how many weekly papers."
The magazine was the Pioneer or California Monthly,
established that month — too soon to say it was " sup-
ported," as the sequel proved. But the Calif ornian lived
long enough to be heard around the world, for it pub-
lished Mark Twain's first hit. The Jumping Frog.
In i860, Bret Harte became editor of the newly founded
Overland Monthly, and though it has lived ever since,
its voice never reached so far again as it did in its second
number. In this, despite the protest of the maiden proof-
reader, The Luck of Roaring Camp was published.
Harte refused to edit the magazine or write for it again
unless the proprietor yielded. A like fate had already
met the hit of a succeeding number. The Heathen
Chinee, which had been rejected by the San Francisco
News-Letter as twaddle. The history of both of these
record-breakers shows that it pays the author to have a
personal pull with the editor. But it did not pay the
Overland Monthly to make its editor so famous. For
Bret Harte succumbed to Eastern publishers and departed
carrying its fame with him; and the Overland got what
consolation it could from the fact that the Atlantic paid
him ten thousand dollars for his literary output for one :
year and in it he wrote almost nothing at all. The hen j
that had hatched ducklings saw them all depart to the dis-
tant water — which is, alas! the fate of all frontier hens.
Promising writers forsake the Athenses that may be for
th^ Athenses that are,

CHAPTER IX

Putnam's and the new journals of opinion

The ideal of a magazine which Lowell had attempted to
embody in his Pioneer (the life of which was so brief
that it might almost have been called the Minute-Man)
found another incarnation in New York before returning,
in the Atlantic, to its original dwelling-place. Still may-
be heard echoes of that joyful choir which hailed the
establishment of Putnam's. This was in 1853 — the
year of the earliest forecasting ripple of the Atlantic, by
the way. It took the Boston literati four years to per-
suade their publishers to make the venture, but either
Putnam was rasher or the New York writers more elo-
quent — for the magazine was only six months incubat-
ing. And the month that saw it absorbed into Emerson's
[beheld its delayed twin just making an appearance. The
race is not always to the swift !

All good periodicals go when they die, said Holmes,

,into the archives of the deaf, dumb, and blind recording

|angel whose name is Oblivion. But magazines which

lave lived ten times as long as Putnam's have been taken

less frequently from their dusty shelves. " Many of the

[{writers of the Dial are now connected with that successful

md independent magazine, Putnam's Monthly," wrote

^r. Frank Sanborn in the Harvard Magazine, 1855.

It is an approximation to the end for which the Dial

^as set up. When shall we have in New England a

lagazine which to the enterprise and briskness of Put-

im's shall add the high purpose and rare genius of the

Half " He seems not to have known that " the gnomon

lat should mark the full noon" (as Alcott pompously

prophesied) was even then in the second year of its ges-

205

2o6 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

tation. To that magazine long years afterwards, Holmes
wrote in retrospect. " The Atlantic was still an experi-
ment. Putnam's, owing its success largely to that very
accomplished and delightful writer, Mr. George William
Curtis, had so well deserved to live that its death was
a surprise and a source of regret. Could another monthly
take its place and keep it when that, with all its attractions
and excellencies, had died out, and left a blank in our
periodical literature which it would be very hard to fill as
well as that had filled it?"

But all unaware has the present writer, as if with the
pen of destiny, killed off the meteoric Putnam's ere it has
fairly begun. He must return to its inception. This was
due to " Harry Franco " Briggs. Like Underwood, he
represented to the publisher that the time was ripe for a
literary monthly of the highest sort, which should stand
for American literature and should at the same time
concern itself with public affairs ; but, very different from
Underwood, he could not point to an established literary
circle on which he could rely. Instead — when Putnam
had willingly listened to the voice of the tempter — a
round-robin was sent out to American authors asking if
they would give their support, and calling attention to
the announcement that the magazine would be entirely
original. Most of the replies were joyful, and com-
mented significantly on the fact that as far as originality
went there would be little domestic rivalry. The pub-
lisher said that he would pay for everything he used at
the highest rate he could afford ; and this he would raise
as time went on. He hinted at his expectation that some
of the magazine material would be available for books.
Sauce for the goose, this had no doubt been sauce for
the gander also; and there was also another inducement
to the book-publisher to undertake the enterprise. The
success of Harper's had shown that such a magazine could
be utilised as the most effective advertising machinery to
make known a publisher's list.

" Has not the long and dreary history of magazines

J

PUTNAM'S AND THE NEW OPINIONS 207

opened our eyes? " questioned Putnam's of echo in open-
ing. " Is there some siren seduction in theatres and
periodicals that forever woos managers and publishers
to a certain destruction? Why do we propose another
twelve-month voyage, in pea-green covers, toward ob-
scurity and the chaos of failures? " The answer to these
questions was the same as it had been one hundred years
before. " Because we believe the time is now ripe," and
so forth. But, aside from this perennial ripeness of the
time, there were two new bids for survival on the part
of the young aspirant. The first was its quixotic deter-
mination to be original and to accept no man's goods
without payment; the second was its intention to move
nearer to life by the discussion of every-day affairs.
For the former, the time proved, on account of certain
local and foreign conditions, to be greener than it had
ever been before. The latter attempt was less premature,
yet it brought no fruitage of enduring subscribers to
Putnam's. Indeed, for most of them it was an ideal
which suffered the fate of the medlar — to become rotten
before ripening. Few free-born American citizens had
ever been willing to have their opinion criticised, and to
pay for the pleasure was quite preposterous. It took
them some years to learn to refrain from the inalienable
right of cancelling their subscriptions at once. Of the
welfare of these two confiding ideals, C. F. Briggs, when
he opened the Second Series of Putnam's, had some in-
teresting things to say :

It is just fourteen years since we had the honour to assist in
getting out the first number of Putnam's Monthly. We derive
considerable satisfaction in remembering the cosy little dinner
in a certain cosy house in Sixteenth Street, at which the plan
of the work was discussed and the adventure determined upon.
The little party consisted of Mrs. Caroline M. Kirkland, Mr.
George Sumner, Mr. Parke Godwin, Mr. George W. Curtis,
Mr. and Mrs. Putnam, and the present writer. Two of that
little party are already gone; the rest remain to assist in the
revival. The chief doubt in the minds of many was whether
the country could furnish the requisite number of writers to

i

2o8 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

sustain an original magazine of the better class, but the experi-
ment proved there was plenty of latent talent which only re-
quired an opportunity for its development. Through certain
misadventures the work stopped for a while, but anxious in-
quiries have constantly been heard as to when it would reap-
pear No one seemed willing to believe it had stopped for
good. When the old Putnam furled its sails for a season, the
Atlantic Monthly was launched and took the flood of public
favour. In its build and trim was much that was most familiar
to us. From the numbers of the first monthly seventeen books
were printed, including Potiphar Papers and Prue and I.
Fourteen years ago it was considered an act of hari-kari for a
popular periodical to express a political opinion, particularly if
it was adverse to the " peculiar institution " of the South. But
we ventured upon it without any particular harm coming of it,
and we shall probably try it again. Certainly, we have no de-
sire to publish a magazine for readers who are too feeble to
endure a candid discussion, now and then, of political subjects.
One serial used to be considered sufficient for an English maga-
zine ; no magazine ventures now to have less than two. Ameri-
can readers are accustomed almost entirely to foreign works of
fiction, but we shall publish none but stories of native pro-
duction. ■ - ^

At the end of the first volume, the editors stated that
they had received from voluntary contributors four hun-
dred and eighty-nine articles, the greater part from
writers wholly unknown before. From them they had
selected some of the most valuable papers they had pub-
lished. Every article had been paid for at a rate which
their writers thought " liberal," all were original, and
with one exception all, they believed, had been written
for the magazine. For volume two they had as many as
nine hundred and eighty articles to choose from, and they
had had the good fortune to introduce some young writers
of promise. This number was doubled for the fourth
volume, and there could be no longer any doubt that
abundant native literary support could be found for an
American magazine. But literary support was by no
means the only thing to be considered. The publishers
stated that they were fully aware that in a country where
the choicest works of foreign genius are to be had for
the taking, to found and sustain a magazine at once uni-

PUTNAM'S AND THE NEW OPINIONS 209

versal in its sympathies and national in its tone, was not
an easy task. But the position of Putnam's, they felt,
was now assured.

No reader of this announcement could have failed to
recognise the point of this allusion. '' Harper's had for
the two years since it had been started been almost wholly
a reprint of English current literature," says Scudder's
Lowell, " and even its cover was a copy of Bentleys.
It had, however, struck a popular taste, and its success
made other publishers jealous, while its easy use of for-
eign matter made the men of letters angry." Putnam's
had little to say of the " scissors and paste-pot maga-
zines " except as they made its own position precarious.
It exhibited commendable restraint even when Harper's
published three months after its original issue in Putnam's
an American story which had been copied without credit
in Eli::;a Cook's Journal, of London. Certainly the inci-
dent afforded a tempting occasion — as did Littell's Liv-
ing Age, when it republished Longfellow's " Two An-
gels," appropriated in the same way by Bentley's — to
remind the public how the reprint magazines kept their
eyes shut to all that was going on in America. But upon
the latter subject — having a mind of their own and
speaking it — Putnam's prided itself very much ; and here
it did venture to proclaim disapproval of its rival. As
Curtis was writing for Harper's Monthly sketches and
social notes, and had The Lounger in the Weekly when
he was associate-editor of Putnam's, it may be guessed
that he was ambidextrous; in this instance, at least, he
must have kept from his right hand the knowledge of
what was going on in the neighbourhood of his left. In
March, 1857, appeared this interesting article about the
periodicals of the rival house.

When Harper's Magazine was commenced, it was in pur-
suance of a shrewd perception that the time and the country
demanded and would readily support a periodical of higher
character than what were termed the " Philadelphia magazines,"
which were, to speak generally, simply repositories of silly love

210 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

stories, rhymes, and fashion-plates, with occasional poems from
our best poets, which served as corks to float the rest of the
freight to market. Harper's was the rod that consumed all
these creeping things. It was compiled with such tact from the
stores of current literature furnished monthly by the English
periodicals; it was so copious, so various, and so entertaining,
and took the field with such an air of confident triumph that a
much inferior magazine would have succeeded. The very first
numbers were so clean and handsome and prompt and bright
that the rivals retired and the " Philadelphia magazines " lost
their exclusive prominence. The secret of its popular success
is that it just keeps pace with the popular mind; consequently
it had no opinions, no politics, no strong expression. The same
good sense and shrewd perception also saw that the unprece-
dented success of the Illustrated London News showed conclu-
sively that the public liked pictures, and that careful illustra-
tions gave an increased value to every descriptive article.
Instead, therefore, of old fashion-plates and Rosalie and Sweet
Seventeen and the Belle of the Ball-room there were two or
three elaborately written and capitally illustrated articles. The
American people had always taken the anti-British view of
Napoleon — and the most illustrious contribution to Harper's
has been the literary apotheosis of Napoleon, wherein for scores
of successive numbers that eminent saint was delineated in all
the details of his humility, piety, and unswerving devotion to
the welfare of mankind by the Reverend Mr. Abbott. This
combination of piety and military glory coinciding with the
prevailing partiality of American readers, confirmed the triumph
that was already achieved. Harper's reached a fabulous circu-
lation. Probably no periodical in the world was ever so popu-
lar or so profitable. It had ably done what it proposed to do.
It was a result to be regarded in some degree with national
complacency and pride, because it was undoubtedly much supe-
rior to the class of periodicals it supplanted.

But there was a remarkable other side to this phenomenon.
It sought to be universally acceptable, and its complaisance in-
evitably destroyed its force; it was known to be largely com-
piled from foreign literature and consequently it was considered
to be no representative of American talent. It was therefore
no leader, no friend, no critic, no censor. It was good-humour-
edly called the Buccaneer's Bag, Abbott's Magazine, the
Monthly Corn Plaster, the Universal Shin-Saver, the Monthly
Nurse. But everybody bought it and read it and everybody was
sure that nothing decided or impolitic, no laugh at anything
that everybody did not laugh at, would be concealed anywhere
between its fair yellow covers. It risked no popularity by trying
to step ahead and to furnish something a little more marrowy.

PUTNAM'S AND THE NEW OPINIONS 211

It was still felt that the intellectual independence and move-
ment of the country had no organ; and from that conviction in
due season sprang Putnam's Monthly. In a retrospective view
of our literature of the last three or four years, it seems to us
very evident that the first immediate effect of the success of
Putnam's was to naturalise Harper's. That magazine ceased to
be a second table of the English periodicals and became grad-
ually more and more American. But rather in subject than in
treatment; its spirit was still timid and hesitating. Every
month it made its courtly bow; and with bent head and unim-
peachable toilet, whispered smoothly, " No offence, I hope ! "
The inevitable penalty was that with the greatest circulation in
the world, it could not make the smallest literary reputation.
It was managed with profuse generosity — probably literary
labour of the kind was never better paid than it has been by
Harper — but when the author had pocketed his money, he
might as well have pocketed his article. Yet elsewhere it might
have made a literary mark. Harper's still flourishes with un-
abated vigour. It still bows and avoids. Their new weekly
periodical commences with more chances of pecuniary success
than any weekly ever undertaken in America. But already the
spirit of the paper is manifestly that of the magazine. In the
War of the Roses it is sure that a great deal may be said for
white, but then it believes there is much to be urged for red.
Whenever unanimity of public opinion may be assumed, then
Harper's Weekly cordially agrees with the public.

Nevertheless, Stedman thought that Putnam's, even in
the line of " opinions," left much to be desired. He
wrote to his step-father in 1857 begging him to come
back from Italy and establish a Republican Review, say-
ing that nine out of ten of the reading public were re-
publicans and had no magazine to represent them.
'' Putnam's is Republican, to be sure, in distinction from
other journals, but it does not fling out much of a banner
and is not sustained in its mental calibre — is alternately
sensible and foolish, light and heavy.'' Lowell, on the
other hand, thought Briggs was a trifle too disposed to
consult the opinions of the majority. " I doubt if your
magazine," he wrote, " will become really popular if you
edit it for the mob. Nothing is more certain than that
popularity goes downward and not up; and it is what
the few like now that the many have got to like by and

212 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

by." What called forth this letter was the editorial dis-
position to pay attention to the comments of the readers
upon the contents of the magazine.

" In 1853," writes Mr. George Haven Putnam, " no
such heavy outlay was required to place a magazine upon
the market as has proved to be necessary in these later
periods of magazine competition. My father told me
he actually made no cash investment other than the pay-
ment to the authors for their contributions for the first
two months. The receipts from subscriptions and sales
proved to be sufficient, before the time came for the set-
tlement of the bills of the printers and paper makers, to
provide the necessary resources for these. The circula-
tion of the magazine during the four years of its existence
ranged from twelve to twenty thousand. What was
called the normal price for the earlier contributions was
$3 a page. The more important men received $5, and
contributions of a special character were paid as high as
$10. Of poetry not very much was utilised, but such
verses as were accepted (mainly for the purpose of filling
up any blank half -pages) were paid for at from $10 to
$25/;

Briggs made an able editor, but the success of Put-
nam's owed to the personal charm of Curtis almost as
much as the Atlantic later owed to Holmes. " He gave,"
said Scudder, himself a seasoned editor, " that distinction
of lightness and flavour which every literary magazine
covets but can rarely command." This all the world
could see, but its readers did not know that they had him
to thank for keeping it, after it passed into other hands,
as near to its original high standards as circumstances
would permit. Nor did they know that he was furnishing
in his own conduct an example of that fine and quixotic
endeavour which from the beginning had characterised
the magazine. Curtis was a special partner of Dix and
Edwards, who bought out Putnam's rights; he took no
part in the management and yet had some pecuniary re-
sponsibility. When the firm failed in 1857, Curtis sac-

PUTNAM'S AND THE NEW OPINIONS 213

rificed his private fortune to save the creditors from loss
and managed by 1873 to recoup them.

But the excellence of his v^ritten work and its popular-
ity all recognised. And the proof of this v^as the fre-
quency with which it was claimed by others. For the plan
of printing articles without names landed them in the
familiar predicament of having unsuspected authors pop
up everywhere. About Potiphar Papers they published
quite a correspondence. The gentleman who insisted
that a deceased friend had written them must have been
somewhat taken aback when he was told that " one of our
editors, Mr. Blank, claimed the authorship for himself.*'
The exquisite pen of this editor opened the new series
with a gay and tender reminiscence.

One bright day and long ago — it seems to me now that it
must have been soon after the War of 1812, but on reflection I
discover that it was in 1852 — I was dining with Mr. Harry
Franco at Windust's in Park Row. Mr. Franco asked me what
I thought of the prospect of a new and wholly American maga-
zine, and immediately proceeded to set forth its possible charac-
ter and brilliant promises so fully and conclusively that I knew
he was prophesying and that before many months a phoenix
would appear. Now in the following autumn after the other
dinner — for it is a beautiful provision of nature that literary
enterprises of great pith and moment should be matured under
the benign influences of good eating and drinking — I found
myself consulting, in a bare room in a deserted house in Park
Place, where nobody could find us out, with Mr. Publisher Put-
nam, Mr. Harry Franco, editor-in-chief, and Mr. Parke God-
win, associate editor, upon the first number of Putnam's Monthly.
Our council chamber was a third story front room in a doomed
house near to Mr. Putnam's headquarters. It was a dwelling
house, and as fashion had at last flown even from Park Place —
the spot below Bleecker Street where it lingered longest — the
house was patiently waiting to be demolished and make way for
a " store." Every day we met and looked over manuscripts.
How many there were ! And how good ! And what piles of
poetry ! The country seemed to be an enormous nest of nightin-
gales ; or perhaps mocking-birds — certainly cat-birds. I can
see the philosophic Godwin tenderly opening a trembling sheet
traced with that feminine chirography so familiar to the edi-
torial eye, and in a hopeful voice beginning to read. After a
very few lines a voice is heard — methinks from Franco's chair :

214 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

" Yes, yes ; guess that's enough "— Walter di Montreal, thy
hour has come, and the familiar chirography flutters into the
basket. I suppose that Mr. Franco and Godwin and the poor
fellow who was snuffed out by Mr. Brown's brief remark (that
he didn't know the person who had written about Mrs. Potiphar
of " Brown's society") might fill many pages with their recol-
lections of the pleasant cradle-and-crib days of the young Put-
nam. Those three were the monthly nurses. They saw that
infant phenomenon safely through his prodigious childhood,
and how rapidly he obtained his growth! There are books in
good standing everywhere, which I can never see but with the
feeling of the pedagogue toward his pupils. My boys, sir, my
boys ! he remarks with complacency as the famous poets or
travellers or novelists pass by. . . . How this latest born into
the monthly world springs and sparkles ! Ah, Mr. Franco, if it
is not our child, let us submit and believe it to be our grand-
child. May heaven bless you, young stranger! Forgive an
old-fashioned benediction, but may you be a better man than
your father!

The father had gone down, like so many good men and
true, in the panic days of 1857. At least, in the euphe-
mistic language of magazine announcements, Putnam's
espoused Emerson's in October of that year — and it was i
never more true that " a young man married is a young
man marred." It then came out that Putnam had sold
the magazine some time in '55. The Round Table in a
series of articles on the publishers in 1866 said that the
amount paid to Dix and Edwards, who bought it, on Put-
nam's own offer, was eleven thousand dollars. And it
had paid him a liberal profit while he published it. Many
readers did not know that Putnam had relinquished it at
the end of its fifth volume, and consequently were some-
what mystified at the absorption, especially when they
were editorially assured that the magazine had doubled
its circulation in the past three rnonths. '* Emerson's
with his honest and manly bearing," ran the announce-
ment, " has grown so rapidly, and on several occasions
so outgrown his tailoring, that it has been a little difficult
to keep up with his length of Hmb." But vital statistics
in magazines are always roseate, and though it was true
that the youngster had changed his name four times re-

PUTNAM'S AND THE NEW OPINIONS 215

cently and was to do so once more, the alliance — which
many people thought unholy — was not to prosper. The
publishers pledged themselves to devote every dollar of
profit for three years to improving the magazine — a
rash oath, for it lasted but one. Thus Putnam's made, in
the eyes of the world at least, a rather inglorious end.
Even before it openly became Emerson' s^ it had greatly
petered out. But the two and a half years that Putnam
had it were illustrious. It not only cut a dash but it
made an epoch in our magazine literature. Tentative
as its policy may seem now, it was the first popular maga-
zine to take so vigorous a stand upon the living questions
of the day. Furthermore, it had announced that it was
going to be American and original; and it had kept its
word. For this we owe it a great debt of gratitude.

None know better than our own authors what discouraging
disadvantages the publisher of an original American magazine
must contend against in being obliged to compete with the un-
paid British productions, which are reproduced here almost
simultaneously with their publication on the other side of the
Atlantic. And while this unequal contest between the publisher
who filches his matter and the one who pays for it almost pro-
hibits the possibility of profit to the latter, the American author
gauges his demand for compensation by the standard of his
British brother. But we are touching, perhaps, on private
rights by these allusions. The commercial value of any article
depends on what it will bring in the open market, and by that
test we will be governed in the question of pay.

Thus ran one of the editorials in the first number of
the New Series, 1868. " Many excellent friends who
have favoured us with their sage advice, have strangely
insisted that it will be useless to expect good contributions
without good pay. As though a publisher or an editor
were likely to have missed this special lesson in his deal-
ings with authors! One veteran author by way of en-
forcing his views on this subject demanded a retaining
fee of five hundred dollars as an earnest of future pay-
ments for whatever he might furnish. But there are two
sides to this interesting question of pay. In order that a

2i6 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

publisher should pay, he must himself be paid." Authors,
indeed, were growing cocky. Mr. George Haven Put-
nam in his Life of his father said that on account of the
three new magazines started about the same time — Scrib-
ne'/s, Lip pine otfs, and the Galaxy — the competition for
the most important contributors became more serious than
that for subscribers. Authors who in the day of the first
Putnam's Monthly had been content with from three to
five dollars a page now secured from ten to twenty, and
for special contributions much larger sums. His account
has many items of interest.

Among the literary plans which engaged my father's first at-
tention in again taking up his publishing business (after the
war) was one for the re-establishment of Putnam's Magazine.
The conditions seemed to be in certain ways favourable for the
experiment, but it proved that the new wealth was very largely
in the hands of people not interested in literature. The book-
buying conditions of the South had of necessity been destroyed
by the war. A very considerable portion of people in the North
who had been buyers of books were no longer able to indulge
in such luxuries. These were the people who had fixed in-
comes; incomes payable in the legal tender of the day were
materially curtailed. The nouveaux riches who had made
money out of shady contracts or from pork speculations could
not easily be reached by the publishers of standard literature.
This seemed to give an opening for a magazine.

The new Putnam's started off as illustriously as the
old. The reputation of the former magazine for a time
seemed likely to be regained and maintained. E. C. Sted-
man and R. H. Stoddard did the department Literature
At Home ; and Bayard Taylor covered Foreign Literature.
All did their work in a way that occasioned admiration
and added prestige. But times had changed very much
since Putnam had started his earlier magazine on no
cash whatever. Not only were authors demanding more
money, the public were demanding illustrations. These
in the first Putnam's had been promised as a treat for the
second year. They proved, however, to be few in num-
ber and mostly architectural ; and the following year, il-

PUTNAM'S AND THE NEW OPINIONS 217

lustrations other than architectural were entirely confined
to the first instalment of the Early Days of George Wash-
ington. But what had been a luxury then was a necessity
now. The competing magazines were making large out-
lays for illustration. The First Series had paid, under
Putnam's management, $12,819 to editors knd authors
and $3,000 for illustrations ; and thus had proved a prac-
ticable undertaking with a circulation ranging from twelve
to twenty thousand. The Second never exceeded fifteen
thousand, and Putnam considered that with the resources
at his disposal it would not be wise to continue. The
following " card " marked to the valedictory :

A few words may be expected from the Publishers in closing
this second series of Putnam's Magazine, and in introducing the
new periodical which will take its place. This magazine was
very generally and very kindly welcomed. We have the right
to infer that the new series has, during the last three years,
given general satisfaction. It has had a larger circulation than
several of its contemporaries at home, and much larger than a
dozen of the English magazines whose names have been familiar
for many years. Yet it is more and more evident that popular
taste calls for something diiferent; it may be higher or lower
or better or worse. But those who pay their money have a
right to the choice. We have aimed to produce a magazine
wholly Original and essentially American. We have avoided
all temptations to reprint from foreign magazines, or to cater to
anything merely sensational. In this we may have been Quix-
otic; but the aim at least was fair. The best material sent us
— out of 3,035 mss. in three years — has been printed in the
six volumes now completed. Our contributors have all received
their pecuniary compensation. We wish it had been a great
deal larger ; but we may state our relative reward thus :

Dr. To Cash paid contributors $30,000

Cr. By compliments to publishers ? ? ?

By profits on outlay of $100,000 000

By Balance — ?

We now ask those who have expressed a friendly apprecia-
tion of the ** pea-green " to permit us to introduce its better-
looking successor. Retaining an interest in the sale of the new
work (our edition bearing the name of Putnam's as well as
Scribner*s) we ask our friends and correspondents to continue

2i8 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

their subscriptions to us, in reasonable confidence that they will
receive the full equivalent for their money. In addition to the
illustrations afforded by the new magazine, there will be an in-
fusion of fresh energy into the editorial management and a
large accession of well-known and capable contributors.

The remainder of Mary Clemmer Ameses serial story
was sent free to all paid subscribers. The new editor was
to decide as soon as possible in regard to using the ac-
cepted manuscripts, and those rejected would be returned
(chilling disappointment !) . In the first number of Scrih-
ner's was this announcement : " Hours At Home, whose
unpretending dress and suggestive title had grown fa-
miliar to the eyes of many thousands, died — not of
disease, not of old age, not of decay — died simply that
Scrihner's Monthly might live. Putnam's, which has em-
bodied in its pages the old Knickerbocker culture and pres-
tige together with the free spirit of American progress,
dies a month later, or rather merges the gathered re-
sources of its life in the new magazine. The two have
made their way to this change with the conviction that
such changes have occurred in the popular demand that a
great success is not possible if sought only by the old
means and methods." This was very handsome editor-
ial language on the part of Dr. Holland; for when he
wrote a retrospect of the magazine eleven years after-
ward, he said that Hours At Home was both worthless
and moribund, and as for Putnam's, " when Mr. Putnam
came to us with an offer for it, we acceded to his condi-
tions, though I have forgotten what they were, and it was
soon quietly left behind with the other." Another sun
was rising and already yesterday's magazine was old-
fashioned.

For Putnam's, in spite of its new and progressive idea
of handling public questions, had upon it the large shadow
of Irving. (It even counselled Melville to read his Ad-
dison! Not that Melville didn't need advice, heaven
knows ; but it would be difficult to devise for his staccato
temper a more ludicrous misfit than the undulating Addi-

PUTNAM'S AND THE NEW OPINIONS 219

sonian phrase.) And there was much of the cottscious
Knickerbocker superiority and deliberate Knickerbocker
exclusivness about it. Perhaps if Putnam's had Hved to
grow up, we should have seen how one good custom could
corrupt the world. As it is, it wears the charming halo
of those generous high-souled companions of our youth
who were destined to die young — and each year to be-
come more admirable thereby. There were those who
deemed Putnam's — in spite of the fledgling authors it
was so proud of — entrenched in its clique. It is amusing
to hear Stedman, who had greatly contributed to maintain
a closed shop, bitterly complain of the Atlantic in this re-
spect. " Would finish the poem for the Atlantic, did I
suppose they would take it from me," he wrote to Bayard
Taylor in 1865. *' Sometimes I must get an introduction
there, through a kind word from you. What bad poetry
they occasionally print. You furnish apparently all their
good." The year before he had recorded in his diary:
" Finished Holyoke Valley. Here now is a poem which
I know to be artistic and full of feeling — equal to any-
thing which the Atlantic has published for months. But
I cannot send it there, because they have time and again
refused the best productions of New York writers. Last
summer they sent back the best short poem I ever wrote,
The Test, afterwards printed in my book and copied
everywhere. So I must send it to the Round Table,
where the impersonal rule hides the author's name and
where it can reach but a limited audience. An American,
New York poet sings against the wind.'*

These quotations date in the arid stretch between the
two oases of Putnam's. During part of that period the
only good literary paper in New York was the Round
Table, a weekly of distinguished tone and bright, force-
ful writing. A literary friend wrote to Stedman in 1864:
" The Round Table must not go down. For God's sake,
if Boston can support a literary journal, cannot New
York ? Your wealthy men must be made to feel that the
literary honour of the great city is at stake, and if she

220 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

totters prop her good legs." The Round Table did not
starve to death until 1869, but like Putnam's, she suffered,
in the optimistic phrase of Briggs, an " interruption " for
a little over a year. Its editorial outlook was similar to
Putnam's. That magazine was saying in 1870: "Our
own box is crammed, but the most of it is not good or
good in such an indifferent way as to be quite as bad as
bad. Nor is it for want of talent it is not better. But
our writers want independence, individuality. They
seem to be afraid of something or somebody and do not
trust their personality. Then again, there is such a mani-
fest absence of care, of study, of labour, of painstaking
accuracy in what we do." Four years earlier the Round
Table had made the same plea for more conscientious de-
votion to thorough work, and some boldness and power.

What are American writers doing to-day? The vigour and
originality that promised a new era at the close of the war are
lost already in nerveless twaddle. The leading monthly of the
country vainly strives for a new and distinctive series of arti-
cles, but is compelled to fall back upon a Biglow paper, Haw-
thorne's private note-books, and a story written on the other
side of the water. The leading review seeks purchasers by
publishing sensational articles upon bar-room dailies, which its
editors freely admit they cannot endorse. Two literary month-
lies, promised to appear, dare not make the venture, mainly be-
cause it is well-nigh impossible to procure worthy literary mat-
ter. The literary field was never so barren. Meanwhile Syl-
vanus Cobb, Mrs. Southworth, and Mrs. Stephens are having a
boundless opportunity. Disgrace to our scholars and authors !
A good writer can make a handsome competence in this country.

The charge of slovenly authorship by both of these
periodicals was well sustained, doubtless; but there was
a reason why Putnam's should have found young writers
" afraid of something or somebody and afraid to trust
their own personality." They were all trying to cram
themselves into the Knickerbocker mould which, though
judiciously followed, was still Putnam's pattern. And
the flowing draperies of the Knickerbocker garment re-
sembled the voluminous military cloak of the period — it
was a fine thing to pose in if one had a figure for posing.

PUTNAM'S AND THE NEW OPINIONS 221

What the youngsters of the day were afraid of was not
filling it out well enough for Putnam's standard, and so
they padded to suit. This editorial in the Round Table
was answered very pertinently (however personally) by
a correspondent. What new authors have lacked, he
said, is editorial sympathy; they have had precious little
of it since the days of Graham's and Sar tain's.

In spite of these publications containing the best efforts of
the established authors, the way was not barred to an untrained
one and real talent had always a welcome. When Sartain gave
up his enterprise and Graham withdrew, a great change came
about. No longer having the stimulus of editorial encourage-
ment and good pay, some ceased writing altogether. The New
England writers went back to write for New England publica-
tions. The New York men of letters soon gravitated to sets.
A few men of merit formed among themselves a kind of free
masonry of authorcraft and seized upon Putnam's Monthly as
their special property and kept out all but the brotherhood.
Putnam's failed as it ought to have failed; and likewise the
weeklies conducted by these other sets. You are almost alone
in volunteering editorial encouragement and proper reward to
new pens. What chance has an unknown correspondent in
Harper's Monthly, Weekly, Independent, Atlantic? A few pens
only are used and paid for. If he is bold enough to venture on
romance, he is informed by Harper's suave editors that both
Monthly and Weekly are more than preoccupied by foreign
writers. Where else can he go? To the New York Ledger,
the New York Mercury, the New York Weekly, to the Philadel-
phia weeklies; just where he will not go if he have any self-
respect left, but just where many have to go who are constrained
by their wants to find a market. Or if perchance Harper's
do accept a brief story from an American pen, the reward is
about one-tenth of what is paid the British writer for mere
advance sheets. It is, as you know, considered an editorial
favour to permit papers of a literary aspirant to go to press,
for which he is supposed to be grateful.

This perennial accusation, never entirely true in the
very worst of times, seems to have been truer then than
generally. For we hear the complaint echoed, as just
now in Stedman's letter, by the most established of writ-
ers. It must, however, be remembered that self-respect,
especially that of writers, is of variable elasticity. Sted-

22Z THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

man, though he said at this period that a married man
could not Hve on magazine work if he wrote night and
day, refused to write eleven poems for the Independent
at one hundred dollars each — he had too much self-re-
spect to make a grist-mill of himself! Yet while he was
writing to his mother in 1864 that literature was at a
stand-still in America — paralysed by the war, though all
other arts and trades were thrifty, the Round Table was
saying: "In these days even the small fry of authors
who live from hand to mouth find far less difficulty in
keeping up a pleasant intercourse between the two."
Furthermore, tastes differ as widely as consciences. In
1866 Stedman wrote to Lowell: "I need not tell you
how much the best readers in New York have been in-
terested in the new series of the North American Review.
We all feel like the audience of an opera when the gas
is suddenly turned up. In New York quite a literary re-
vival has followed the happy close of the war — you
know we have the Nation and the Round Table, such as
they are, well written-for and poorly edited. Then we
are to have at least two new magazines this spring, of a
respectful cast, and perhaps three. I fear that, as usual
here, our publishers and writers will so divide their en-
ergies that we shall have three tolerable affairs instead of
one first-rate and standard." To say nothing of the fact
that there were many people in New York calling them-
selves the best readers whose pulses were quite unstirred
by the prospect of a new series of the North American,
Stedman and Lowell (who might have agreed exactly
upon the latter's beneficent ministries for the Boston
magazine) differed decidedly about the Nation established
by Godkin in 1865. Stedman said the first number was
rather heavy, and in 1867 he wrote: "The Nation is
cheaper than ever. The magazine man in his complacent
stupidity has a laborious genius for saying precisely the
wrong thing, as regards poetry." Lowell, on the other
hand, wrote thus to Godkin in 1868 : " Its discussions of
politics have done more good and influenced more opinion

PUTNAM'S AND THE NEW OPINIONS 223

than any other agency, or all others combined, in the
country. For my own part, I am not only thankful for
the Nation, but continually wonder how you are able to
make so excellent a paper with your material. I have
been an editor and know how hard it is. ... I shall
write from time to time till I think we are square. What
Fields pays me, I doubt if anybody else would." Three
years later he wrote : " You are the only man I know
who carries his head perfectly steady, and I find myself
so thoroughly agreeing with the Nation always that I am
half persuaded I edit it myself."

Thus we again return to the point of union between
these divergent doctors — foj if Lowell thought the man
who agreed with him had a steady head, Stedman in
1868 was proposing to Ticknor and Fields to scatter the
energies of New York writers still further by a literary
journal of which he was to be editor. Having gone
vainly so often to the Atlantic, he was now trying to get
an Atlantic to come to him! It was a neat little irony
which the whirligig of time had played upon one of the
leading exponents of interurban jealousy.

He and Bayard Taylor were enthusiastically interested
in the welfare of the Galaxy, a monthly established in
1866, edited by friends of his " who are doing their
bravest to establish a New York magazine, and ought to
be helped and encouraged by New York authors." To
this, Taylor sold many poems of a new friend of his from
the South, Sidney Lanier, and got better prices for his in-
tercession. Lanier had brought his first considerable
poem, Corn, to New York himself but had gone home
unsuccessful, convinced " of the wooden-headedness of
many persons who were leaders there in literary matters."
The Galaxy lasted a dozen years — a high class magazine
which left no particular mark deserving of notice here,
but a boon to "self-respecting" authors — and then
(cruel fate for any periodical in which Stedman was in-
terested!) died and entered into Nirvana, the Atlantic ,
in 1878.

224 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

The Round Table, 1866, in commenting on the great
increase in periodicals since the close of the war, summed
up the situation, " Many of these new periodicals were
trashy to the last degree; some were simply rehashes of
the English weeklies ; a few were honourable attempts to
elevate the standard of literary taste. The era of weekly
journalism has fairly begun in this country. Of the
weeklies started last year three or four appeal to intel-
ligent people, and these still have vitality." It is strange
that any literary man in New York should have failed to
see that the Nation and the Round Table marked the be-
ginning of a better era. Each was the exponent — in
the words of the latter periodical — of a high-class, high-
toned, and well-written weekly, which believed that people
were something more than grown-up babies unable to
digest anything more solid than Sylvanus Cobb's ro-
mances and Fanny Fern's tart paragraphs, but would
listen to a serious discussion of serious topics from a
purely American point of view and without scissors or
pastepot.

" I used to try hard," wrote Mr. W. C. Brownell in the
semi-centennial number of the Nation^ "to think the
Round Table a real rival." Nevertheless, both were seek-
ing to do the same thing — to cultivate a spirit of rea-
sonableness, to express trained and cosmopolitan judg-
ments upon American life and literature. The criticism
of public men and public movements had always been per-
sonal and partisan, in each case provincial and undiscrim-
inating. Both were trying to give the educated man a
voice in the periodical press. Before their advent, and
that of Putnam's and the Atlantic, he had no place to go.
Either the audience that he could address was already
committed to follow a policy through thick and thin —
and demanded that he do likewise; or it barred out any
expression of opinion as being likely to disturb the fellow-
ship of the gentlemen there assembled. With the decline
of the lyceum lecturer just before the war, the old method
of shaping popular thought on public matters had disap-

PUTNAM'S AND THE NEW OPINIONS 225

peared. The growing supremacy in politics of purely
material interests made it all the more necessary that pop-
ular thought should be directed by independent judgments
and in an unpartisan vehicle, particularly as the partisan
press was largely given over to glib and gushing writers
who rarely imparted their own opinions and never in-
spected them in the light of other people's.

The attitude of independent judgment on the part of a
periodical is now frequently encountered, even though its
practise far less frequently carries out its promise, but in
that day the assertion of such an attitude was cynically
revolutionary. As for the admission that national char-
acteristics and international prejudices might distort judg-
ment, the idea was no less than treasonable ! To this last
accusation the nationality of the editor of the Nation sup-
plied many a frenzied period. Even in Boston, it was
said at a dinner table where mature minds were gathered
together, " An Englishman might be fit for the kingdom
of Heaven but not to edit an American periodical " ; and
British gold was at its favourite occupation of supplying
capital to undermine American ideals. This last in spite
of the facts that the financial embarrassments of the Na-
tion were unfortunately public property and that the paper
was constantly experimenting with changes in make-up
in the endeavour to keep afloat. It was generally believed
that the end was a foregone conclusion. No matter how
" uncommon its gift to make serious inquiry attractive ''
(in the pat phrase of Mr. Howells), an independent
periodical, criticising life and literature from only the
highest standards of morality and taste and with no other
popular appeal than this, could not long survive. That
the Nation should have started ofT with as many as five
thousand subscribers is remarkable. On this subscrip-
tion list it sustained itself, in spite of bad business man-
agement, without profiting by patronage or puffery.
Lowell (that unpatriotic person!) said that in this regard
it was the solitary American journal worthy of respect;
and Charles Eliot Norton ("without whose aid," said

226 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

Godkin, "I could never have been successful") capped
the climax by expostulating with America in its seditious
columns for being satisfied with half-way men and half-
way achievements. Not even in the old lyceum days,
when such unpartisan opinions as people heard were ex-
pected to wear the fiery garments of oratory, had any
one ventured to proclaim the home of the free the paradise
of mediocrity ! It raised a rumpus. But the traitors who
read its inspection of American ways and institutions
somehow took its point of view after the first gasp, and
then went forth to make similar nuisances of themselves.
At high-water mark there were twelve thousand traitors
in all, somewhere about its fifteenth year; but each felt
himself commissioned to a high calling and remembered
that the success of Saint Paul had largely come about
from his talking out of season as well as in. ** To my
generation," wrote William James, " Godkin's was cer-
tainly the towering influence in all thought concerning
public afifairs, and indirectly his influence has certainly
been more pervasive than that of any other writer of the
generation."

Now, it is necessary — if .we would estimate the in-
fluence of these three New York periodicals and their
Boston neighbour — to emphasise the fact that all this
expression of independent judgment in crisp and quiet ac-
cents was something quite new. The Nation itself pro-
vides an amusing illustration of this. Calling attention
with unwearied reiteration to the independence of its
opinion, it nevertheless had not ventured to put from
harbour without a flag. It intended to furnish " earnest
and persistent consideration of the labouring class at the
South with a view to the removal of all artificial distinc- ;
tion between them and the rest of the population." And i
if its consideration lacked anything, it was not persistence.
Edward Everett Hale somewhere speaks of the old war-
horse abolitionists casting anxiously about for another'
crusade — most of them polygamously embraced woman's
suffrage before the breath was well out of the body of

PUTNAM'S AND THE NEW OPINIONS 227

the first spouse. Godkin, later in one of his letters,
naively indicates the same necessity. " The newspapers
all began now to look about for a cause, and in bethinking
myself what the United States seemed to need most in
this new emergency, I bethought myself of a reform of the
civil service." Thus the natural-born free-lance is ever
boastful of the freedom which frets him, and ever provok-
ing the inevitable yoke. At least, so it was in the glad
days when independent opinion first tried its wings —
the day of the foot-loose reformer and the migratory
muck-rake was still unborn. Putnam's, ere its brief
second life was sped, saw popular magazines which once
deemed it indiscreet to hold opinions, scramble for some
to exploit ; and Godkin chided even George William Cur-
tis in his later editorial chair for upholding principles
which as a private citizen he did not believe. The era
of opinions or nothing was dawning.

As for literature in the Nation, it did not lag behind
life. It insisted on impartial and informed judgment of
books. This was as new in the literary world as the
other in the political and social. Mr. Henry Holt says
he still remembers his surprise and enlightenment at
their sending a book for review to a man who was sup-
posed to have some special knowledge of the subject.
Such a thing, he thinks, had never been done before in
American journalism, except spasmodically by the North
American or the Atlantic. Furthermore, the publishers
had been used to having everything that was not glaringly
ignorant or immoral gently treated, if it was not praised.
They did not know what to make of the Nation's strange
ways, and it educated the publishing trade as well as
raised the standard of literary criticism. " Then we used
to feel if a book was pitched into it was because of per-
sonal feeling against the author or the house. The
Nation was the leader in the policy of without fear and
without favour."

Thus, the period of social responsibility had set in for
periodicals; and, as was to be hoped and expected, it

228 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

replaced the ideal of moral responsibility — under which
they had so long led a pallid and mincing existence, when
it was their stupid boast that " everything in the slightest
way offensive even to the least fastidious would of course
be excluded from these pages.'* Another race had come,
it is true, and the war had fortunately killed off many
age-worn notions and substituted for them others nearer
to actuality and common sense. But it was Putnam's
that, along with its quixotic attempt to make a native
literature, had paved the way for a magazine which,
retaining the urbanity of the Knickerbocker school, should
concern itself not only with literature but life.

And by and by came the recognition of active social
forces from a source where it was least to be expected —
the North American. This is getting us a little ahead
of our chronology, but you have already seen how dis-
turbing to classification is the longevity of the North
American. It is no respecter of pigeon-holes, or we
might say ( in language more applicable to this immediate
literature than to her continuous life) she flutters all
dove-cotes.

Osgood sold the magazine to Allen Thorndike Rice
for four thousand dollars. Mr. Henry Holt said that he
had intended to buy it and thought he had an option
on it, and Godkin had agreed to edit it in connection with
the machinery of the Nation. But the Nation itself could
scarcely have shaken it more to its foundations than did
Mr. Rice. He proceeded to make three astounding
changes, and in the intervals between the first and second
and the second and third, he seems to have paused to
recover from the gasps aroused by his impiety and to
generate enough courage for another audacity. First,
he removed the magazine — just as if it had been any
ordinary movable — from Boston to New York. Sec-
ond, he made it a bi-monthly ; third, he made it a monthly.
The reason for the second and third changes was that the
quarterly could not keep in sufficiently close contact with
current questions or deal with them thoroughly before

PUTNAM'S AND THE NEW OPINIONS 229

the special interest in them had departed. Both of these
changes New Yorkers modestly owned to be but conse-
quent upon its change of residence — nobody in Boston
cared for close contact with current questions. But for
Boston herself the latter changes were unimportant — the
Review might become a weekly and go to Halifax, so
long as it had turned its treacherous and massive back
upon its native town. It was as if Bunker Hill monu-
ment had walked away. On October 30th, 1877, Long-
fellow wrote : " Osgood has sold or given or conveyed
the North American into the hands of the Appletons.
Henceforth it will be edited, printed, and published in
New York. Mr. Clark at the printing office said, * It is
like parting with the New England Blarney Stone.'
He might have said in more classic language * Troy has
lost her Palladium.' . . . That ever the old Review should
have slipped its moorings in Massachusetts Bay and
drifted down to the mouth of the Hudson! It must
be towed back again, and safely anchored in our har-
bour.''

Mr. Howells in his delightful contribution to the cen-
tenary number says :

" The translation of the North American from the
intellectual Boston to the commercial metropolis, did make
Boston rub her eyes a little, but, as I remember, not much.
It would have taken far more than that to make her, long
confirmed in her superiority, rub her eyes much. Yet
we were not insensible to our incalculable loss ; the North
American had been one of our glories, dim at times but
lastingly a glory, an honour to our letters and a very
strenuous help to such nationality as they had achieved.
The removal may not have been the condition of the
Review's survival ; it might have lived on in Boston, de-
vouring successions of horses and carriages and obliging
publishers to get about on foot as if they were no better
than so many authors. But the Review passed from its
noble adversity to the honourable prosperity which now
crowns its century. Mr. Rice gave it the look of a maga-

230 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

zine without and within; and the stately Roman-numer-
alled articles with the foot-noted book titles on which
they stood, retreated before the brisk onset of light
papers of more journalistic cast. I am not sure that it
ever sank so low as the symposium, but I believe that Mr.
Rice had sometimes the courage to admit two embattled
champions to the same number, there to fight out their
differing opinions. That was a new thing, and it must
have made the older readers of the Review sit up. The
North American is now not at all a review of the old
pattern. Something is still to be said for the old pattern,
but since it is gone perhaps one is apt to over-praise it.
If we waited now for a quarterly criticism of new books,
the books would have died of old age; younger sellers
would be pushing them from their shelves, and it would
not be possible to buy or even borrow the authors re-
viewed. ... In the new Review literature is given a
back seat, but all the seats are good; and literature is
treated at least as a living interest. I never saw the
reasons for the old adversity but I see the reasons for the
new prosperity in the eager immediate potent grapple with
topics which advance upon the thinker from the forum
and the market rather than from the study." Thus, if
the Christian Examiner had come to New York and lost
its soul, the North American had come and gained not
only its body but its opinions. Boston might grumble
as much as she pleased that the magazine had entirely
departed from its old critical fastidiousness, but New
York knew that she had touched her rival under the
fifth rib, where had pulsed the very centre and core of
her being. As for critical fastidiousness, what were
contemplation and sentiment and ideality so long as one
remained only a Saint Simeon Stylites on a pillar !

But to return to our pigeon-hole again (after this little
forward voyage with that " extravagant and erring
spirit," the North American). Only one other aspect
in the period may detain us here. We quote from a
Round Table of 1867.

PUTNAM'S AND THE NEW OPINIONS 231

A magazine has long been known as among the useful ad-
juncts to the business of a larger publishing house, and it would
seem that it is now becoming recognised as an indispensable
appliance of any whose operations are on a grand scale. Al-
ready there are in our three publishing cities fourteen of the
book-publishing firms which among them issue twenty-one pe-
riodicals, varying in grade from quarterly and professional or
scientific reviews to weekly and juvenile journals, a majority
of which have come into life within a very short time. Be-
sides these are New York branches of three London houses
publishing eight magazines, and rumour says four more of our
publishers are to give us new monthlies. The magazine mania
— for it is scarcely less — prevailed in England for many
months before it appeared here. That Messrs. Putnam and
Lippincott will do well with their new monthlies is a matter
of course. It is clearly out of the question that a book-publish-
ing house of repute and large business connection should find a
periodical otherwise than remunerative. That the taste of the
pubHc for literature has grown as well as its appetite is attested
by recent successes which a few years ago could have found
no sustaining clientage. There is one measure of paramount
importance that must be hastened by this literary revival.
Magazine-writing will become little less than a profession, a
new class among us, and its members must be paid. Publishers
will thus be forced to secure protection through an international
copyright.

The facts of this editorial are, as usual, more impres-
sive than the opinions — which well illustrate the futility
of prophecy. Putnam, as we have seen, did not do well
with his new monthly; and it was many a weary year
before some publishers who were then doing well without
an international copyright found the need of one become
imperative.

CHAPTER X

harper's — THE CONVERTED CORSAIR

In George W. Child's memoirs there is a story which
makes an exclamation point seem but a feeble toy. *' I
can recall," says he, " a solemn conversation in the office
of the Harpers, then on Cliff Street. The four founders
of the great firm were present. I was one of a group
of Philadelphians and we were discussing the first number
of Harper's new monthly. It seemed so certain to us
that the publication would be a failure. * It can't,' said
one Philadelphian emphatically, * last very long.' The
only successful magazines then published in the United
States were in Philadelphia — Graham's, Godey's, Sar-
tain's and Peterson's/'

One can understand under these circumstances (or
perhaps under any) the peculiar bias of Philadelphians;
but you will look in vain, in authors' letters and reminis-
cences, for any of those familiar chirps of satisfaction
which heralded the hatching of almost all the other Ameri-
can magazines. You will find, instead, curses not loud
but deep. Indeed, there was no reason why any one,
besides the publishers themselves, should have hailed the
advent of Harper's with joy except that notoriously in-
articulate person, the Average Reader — and he, as was
soon admitted even by the most disgruntled American
author, was placed under an everlasting debt of gratitude.
The Philadelphia magazines, so shortly to be extinguished
or dimmed by the new luminary, might have merited the
derision which they later received from those who
now mocked the meat they had once gladly fed upon, but
there was never any question that they had saved the

232

THE CONVERTED CORSAIR 233

life of the struggling American author of professional
potentiality — life which the paddles of the first trans-
atlantic steamer had well nigh made an end of. For
when it became possible to get English magazines once a
fortnight, there had sprung up in New York numerous
weeklies whose sole purpose was to serve the plunder
piping hot ; and had it not been for the Philadelphia maga-
zines, the native author would have found no market
whatever, so entirely had these weeklies driven out of
existence the dealers who paid for home products.
Though like all the magazines they were in the habit of
printing for nothing what was worth scarcely more, to
writers who were in demand Philadelphia paid prices
deemed munificent in those days. And the writers, in
return, were never weary of testifying that to her they
owed creation, preservation, and what temporal blessings
they possessed. And of that gratitude Graham's had the
lion's share. The United States Gazette cautiously esti-
mated that sometimes Graham's must be paying as much
as five hundred dollars a number to American authors.
But the figure was low, in spite of its being put forward
as strapping.

" Graham says he would have given me one hundred
and fifty dollars for the Legend of Brittany without the
copyright," wrote Lowell in 1845, ^^^7 three years after
he had written jubilantly that he might safely reckon on
earning four hundred dollars by his pen the following
year. " We have spent as high as fifteen hundred dol-
lars on a single number for authorship alone," said Gra-
ham's editorially in 1853. " This is more than twice
the sum ever paid by any other magazine in America;
while for years our minimum rate was eight hundred
dollars per number." In its valedictory to Sar tain's,
which had made a splendid struggle for three years, there
is a note of bitterness :

It has spent over fifteen thousand dollars for original contri-
butions, and now it is hopelessly wrecked. The publishers
Spent money with a lavish hand to American writers, but the

234 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

flood of foreign literature overwhelmed the gallant book and
she has gone down to rise no more. Will there never be pride
enough in the American people to stand by those who support a
national literature ! We felt a year ago the demand for Eng-
lish magazine articles; the success of the reprint magazines con-
firmed what we felt; and we therefore doubled the number of
our pages to give our readers, in addition to our former supply
of original American articles, such papers from foreign sources
as struck us of value or interest. We shall only add — in an-
swer to carpers generally — that Graham's for the last ten years
has paid over eighty thousand dollars to American writers.

This was in 1852 — two years after the establishment
of a magazine which had helped to re-create and greatly
profited by this demand for English magazine articles.
Graham's had watched anxiously the growth of its com-
petitor. '^ Harper's is a good foreign magazine, but it is
not Graham's by a long way," had run an editorial in
185 1. "The veriest worshipper of the dust of Europe
will tire of the dead level of silly praise of John Bull
upon every page. John hasn't quite the brains of all the
family. Jonathan is not altogether a dolt in letters.
Graham thinks he has a class of young writers now who
ask no odds in a fair encounter — Lowell, Read, Legare,
Godman, Whipple, Fields, Bayard Taylor, Stoddard,
Hosmer, Street, Boker, Tuckerman, Hawthorne, Conrad,
Moorhead and others of the young men." Many news-
papers of the country were watching the struggle with
indignation. '' Graham's great rival now is Harper's,"
said one of them, "but Graham's equals it in amount
and quality of literary contents and far exceeds it in
beauty of illustration — and in the fact that its contrib-
utors are all honestly paid for their labours." Said
another : " Graham's is now what Harper's should have
been. Harper's is a grand failure." Upon which re-
mark Graham commented grimly : " Our friend is a wag
in his way. We have done more for magazine writers
than Harper's will ever do, but one hundred and thirty-
five thousand copies a month does not seem to us a grand
failure." This same year of 1852 Boker was writing
to Stoddard :

THE CONVERTED CORSAIR 235

Graham is our only stand-by in these evil times. He is a
man with a big soul and a gentleman, but his liberality, great
as it is, cannot support an author. Alas ! alas ! Dick, is it not
sad that an American author cannot live by magazine writing?
And this is wholly due to the want of an international copy-
right law.

In these documents, then, we find one of the reasons
why we encounter so little pleasant mention of Harper's
in authors' correspondence in the fifties. Furthermore,
there was an indefinable but spacious air of self -righteous-
ness about the magazine which, taken with what was
considered the unique opulence of its publishers, seems
to have greatly annoyed its critics — and not the less, of
course, because they were less successful. There was,
for instance, none of the ingratiating impudence which
Willis had exhibited a few years before when he estab-
lished the Corsair. Lest the romance of this title should
deceive any one, Willis had proposed to name it the
Pirate; and he editorially desired Henry Clay to take it
into Congress as a people's exhibit of the results of an
iniquitous law. " We shall convey to our columns," said
he, '' the cream and spirit of everything that ventures to
light, in France, England and Germany. As to original
American productions, we shall, as the publishers do, take
what we can get for nothing, holding, as the publishers
do, that while we can get Boz and Bulwer for a thank-ye
or less, it is not pocket-wise to pay much for Halleck and
Irving."

As frankly did Harpers announce their intention, but
the implication was different. In their New Monthly
Magazine, June, 1850, occurs A Word at the Start:

The design is to place within the reach of the great mass of
the American people the unbounded treasures of the periodical
literature of the present day. The leading authors of Great
Britain and France, as well as of the United States, are now
regular and constant contributors to the periodicals of their
several countries. The publishers intend to place everything
of permanent value and interest in this literature in the hands
of people who up to now have been hopelessly excluded from it.

I

236 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

The columns of Harper's did not for a long time,
however, contain any treasures of the ** leading authors
of the United States." In the Contents of volume one
appear only a few names, leading or otherwise. They
are Ik Marvel, William Howitt, Dr. Moore, Leigh Hunt,
Albert Smith, Harriet Martineau, Frederika Bremer, and
Robert Southey. Volume three announces that the best
talent of the country has been engaged in writing and
illustrating original articles, and the magazine now con-
tains regularly one or more original articles upon some
topic of historical or national interest by some able and
popular writer, illustrated by from fifteen to thirty wood-
engravings. In the Contents now appear the American
names : G. W. Curtis, G. P. Morris, Epes Sargent, Jacob
Abbott, John S. C. Abbott, B. J. Lossing. Setting aside
Curtis, who w^as one of the editors, and Lossing, whose
historical articles were a convenient vehicle for illustra-
tions, the leading authors of the country had no reason to
regard this list with satisfaction. Volume ten announces
that, while they have not neglected the rich stores of
foreign literature, they have gradually enlarged the list
of their editors and contributors till it includes the names
of a large portion of the most popular writers of the
country, and nothing has been wanting to induce them to
contribute their best productions. But the Contents pre-
sents only the names of J. T. Headley, G. P. R. James,
J. Abbott, S. I. Prime, Thomas Ewbank, G. W. Greene,
Elias Loomis.

Certainly, no material inducement should have been
wanting. " Although but six months have elapsed," said
volume one, " we have a monthly issue of fifty thousand."
Volume three speaks of the present circulation as enor-
mous, saying, and with justice, that it has come about
simply because the magazine gives a greater amount of
reading matter, of a higher quality, in better style and at
a cheaper price, than any other periodical ever published.
Volume six proclaims a monthly edition of one hundred
and eighteen thousand, and it had to be electrotyped.

THE CONVERTED CORSAIR 237

Volume seven announced a gain of seventeen thousand
over the last. Thus in four short years the magazine
was financially able to stimulate the best writers to
contribute to its columns. The Atlantic had not yet come
to afford the Boston men an outlet; and many New
Yorkers were complaining that they could not get a living
price for their wares at home; while the Philadelphia
magazines, as we have seen, were offering less and less,
on account of the shrivelling of their subscription. The
best writers of America had either been uncharacteristic-
ally deaf to inducement, or Harper^ s considered that they
were already included in its columns. In the first decade
of its successful existence Harper's had printed, by the
standard of contemporary judgment, scarcely a notable
name. The home-grown treasures it had contributed
came chiefly from the store of the Abbott brothers —
Jacob, the father of the immortal Rollo and Lucy, and of
many histories which on a somewhat wider canvas pre-
sented life in the same spirit of domestic didactics; and
John, who piled up during his industrious and exemplary
existence more than fifty volumes of a moral, religious
and historical nature. In 1870 he wrote :

I prepare a monthly article of twenty pages for Harper's,
and am writing two books, one on the history of Louis XIV
and the other the History of the Christian Religion. Last week
I wrote the tenth chapter of this history. I have sent the first
four chapters of Louis XIV to Harper's and have four other
chapters completed. In addition to this, I have full charge of
not a small parish, with all its pulpit and parochial labours;
it is a rule with me to prepare one new sermon every week.

It is no wonder that Henry James, senior, complained
of the " stupid Methodism "of Harper's, or that here and
there among the sturdy middle class it so triumphantly
catered to were some who remembered that even in the
Scriptures it had been written that man should not live
by bread alone.

In 1859, after almost a decade of Harper's, Godkin
could write, from the city which now raised the ancient

238 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

Philadelphia boast of the greatest periodical in the world,
to a friend in England, his apprehension about the finan-
cial embarrassment of the Atlantic — with never a hint
that Harper's was existent :

Our one, our only, magazine is again in danger. We have
been for many years dying for a magazine and have been mak-
ing divers unsuccessful attempts to have one of a high order,
that would rival your Blackwood or Fraser. Our last attempt
was Putnam's Magazine, which, after a brilliant career of a few
years, was at last driven into that last haven of all crazy literary
craft, " first-class wood-engravings." Boston stepped into the
breach, however, and set on foot the Atlantic, which was to be
kept up to the highest point of excellence by contributions from
both sides of the Atlantic. The British quota, however, was
not sent in very long, and it has owed a very remarkable suc-
cess almost entirely to native pens. The articles were rarely
either so elaborate or so profound, or even so varied in interest,
as those of its English contemporaries, since that ripe and
careful cultivation of which good magazine literature is the
fruit is by no means so general here as with you ; but they were
incomparably better than any similar recueil that has yet made
its appearance.

In reviewing the early history of its magazine, the
House of Harper, published in 19 12, discloses an uneasy
appreciation of the need for an apologist. "If Harper's
Magazine had been started upon the plan of exclusive
American authorship," it says, " the limitation thus im-
posed would have been an obstacle to the development of
its present comprehensive and popular scope. Every
other American magazine published in 1850 had a definite
plan which determined its field, and, as a matter of fact,
had filled its field and had attained its full development.
As regards literary appeal, the conditions of American
literature at that time fixed a narrow limit. In this situa-
tion the Harpers did, as magazine publishers, what for
many years they had been doing in their book business —
they brought to readers the richest treasures of literature
wherever they were to be found, which at that time was
mostly in periodical publications of Europe." Yet in a
moment the apologist hastens to announce that its eclectic

THE CONVERTED CORSAIR 239

character — in spite of the Hmitations of American
Hterary appeal — rapidly disappeared in its very infancy.
Now, it does not appear that the work of the chief native
authors had undergone any change whatever by the time
Harper's decided to give a more national tone to its pages.
But even had this been the case, its readers would not
have benefited thereby ; for the chief concession the maga-
zine had made to native authorship was in articles espe-
cially designed as vehicles for the illustrations that had
been the other great reason for the financial success of
the publication — " popular " scientific and historical and
travel articles, which cheered the family circle without
any danger of inebriation. These were supplied by
American ministers and writers of journalistic calibre,
but for the most part all expression of thought or imagin-
ation was imported from England. A moment's mar-
shalling of the men so limited in literary appeal as to
fail entirely to meet the demands of the early Harper's
will convince one of the impressiveness of their exclusion.
We may find them in Parke Godwin's address upon
Curtis :

When we began Putnam's, among our promised contributors
— and nearly all of them made good their promise — were
Irving, Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Hawthorne,
Thoreau, Ripley, Miss Sedgwick, Mrs. Kirkland, J. P. Kennedy,
Fred Cozzens, Richard Grant White, Melville, Stoddard, Sted-
man, Read, Maria Lowell.

The secret of the exclusion of these writers is afforded
almost in the same paragraph. ** If we were asked why
we started a monthly magazine," said Fletcher Harper,
" we would have to say frankly that it was as a tender
to our business, though it has grown into something quite
beyond that." The business of the house, the author
states quite as frankly a little later :

The Harper brothers saw an enormous reading public in a
country of cheap literature and an immense store of material
at their disposal in England, more various and more attractive
than the home supply; and they resolved to bring the two
together.

240 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

Harper's Magazine, in short, intended to do on a wider
basis only what Harper's Family Library had done —
and bring as many kinds of English literary goods as
possible to an American market.

There is no reason why it should not have done so,
but in the process of the lucrative enterprise no outsider,
except the Average Reader, had any cause for gratitude.
Knickerbocker, Putnam's, Graham's and the Philadelphia
sisterhood had all likewise fought according to the
measure of their intelligence for their place in the sun, yet
they had fought for the fatherland also — they had fallen
in the combat, it is true, but they had gone down with
the sustaining thought of having assisted in furthering
the cause of American literature. Although Harper's
splendidly atoned for the sins of her youth, her punish-
ment endures now when those sins have been forgotten
by the present grateful generation. Scarcely, in the lives
and letters of our illustrious of fifty years ago, do we
come across an appreciative and endearing mention of her
name, like that which has so often bejewelled all the
others. Putnam's, while the light of her founder still
shone in her, contributed generously to the advancement
of periodical literature in America, but not the least of
her gifts was bestowed in departing from the field it was
not given her to win — the nationalisation of Harper's.
The Atlantic continued the fight, and when Scrihner's
came along in 1870 to make its notable American success,
it had become no longer possible for an American maga-
zine to be mainly nourished from over seas. The con-
verted corsair had metamorphosed into one of our most
reliable merchantmen ; and thus we may echo the House
of Harper in closing the retrospect of its magazine:
" Looking back upon the one hundred and twenty-one
volumes, the first impression made upon the mind is their
real exposition of human activity and interest in the
half-century and " — when it at last made its delayed
appearance — " our steady growth in literary and artistic
excellence.*'

THE CONVERTED CORSAIR 241

For a long time after American authors of a higher rank
began to appear, the magazine and the other periodicals
of the house had but Httle room for them. Three novels
of Dickens', four of Thackeray's, with the Four Georges,
one of Bulwer's, two of George Eliot's, six of Trollope's
rather crowded its earlier years. " In the period i860—
1880," says the House of Harper, "not infrequently we
would have two and even three foreign serials running
at the same time in each one of our three periodicals."
As the prominent English novelists did not, in their
opinion, often write good short stories, here seemed to
offer the American opportunity; indeed, the English se-
rials, the account continues, caused special stress to be
laid upon short stories of American life. Yet the stories
submitted could not have been very satisfactory, for on
the occasion of Justin McCarthy's first visit to America
they gave him an order for forty-five in a batch. These,
with an industry which even John Abbott might have en-
vied, he finished and delivered before returning to the
smiling shore of Britain. Besides lecturing right and left
and acting as the literary editor of the Independent! He
must have looked back upon his tidy trip with satisfac-
tion.

All the more because, although he went to America
to make money, his immediate literary success came as a
surprise to him. " Up to the time of my visiting New
York," he says, " I had published nothing bearing my
name, but I had published three books anonymously. I
found on my arrival one of my novels passing as a serial
through Harper's, which became the means of introduc-
ing me personally to the house, with which I have had
many dealings since of the most cordial and satisfactory
kind." McCarthy does not, unfortunately, tell us how
it happened that a serial of his could be running in New
York without his knowledge. But the confusions aris-
ing from the lack of copyright gave room for endless
predicaments as well as endless exploitations. William
James Stillman throws some light on the magazine phase

242 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

of the situation in the Autobiography of a Journa-
Hst:

In 1871 I became the London literary agent for Scrihner's
Magazine, afterward the Century. I was instructed to secure a
story from a certain author and contracted for the proof sheets
of her next novel, about to be published in England in a certain
magazine. On the announcement of Scrihner's of the coming
publication, the (American) firm who published her prior works
announced that they would not respect the agreement with the
author, but would pirate the story. As the result of the quarrel,
Scrihner's resigned the story to its rival on payment to the lady
of the sum agreed on. But now appeared an utterly unsus-
pected state of things: the London magazine had already sold
the proof sheets of the story to a third American house, and an
expose of the situation showed that English publishers had been
in the practice of selling the advance proofs of their most
popular works and recouping the half of the price paid the
authors. I wrote to the English papers, which were just now
indulging in one of their periodical outbreaks against American
literary piracy, and dwelt on the hitherto unknown point that
the depredations on the author's interests were committed by
the English publishers, who sold to the American the wares the
latter was accused of stealing, whereas the fact was that he
bought and paid equally for the right of publication, while the
English publishers continued to reprint American books without
the least regard for analogous transatlantic rights. ... I was
treated with a torrent of abuse. Only Mr. Trollope came for-
ward to sustain me, with the statement that he had received
mere from Harpers than from his English publishers. The
author whose novel had been the occasion of the trouble de-
clared that English authors ought to make me a testimonial, but
from no other source did I receive a word of thanks.

To follow all the implications of this interesting story
would lead us far afield. There was, at any rate, no
lack of British material, and the success of it in the maga-
zine amply justified the admirable business perception
which had thus made a market for it. As Charles Nord-
hoff said, " Fletcher Harper made few mistakes about
his public, because he had created it." And even had he
been seeking to force American writers down its captious
throat, there was a striking confirmation of the wisdom
of his policy. We are told that after the conclusion of
the war the edition of the magazine fell off so greatly

THE CONVERTED CORSAIR 243

that he seriously considered terminating its publication;
but Our Mutual Friend and Wilkie Collin's Arma-
dale, especially the latter, revived its circulation. After
all, even when one has created a public, one is as much
at its mercy as if one had not. It is with gratitude that
we find that in the mid seventies this infant turned giant
had at last come to the appreciation of Longfellow (who
had for some years been getting from one hundred to
one hundred and fifty dollars a poem in other magazines,
and for whose Hanging of the Crane Robert Bonner,
catering to the exclusively intellectual readers of the
Ledger, had paid three thousand dollars). The poet
records in 1877 that he has received one thousand dollars
from them for the right of first publication of Kera-
mos in their magazine, his earliest mention of any deal-
ings with them, although he had, through the kindly
services of Fields, sold them Morituri Salutamus in
1875. By 1882 Higginson also, having outlived the
earlier limitations of his appeal, was publishing there
chapters of his Larger History of the United States:
and notes, " I have written one of my Harper's papers
regularly every month for the last eleven months." And
in 1885 — when he engaged to write a weekly article for
Harper's Bazar, similar in tone to his Woman's Journal
papers, but not entering upon the still delicate question,
from a publisher's point of view, of suffrage — he speaks
of his great pleasure in an audience of one hundred
thousand people listening to his voice in all parts of the
civilised world.

In artistic excellence, however, the record of America's
steady growth began from the very beginning. This was
for precisely the same reason that the other had not. It
was found before the first year was out that the patrons
wanted pictorial illustrations; and these, if they were to
have any appositeness, were better procured in America.
The prejudice of high-class readers against "picture-
books " has historically been one of the most amusing of
their many affectations; and, like a great many others,

244 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

it had little counterpart in their actual practice. Intel-
lectual people liked pictures whenever they were inter-
esting; when they were not, it afforded an excellent op-
portunity to exhibit a fine chastity of taste. The three
portraits of contemporary historians which enlivened the
first number of Harper's naturally filled no family circle
with clamorous joy, nor did the cautious adventures of
the rest of the first volume. The numbers had, apart
from fashion-plates, only about half a dozen pictures
each, and almost all of them were of the highly uninter-
esting kind which have " literary associations." But
crude by our standards as are the early wood-cuts, the
fact that they bore any immediate and spontaneous rela-
tion to the text was very interesting in itself to readers
for whom the funeral-baked steel-engravings of Graham's
and Godey's had coldly furnished forth the wedding feast
for so many years; and Harper's, emboldened by the
great success of a new pictorial London paper, tried a
flyer with some home-made descriptive articles rather
elaborately and freshly illustrated. The experiment dem-
onstrated. Until Scribner's was founded in 1870,
Harper's had, except for a limited flight or two by the
clipped-winged Putnam's, no competition in the new popu-
lar specialty. Their rival took a long leap ahead in
the discovery and development of a new method of print-
ing illustrations — to which perhaps more than to any
other one item the success of the American magazine is
to be ascribed — and Harper's naturally strained every
nerve to come abreast of her once more. " The compe-
tition between the two," says the House of Harper, " be-
came so keen that at times we paid as high as five hundred
dollars for engraving one page. In 1888, when both
the Century and Scribner's were in the field, the demand
for first-class engravers was very great, and the market
value of their work became a serious consideration for
the publishers." Thus the competition waxed — to the
chagrin and often to the cost of authors, who found
their texts become decidedly second-fiddle — until the

THE CONVERTED CORSAIR 245

invention of process reproduction in half-tone worked
another revohition and began to take the place of wood-
engraving. But with it the author was in no better case.
Indeed, he had all the more reason to feel that by the de-
crees of heaven and publishers the artist was a pampered
child of fortune. For he was still second-fiddle in prices,
and the change allowed the artist to gloat over the en-
graver, whom he had accused of tampering constantly
with his work; but no revolution of process is yet in sight
which will compel the illustrator to stick to the author's
text. Lafcadio Hearn broke his contract with Harper's
when he found that he was getting less for his Japanese
sketches than his illustrator, but his fancied superiority
was as unwarrantable as his folly. Now — in the mak-
ing of the modem magazine — abideth these three: the
advertiser, the artist, and the author, and the least of
these is the last.

The new journals of opinion founded during Harper's
first decade and a little later reproached it for having
none. But it is to be remembered that this was distinctly
a new idea for a magazine which aimed at large popular
circulation. Lewis Gaylord Clark, who was in charge
of the " Drawer," had been editor of Knickerbocker, and
that urbane old party would have thought it as bad
taste to divide the company of gentlemen by uttering an
opinion which all could not share as to raise his voice
in the lurid accents of the Ledger. Another editor of
Harper's was H. J. Raymond, who had plenty of opinions
(proved by his having helped to found the New York
Tinted and his resigning in five years in order to pay
exclusive attention to it), but, like Curtis, who also had
a mind of his own, he was not encouraged to express
them. Indeed, when Curtis was very forcibly expressing
his editorial opinion in the Weekly at a later date, Godkin
of the Nation felt aggrieved that it ran counter to the
personal opinion of the man. But the real editor,
Fletcher Harper, kept his eye single unto the prospectus.
This announced that the magazine intended to supply to

246 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

the family circle of every intelligent citizen in the United
States, at so low a rate as to give it a value much beyond
its price, everything of general interest and usefulness.
And the family circle must not be disrupted by opinions.
" We shall not, I trust," said Mrs. Malaprop, or some
other Dogberry, " venture any opinions before ladies."
It was many years before the ideal of the magazine —
" that it should lie along the great lines of current
thought " — was interpreted as other than merely exposi-
tory. That it should not risk its great circulation by^
having opinions was naturally resented by those virtuous \
magazines which had thus limited theirs. The obvious/^
safety of this course somewhat discredited, in the minds
of its enemies, the obvious sanity of another — the
middle path it took between the immoderation of slave-
holder and of abolitionist. This was also thought to be
dictated by prudence. It was, however, an opinion shared
by every property-holder in New York; as was also the
advocation, after 1 86 1, of the principles of the Republican
party. Not, then, until it espoused Civil Service Re-
form, and later the nomination of Grover Cleveland,
did its subscription list run any risk by reason of its ideas.
And by that time it was beginning to be discovered that
nobody gave up reading a magazine which was nine-
tenths profitable entertainment merely because he dis-
agreed with the other tenth. It was just about this era
that Sarah Bernhardt became a great factor in our civili-
sation by providing a topic of burning discussion in clubs
and debating societies (a subject which agitated many
editorial sanctums also) : " Should we go to see an im-
moral actress? (Especially if foreign?)" But long be-
fore the Magazine ventured to have opinions of its own,
it had intrusted them to the Weekly, issued in 1857.
This, too, announced itself as " adopted for family read-
ing"; but, being nearer a newspaper by three weeks,
tradition justified it, family harmony notwithstanding, in
speaking its mind. How long ago it seems since literary

THE CONVERTED CORSAIR 247

magazines, like clergymen, were expected to have plenty
of sentiments, but no alienating ideas!

Almost as long ago was it when publishers trusted it
was not necessary for them to reiterate their assurance
that nothing should ever be admitted to the pages of the
magazine in the slightest degree offensive to delicacy or
any moral sentiment. When Harper's added in volume
five a department " Pictorial Comicalities " — the matter
and manner of which was not very dissimilar to Graham's
"Sips of Punch," begun in 185 1 and followed later by
" Original Comicalities " — it declared its intention with
the utmost solemnity : " The most scrupulous care will
be exercised that humour shall not pass into vulgarity or
satire degenerate into abuse."

This whole subject of the sacredness of moral senti-
ments, which once so concerned our publishers, is, of
course, extremely skittish. Nor is this the place to dwell
upon the inevitable absurdities of a censor. It is not so
long ago that the law of the English-speaking stage
was, " Say anything you like about seduction, but be
sure you call it flirtation — except, of course, in a farce " ;
and since mothers were writing to school teachers, " Don't
teach my girl anything about her insides ; 'taint no use,
and besides it's rude." But surely few things are more
apt to make us blush than the books we once called im-
moral. "^And the influence of our magazine publishers in
prolonging our intellectual infancy must have been a
powerful one.^ The announcements which bleat so
proudly from all of their opening pages would no longer
allure subscribers to-day, when the hearth has ceased to
be a cloister and fathers have given up fondly conceiving
that the family circle suspends its animation until they
return with the hour of the evening lamp. The House
of Harper provides a delightful illustration of how benefi-
cent has been the flight of time. Can you fancy this
happening in the sixties, for instance, when the moral
sensitiveness of Harper's was appalling?

248 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

The Simpletons, afterward Hearts Insurgent, as it appeared
in the magazine, was published by us in its original form as a
book, with the title Jude the Obscure. We had said when he
wrote us that he must assure us it would be in every respect
suitable for a family magazine. He said it would not offend the
most fastidious maiden; so we began it. It had not progressed
far when he informed us that he was distressed to say the de-
velopment of the story was carrying him into unexpected fields,
and he proposed that we discontinue it or make any changes
we desired. We wrote him that we were properly ashamed of
every word of protest we had to write, but our rule was that
the magazine should contain nothing which could not be read
aloud in any family circle. Hardy, without any irritation, re-
wrote one of the chapters, and we made some modifications as
the story ran.

Addisonian in its morality and its sentimentality, it
was — in the beginning — following in all other respects
the well-beaten and safe path. Unlike Putnam's and the
Atlantic, it sought nothing new. The early issues lacked
only a meteorological page to duplicate its forbears of a
score of years before. The old titles to the old depart-
ments are all here, without any effort for individuality
or originality — Literary and Scientific Miscellany, Lit-
erary Notices, Monthly Review of Current Events,
Domestic and Foreign, Fashions. Only in the third
volume is an attempt made to be interesting in the titles
of the new departments, Editor's Drawer, Easy Chair,
and Editor's Table. These headings, like Leaves from
Punch, were stereotype, but not flavourless, and made
some slight concession to erring humanity. They did
not even exhibit any novelty in the type they employed —
speaking according to sanctified precedent in the tiny
voice of Alice's gnat, as if their time alone were worth
a thousand pounds a minute. This third volume, by the
way, announces that it cost more than either of its prede-
cessors by five to ten thousand dollars ! A lavish use of
figures, which becomes all the more convincing when you
remember that just at this time Graham mentioned (cer-
tainly not conservatively) one- fourth of the lesser amount
as a thumping sum for a single number, even when most

THE CONVERTED CORSAIR 249

of his authors were paid. The Editor's Table purposed
to discuss the higher questions of ethics and principles,
the Drawer was to serve viands otherwise rejectable, the
Easy Chair was for light and pointed social chat. The
last was undertaken in 1853 by Curtis, although other
men contributed to it for several years. Curtis had be-
come a Harper author with Nile Notes in 185 1, and
when he became associated with the magazine he was an
editor of Putnam's, which a little later spoke its mind so
freely on the policy of its editor's other household. As
the two publishers were on the most ticklish terms, never
could a man have had more trouble with his double life;
and he doubtless returned devout thanks when he became
monogamous again. In 1863 the Chair was made politi-
cal editor of the Weekly. This year Mr. Howells joined
the magazine, and Literary Notices reincarnated under
the more attractive name of Editor's Study. Here he
was succeeded by Charles Dudley Warner. The trio is
a gracious and accomplished one, of which any magazine
— or era — might be proud. When the Bazar appeared
in 1867, Curtis took a department in that also. The
Bazar was the same canny compound of old and new
which had made the other periodicals so brilliantly suc-
cessful. Its sub-title, A Repository of Fashion and In-
struction, might have graced many of our eighteenth
century magazines; but the ingenious advertising which
heralded it and its pictorial policy were an outcome of
Harper's specialised experience. The first Easy Chair,
so charmingly endeared to later generations by its suc-
cession of genial occupants, is of interest.

After our more severe editorial work is done — the scissors
laid in our drawer and the Monthly Record made as full as
our pages will bear, of history — we have a way of throwing
ourselves back into an old red-backed easy chair that has long
been an ornament of our dingy office, and indulging in an easy
and careless overlook of the gossiping papers of the day, and in
such chit-chat with chance visitors as keeps us informed of the
drift of the town-talk. Having made our course good, we mean
to catch up in these few additional pages those lighter whiffs

250 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

from the great world of opinion which come floating to us as
we sit here in our Easy-Chair.

Thus it records the fire of December, 1853, which cost
the firm a million and a half dollars and destroyed the
entire January number of the magazine — and inciden-
tally demonstrated most triumphantly the Harper effi-
ciency by delaying it no more than ten days :

It is now just about a year since we rescued our Easy-Chair
from the falling timbers and the general wreck of our great
fire. This Easy-Chair can never forget how along the wires
came thrilling a thousand messages of cheerful encouragement,
of prompt offers of aid, and of the most generous sympathy.
But not only is our Easy-Chair planted again, but a great part
of the building in which it stands is restored. The same old
square between Cliff Street and Pearl Street will be occupied
by the new structure.

" Wesley Harper told me," wrote Charles Nordhoff,
" that the fire seemed at first a heaven-sent opportunity
to give up business. They were abundantly wealthy.
* We never dared let our children know how well off we
were,' he said, * for fear of spoiling their lives.' " Nord-
hoff tells his experience in Some Editors I have Known :

I came into the firm in the fall of 1856. Mr. Fletcher Harper
was then in his prime and planning the establishment of a
weekly paper. I was a young man and very much unknown.
I had offered them a small book for children and had signed
the contract, when he suddenly asked me if I should like to
come to them. I was to have no specific duties, but would have
to find my place and work. On my first appearance in Franklin
Square I felt as uncomfortable as a very young cat in a very
strange garret. I found it literally true that for a while I had
no regular duties. I wrote some things, of which a few were
used; I read foreign papers and made extracts; at the sugges-
tion of an editor, whose kindness to a very depressed young
man I have never forgotten, I " gutted " a new book of travel
and adventure — that is to say, I made out of the most readable
parts of it a magazine article, and this, to my delight, was
printed ; and of this kind of work I did later a good deal. Then
I became one of the readers. . . . Mr. Fletcher Harper had a
sound popular judgment. In respect to magazine articles he
often stood alone — but his judgment was final. " Whether
we ought to publish it" meant with him whether it would be

r

THE CONVERTED COiRSAIR 251

intelligible, interesting and useful to the average American
reader. Mr. Harper made very few mistakes. He was a most
lovely character, unpretentious and considerate to all in his
employ. I suppose the other brothers would have freely owned
that Mr. Fletcher Harper was the ablest of them all, but they
were a united band.

Like Beecher, he was an editor without a desk. " He
was a great editor," wrote Dr. Lyman Abbott. " I do
not think Mr. Harper ever wrote a line for publication.
I doubt whether he ever read a manuscript but he created
the Magadne and the Weekly and the Bazar and per-
vaded them with his own informing spirit. He created
a new school of journaHsm.'*

In 1874 Harper's followed the lead of Scrihner^s and
the Atlantic in introducing the transformed South and
its new writers. This exceedingly great service to the
cause of the American reunion, as well as of American
letters, had been begun the year before. Its effect upon
the Southern attitude toward the North was immediate.
" Contrary to the idea which had prevailed in the South
after the war," says Mr. Edwin Mims in his Life of
Lanier, " that Northern people would refuse to recognise
Southern genius, it was the Northern magazines which
made possible the success of Southern literature." Har-
per's in January, 1874, began a series of articles on the
New South, and the next year Constance Fenimore
Woolson began to write her Southern articles. In 1887
Southern literature, thanks to Scribne/s and the Atlantic,
had now become of such bulk and quality as to hold a
conspicuous place in periodical output, and Harper's
devoted an appreciative article to it, saying that it had
introduced a stream of rich warm blood. In opening
another new field Harper's was nip and tuck with Scrih-
ner's, but, as before, the latter seems to have nipped first.
This was the issuing of an English edition. It started
off in 1880 with a large circulation, and there was in the
beginning a difference in the editorial departments.
" The delicacy and beauty of the illustrations," says the
House of Harper, " found nothing comparable in Europe ;

252 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

and it was the English edition of Harper's which made
Europe acknowledge our superior work in rapid fine art
printing." But Scrihner's also rather piqued itself on
making Europe sit up and take notice — the inborn crav-
ing of every true American heart — and feeling that she
was ahead of her rival in illustration, as well as in prior-
ity of the invasion of London, she naturally claimed that
honour. " The founding of an English edition," said
she in 1881, " seemed on the face of it like carrying coals
to Newcastle. It was not many years since American
monthlies largely lived upon the productions, sometimes
bought and sometimes stolen, of English writers. Start-
ing with an edition of two thousand, it now issues iij-.
England eighteen thousand. The daring of the pub-~7
lishers has given an impetus to American literature in (
England, two other magazines having since issued English
editions."

Her rivalry with Scribner's-Century was always a
touchy subject with Harper's, Dr. H. M. Field in his
paper, The Evangelist, wrote in 1894 a straddling article
entitled Is There a Falling Off in Our Magazines, or
Are They Better Than Ever? It was difficult to ex-
tract his meaning, for what he took away with one hand
he gave back with the other. But it was at least appar-
ent that he had praised the Century, and condemned some
qualities which Harper's shared with the other popular
magazines. " The idea of Harper's learning a lesson
from the Century is not objectionable," wrote Mr. H. M.
Alden in reply, " as I hope we are not above learning a
lesson from any quarter. There would have been no
competition if the Century had not so entirely adopted
the plan of Harper's from beginning to end, even in its
editorial department. This was a very comprehensive
lesson taught by Harper's to the Century, as, indeed, to
every popular illustrated magazine that could hope for
wide success." As we have already seen, neither the
idea of their editorial departments nor of addressing the
average family circle originated with Harper's; what the

THE CONVERTED CORSAIR 253

magazine chiefly resented was the imputation of " stoop-
ing to a lower level of readers." But it was an accusa-
tion that once the firm would have gloried in, and did
when charged with it by certain unsuccessful magazines.
Harper's had grown with the growing age, that is all;
and was a little ashamed to recall that its estimate of the
average family circle had once been somewhat lower than
now could be remembered with any pride. As for the
rest of Dr. Field's charge, it ran as follows :

They have carried illustrations to such an extent that they
(the magazines) are becoming more and more picture-books,
very beautiful to the eye, but a little wearisome to one who
looks for something besides " embellishments," while in their
contents there is a little too much of froth and foam for my
antiquated taste. Whereas I once felt that life was hardly
worth living if I did not have my monthly magazines, I now
feel that I could at least endure existence if those stars in the
literary firmament should disappear.

Mr. Alden wrote in somewhat pointed rejoinder to this
part of the accusation:

I will admit that we are not making so prominent the editorial
features as we did a generation ago — simply because other
agencies meet the popular need. We never treated political or
religious questions; but recently, far more than formerly, have
we laid open the more hidden phases of European politics and
the most important phases of religious development. It is a
good thing for you and me (who are growing older) that there
are now special periodicals, religious, scientific, artistic and po-
litical, to which we can resort for the satisfaction of our schol-
arly interests in these several fields, untroubled and undisturbed
by the fluctuating and ever-changing moods of a world that in-
sists upon living as strongly as we insist upon studying.

This was a good enough answer, but there were ob-
viously three better ones which he was constrained from
making. It would perhaps have been impolitic to express
his surprise that any one could prefer the didactic and
wishy-washy tone of the old Harper's to the tone of the
modern magazine; it would perhaps have been impolite
to point to the pages of the dull and feeble Evangelist as
the sort of thing they had now learned to avoid; and it

254 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

would perhaps have proved embarrassing to inquire what
in that year's contents had given Dr. Field the impression
of prevailing foam and froth. Merely to open the two
bound volumes of that year gives a reminiscent delight.
Where could be found a more varied, substantial, and
well-seasoned feast? Dr. Field confessed to as much
loftiness of spirit about stories as about pictures — but
friends who had read them didn't feel repaid for their
time. Well, they were by Miss Wilkins, Constance
Woolson, Ruth McEnery Stuart, Sarah Orne Jewett, Eg-
bert Craddock, Owen Wister, R. H. Davis, and Howard
Pyle. As for serials, the year was made remarkable by
one of the most exquisite of American romances — A
Kentucky Cardinal, by James Lane Allen — and Trilby,
by Du Maurier, which if it stooped to a lower level of
readers, stooped to conquer the world, since it was by
universal admission more popular with more kinds of
readers than any other serial ever published. But to turn
to something Dr. Field at least would not recoil from
unread, since it provided the educational and informa^
tional food he craved, there were, among an opulent list
of topics, Charleston in 1861, Egypt and Chaldea
in Recent Discoveries, Emperor William's Stud Farm
and Hunting Forest, The English Senate, Russia
and Her Jews, Tuberculosis and Its Prevention, Relation
of Life to Style in Architecture, a series of articles on
Great American Industries and some studies of the
Comedies of Shakespeare, together with instalments of
Mr. Howells's charming literary recollections. Other
authors were Frederic Remington, George W. Smalley,
Edwin Lord Weeks, Poultney Bigelow, and Arthur
T. Hadley — a light and frothy crew! It was a
golden year. What volume of Knickerbocker's or Put-
nam's or Graham's or Godey's could have made his
life more worth living when he was young? Dr. Field
confessed that he might be growing old, but what
rose-misted reminiscence of youth could so enhalo any
periodical in the whole history of America as to entitle

THE CONVERTED CORSAIR 255

it to stand beside the plain fact of Harper's, 1894! And
except for the beatific chance of the two serials, the year
was not unrepresentative. Fashions in literature come
and go, and the worst as well as the best of magazines
must follow them; after a season of grey half -tints and
an exasperating cultivation of nuances, swings in a sea-
son of splurge and an equally exasperating welter of
red blood — with the change the individual liking may
expand or contract, but it should admit, if it recognise
that a magazine is published for more than one sub-
scriber, a steady level of catholic excellence in Harper's
which it would be difficult to suggest ways of surpassing.

CHAPTER XI

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE HAVE MISSED EACH OTHER

The first distinctively religious magazine printed in
America was the Christian History, 1743-45. The sec-
ond came twenty years later and presented two unusual
features. It was printed in German and used in its
twelfth number the first German types cast in this country.
The second feature was not duplicated until the appear-
ance over a century later of Sunday School organs. It
was not for sale but was distributed without money and
without price. In spite of its prodigality, it continued
to be published at Germantown from 1764 to 1770.
Though most of the subscribers to the other early re-
ligious magazines got them for nothing, it was not by the
intention of the proprietors. Foreseeing the delinquency
of their patrons, some magazines made sure of a fund
to keep them going. But this was sometimes perfidiously
withdrawn, as in the case of the United States Christian
in 1796 ; and the magazine after a hand to mouth existence
on subscriptions only, perished. Many of the magazines
gravely pledged every cent of their profits to the mis-
sionary cause, although they must have known that if
they paid expenses they would be succeeding beyond hope.
So soon did guile begin in religious periodicals.

Of the eighteenth century magazines, however, com-
paratively few are devoted to religion. A glance at the
list of our early publications shows why. Almost the
entire publishing output of the period consisted of re-
ligious books and tracts. The general magazine, indeed,
seems to have reckoned upon elbowing its way into a
community where most of the lettered were devout, simply

256

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE 257

because it afforded some variety to the everlasting diet of
disquisitions. But it did not, for the most part, venture
too boldly. For a long time it was as much religious as
literary; just as when the religious magazine began to
emerge later, it was for a long time as much literary as
religious. Here is a title which sounds edifying in the
extreme yet it heralded nothing distinctively religious —
the Young Man's Magazine (Philadelphia 1786) "Con-
taining the Substance of Moral Philosophy and Divinity,
selected from the works of the most eminent for Wisdom,
Learning and Virtue Among the Ancients and Moderns."
Nevertheless, there is a smack of this-worldliness about
it which one does not savour in the title, the Theological
Magazine (New York 1796-99) "A Synopsis of Mod-
ern Religious Sentiment." But this editor announced
that he particularly desired to please. Not only did he
hope to have all his pieces original and recently written,
but he wanted them short also — sermons thus being in
all three particulars disqualified. " Anecdotes, remark-
able Providences, and the experiences of Dying Christians
preferred." Some religious magazines, however, spread
this table with the stern fare of sermons only, as 'was
the case with the Royal Spiritual or the Christian's Grand
Treasure. By Several Divines (1771).

It took the Baptist Missionary Messenger, started in
1803, five years to complete its first volume; but now,
more than a centurion, it can look back indulgently on
the intermittent chills and fever of its infancy. Another
Baptist magazine, labouring under the singularly unat-
tractive title of Analytical Repository, had been attempted
in 1 80 1, but could not survive. In the very incomplete
list of eighteen magazines which Isaiah Thomas men-
tioned in 1 8 10, only four are religious. The Panoplist
and the Christian Monitor of Boston, the Evangelist of
Hartford, the Churchman's Magazine of New York. To
the somewhat sharp dealing on the part of the last named,
we owe a fifth religious periodical, the Magazine of Ec-
clesiastical History. A printer who had been given the

258 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

contract for the Churchman's had been sent South by the
editors to canvass for subscribers, and while on his mis-
sion the printing was coolly withdrawn from him and
placed elsewhere. To get even he started a religious
magazine of his own (to which, let us hope, he was able
to shift all the subscribers he had drummed up !). Thus,
as might have aptly quoted some na'ive contemporary
divine (of another persuasion, of course) doth the Lord
make the wrath of man to please Him.

The early religious periodicals had been for the most
part in the interests of Christianity at large, and the few
which were denominational were only mildly so. But
since sermons were their chief religious provender and
they were published by Church societies, it was inevitable
that as time went on all the sects should have their own
representatives. Of the one hundred and thirty-seven
periodicals begun between 1815 and 1833, Mr. W. B.
Cairns says that about fifty were religious in character.
In the West the emotional element in religion received
more attention, but in the East the discussion of theology
remained supreme. It was carried on with fierce in-
tensity. The entire literary strength of the smaller towns
was exhausted in the flowering of one religious organ;
and even Boston, at the period of her brightest intellects,
diverted most of her intellectual energy to theological
controversy. At the close of this period came a great
religious awakening through all the States, which for a
while sought in varying forms a larger emotional expres-
sion, but in the decade 1835-45 ecclesiastical turmoil
reached its climax.

In all of the churches except the Catholic, had arisen
controversies which demanded their own special mouth-
pieces. Even in the Church of England, which after the
Revolution organised into the Protestant Episcopal
Church, the retention of old types under new condi-
tions gave rise to dissensions. Just as it became the
most influential religious body in the country, the Pres-
byterian Church was in 1837 sundered by its great schism.

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE 259

There were three parties in the society, and there was
that year for the first time in seven years an Old-School
majority in the Assembly. Whereupon, without notice
or specification, it excommunicated four-ninths of its
membership. For thirty years almost half of the church

— under the same name, doctrines, ritual, and discipline

— existed separately. Naturally, the organs of the ex-
Presbyterians, thus conceived by sin and created in wrath,
devoted themselves more to light than to sweetness.
Such high-handed methods did not bring about absolute
rupture in the other bodies, but in all of them internal
discord cried aloud for vengeance. " The Churchman
and other periodicals," says Archdeacon Tiffany in his
history of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America,
" evidenced the growth of church interest, but also in-
crease of church strife, which they did nothing to allay
but everything to inflame." The Congregationalists had
early developed a liberal body which was moving towards
Unitarianism. The Monthly Anthology which several
liberalists had started in 1803 was met by the Panoplist
in 1805, founded " by an association of Friends to Evan-
gelical Truth," and this began at once to force the Lib-
erals to define their position.

Thus, everywhere there were controversies; and each
voiced its righteous indignation in the existing church
organs or created others for the same purpose. And
each man wrote as if he might never change his mind
again. Orestes Brownson, far more temperate than most
in his denunciations, passed through Baptist, Presbyterian,
and Unitarian churches to become Roman Catholic at
last. When no suitable temple could be found for the
enlarging soul, one was constructed forthwith. " How
can I live," said Dr. Dollinger, " in a country where they
found a new church every day ! " Emerson, Ripley, W.
H. Channing, Pierpont all began as clergymen and moved
into a wider world, but before they went threats of heresy
trials were rife. Turn where you might, you heard angry
and harsh voices hurtling from the religious arena. An

26o THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

inspection of the religious magazines of the first half of
the nineteenth century, recalls the story told of a Scotch
minister who, having written a particularly melting tract
on the Divine Love, asked a friend to whom he had sub-
mitted his previous tract on the Divine Wrath against
schismatists, what he should name it. " Why not call
it," answered his friend, *' Come to Jesus, by the author
of Go to the Devil?"

Between the unsuccessful early attempts to float reli-
gious magazines of a mild sectarianism and the later hectic
activity in founding periodicals which flourished on
mutual vituperation, had interposed a decided lull. In it,
religious magazines grew more and more infrequent in
their issues and the subscribers more and more languid in
their support. When the Episcopal Church of Vermont
began in 1813 the quarterly Theological Magazine and
Religious Repository, the editor announced that monthlies
calculated to convey religious instruction had most of
them been discontinued, and he believed that if the
churches could not support a monthly they might support
a quarterly. But this same year another editor, basing
his reasoning on the same phenomenon, arrived at a dia-
metrically different conclusion. Why should not a re-
ligious periodical supply the news also, and come out as
often as a Gazette? The idea was destined to elevate
the religious press of America into first rank, not only
at home but among the publications of the entire world.
As far as can be seen, it was destined also to have an-
other result of perhaps equal importance — namely, to
defer for a great many decades the establishment of any
.„-^^ermanent literary magazine by largely decreasing the
available audience for one. In Philadelphia, which had
mothered every other new experiment in literature and
was to mother many more, was started the religious
weekly newspaper, the Remembrancer. The innovation
took root at once. Ten journals in various parts of the
country were quickly founded in imitation. The Boston
Recorder and Telegraph and Zion's Herald had a circu-

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE 261

lation of five thousand each by 1826; and the Watchman,
the Christian Register, and the Universalist Magazine
printed a thousand copies a week. By 1828 there were
thirty-seven of these religious newspapers and one of
them, the Christian Advocate, had a weekly circulation
of fifteen thousand — the largest, it was claimed, then
reached by any newspaper in the world, not excepting the
London Times. This paper was published by the Metho-
dist Book Concern in New York in 1826. In the two
years it had already devoured the Missionary Journal of
Charleston, South Carolina, and it leapt to its supreme
position by the simple device of finishing off its repast
with the Boston Zion's Herald; and for two years more
it did not run the risk of losing a single old subscriber
by dropping the name of either of its constituents. A
man must have felt that he got his money's worth when
he took in for one subscription the Christian Advocate and
Missionary Journal and Zion's Herald, Dr. Howard
Bridgman says that in 1833 the circulation of religious
papers in New York City exceeded the circulation of
all its secular newspapers, and it was the penny daily
started by the New York Sun which first made the news-
paper proper a formidable competitor. The Philadel-
phia idea of grafting the religious element upon the news
journal made its first near approach to literature when it
was seized upon by Nathaniel Willis in the Boston Re-
corder. This aimed to do slightly more of the same
sort of thing that the Christian Science Monitor does to-
day— to give the news and an editorial presentation of
public affairs uncoloured by partisanship, and to introduce
as much religious intelligence as could be made con-
sistent with this aim. The paper continued an independ-
ent existence until 1867, when it was engulfed in the em-
brace of a young and lusty rival, the C ongregationalist
begun in 1849. For the Baptists the Watchman begun in
18 19 absorbed the Christian Reiiector in 1848 and the
Christian Era in 1875, and still sends out its cry. The
Examiner is a seven-branched candlestick and shines with

262 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

the light of six other luminaries which it gathered to
itself. The Religions Herald, 1828, still continues. Be-
fore the religious denominational magazine had time to
gain as firm a foothold in America as in Europe, the
weekly religious newspaper had established itself and
taken all the patronage. Before the religious magazine
had discovered that strife was the law of life, the re-
ligious weekly, already attractive by reasons of furnishing
the secular news, had made its position invulnerable by
the superior advantages it offered for immediate retort
in controversial discussion.

In the meantime, the literary element had been grow-
ing, and particularly up Boston way. The Monthly
Anthology had formed the starting point of the half-
religious, half-Hterary impulse which was so marked a
characteristic of the first New England Unitarians and
of which our New England literature is so largely an
embodiment. When the Anthology went to its rest, they
continued writing for its reincarnation, the North Ameri-
can, and for the various religious papers of Boston.
William Ellery Channing, who was minister in Boston
from 1803 to 1842, wrote innumerable book reviews for
the Christian Examiner; and Theodore Parker's pen was
busy not only in his own magazine but elsewhere. Both
the Massachusetts Quarterly and the Dial, in their short
brilliant lives, were very valuable in bringing to public
expression the brainy men who, having passed from
Liberal Congregationalism into Unitarianism, now felt
compelled to let not even the last mentioned roomy dome
shut them from heaven. The Unitarian clergymen, early
and late, have always had a literary turn. William
W^are, editor of the Christian Examiner, wrote often for
Knickerbocker and was author of several novels which
in themselves rather summed up the Unitarian blend of
literature and religion, being of the type of which Ben
Hur proved later the most successful example.

The Christian Examiner, 1824, was a development of
an earlier periodical begun in 18 14 by his brother Henry.

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE 263

Its first number announced : " The Christian Disciple
being in some numbers exhausted, it became convenient
to adopt another title, but we do not propose any con-
siderable deviation from the plan of the former v^ork.
We trust that the temper in which, as occasion shall re-
quire, we shall maintain our disputed sentiments will not
be found deficient in gentleness and candour. We shall
advocate a liberal theology but give it only its due space."
Bryant wrote to Ware in 1842: "I am sorry to hear
that the Christian Examiner is not so successful as it
should be. The cause to which you ascribe it is doubtless
the true one — that of its having taken the review form,
which is too solemn and didactic for the public taste."
From the year 1842 James Freeman Clarke had been a
frequent contributor to the paper and he wrote for it con-
stantly until it was absorbed in Old and New, to which
journal he also contributed. " When I returned to Bos-
ton in 1856," wrote Dr. Hale, " for two or three years
I had a certain responsibility in the editing and then was
appointed to take charge of Old and New, established
under the auspices of the Unitarian Association. It was
a monthly magazine which we started under what I still
think a well-conceived idea that if we took the acceptable
form of a literary and political journal, we could carry
to thousands of people intelligent discussions on the sub-
ject of religion which they would otherwise never have
heard. I venture to say that we attempted to do what the
Outlook does so well to-day."

When the Dial had run its too brief course, Mr. Frank
Sanborn, the last of the Emersonian group, says that its
readers went back to the North American Review and the
Christian Examiner (satisfying as best they might their
twin literary and religious impulses), till in 1847 the
Massachusetts Quarterly was started, to die in its turn
at the end of the third volume. Emerson, a year or so
before he began the Dial and while the project was being
spaciously discussed by its abstracted progenitors, had
been writing for a remarkable journal maintained single-

264 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA |

handed by that remarkable personality Orestes A, Brown-
son. He had begun the dignified Boston Quarterly in
1838, and his reasons for doing so were the same as ,
Emerson's for beginning the Dial. The religious con- j
victions he had possessed — and he had possessed sev- ^
eral — no longer held him, and even the most liberal
Unitarian periodical he now felt to bind him unduly.

The Boston Quarterly Review 'occupied part of the
interval during which Brownson having pushed his way
beyond the furthest frontier of Unitarianism had set up
his habitation in No-Man's Land. Said the Christian
Examiner in 1844: "The most remarkable occurrence
in our literary world is the re-appearance of Mr. Brown-
son's review, with even more of his peculiar mental char-
acter impressed upon it, since now it is exclusively from
his pen alone. Whatever be thought of his opinion and
changes of opinion, no one can deny the earnestness and
industry of his mind, his power and skill as a writer, or
the courageous and almost reckless independence with
which he throws his views before the public. His con-
nection with the Democratic Review having been found
mutually inconvenient, has been dissolved." Brownson's
contract with O' Sullivan had been to print what he
pleased. But his articles were often opposed to the
policy of the party and cost the magazine many sub-
scribers. In a few years he was editing a Catholic quar-
terly in the same dignified and earnest manner. His
inquiring spirit searching freedom had made the circuit
of the Theologies, and put in at last at an even tighter
port than the one he set out from. And erratic though \
his course had been, the eyes of the pilot still looked out I
from the bridge with serene and just eyes. " Aside from :
its theology, with which of course we have no sympathy "
he wrote in Brownson's Quarterly 1849, " the Christian
Examiner is second to no periodical in the country ; and
it was in its pages that Channing, Norton, Ware, the
Peabodys, Lawson, Walker, Frothingham, Dewey, Rip-
ley, and others first became generally known to the read-

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE 265

ing public and acquired their literary reputation. We
have many pleasant as well as painful recollections con-
nected with it, for we were ourselves for several years
counted among its contributors." Nevertheless, even
the most authoritative institution known to mankind
could not entirely muzzle Brownson. Though he re-
mained a Catholic for the rest of his life, he collided with
the church on several questions. Brownson's last-re-
vived Review, in 1873, ^^s the first American periodical
reprinted in England, where it had a large circulation.

In 1849 there were thirteen Catholic journals, eleven
once a week, one once a month, one a quarterly — ten in
the English language, two in the German, one in the
French. " The people on whom these journals have to
depend," wrote Brownson, " are for the most part recent
emigrants from foreign countries, of limited education
and means. That the Catholic press has been able to do
no more need not surprise us; that they have been able
to do so much and do it so well is the wonder."

But the civil and dignified tone of the Unitarians,
fixed or progressive, and of Brownson when he became
a Catholic spokesman, was a solitary phenomenon. It
was soon after 1830 that the religious press, already
sufficiently strident, began to grow more aggressively
denominational and theological. Politeness had always
been looked upon with suspicion by the church, and when
the words in the mouth were as soft as butter it was
because Satan lurked in the heart. By the close of the
decade the nation was shaken with grave social and
political issues, and it brought to them its fiercely polemi-
cal spirit — matched, to be sure, by the fiercely partisan
spirit of the secular papers. The church by this time
had moved much nearer to general social life. Internal
activities like the Sunday School and the Temperance
movements had thrown open its doors. Those who had
looked upon the Sunday School as an innovation quite as
worldly as the earlier introduction of the fiddle and then
the organ into the sanctuary, had a firm basis for their

266 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

fears — it was the Sunday School movement, as we
shall see, which began the undermining of denominational
religion. Total abstinence was another relaxing in-
fluence, as the parishioners of Pierpont may have fore-
seen when they turned him out of the pulpit of the HolHs
Street Society in Boston for preaching it. But as yet
neither of these socialising elements had largely entered
the religious papers. The Roman Catholic press had
remained from policy as aloof from American affairs as
the Protestant press had been from self-absorption; but
now by reason of the great increase in immigration it
was being brought into collision with the public-school
system. In the great question of slavery which now
began to rock the nation, however, almost the entire re-
ligious press stood silent until it was forced to declare
itself.

The Protestant Episcopal papers had never had very
much to say on the subject. In both the Methodist and
Baptist denominations, the agitation culminated in the
deliberate partition of the church between North and
South, the Methodists in 1844 and the Baptists in 1845.
Yet with the exception of Zion's Herald, Methodist
papers of the North condemned abolitionism; and the
slave-holding Methodists of course supported slavery as
a divine institution. Not until 1842 did the Christian
Advocate admit an editorial upon it. " The Christian
Advocate and Journal'^ said the Zion's Watchman, es-
tablished 1836, " has from time to time during two years
past indiscriminately applied to the Abolitionists uncour-
teous and unchristian names. It has given an incorrect
and mischievous view of their sentiments, by denouncing
them in severe and censorious language, and refused them
the privilege of explaining their views when they be-
lieved themselves misunderstood or defending themselves
against the unjust charges which they believed that paper
had published against them." The Zion's Herald, an-
other Methodist paper, early opened its columns to free
discussion of slavery but refused to take a stand. The

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE 267

theological professors at Andover agreed with the
Southern ministry that slavery had divine sanction, and
signed a proclamation saying so. The large body of the
clergy of all denominations refused to countenance the
Abolitionists, and the American Tract Society cut out
all condemnation of slavery from its English reprints.

It was with the intention of providing an organ for
a liberal and anti-slavery Congregationalism that the In-
dependent was started in 1848 by H. C. Bowen and three
others, yet one of its proprietors withdrew because in
course of time it declared itself too vigorously. In 1898
the paper published a retrospect of its fifty years of life.
Dr. R. S. Storrs, one of its first editors, wrote thus :

When it began, relations in all the sects externally and in-
ternally were very much strained, and at the same time was go-
ing on the even fiercer debate, perturbing and exciting beyond
comparison, on Slavery. This dangerous disturbance added a
new one to religious controversy, only the Episcopal Church
being apathetic on the subject. The American Tract Society,
vociferous on dancing and novel-reading, was utterly dumb on
the subject, to its everlasting disgrace; likewise the American
Sunday School Union and the American Board of Missions.
The American Anti-Slavery Society had been organised fifteen
years before. It was into these times of clashing forces and
fermenting excitements, religious and political, that the Inde-
pendent entered. Above all, it gave immense assistance to the
often buffeted but ever renewed anti-slavery sentiment. But
for it, I do not think that three thousand and more New Eng-
land ministers would have entered their protest against the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, or even that the Republican party would
have been victorious in i860. Senators Chase, Sumner,
Seward, and President Lincoln were frankly earnest in spon-
taneous acknowledgment of its great service.

Lincoln said to Theodore Cuyler at their first meeting,
" I keep up with you in the Independent." Well might
he do so, for amid so much sycophancy and truckling
the paper had made good its title. This in itself marked
a new epoch. " How well I remember the first num-
ber ! " says Edward Everett Hale. " At last we young-
sters knew that we had a journal the editors of which
were not ashamed to say they were independents. They

268 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

did not mean to have the general drift of the paper dic-
tated to them. Even John Cotton and John Winthrop
v^ere afraid of the word * independent,' and all the other
lights of the new-born Congregationalism." Though it
was started as a Congregational paper, its announcement
created consternation in many a Congregational pulpit.
It did not intend to squabble about internal controversies
but to insist upon a fearless application of Puritan doc-
trines to social problems, especially slavery. At once it
became a social and political force. When Greeley was
editor of the Tribune, he wrote for the Independent at
twenty-five dollars an article. " Beecher's leaders have
never been surpassed in American journalism," thinks
Dr. Abbott. " Only the Tribune and the Evening Post
exerted so powerful an influence in creating and guiding
public opinion during the decade before the war. When
Beecher took control in December, 1861, he said that he
would assume the liberty of meddling with every ques-
tion which agitated the civil or Christian community, and
his efforts would be, as heretofore, to promote vital god-
liness rather than sectarianism."

In the first ten years of its existence it lost eighty
thousand dollars, wrote Dr. William Hayes Ward, who
came to be one of its editors nearly twenty years later.
At the outbreak of the war, it was compelled to suspend.
When it resumed, it relinquished its thirteen year old
policy of three editors for the sole editorship of Henry
Ward Beecher, who for three years had been publishing
his sermons there. Under Beecher it ceased entirely to
champion Congregationalism and became undenomina-
tional. As Beecher did not care to give much of his
time to editorial work, and indeed was temperamentally
unfitted for routine of that sort, he made Theodore Til-
ton his assistant editor; and in 1864 Tilton officially took
the position he had actually filled since coming into the
office. In 1866, says Dr. Abbott, the publication of the
weekly Beecher sermon was suspended without explana-
tion or notice; and Beecher was deluged with protests

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE 269

from subscribers who assumed that he had withdrawn his
sermons from the paper because it had criticised him.
In a short while he gave notice to Mr. Bowen that he
wished to sever his connection with the paper. " I en-
tered just after the brilHant but erratic rule of Mr.
Tilton," resumes Dr. Ward. " Tilton, like Beecher,
wrote little except his article. Differences of policy as
to religious faith dictated Tilton's retirement." Dr.
Abbott says that his utterances on religious questions
had been increasingly distasteful to the orthodox churches
and he was thought to promote social heresies as well, and
at last Mr. Bowen dismissed him. The proprietor and
publisher then assumed editorial control himself, having
been kept on the anxious seat long enough by reason of
the theological eccentricities of his staff. He made Dr.
Edward Eggleston his superintending editor for two
years, and then Dr. Ward took his place. Like most
anti-slavery ites, after the war it looked around for a
new cause and selected woman's suffrage. Up to 1873,
says Ward, it had been the largest blanket sheet in the
country, and when it wanted more space it cut down the
size of its pages and increased their number. Towards
the end of the century it repeated this process. In the
late sixties it had greatly extended its circulation by a
liberal premium system — dictionaries, steel engravings,
sewing machines — a method of the day, now almost for-
gotten.

But to return to Dr. Storr's reminiscences.

The process of starting a newspaper then was about as sim-
ple as pitching a summer tent. No vast capital and prolonged
preparation were needed. It was a time of vehement discussion
on questions engaging public attention, most of which have now
ceased to be exciting. The controversy between Old School
and New School Presbyterians was as severe as if the union
which took place in 1869 were impossible. Among Congrega-
tionalists, doctrinal discussion was incessant, and by no means
always intelligent or high-toned. Religious controversy is
never apt to be conciliatory, and it was then as sharp and spite-
ful as I have ever known it. In the Episcopal Communion, the
contest between High and Low was as violent as anywhere else.

270 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

and the two parties spoke of each other more contemptuously
than they commonly did of others outside of their communion.
The fullest liberty of utterance was guaranteed the editors of
the new Independent by the backers. It had no particular pro-
gramme other than to be a voice for righteousness as it should
be discerned, but it sympathised with the characteristic theology
of New England and yet was solicitous to make its churches
more attractive. So far as I know the only point of positive
disagreement among the editors was on the spelling of the word
" centre." We expected attacks as a matter of course. They
came in abundance from the pronounced old-school papers, the
Puritan of Boston, and a monthly called the Observatory ; and
also from the pro-slavery papers; and from representatives of
religious and philanthropic societies whose financial or other
reports we had now and then sharply to criticise. Attacks came
from many other quarters and from those we had counted as
probable friends. I have no doubt we often retorted with in-
considerate speech in a tone sadly wanting in the lovely grace
of Christian meekness. But we kept our heads and it came
gradually to be recognised that the paper could not be beaten
down or sneered down. Meanwhile we had a large number of
active friends. Some things now generally accepted were, I
think, aided by the paper; and it contributed importantly to
securing to fresh thinkers, within the distinct evangelical lines,
liberty in thought and expression. The tone of the paper con-
tributed to eliminate inert and noxious elements from the gen-
eral religious journalism of the day. It was not perfunctory
and it was free from cant.

On one point Dr. Storr feels many regrets — that they
did not minister more constantly to the spiritual life of
their readers. " The necessary treatment of great semi-
secular themes and the controversial attitude into which
we were forced prevented us. There was more ground
than there ought to have been in the caustic criticism of
an adversary that the Independent was a strong paper and
might in time become a useful one if it should ever get
religion." The secularity of the Independent was natur-
ally the subject of much bitter attack on the part of
religious papers which devoted their articles exclusively
to theological and religious matters. And the innova-
tion was looked upon with disapproval by many secular
papers which, possibly not entirely without a fear of
the formidable rivalry which such a paper might exert,

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE 271

deprecated that an intentionally religious journal should
afford so much week-day reading. To the Nation it
seemed that the Independent was unduly controversial
also. Godkin wrote to it in 1868 : " We have endeav-
oured and successfully endeavoured, in the interest of
reason as well as of decency, to make discussion im-
personal. If I were to make your birth or education a
means of exciting either a prejudice against you per-
sonally or of weakening the effect of your arguments, I
should consider myself a very base and malignant per-
son. It seems to me that you should be amongst the
last to encourage a tendency which is the curse of the
press in this country." The Round Table, too, kept re-
ferring to another manifestation of worldly spirit on the
part of the Independent, in which it deemed that in com-
mon with all the children of light this journal showed
itself cannier than the children frankly of this world.

We have never discovered that liberal advertising does not
quite as uniformly secure their favourable editorial judgment
of books or of inventions as that of the more worldly journals.
In fact, the veritable puff abounds much more frequently in
their columns than in the first class dailies. A single illustra-
tion will suffice. Some years ago a book was published in this
city called Hot Corn; Life Scenes in New York. A secular
paper of this city pubHshed a most indignant and scathing
article against it. Another followed, denouncing it as a vicious
and obscene book. The publisher got out an immense adver-
tisement embodying unqualified commendation from some ten
or twelve of our religious journals. Some of the same religious
papers which had praised it then made public recantation.
Perhaps this was an uncommonly flagrant case. But in nearly
every issue of our religious contemporaries may be found
unduly indulgent criticism favouring the interests of adver-
tisers.

The standards of the Round Table were unquestionably
almost impossibly idealistic. It was imbued with all the
elegant New England tradition of letters and of the ex-
clusive function of high-class journalism. Many clergy-
men habitually contributed to the Round Table, and it was
possibly owing to their influence working in connection

272 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

with its own ideals that the paper was continuous in its
condemnation of the secularity of the Independent.
" Both the Observer and the Independent/' it said, " ex-
hibit a shameless perversion of religious journalism, and
the secular and avaricious schemes of the latter are par-
ticularly unblushing. Thirty-two flaring columns of ad-
vertisements, sixteen columns of articles and items on
everything from politics to sewing machines, yet it an-
swers an inquiry from a subscriber as to what constitutes
a religious paper by referring to itself as an example.
Whole columns of filthy advertisements, overflowing with
puffs and politics, war-news and business, the Cherokee
Remedy, Constitution Water, and a clergyman's puff
of Bronchial Trochees! We protest against this degra-
dation and pernicious influence for personal profit."
The issue of June 30, 1864, had, for instance — out of
the whole number of forty-eight columns — twenty-six
columns of advertisements, eleven columns of war, poli-
tics, finance, one column of market reports, two columns
of religious news, five columns of Mr. Beecher's sermon,
three columns of religious articles; and there were no
religious editorials. " Putting the most secular of
papers ! " cried the scandalised Round Table, " into the
hands of Sabbath readers under the guise of religion."

Happily, there is no longer any such thing as Sabbath
reading. But in the days when discussion waxed high
over this vital subject, thinkers on both sides revealed
curious inconsistencies. The Sunday edition of the
newspaper, we are told, came during the Civil War in
response to the demand of people not be left one day
in the week without news at a time when important hap-
penings, being no respecter of man's sanctities, were just
as liable to occur on Sunday as any other day. The
Round Table in spite of its advanced notions on many
topics, entertained ideas just as illogical as any when it
took its broad stand on the fundamental verities of the
question. On December 23, 1865, it had the following
editorial on the innovation — in a city where up to 1830

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE 273

churches even had the privilege of hanging chains across
the street to stop all Sunday travel.

The publisher of the Philadelphia Press has recently issued
a Sunday edition and announces his intention of keeping it up
as long as it will pay. This course has evoked much local com-
ment and even a formal remonstrance from the Methodist
clergy. We have a few words to say to both parties. The ar-
guments frequently urged in favour of Sunday issues are not
arguments at all. The whole question resolves itself to this:
is it morally right? To our minds there is neither right nor
reason in it, but the responsibility rests with the public. But
were religious papers what they should be, the Sunday issues
would be less frequent than they are now. As a class they are
unpardonably stupid. The secular newspaper that would be
managed as slovenly, as poorly, as unattractively, would die in
less than a week. There is little difference between a Sunday
issue and a religious weekly except that the latter is more unin-
teresting. The Independent is not so stupid as the Observer,
but a religious article in its columns is an accident.

How long ago it seems since the running of street cars
on the Sabbath was violently protested by many clergy-
men who had come to their pulpits in their own carriages !
Doubtless we ourselves, advanced thinkers as we are,
would be quite unaware of some equally laughable in-
consistency, were we not told them by radicals who dwell
now beyond the frontier of public sanction. Dr. Bush-
nell's nice discriminations as to the exact moment in the
study of law or medicine when a woman unsexed herself
were as hotly derided by the suffragists who bounded
him on the north as by the orthodox theologians who
bounded him on the south. And while Dr. Bushnell was
saying that a certain religious paper was not only behind
the times but behind all times, he was being threatened
with trial for heresy by the New York Evangelist and
by the Princeton Review, which was busily proclaiming
that the theory of evolution must not be permitted to
creep into intellectual thought because it meant atheism.
The recurring painful effort to adjust new ideas to old
beliefs, however untenable the conclusions to which
straining thinkers may be reduced, commands respect.

274 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

Dr. Hodges' struggles to get around the doctrine of evo-
lution are far more worthy of admiration than his at-
tacks upon Dr. Bushnell; Dr. Bushnell's struggles to
blind himself to his own conclusions in his Reform
Against Nature have a quality of bigness about them
when one considers how large the authority of St. Paul
bulked in all Christian minds ; and humour is mixed with
admiration at his independence in declaring that women
have a right to make advances toward marriage and to
make their own living, but though they may study law
they may not speak in court and though they may practise
medicine nature itself forbids them to practise surgery.
Much in the attitude of the religious papers in America,
however, merits the indignation and contempt inspired
by a British religious weekly, when it announced that the
accident which occurred at the launching of the Great
Eastern was a direct manifestation of divine wrath on
account of the change of the name of the ship to Levia-
than, " which with all deep theologians is a scriptural
synonym for the Devil." One expects difficulty in the
eternal human quandary of decanting new ferments into
old bottles ; but the attempt, not yet abandoned, to justify
the ways of God to man is as blasphemous as it is puerile.
The rancour of religious zeal has always been a conspicu-
ous and interesting phenomenon. Holmes told Motley
that for three years he had suffered revilings from the
evangelical press because he had opinions of his own.
It detected atheism in Dr. Holland and libertinism in
Stedman; and Stedman wrote Holmes in 1890: " I find
myself reflecting on the change of moral temperature * in
these parts ' since the Guardian Angel made all the cleri-
cal cats arch their backs and spread their fur." Lowell,
when editor of the Atlantic wrote to Higginson about
a proposed change in the latter's copy. " I hke your
article (Ought Women to learn the Alphabet) so much
that it is already in press as leader for the next num-
ber. You misunderstand me. I want no change except
the insertion of a qualifying ' perhaps,' where you speak

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE 275

of the natural equality of the sexes; and that as much on
your own account as mine — because I think it is not
yet demonstrated. Even in this, if you prefer it, leave
it your own way. I only look upon my duty as a vicari-
ous one for Phillips and Sampson, that nothing may go
in (before we are firm on our feet) that helps the * re-
ligious ' press in their warfare on us. Presently we
shall be even with them, and have a free magazine in
its true sense."

When Lowell thought of the truckling tactics of the
majority of the religious papers on the question of slavery
and the decidedly dubious business dealings of many re-
ligious organisations of the period, and compared it
with his own behaviour, he might well have been par-
doned a disdainful smile. While they were polHng their
subscribers up to the last minute before venturing to
declare themselves, he had, without a backward look,
greatly curtailed his market in coming out against Slav-
ery. Nor could Lowell be called in any sense of the
word a war-horse abolitionist to whom nothing else mat-
tered. He had written to Briggs on the Broadway
Journal in 1845 : " I do not wish to see the Journal a
partisan. I think it would do more good by always
speaking of certain reforms and the vileness of certain
portions of our present civilisation as matters of course
than by attacking them fiercely and individually. I as-
sure you that (minister's son and conservative's son as
I am) I do not occupy my present position without pain."

When three years after he left the Independent,
Beecher became editor of the Christian Union, he sig-
nalised his advent by an unheard of dictation, says Dr.
Abbott. He demanded that a paper which preached
religion should practise it. " He shut down once and
for all," says John Howard, his publisher, " upon a large
class of profitable business, in excluding medical adver-
tisements and in ordering a strict censorship upon what-
ever might offend the taste or impose upon the credulity
of readers." " Those who remember the class of adver-

276 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

tising on which religious journals of that period, with few
exceptions, largely depended, will perhaps realise what
so radical an action involved in this starting of a new
journal," continues Dr. Abbott. It is not apparent
whether Beecher had attempted the same stand with his
former publisher Bowen, but if he had, he failed. The
Round Table kept on attacking the Independent for the
nature of its advertising. "The vilest of the vile ad-
vertisements, which we know secular papers to have
refused over and over again, defile its pages. Here the
young woman can learn how to ward off the troubles
of misconduct, and the young man how to counteract the
effects of dissipation. And this almost side by side with
Mr. Beechers' sermons ! " Religious periodicals had
seemingly gone on the working theory that it was better
to have a temple disfigured with money-changers than no
temple at all. The point is, on the whole, hardly dispu-
table, but it certainly calls for constant discretion in
drawing the line. The religious periodicals were for a
long time one of the last stands of the objectionable
advertiser. When the Round Table resumed publication
in 1865, it resumed also its war against indecent adver-
tising, and said very frankly that the religious weeklies
had largely cleared themselves of this stain. But since
its discontinuance it had been amazed to see that the
taint of indecent advertising had now begun to appear in
the most moral dailies, claiming to be respectable and
edited by respectable men. On the front page of both
Times and Tribune were as disreputable advertisements
as had ever entered decent homes. Consequently, in
1869 when Beecher became editor of the Christian Union,
the weekly was doing only what secular papers of the
first class were doing, and must have been more sure of
the justification of its position than the Independent of
some years before — if the accusation of the Round
Table is correct, that it was admitting advertisements
which would not be published in the best secular sheets.
Yet Beecher accomplished with Howard what was not

1

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE 277

accomplished with Bowen, and that when the paper was
just struggHng into existence.

" Dr. Bowen," wrote Theodore Cuyler, " was a man
who never yielded in any matter that he undertook, great
or small." But if Mr. G. P. Rowell is to be believed, a
story he relates in Fifty Years an Advertising Agent,
shows that this doughty warrior came a cropper at last.
The Independent from its early days, says Mr. Rowell,
carried more advertising and at a higher price than all
the other religious papers of New York. It was in 1869
that Mr. Rowell started the first Directory, the indis-
pensability of which and its stimulus to advertisers were
almost immediately recognised. " Publishers of high
character owning papers of high character that appeal
to an exclusive constituency are given to being super-
sensitive on the subject of circulation. The only time
I can recollect having a circulation report from Mr. H. C.
Bowen, long owner and publisher of that superlatively
excellent and exceptionally successful religious paper,
the Independent, he sent a man to me with a piece of
white paper about half as large as a postal card upon
which was written in pencil the figures 67,000; and the
man said that Mr. Bowen said that that was the circula-
tion of his paper and that he sent it to me in reply to my
application for a statement upon which a circulation
rating might be based. It is quite possible I ought to
have accepted the pencil slip with confidence; but if I
had, I feel certain the reputation of the Directory would
fall something short of that it has to-day. In after
years, Mr. Bowen once sent for me and expressed an
ardent desire to be freed from the annoyance of being
called upon annually for a circulation statement, and
wished to learn if there did not exist some method
whereby he might escape an affliction that had become
distasteful to him to a degree he could hardly express."

The religious papers about i860, says Mr. Rowell,
were of vastly more importance than they are now. The
prominent New York ones were the Observer, Evangelist,

I

278 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

Examiner, Christian Advocate, and Independent; in
Boston there were Zion's Herald, Watchman and Re-
flector, Congregationalist. To these papers the Round
Table paid its respects in 1864. From them it may be
gathered that the Round Table, at least, thought that the
vitaHty of the reHgious Dress depended upon controversy.

Not many years ago the House of Bishops of the Protestant
Episcopal Church issued a pastoral letter specially rebuking
the contentious and mischievous spirit of the religious press
of their church. The General Association of Connecticut
made up of Congregational ministers at one of its annual
sessions unanimously passed censure upon the too-common as-
perity of religious newspapers, especially in the matter of a
controversy. Most of the religious journals of all denomina-
tions had truly exposed themselves to such reproofs. Their
addictions to controversy and the bad spirit with which they
conducted it became a positive scandal to the Christian name.
Their general influence instead of being what it ought to
have been, particularly liberalising, elevating and refining, was
particularly narrowing, embittering and vulgarising. The re-
ligious press no longer exhibits that fondness for strife, but
strange to say, this relinquishment of controversy has debili-
tated them most pitifully. No discerning man who looks upon
them can fail to be struck at their want of both moral and
intellectual force. Here and there is an exception, but weak-
ness is now the prime characteristic of our religious journals
in both city and country. Their positive faults it would be
still easier to indicate. They are generally of the same kind as
attach to the secular press, nor do they vary very much in
degree — they puff their patrons and admit questionable ad-
vertisements.

Yet the decrease in the acrimonious tone of controversy
which the Round Table noted was only relative. Re-
ligious discords reached their climax between the years
1840 and i860, it is true, but it continued long after that,
and finally was to wane not so much on account of an
inward change of heart (in spite of prominent leaders
who pled for it) as from outward conditions. There
was enough left in 1872 to sadden the Christian Union
with what appeared to it to be the striking characteristic
of church papers. "As we look over the huge pile of
religious exchanges in our office, we are struck with

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE '279

some general facts as to the spirit of various church
bodies. To one who is sincerely looking in every quarter
for some ground of sympathy their perpetual war-whoop
is discouraging. The Roman Catholics deal out to all
their fellow Christians red-hot shot, vitriol and cayenne
pepper. The many newspapers of the great Methodist
Church, though they express for the most part only
friendship for other Christian bodies, are always throw-
ing a stone at Rome. The Episcopalians recognise as
little kinship with the other sects as do the Catholics, and
assume axiomatic principles unacceptable and unfamiliar
to the religious community at large."

But two years old was the Christian Union at the time
of this editorial. It was in January, 1870, that Beecher
took the editorship of an impecunious weekly called the
Church Union. This was begun under the policy which
its name signified — of securing the organic unity of all
Protestant Evangelical churches. Beecher said that he
insisted on the change of name because he wanted to be
as free from sectarian bias as the Sermon on the Mount.
" We distinguish between oneness of Church and oneness
of Christian sympathy," he wrote in his opening an-
nouncement. " Not only shall we not labour for an ex-
ternal and ecclesiastical unity but we should regard it as
a step backward. The Christian Union will devote no
time to inveighing again sects, but will spare no pains to
persuade Christians of every sect to treat one another with
Christian charity, love and sympathy." Perhaps nothing
could better illustrate the spirit of religious journalism
than the attacks which the paper received for this sweet
and temperate doctrine. Church papers everywhere as-
sailed him. It was, to be sure, an entire innovation ; but
the suspicion entertained by conservative minds for every-
thing novel is not sufficient to excuse their virulent opposi-
tion. However the members of church communities may
have regarded Beecher's announced intention " to seek
to interpret the Bible rather as a religion of life than a
book of doctrine," church journals seemed to have scented

28o THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

that their existence was threatened by the newcomerj
If people of every creed found the Christian Union at-
tractive reading, they might in time cease to consider itj
a duty to subscribe to the organ of their own creed.
Thus, for the first time in the history of rehgious journal-
ism, all the denominational journals found themselves
united in a common cause against a common enemy.
That their unspoken fear had a substantial basis was
demonstrated before the quarter-century had ended.
The decrease of denominational rivalries began in fact to
undermine the denominational press. When in addition
to the great success of an undenominational religious
journal arose within the churches social institutions
which continued the work of Beecher in emphasising a
common religious sentiment rather than a difference of
doctrine, the decline of the denominational press became
more rapid. The Young Men's Christian Association,
the Christian Endeavour, and the Sunday School Con-
vention greatly widened the influence which Beecher had
begun. The denominational journals had been right in
their fear that if people began to slacken their church
ties by taking in an undenominational religious paper,
they might end in regarding the church more as a social
than a religious institution.

But to return to the Christian Union, which teaching
Christian love found itself the universal object of Chris-
tian hatred. Dr. Lyman Abbott has paid a glorious
tribute to it in his life of its editor:

In a discussion which arose over the addition of a Farm and
Garden Department, he said : " It is the aim of the Christian
Union to gospelise all the industrial functions of life." Never
in the five years in which we were associated do I recall a single
instance in which he manifested an acerb or irritated spirit, a
desire to hit back, a wish to get even with an antagonist, or
even an ambition for a victory over him. He would not allow
the journal to be used in his own personal defence. I think
now, as I thought then, that he carried this principle too far.
The journal suffered from the silence he imposed upon it dur-
ing the time in which he was subjected to vituperation and
abuse. The phenomenal success into which the Christian Union

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE 281

leaped from its birth, was due to him; and due also to the
support of his associate, George Merriam, and the energy and
sagacity of the publishers."

In 1 88 1 he sold his interest and retired. He had come
to feel, says Dr. Abbott, that his name must be removed
as editor since he furnished almost nothing to the paper.
When it changed its name for the second time, it gave
us a retrospect. " In 1869 ^ feeble journal bearing the
name of Church Union was maintaining a struggling
existence. Now a quarter of a century later, denomina-
tions still exist but denominational sermons are increas-
ingly rare. Polemical theory is banished from the pulpit,
where it once reigned supreme, to the ecclesiastical court
room. The name Christian Union has identified the
paper with the religious press, and as this is with a few
exceptions denominational, even its other religious con-
temporaries fell into the error of imagining it to be the
organ of a denomination. There are in the country
more than one hundred weekly journals which bear the
title * Christian.' These considerations and the practical
results of these circumstances have compelled for some
years the consideration of a change of name. The title
of this department, which has always occupied the first
and most prominent place in the paper and which in some
sense characterises the attitude of the paper, naturally
suggested an alternative." The sub-title of the Chris-
tian Union had been " Undenominational, Evangelical,
Protestant, Christian " : the Outlook announced itself as
a weekly Family newspaper, a running history of the
year. The department of the Religious World, it said,
would be but a feature, and its main attempt would be
but to trace and record the religious activities of the
times, though it would print a weekly sermon and weekly
comments on the Sunday School Lesson.

But even before the Independent had let down the bars
to the worldliness which is symbolised finally by a re-
ligious paper's classification of itself as merely a Family
newspaper, the religious press even of the more rigidly

282 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

denominational type, had sedulously been offering literary
fare which tended to decrease any sharp distinction be-
tween sectarian and secular journalism. One is struck
by the abundant mention in letters and lives of our liter-
ary men of their connection with the religious press and
how greatly it contributed, though in small doles, to the
support of literature at a time when bread was scarce.
Many of the religious weeklies had their New York and
Washington correspondents. Gail Hamilton wrote in
i860 of the Congregationalist to which she had been
sending Washington letters for two years : " They will
give me a salary of $400 to $600 a year for work which
will take only about a day or a day and a half a week."
In answer to one of her first literary ventures, the Inde-
pendent had written : " You shall be paid at the rate of
$3 a column — when we know who you are. For, my
dear Mrs. Gail or Girl, we don't pay nobody's, we don't.
If you will let me into the secret of your name, I will be
very whist about it and send your money promptly." In
i860 Mrs. Kinney wrote from Florence to her son,
Stedman, " The Independent has offered Mrs. Browning
a hundred dollars for any original scrap of her poetry; "
and Stedman notes in 1869 that Bowen paid him one
hundred dollars for " some trash called The House That
Vanderbilt " and had asked him to write twelve more
poems at the same price. In the late '6o's the Inde-
pendent made Justin McCarthy its literary editor while
he was in this country; and the rising fame of Sidney
Lanier owed much to this paper's fostering. In 1888
Maurice Thompson became its literary editor. When
the Christian Union started, Mrs. Stowe was naturally
very desirous for the success of her brother's venture and
pledged her literary support. " I see," she wrote Mr.
Howard, " you have advertised a serial story from me
as one of the attractions of the year to come, and I ought
therefore to be thinking what to write. A story ought
to grow out of one's heart like a flower, not to be meas-

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE 283

ured off by the yard. To have eyes fixed on me and
people all waiting!" Later she wrote him: "I am
very much gratified with the success of My Wife and I.
I get a great many more letters about it than I re-
ceived about anything except Uncle Tom. When you
advertise again, there is no harm in saying how many
you have sold. I like people to know it for many
reasons." In 1877 Gail Hamilton wrote briskly to the
managing editor of the Alliance: "The only reason I
cannot form an alliance offensive and defensive with
you, is because you are poor, and I am a saint and a
martyr to the one fixed principle, never to write except
for the highest price. I know nothing of your finances
except what may be inferred from the nature of things,
but a religious and radical and new newspaper, it stands
to reason cannot be rich. When your ship comes home
from sea, oh, whistle and I'm come to you, my lad ! But
so long as you cultivate literature on a Httle oatmeal,
bless you my children, bless you, but leave me my fatted
calf!" Lest Gail be thought too mercenary, let it be
added quickly that she was earning her own living and
that of others by her pen, and as she wrote all her let-
ters " between hunting for the soap and the scissors,
and treated every principle of politics while going from
the baker at the end gate to the plumber at the back
door," time for scribbling was limited; and too many
religious weeklies were like the paper of which she puts
down this note in 1881 : " Wanted me to write
Thoughts On Mother's Death, or Mother's Grave, or
Mother's House in Heaven, for a book; should receive
a copy of book in payment ! " And lest the Alliance
itself be sympathised with for its poverty, let it be added
that it sneered at Stedman as one who had voluntarily
tried to unite the services of God and Mammon — be-
cause, unable to support himself by poetry and refusing
to become a newspaper drudge, he had gone into Wall
Street. Yet the " broker-poet " had refused to write

284 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

eleven more poems at one hundred dollars each like the
House That Vanderbilt, for the Independent — he said
he could not afford to write such trash.

Thus the religious press itself in its literary department
had contributed to breaking down the bulwark between
sacred and secular reading which seems to have chiefly
kept it from the flood that finally swept away its authority
and prestige. The New York Observer at one time
frankly divided itself into two sections, for Sunday and
for week-day perusal. One of the earliest religious
weeklies went further, and asked its subscribers not to
read it on Sunday at all. But as such nice distinctions
ceased to be insisted upon and the religious press dallied
more and more with the affairs of the world, a similar
tendency began to be exhibited by the secular press. Just
as the one was extending the week-day into Sunday, the
other was coming to extend Sunday into the week-day.
Far more matters once considered distinctively religious
began to appear in the newspapers — discussions of
church affairs and religious events — until nowadays
dailies thought by some anxious conservatives to be other-
worldly in an opposite sense from the ancient religious
organs, publish sermons and have editorial departments
conducted by clergymen. The encroachment of the
newspaper is particularly felt, writes Rev. William Ells-
worth Strong, in the once very successful missionary
periodical. " In the beginning the missionary magazine
reflected as nowhere else the romance of far-off lands
and the life of strange peoples; to-day it competes with
the Associated Press and the kodak of every traveller.
Missionary news and scenes now make good copy for
daily and weekly, just as popular monthlies and scien-
tific reviews often include more strictly religious articles."

Mr. Hamilton Mabie says that there was once a Bos-
ton religious weekly so eager to keep up with the times
that it changed its name from the Fireside Companion to
the Christian Register. But the case (if it ever existed,
since as early as 1821 — before furnaces came in — the

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE 285

Register was turned on) was by no means representa-
tive. Religious papers have been noticeably not only
behind the times of the rest of the world but behind their
own times. This constant phenomenon, Dr. W. H. Ward
noted in 1891 in The Religious Paper and the Ministry.
The editor being generally a minister, he says, is likely
to edit for ministers rather than for laymen. " The
serious danger is his setting up as dictator. Generally,
too, it is edited by rather old men who are in serious
danger of being behind the thinking of their age. The
religious papers were almost unanimously against toler-
ance even up to the time when the ministry was ready to
decide in favour of liberty of views and of teaching. Lay
representatives among the Methodists could not find ex-
pression in the Methodist papers and had to establish new
papers through which it could speak, just as fifty years
before New School Presbyterianism had to create a new
press for itself. Now the Presbyterian papers are far
behind the seminaries and the ministry in accepting the
general results of the Higher Criticism."

For these reasons internal and external, then, the sig-
nificance of the religious press in America has greatly
diminished. Within came the gradual cessation, through
the development of social institutions in common, of the
vigour that unhappily enough seems to have been de-
pendent upon sectarian strife; but this latter manifesta-
tion of progress was accompanied by a dogged determina-
tion to be the last to throw the old forms aside. To this
must be added the tendency to develop specialised maga-
zines of theology by the various schools, says Dr. Ward ;
these have to a great extent absorbed the determinedly
denominational reader. Many more of these exist now
than when the religious weekly was so formidable a
rival. With the decline of the religious weekly came the
growth of the religious magazine which, however, makes
little bid for general support and is more and more en-
dowed. Mr. Bryce could no longer write in his Ameri-
can Commonwealth as in 1888 that the religious weekly

^86 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

remained a force of immense influence in the life of the
nation and was quite unparalleled in Europe. Instead,
he would note the fact that the two most famous week-
lies, the Independent and the Outlook, have quite sub-
ordinated their religious features in order to survive;
and that many others which once had authority and
prosperity, having still retained their religious depart-
ments as their chief feature, seem moribund.

In 1897 the advertising agency of George Batten and
Company announced to its advertisers the eight repre-
sentative religious papers of the United States to be the
Christian Advocate (Methodist), the Churchman (Prot-
estant Episcopal), the Congregationalist, the Evangelist
(Presbyterian), the Examiner (Baptist), the Independ-
ent (Undenominational), the New York Observer,
(Presbyterian), the Outlook (Undenominational). All
of these papers have been long-lived though some have
seen many vicissitudes. With the exception of the
Outlook and the Independent and the Churchman they
date around the first quarter-century mark. Besides
these, there were 1,187 religious papers, of which 569
are weeklies, 6 semi-weeklies, i thrice a month, and 2
dailies. Of the magazine type there were 438 monthlies,
71 semi-monthlies, and 8 bi-monthlies, and 91 quarterlies,
chiefly Sunday School publications. Thus apparently,
though the authority and prestige of the palmy days of
religious journalism have departed, never to return since
the cessation of distinctively Sunday reading and the en-
croachment upon its domain of secular journals, there
was plenty of life left at the end of the century even if
its manifestation had ceased to be of national importance.

CHAPTER XII

CENTURY BORN SCRIBNEr's

New York had no sooner knocked into a cocked hat the
Philadelphia brag of the greatest circulation than another
heady project for silencing her ancient rival occurred to
her. The war, which threatened the security even of
Harper's, kept it in cold storage for a decade, but age
did not wither it. Philadelphia had been able to keep
going at once several magazines of the same rank; the
metropolis could never demonstrate her literary suprem-
acy until she did the same. The jeers of her sisters were
at last beginning to penetrate. New York — they said
loftily, hugging their Hobson's choice — may publish
literature but she does not read it; better a dinner of
herbs where love is than a stalled ox which is eaten only
by your neighbours. The only appropriate retort was
not for the moment forthcoming and must be relegated
to the misty future. But in the meantime why not de-
molish Philadelphia's sole remaining brag?

New York's one great magazine still left some con-
spicuous fields of activity untouched. Family circles
had been known to take in more than one magazine even
in the old days when magazines were all about the same.
Perhaps there might be room, even at some of the fire-
sides pre-empted by Harper's, for a periodical with dif-
ferent aims — more national certainly, and perhaps less
preoccupied with finding a common denominator. So
thought Charles Scribner, head of a New York publishing
house, and so thought the man who became his editor.
In two items, they agreed, lay their best chance — finer
illustrations and native writers. For the rest they would
feel their way. And Scribner's was brought forth.

287

288 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

The feature of illustrations, ran the editorial announce-
ment in the first number, has been adopted to meet a
thoroughly pronounced popular demand. In the last
number before it became the Century there was another
editorial announcement. " Its superb engravings and
the era it introduced of improved illustrative art, have
been the chief factor in its success. This feature is
attributable to Mr. R. W. Gilder and Mr. A. W. Drake.
The effects achieved excited great curiosity both in this
country and in England. Mr. Smith may legitimately
claim to have revolutionised the cut-printing of the world.
It took a lawyer turned business man to discover that
damp paper is not the best for printing cuts on." In
those eleven years they had heard the intellectual protest
against " picture-books " grow small by degrees and
beautifully less, until save for a few stalwart souls it
had ceased altogether to spell that fatty degeneration of
culture once so profoundly feared by those who grudged
that others should be carried to the skies on flowery beds
of ease. One might almost forget that such ideas were
ever entertained by sensible people did we not in our own
day behold austere persons raise the same objection to
their children acquiring knowledge easily (and more
lastingly) by means of the "movies." The revolution
which Scribner's effected, like every other successful one,
owed much to its coming at the right moment.

It was the good fortune of the magazine to be born with the
rise of a new school of American art, and it has probably never
happened to any periodical to hold a relation so intimate with
the arts of design or to be a means of diffusing correct judg-
ments and principles. When it was founded eleven years ago,
the art of wood-engraving was almost stationary. The illus-
trated periodicals were hardly better than they had been for
twenty years. A dozen years ago, one of the leading engravers
declared there was not an illustrator on wood in New York
who could draw the human figure correctly. It was manifestly
impossible to make a really great illustrated magazine under
such conditions. Scribner's, therefore, had recourse to a method
already in use for certain purposes — that of photographing on
wood. This was not then considered the correct way to obtain

CENTURY BORN SCRIBNER'S 289

an artistic picture. By degrees, the change was wrought, and
the individuality of painter and designer retained. Protests
were many — the pictures were positively ugly, it was alleged;
but by degrees people came to prefer their real beauty to the
old conventional properness. Never before by means of any
art or device had the excellence of a great picture been carried
by multiplied copies. In a country like ours, where galleries
are few and worthy paintings rarely to be seen out of the great
cities, the educational service of such art-work as Scribner's
is incalculable. The London Standard said of the Portfolio of
Proof Impressions from Scribner's : " It is impossible for an
Englishman to look through this collection of engravings with-
out a deep feeling of humiliation. The wood-engraving stands
now at the head of all methods of reproduction. A dozen years
ago steel prints were thought to be the chief means. To have
attained this is to work an ultimate revolution in the world's
art-culture."

In June, 1881, Dr. Holland wrote a retrospect for his
magazine just undergoing its second baptism. Mr.
Charles Scribner had applied to him thirteen years before
to take the editorship of Hours at Home, a periodical
the publisher had started some years earlier. Holland,
however, believed it to be moribund. Happening some-
time later to meet Mr. Roswell Smith in Europe, he spoke
of the offer and said he would be glad of the opportunity
to undertake a new one of his own. Mr. Smith, who
appears never to have considered the subject before, re-
plied that he would like to manage the business end of
such an enterprise. Together the two went to Scribner
and unfolded the project, and they found him favourably
inclined.

Naturally it was his wish to have the new magazine ernanate
from his book-house. I refused, however, to have anything to
do with a magazine that should be floated as the flag of a book-
house, or as a tributary or subordinate to a book-house. It was
agreed that a new concern should be formed. Mr. Smith had
no knowledge whatever of the publishing business, and I had
none save that which I had acquired in the publication of a
country newspaper, with the details of which, however, I had
little to do. It was deemed desirable by Mr. Scribner that the
magazine should bear the name of the book-house. I was glad
to have the prestige of the name, he was glad to have the adver-

290 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

tising which the new magazine would thus give. But in an-
other respect it was not a selfish matter at all. Through long
years of the most brotherly intercourse I had come into very
affectionate relations with Mr. Scribner. But we — the two
parties — regarded the enterprise and operations of the maga-
zine house from radically different standpoints. We, the ma-
jority interest, had no interest whatever in the book-house; we
were organised to do our own business and neither to do nor to
mind any other man's. We felt that if we should desire to pub-
lish a book, we ought not to be called upon to consider whether
we were affecting the business of any other concern whatsoever.
This difference was the inspiring cause of all the recent changes
that have taken place in the proprietorship of the concern.

If Charles Scribner relinquished his pet project, to
have a magazine of his own in the same way that the
Harper firm had one of its own, it was because he was
confident that Dr. Holland was worth the price he un-
accountably exacted. Scribner knew more than anybody
else but Bowles of the Springfield Republican how much
Holland was worth to him as an editor. Holland had
gone on Bowles' paper as assistant in 1847 for a salary
of $480, which was increased the next year to $700. The
Letters he wrote for the paper were so popular that
the subscription responded at once. But in spite of their
history and of a didactic home-spun quality as dear to
the heart as to the head of the American publisher of the
period, Holland was unable to find a publisher until
Scribner consented to hear them. Their success at once
showed Scribner that their author had gauged rightly
the widest audience in the country — the practical intelli-
gent people who wanted to better themselves. The New
York Evening Post said at his death that no literary man
in America was so accurately fitted for the precise work
of developing a great popular magazine. He had the
immense advantage of keeping on a plane of thought
just above that of a vast multitude of readers, each one
of whom he could touch with his hand and raise a little
upward. " No other man in this country," said Robert
Collyer, " could have built up Scrihner's as he did, mak-
ing it fill a place uniquely adapted to the great mass of

CENTURY BORN SCRIBNER'S 291

the American people." This was his ideal — to speak
to the heart and mind of the average man. His proudest
title was " The Great Apostle to the Multitude of Intelli-
gent Americans who have Missed a College Education."
To them he preached constantly, and in the most neigh-
bourly of fashions. One of his great texts was tem-
perance, but he had no intention of remaining the stock
moralist which so long contented his more prudent rival,
Harper's. Not only did he criticise severely the political
and social abuses of his time — still a preposterous rash-
ness for a popular magazine ; but, bolder still, he did not
care how many sects squinted at his theology. That we
fail to extract any heretical doctrines from the whole-
some but somewhat stodgy Bitter Sweet to-day, does
not subtract from the audacity of an editor who dared
to risk subscriptions by publishing the poem in a day
when he knew it would poke up the pulpits. He knew
how to feed the virtuous and yet give them cakes and ale
also — a born editor. This Charles Scribner seems to
have divined from the start, when he allowed a man to
step from a subordinate position on a small city news-
paper into his office and dictate the terms on which he
would assume control of an old publisher's new maga-
zine. " I risked in the business," wrote Holland after-
ward, " all the money and all the reputation I had made,
and it is a great satisfaction that I did not miscalculate
the resources of my business associate or my own. Al-
though the Monthly started without a subscriber it never
printed or sold less than forty thousand copies a month.
The highest task we set ourselves was to reach one
hundred thousand, now we are looking forward to one
hundred and fifty. That two men utterly unused to
the business should succeed from the first in so difficult
a field is, in retrospect, a surprise to themselves."

These two men, though of a progressive cast, were on
account of their inexperience the more desirous to make
haste slowly. A magazine, too, which had absorbed
Hours at Home and Putnam's at the very outset natu-

1292 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

rally owed something to its digestion. Putnam's, as we
have seen, prided itself on possessing opinions; and the
Riverside Magazine, which was the next candidate for
assimilation, was a juvenile which prided itself on form-
ing them. In five years another set of readers inured to
catholic discussion of ideas came in a body to swell the
subscription list. This flock had been shepherded by
Edward Everett Hale in Old and New, a magazine begun
under the auspices of the Unitarian Association, with
an idea then quite radical even for so unorthodox a
creed. " We took the ground," says he, " that literature
and politics and theology and religion might be discussed
within the same covers and read by the same readers. If
you please to take the language of the trade, we believed
that the stories and the poems in our journal could float
the theology and the religion. In eleven volumes I
edited the journal. At the end of that time we had more
than one competitor in the same path; especially Scrih-
ner's. The Unitarian Association had long since tired
of us; for it was impossible to make the directors of a
denominational society understand that we were doing
their work — as we were — better than they could do
it themselves. For myself I was tired of the strain of
editorial life ; and Old and New was merged into Scrih-
ner's. This is the reason why Philip Nolan's Friends
was printed in that magazine." The author of such nar-
rative poems as Bitter Sweet and Kathrina would of
course have been congenial to Unitarian readers any-
way, and they would have remained unstirred by the
heresies therein ventilated. It is ironic to find that Dr.
Holland did not escape the common fate of reformers
any more than Scribner himself kept his well-known pro-
fessional morality above reproach by publishing him —
for when Stedman came to publish in the magazine his
series on the American Poets, Dr. Holland very strongly
objected on moral grounds to including his paper on
Whitman, which proved, indeed, to arouse a great deal
of controversy. It has been ever thus in the history of

CENTURY BORN SCRIBNER'S 293

human thought; always reformers have dreamed them-
selves the only sane pioneers, and to adventure beyond
their last stake is to pass the frontier of safety.

Intending to occupy a field which Harper's had not
entered — the discussion, as well as the exposition, of
ideas — still it w^as many years, said the Century as it
made its debut, before Scrihner's thoroughly grasped and
adopted the scheme for presenting, as the best of all
magazine material, the elaborate discussion of living,
practical questions. " Also we made only one attempt
in the old series at popular studies, and now we know
better how to manage it. There is nothing that opens
before us now more attractive than this field of illus-
trated historical research and representation." Many
years was it, also, before the magazine ventured to depart
from the old custom of recapitulating each month the
progress of civilisation. Literature, Home and Society,
the World's Work were sanctioned summaries of which
only the first possessed much claim to be included in a
magazine that no longer sought to occupy the place of a
newspaper as well. Another slow evolution from the
old to the new was the gradual cessation of self-con-
sciousness about the names of contributors. More than
a decade later than the first Putnam's and the Atlantic,
it had begun with printing names in the Contents. In
the first number the only name permitted to appear with
the text was that of George MacDonald, who was running
a serial. Gradual also, although it featured and paid
for American material from the outset, was its relinquish-
ment of the English reprint. " The system of reprint-
ing English serials, which had proven itself the deadly
blight of native literature," reminisced the Century, " was
tried for a year or two and then wholly given up. One
of the things which tended to give Scrihner's a distinc-
tive character of its own was its discarding of English
serials and its cordial encouragement of every sign of
originality and force in the younger American writers."

It w^as the good fortune of the Century to come into

294 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

existence at the moment when a renascence was prepar-
ing in American literature, said that magazine modestly
in its fourth volume. But indeed, this renascence seems
more due to Scribner's than to any other one force. It
is true that it had come in with a new era ; that the war
had pushed the old and narrow American life into a pre-
mature antiquity, and that many new periodicals and
journals sprang out of this mental reaction. But most
of them perished; and the new writers, thanks to the
unfair competition with English authors, could find for
their fermentation no outlet in books. It was because
the pages of Scribner's were open to these youngsters
that they lived to grow up. Especially was this true of
the Southern writers, and the service of Scribner's in
this respect and its wider service in helping the wounds
of the war to heal — in accordance with the newly dis-
covered surgical treatment by drainage — cannot be over-
estimated. Their War articles were not only superb
journalism, but splendid patriotism also. In the chroni-
cle of the war by the leading generals, each side will dis-
cover the true mettle of the other, the magazine ventured
to hope. It was in 1873 that it sent a special train
through the South with the purpose of securing a series
of articles. " The discussion now going on in the Cen-
tury about the re-organisation of society in the Southern
States," they said, " is of the utmost value in putting the
North in possession of the facts and the South of a
temper, to which inherited views and party spirit have
blinded both sides."

One of the articles in Scribne/s stated the general
situation. " A Northern business man who had pub-
lished an Army and Navy Journal or something of the
sort during the war, when he found his occupation gone,
tried to exploit the local patriotism of the South by
getting up a series of Southern text-books, with results
that will not be forgotten by the investors. Magazine
after magazine was started. But the new generation
began to recognise it was necessary to seek a wider public.

CENTURY BORN SCRIBNER'S '295

It was not until Southern men began to write for North-
ern magazines that the South became a factor in the liter-
ary life of the country."

The first Northern magazine open to them was Scrib-
ners, both in stories which represented their life and
articles which stated their point of view. Immediately
after the war there was in the South as in the North the
usual ebullition of literary energy. But in the South it
was much increased by the desire to present their cause
aright to the world. The activity in starting new maga-
zines as vehicles for the passionate desire for expression
was proportionately even greater in the South than in
the North, where, as we have seen, it was abundantly
fruitful. But these magazines naturally had even greater
mortality. The South had never been able to support
periodicals, and now that it was impoverished it was
far less able to do so. The writers, too, of such a litera-
ture as the South felt the need of to represent it aright
were far less able than formerly to work for nothing,
even had the magazines been able to continue, on their
short rations, to afford them a medium for their patriot-
ism. To exploit this patriotism had been their publish-
ers' frank and commendable object. De Bow's Review
began the last of its many series, " devoted to the restora-
tion of the Southern States." The Southern Review
dedicated itself " to the despised, the disfranchised, and
the down-trodden people of the South." In Charlotte,
Atlanta, Raleigh, Charleston, and New Orleans other
magazines took up the cry — the children of the new
generation must be educated in the old ideals and the
North must not be allowed to misrepresent their fathers
to them. The most successful of these short-lived maga-
zines was the Southern of Baltimore, which lasted five
years. In addition to its English reprints, it introduced
several young Southerners in original work. The chief
of these were Margaret Preston, Malcolm Johnston,
[Sidney Lanier, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Maurice Thomp-
■son, Professor Gildersleeve, and Professor Price. But

296 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

the Southern in spite of the best intentions could pay
nothing — Malcolm Johnston, for instance, gave them his
Dukesborough Tales, which afterward reached a wider
audience and brought some return to the author. All
of these people were shortly publishing in Scribner's at
the regular rates. On the trip which the magazine
planned in 1873 for the purpose of its articles on the New
South, was discovered in New Orleans one of the story-
tellers of the New South, George W. Cable; and within
six months he appeared in its pages. Within half a
dozen years John Esten Cooke, Thomas Nelson Page,
and Joel Chandler Harris were coming to the front. Mrs.
Burnett was one of Scribner's greatest finds. In 1881
the editor in calling attention to the fact that seven ar-
ticles by Southerners had appeared in one number, said,
** We are glad to recognise that there is a permanent
productive force in literature in the Southern States.
We welcome the new writers to the great republic of let-
ters." So much was the Century a patron of the new
authors that its " dialect '' stories seemed to many readers
decidedly overworked; and they longed for pages less
hen-tracked.

The Atlantic and Harpe/s quickly followed Scribner's
lead, the former exploiting Maurice Thompson and
Charles Egbert Craddock and printing in series George
Cary Eggleston's A Rebel's Recollections. Lippincotts,
and the Independent made the fame of Sidney Lanier.
Of this last periodical Maurice Thompson became literary
editor in 1888, though Southerners had long singled it
out for special condemnation on account of its bias. In
1890 Mr. Walter Hines Page of North Carolina even
entered the sanctum of the New England holy of holies,
the Atlantic.

All this change of attitude. North and South, had been
brought about by Scribner's. It had not only opened its
doors to Southern writers, but it had gone to them and
invited them to come in. To the opportunity thus af-
forded, the disappearance of the truculent, professional,

CENTURY BORN SCRIBNER'S 297

and provincial spirit of Southern literature owes its first
impetus and its gathering strength. Mr. Mims in his
Life of Lanier gives us some interesting details of this,
as well as an excellent resume of the situation.

In the period '75-85 the old order of Southern writers passed
away. Paul Hamilton Hayne best represents the transition to
the new group. This began to write, not in the attempt to
create a distinctively Southern literature, but because the new
literature, unlike the old, was related directly to the life of the
people. Sentimentalism was superseded by a healthy realism.
They were (for the first time) wiUing to be known as men who
made their living by literature. They did not want to be sec-
tional but national in spirit. Joel Chandler Harris said, " What
does it matter whether I am Northerner or Southerner. Litera-
ture that can be labelled Northern, Southern, Western, or East-
en is not worth labelling at all. Whenever we have a genuinely
Southern literature, it will be American and cosmopolitan as
well." All of the new writers had little patience with the
former literary methods and criticism of the South. As early
as 1871 the Southern Magazine in a review of Southern writ-
ers had written : " We should be courageous enough to con-
demn bad art and bad workmanship no matter whose it be; to
say, for instance, to more than half of the writers in these vol-
umes, * Ladies, you may be all that is good, noble, and fair ; you
may be the pride of society and the lights of your homes; so
far as you are Southern women our hearts are at your feet —
but you have neither the genius, the learning, nor the judgment
to qualify you for literature.' " In 1874 Hayne condemned in
the same magazine the provincial literary criticism which had
prevailed. " No foreign ridicule, however richly deserved, can
stop this growing evil until our own scholars and thinkers have
the manliness and the honesty to discourage instead of applaud-
ing such manifestations of artistic weakness and artistic plati-
tudes as have hitherto been foisted on us by persons uncalled
and unchosen by any of the Muses."

Scrihner's in providing Southern writers with an ap-
proved and profitable Northern vehicle created a new na-
tional attitude in both North and South; and shaped a
literature it had gone far toward creating, by banishing
its provinciality.

But the War articles performed a great service to more
than the nation at large. They lifted the circulation of
the Century to a high figure and they made much money

298 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

for the book publishing end of the two firms. Told by
the actors themselves on both sides and illustrated with
an excellence never attained before, they naturally at-
tracted enormous attention. Those contributed by Gen-
eral Grant were, on account of his prominence and some
special circumstances, particularly profitable. Mr. Al-
bert Bigelow Paine gives an account of them in his Life
of Mark Twain. Mr. Gilder told Twain, he says, that
the Century editors had endeavoured to get Grant to con-
tribute to their War series, but that not until his financial
disaster, as a member of the firm of Grant and Ward,
had he been willing to consider the matter; that Grant
now welcomed the idea of contributing three papers to
the series and that the promised payment of $500 for
each had gladdened his heart and relieved him of immedi-
ate anxiety. (Somewhat later, adds Paine, the Century
Company of their own accord added liberally to this sum.)
Twain went to see Grant about book publication and was
told that they had made him a proposition for his com-
pleted memoirs. Grant had not thought the proposition
good enough, but when Twain told the General what
offer, in his person, the American Book Company of
Hartford would make, he took the General's breath away.
Yet Grant demurred, saying that the book ought to go,
other things being equal, to the man who had first sug-
gested it to him. Then said Twain, " I am the man, and
you should place your book with my firm," and recalled
to him a conversation to that effect. After much dis-
cussion the General agreed, though he felt that Twain
was bankrupting himself by the royalty he offered. All
this got into the papers, and Mark Twain publishing Gen-
eral Grant became the most talked of event in the book
world. To increase the advertising the project received,
certain newspapers persistently circulated rumours of es-
trangements between Grant and the Century and between
Mark Twain and the Century as a result of the book de-
cision. Nothing but the most cordial relations and un-
derstanding prevailed, says Mr, Paine, but all this greatly

CENTURY BORN SCRIBNER'S 299

fomented public interest in the General's Century papers,
which in that respect were already record-breakers. And
as if this were not fortunate enough, it was increased by
another happening. The public knew that General Grant
was dying as he wrote or dictated his story with Mark
Twain hovering around to encourage him. It appeared
that at one of their sittings they discovered that Mark had
cleared out of camp once in Missouri just in time to es-
cape capture by the man whose book he was now going
to publish. The Century got wind of this extremely pic-
turesque anecdote, and at their request Mark wrote for
their War series the story of his share in the Rebellion
and particularly of his war relations with General Grant.
The good fortune and fine editorial sense in all this at-
tended the succeeding leaders of the magazine. Ken-
nan's Siberian papers proved another enormous sensa-
tion, and won the magazine the proud distinction of be-
ing forbidden to enter Russia. The next sensation was
greater still, although the public had time to moderate
its transports in the four years that the articles ran.
This was the History of Lincoln by his two secretaries,
which had been in cold storage for twenty years await-
ing Mr. Smith's sagacity. As early as 1867 Hay and
Nicolay had tried to get Harper's interested, but neither
it nor any of the book publishers would listen. " We
shall have to write it and publish it on our own hook some
day," said Hay. When after a score of years, the Cen-
tury asked them to set about the work in earnest, they
received the largest price any magazine had paid up to
that date — fifty thousand dollars. Harpers, interested
at last, again had to yield to her rival. During negotia-
tions Hay wrote to Nicolay : " I do not believe Gilder
will want the stuff for his magazine. It is not adapted
for that ; there is too much .truth in it. We will not fall
in with the present tone of blubbering sentiment of
course." John Hay wrote another record-maker for the
Century. The success of The Bread- Winners exceeded
that of any previous American novel. Its anonymous au-

300 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

thor set everybody guessing. A Western Doctor of Di-
vinity declared that he wrote it and that the publishers
never paid him. But this, the customary fate of anony-
mous hits, is not so amusing as that the once anonymous
Atlantic refused it because the author would not sign it.
Before taking the most important step that can happen
to a maiden magazine — changing its name for better
or for worse — Scribner's in 1881 pubHshed a pamphlet
modestly relating her birth, breeding, and expectations.
" In the height of prosperity she was about to assume a
name of broader significance. The magazine whose ways
are not the ways of the present time cannot live on its old
reputation, but must stiffen and die with the infirmities of
age. (Like a theatrical star, only constant contact with
the public can keep her young!) There were those who
predicted that she would die by the severe law of natural
selection as had died Knickerbocker and Putnam's. The
starting of a magazine in face of able and established
competitors is always a most venturous and difficult task.
So it had been with her. It was fortunate perhaps that
her conductors and editors were inexperienced in the con-
duct of periodicals. Lack of skill was more than made
up by their freedom from bondage to old ways of doing.
It did not take them long to discover that the methods
and men then in vogue were not sufficient. A new maga-
zine must find new men. It was thought necessary to
make it cheap in the beginning, but before the close of the
year it was found that a three dollar magazine could not
afford the highest excellence, and the second year began
with a most perilous change for a new periodical. It was
enlarged and the price raised to four dollars, at a moment
of great popular excitement and no little financial strin-
gency. But after a temporary check it was soon again
on the high road to prosperity. New methods of engrav-
ings were ventured upon in the face of a shower of ad-
verse criticism. The steady increase in circulation of
from ten to twenty per cent, a year made it possible to
augment its facilities in every direction."

CENTURY BORN SCRIBNER'S 301

In short, the young woman was putting herself on
record before taking a decisive step. In spite of her ef-
forts to have it all understood, people had got the idea
that she was married to a book-publishing house, and she
didn't propose to stand it any longer. She was a maiden
bright and free, no guile seduced, no force could violate,
and she didn't propose to take unto lierself a mate unless
it were Father Time itself, the everlasting. And so, to
the confusion of library-boys until time itself shall have
an end, Scrihner's was going to become the Century.
For her scorned and reputed spouse, some while after-
ward, having caught the habit from his long quasi-rela-
tion, married a maiden of the name he had grown used
to; and generations yet unborn will complain therefore
of mistaken identity. [_The history of this noble young
woman, Scrihner's Nimiber Two, belongs rather to the
twentieth century than to the nineteenth. Having
bounded into immediate maturity like Minerva from the
head of Jove — fully dowered and with gifts in her hands
and armoured with the welded experience of the parent
brain — she had no gro wing-up days. On the night of
publication her first edition, of one hundred thousand
copies, had been sold out. As Stevenson might have
paraphrased himself (in the rich and genial Vailima Let-
ters, with which she continued, in 1888, her second year
of appeal to the ripest culture in America), she hopefully
arrived without any journey whatever, which is the best
of all ways to get there.

Here is Dr. Holland's last announcement in the old
Scrihner's:

The present Mr. Charles Scribner and I have ceased to be
proprietors, and Mr. Roswell Smith has acquired about nine-
tenths of the stock. The remainder has been divided among
the young men who have done so much and worked so faith-
fully to make the magazine what it has been and what it is. I
am glad they own it, and that it is Mr. Smith's design that they
shall have more as they win the ability to purchase it. I owe
so much to these men that I shall greatly rejoice in any sub-
stantial rewards that they may reap for their long and faithful
service in building up the interests of the concern.

302 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

And here is the first announcement of the new Century:

Names do not make magazines but magazines give signifi-
cance to names. We wholly sympathise with readers in their
sentimental regard for our old name and wish it were never
to be dropped, for it means more to us than it ever could mean
to a subscriber and reader; but the reasons for the change are
imperative. Scribner's Monthly started eleven years ago with-
out a subscriber; the Century starts with virtually one hundred
and twenty-five thousand subscribers. The former was begun
without experience and with everything to learn ; the latter lifts
its fresh ensign upon a field of conquest. The former was
obliged to go out among the men and women of letters and ask
for contributions, which, in many instances, were doubtfully
or questioningly rendered; the latter is overwhelmed with
voluntary offerings of the best material from the best pens.
The former sought in vain among artists and" engravers for
such illustrations as would satisfy its wants and reaHse its
ideals ; the latter begins with all the talent at its command which
Scribner's Monthly helped to discover and develop. The same
business manager is at the front, and the same editorial force
controls and directs the pages, the same man directs the art
department who made Scribner's Monthly famous as a reformer
in the arts of designing and wood-engraving.

But it is destiny which disposes. Almost the last word
Dr. Holland had written for the magazine he founded
was, " With the burden of business responsibility lifted
from my shoulders, I hope to find my hand more easily
at work with my pen.'' Before the Far West saw the new
fawn-coloured dress of the Century, replacing the too
prosaic blue of the old Scribner's, the pen had dropped
from his hand forever; and the issue which announced
that its life was likely to continue, with unchanged name,
perhaps for centuries, announced that the life of the editor
was concluded.

The service the magazine rendered for Southern
writers and for the reunion of the whole country sinks,
however, almost to insignificance (if one may say so with-
out being accused of cynicism!) beside the beneficence of
another achievement, the end of which is not yet. It
began the modern system of magazine advertising.

The history of periodical advertising in America pre-

CENTURY BORN SCRIBNER'S 303

sents three stages, that of the newspaper, of the weekly,
and of the monthly. The stupendous development of
American journalism, in which it has outstripped the
world, would have been impossible without advertising
patronage. The growth of newspapers, we are told, has
been about a thousand per cent, in each half of the cen-
tury. Newspaper advertising began as a habit with the
last decade of the eighteenth century, but it cannot be said
to have increased even proportionately until the third
decade of the nineteenth, when it suddenly leaped for-
ward with giant strides. This was by reason of the
establishment of the New York Sim in 1833, the Herald
in 1835, the Philadelphia Public Ledger in 1836, and the
New York 7 rihiine in 1841. Even for a long time after
advertising space was regularly set aside in newspapers,
however, the majority of them did not have any regular
rates for advertising. Newspapers depended mainly
upon subscriptions or graft (the latter the more de-
pendable part of their income) and they got what they
could for advertisements as extra revenue. " In the
seventies," says Mr. George P. Rowell of Printer's Ink,
" advertising had in the ordinary run of papers little
standard of value. Conditions now are in every way
almost inconceivably different. John Wanamaker spends
more money for advertising every week in the dailies than
A. T. Stewart did in a year."

It was Robert Bonner who first made the newspapers
and the public appreciate what could be done with ad-
vertising. He would take a whole page of a paper, and
say in it over and over again, " Fanny Fern Writes Only
For the Ledger." My success, he cried aloud frankly
and reverberatingly from every housetop, is owing to my
liberality in advertising. " I get all the money I can lay
my hands on and throw it out to the newspapers," he said,
" and before I can get back to my office, there it all is
again and a lot more with it." But his returns for this
sort of advertising were due merely to the novelty of
advertising in bulk and with display — when the novelty

304 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

wore away, as it happened in book advertising fifty years
later, the method was no longer effective. Other adver-
tising of his, however, was far more subtle and ingenious ;
and each new device for attracting attention to his weekly
hit the bull's eye. They were legion. Godkin mentions
one in a letter to a friend in 1858.

The great topic of the quidnuncs for the past few days has
been Edward Everett's extraordinary undertaking to write for
the New York Ledger, a two-penny weekly magazine circu-
lating nearly three hundred thousand copies. It is filled with
tales of the Demon Cabman, the Maiden's Revenge, the Tyrant's
Vault, and a great variety of " mysteries " and " revelations,"
and, in short, barring its general decency of language, belongs
to as low and coarse an order of literature as any publication
in the world. By the lavish use of puffery a la Barnum, the
proprietor, a journeyman printer four or five years ago, has
amassed a large fortune. He offered to pay over to the Ladies
Mount Vernon Association — a project in which Mr. Everett
is greatly interested — the sum of $10,000 in case the latter
would undertake to write one article every week for one year.
To the astonishment of the whole Union the ex-ambassador,
ex-secretary, ex-president of Harvard University, ex-editor of
the Greek Reader, the scholar, the exquisite, the one aristocrat
of " the universal Yankee nation " has accepted the proposal.
Bonner will no doubt shortly fill whole sides of the newspapers
with announcements of the fact.

But whether it was because Bonner heroically main-
tained at home an idealism he could not exercise abroad
(amazing figure!) or whether advertising in weeklies had
not yet in his estimation become profitable, or whether his
ingenious advertising mind had determined that the
money lost in not accepting advertising in his own paper
was money well spent for the most unique advertising he
could get under the circumstances — the surprising fact is
that he never even in the day of the Ledger's colossal
success inserted a single advertisement. The. paradox —
as Gonoril might say — makes speech poor and breath
unable! Certainly some weeklies had already begun to
make fortunes out of advertising, under that pleasantest
of systems which allowed them to get all of their text for
nothing. Nor was the English reprint their only gratui-

CENTURY BORN SCRIBNER'S 305

tous fodder. Mr. Rowell remembers the Waverly of
Boston, which lived entirely upon the effusions of roman-
tic misses and young men at college, and never paid one
cent for its contributions. It was a weekly, sold for ten
cents, and it charged one dollar a line for its abundant
advertisements. This admirable plan is by no means
archaic, even if the international copyright law cuts off
one source of free material and the vanity of young per-
sons is now less easily appeased. A great many weeklies
and monthlies exist solely for advertising purposes, espe-
cially in States where public opinion is not exacting in
the matter of patent medicine and other questionable ad-
vertisements. Mr. Rowell raises a humorous eyebrow
over the dozens of papers published in Augusta, Maine,
the capital of the State, for prices ranging around twenty-
five cents a year, and queries why the Post Office law
should be so flouted. It is interesting to recall, as an ex-
ample of how difficult it is to draw the line, that the
Delineator was established, says he, for the purpose of
advertising the Butterick Paper Patterns and with no
other purpose. Yet bare as it was of other features, it
early found more than a hundred thousand women glad
to pay the subscription price in advance for it. The
question of admitting it to the mails puzzled the clerks
in the Post Office Department, but if they ever excluded
it, the time of its exclusion was brief. Of so little ac-
count was considered the advertising it printed that the
man who supplied the printing-ink took his pay in ad-
vertising space: at last accounting, the magazine was
charging six dollars a line for advertising.

All this is quoted not to show the guile of the advertis-
ing man from the very start (where, oh, where is the
need?) or the continuous performance of his growing im-
portance (humiliating task for the scribe!), but to em-
phasise the fact that magazines did not once conceive
advertising worth their attention nor did advertisers con-
sider magazines worth their consideration. Mr. Rowell,
who founded one of the earliest advertising agencies and

go6 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

made in 1869 the first permanent lists of newspapers and
periodicals for agency purposes, says that circumstances
led him to buy a space on the outside cover page of Our
Young Folks for the period of a year, hoping to sell it at
a profit. But no one wanted to buy it and he had to use
it himself. His advertisement after lying dormant for
some time brought him in the end an advertiser, and he
doubtless made the experience of assistance in furthering
the as yet undeveloped work of the agency. This, then,
was the condition of magazine advertising. To account
for it, in face of the successful demonstration which ad-
vertising had already made in newspapers and some semi-
literary periodicals, is not easy. It may have been be-
cause of the scorn of or indifference to the business end
of the enterprise which had so often characterised even
those magazines which tried to keep their feet on the
ground and their heads out of the high air of idealism.
From the very beginning most of them had genuinely dis-
claimed motives of commercial success — they had striven
to mould minds and create a literature. To many such,
advertising seemed sordid; and, indeed, they held them-
selves above all the details of the commercial side. One
might have expected, perhaps, the most extreme cases of
idealism in the pioneer publishers, as they appeared in
State after State ; and it is noticeable that everywhere the
pioneer sentiment on advertising was contemptuous. The
cruder the country the loftier the aspirations of its volun-
teer editors. But to Chicago in 1850 (though certainly
crude and new enough) one would not have looked for
juvenile ideaHsms — she already knew herself the capital
of the northwestern Empire and had no illusions as to the
foundation of her greatness. Consequently it is a strik-
ing illustration of the current literary attitude which was
afforded by a miscellany called Garden City. This was
founded by Sloan, the patent-medicine man, who had so
profitably advertised his patent medicines in the Gem of
the Prairie that he desired a magazine of his own. Mr.
Fleming tells us that for the first few numbers he even

CENTURY BORN SCRIBNER'S 307

printed in his literary pages a " Sloan's Column." But
although the magazine had its origin as an advertising
medium, it gradually curtailed these notices of the pro-
prietor's wares and throughout its last years admitted
very little advertising of any kind. One is perhaps not
surprised to hear that in 1854 it was merged into a Boston
periodical, seeing how long it had been heading for the
heights of sublimity. And even in Chicago there ap-
peared something peculiarly base about advertising which
made other schemes for self-support the less of two evils.
The Chicago Magazine frankly announced that it ex-
pected to get revenue " daguerreotyping leading citizens
and near-by towns," yet it said magnificently at the same
time, " We respond to the wish of a contemporary that
we might be able to dispense with advertising as an ave-
nue of public patronage ; but at present the law of neces-
sity must overrule the law of taste."

What then demolished this elegant delusion? Both
Mr. F. W. Ayer and Mr. Rowell, heads of our oldest and
best advertising agencies, unite in saying it was Scrib-
ner's. The new order of things began in 1870 with the
success and policy of this magazine. Yet like most new
orders, it made its way slowly and in the face of opposi-
tion. The early Harper's was as conservative and as
tentative in its attitude toward the innovation as it had
been about introducing opinions into its pages. Mr.
Rowell narrates an experience in Forty Years An Ad-
vertising Agent:

Harper's in 1868 not only did not seek advertisements but
actually refused to take them. The writer remembers listening
with staring eyes while Fletcher Harper the younger related
that he had in the early seventies refused an offer of $18,000
for the use of the last page for a year for an advertisement of
the Howe Sewing Machine. I have stated that Harper's was
established for the deliberate purpose of advertising the books
published by the firm. In the early days the reading matter
was largely made up of what might be called advance notices
of forthcoming publications. Advertisements from outsiders
were declined. The tempting proposition of the Howe people
would have removed from the last page the prospectus that

3o8 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

told on what terms the Magazine, the Weekly, the Basar, and
the Round Table could be had either together or separately.

It is not clear why advertisers were so long content to
let the magazine field go unessayed. If magazines had a
way of failing, so had the weeklies and the dailies; and
readers who paid a quarter and more for their periodical
were perhaps more likely to patronise the local firms and
the railroads that were the first advertisements to venture
into the monthlies. The reason is probably to be found
in that unprogressiveness of American business which
seems to us to-day so antediluvian. That advertisers con-
quered their inertia at all appears to have been due to the
industry of Scrihnefs in approaching them and the new
Advertising Agent in corralling them. It was the latter
\vho made possible the enormous growth of advertising.
[How enormous, Mr. Ayer figured out in 1894. That
year the December issue of the Century had one hundred
and thirty- four pages of advertising. Harper's in 1882,
after thirty-two successful years without them, yielded to
the inevitable and began to insert them : in December of
1894 it carried one hundred and forty-four pages. At
the page rate of $250, the advertising income of such an
issue would be $36,000. Putting the average amount at
ninety-two pages a month, the advertising receipts of this
one magazine would reach $276,000. It is estimated that
the December, 1894, issue of the six leading monthlies
represented $180,000.

Yet indispensable as the work of the agency had been
in building this volume of business, the slowness of some
magazines to appreciate the value of the service more than
matched their early reluctance to advertise at all. Mr.
Rowell gives an instance of this:

We were paying Harper's Weekly as much as five thousand
a month, but as circulation statements from the office fell short
of being definite, there came a time when the rating accorded
by our directory failed to be satisfactory, and I went to Frank-
lin Square to talk the matter over. I explained that we had to
have the same sort of statement from one paper as another,
what we asked from the Bungtown Banner we were obliged to

CENTURY BORN SCRIBNER'S 309

require from Harper's Weekly. There was a pause. The gen-
tlemen looked at each other, and one quietly said to the others:
*' It seems to me if Mr. Rowell talks that way, we don't want
to continue to do business with him " ; and the others in a rather
indifferent way appeared to coincide with that view. There
was nothing more to be said and I came away. And the next
advertising order sent out from the Rowell Agency was refused.
By and by the rule was rescinded but in the meantime we had
gotten out of the habit of recommending the paper, and a time
came when instead of sending advertising to it to the amount
of five thousand a month, I doubt if so much as that went to it,
upon orders from our agency, in some periods of five years.
When, a long time after, the old house of Harper and Brothers
failed, I could but wonder whether the firm had been as suc-
cessful in shutting off streams of revenue from numerous other
sources.

By the end of the century the advertiser had become en-
throned. There were agents who humorously suggested
that the magazine of the twentieth century would contain
just enough literary stuff to float the advertisements, and
who recalled that friends of theirs resembled Gladstone in
finding the latter more interesting than the former. Per-
haps a prophetic eye or two had even discerned a distant
day when an established magazine might change its
make-up entirely for the sake of exploiting its advertising.
The new Scrihner's and Lippincotfs had long since lured
the readers to adventure hopefully in the vast hinterland
of their advertising section by spreading artfully the dis-
jected members of an illustrated comic throughout its
length. Possibly this was the germ of an idea that was
to scandalise the high brow and pucker the low in the
early years of the twentieth century. Wiser than most,
Harper's may, in resisting the advertisement for so long
a time, have recognised the little rift that by and by would
make all the music mute. Who knows ? " The securing
of contracts for advertising," blandly remarks a recent
book on the subject, *' is the main objective in a modern
magazine. The receipts from purchasers at news stands
and from subscribers cover only a small percentage of the
total expenses of the production. The kind of goods
most advertised are staples of home consumption. Hence

3IO THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

the people who must be reached by a magazine whose pub-
Hshers wish to make it a medium for a large volume of
advertising, are the home-maintainers. To get this ad-
vertising, you must have in the literary pages the stuff
that will appeal to the people interested in those * ads ' ! "
This leads us to one of the most interesting back-ac-
tions in the history of our periodicals. Godkin suggests
it in an article in the Atlantic January, 1898.

The idea that the newspapers utter the opinions of which their
readers approve is being made less tenable every year by the
fact that more and more newspapers rely on advertising rather
than on subscriptions for their support and profits; and agree-
ment with their readers is thus less and less important to them.
The old threat of " stopping my paper " if a subscriber came
across unpalatable views in the editorial columns is therefore
not so formidable as it used to be. The advertiser rather than
the subscriber is now the newspaper bogie. He is the person
before whom the publisher cowers and whom he tries to please;
and the advertiser is very indifferent about the opinions of a
newspaper. He wants to know how many persons see it rather
than how many agree with it.

All this seems at first very encouraging. We have,
then, the advertiser to thank that we may hear, as often
as we do, what is being thought by people whose minds
are more enlightened or unfettered than ours. Blessed
be the Century that in helping itself so helped us all, when
it founded modern magazine advertising. But Godkin's
next sentence plunges us into despair again. " The con-
sequence is that newspapers of largest circulation are less
and less organs of opinion. In fact, in some cases, ad-
vertisers use their influence to prevent the expression of
opinions. There are not many papers which can afford
to defy a large advertiser.'*

If for " newspapers " you may read " magazines '' (and
possibly etiquette might even have caused the Atlantic to
substitute the former for the latter word, had it been
written), how drunk is now the hope wherein a moment
ago we dressed ourselves! There is something quite
dizzying about this transfer of moral sensitiveness from

CENTURY BORN SCRIBNER'S 311

the family-circle to the factory. What are we coming
to? Oh Century, Century (as Sir Isaac said to his dog
Diamond), if only you had known what you were doing!
What avails the most beautiful temple to the Muses when
you have unlocked the gates to the Barbarians ?

CHAPTER XIII

SOME MAGAZINE NOTIONS DEAD AND DYING

The nineteenth century in the magazines presented a long
and amusing struggle with the theory of anonymity of
authorship. It was part of the inherited attitudinising of
literature, greatly reinforced in America by the gestures
of Puritanism. Most periodicals and even some writers
were eager to demonstrate that art should be its own re-
ward ; and having industriously sown the pretty idea
throughout the land, it was hardly fair of them to com-
plain so bitterly when coarser-fibred United States Con-
gressmen ate the wheat that grew from it later. Authors,
especially New England ones, liked to think of their call-
ing as a thing remote from the market — particularly
since, but for the soft word, their parsnips would have
gone unbuttered anyway. And it was not to the interest
of magazines to uproot the illusion — -particularly since
they themselves, having invested actual money in a losing
enterprise, constantly found it the sole consolation for
their expenditure. Thus each of the parties, gladly or
otherwise, fanned the flame of their divinity. Some
writers, too, seemed to have thought that magazine work
was beneath them. Longfellow, for instance, more than
once wrote to a periodical that he would contribute if he
could do so anonymously. Some, too, seem genuinely to
have felt that a tree should be known to the public only
by its fruits. But whatever the reason, the lame show-
ing that editors and authors made when they attempted
to find a rational basis for anonymity as a policy, demon-
strates that it was part of the sacrosanct pose of letters.
In the prospectus which Charles Brockden Brown
wrote for his Philadelphia magazine in 1803 he said:

312

/

MAGAZINE NOTIONS DEAD AND DYING 313

" I shall take no pains to conceal my name. Anybody
may know it who chooses to ask me or my publisher, but
diffidence or discretion hinders me from calling it out
in a crowd ; and I have an insuperable aversion to naming
myself to my readers. But an author or editor who takes
no pains to conceal himself cannot fail of being known
to as many as desire to know him. ... To accomplish
his ends, the editor is secure of the liberal aid of many
most respectable persons in this city and in New York.
He regrets the necessity he is under of concealing these
names since they would furnish the public with irresistible
inducements to read what, when they had read, they
would find sufficiently recommended by its own merits."
It is easier to sympathise with Brown's temperamental
objection than to understand the devious reasoning of
his last remark. But the idea — firm-set, as we shall see,
in the editorial mind — was certainly more explicable
then than fifty years later when it was still flourishing.
Ephemeral writing, although almost entirely confined to
the professional classes, was still a business for vagabonds
when it was not the pastime of gentlemen in mask. It
was not a respectable occupation for any member of the
middle class. Even forty years later. Holmes said
that to be known as a writer would damage him as a
doctor. But Brown's na'ive statement that to mention
the names of his contributors would destroy the initiative
of the public, was to bob up again many times in the
course of the century.

The Boston American Monthly, a third of a century
later, achieved a more substantial reason for anonymity.
As those who entered its portals must abandon individu-
ality, why preserve their identity ? " We still believe the
use of names to be incompatible with the character of a
periodical which aims to represent views, tastes, and opin-
ions of its own and not to be an arena for desultory dis-
cussion; and which prefers the vigorous mental effort
of the most obscure contributor to the use of a popular
name however inspiring." Its contemporary the Pearl,

314 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

being of a contrary persuasion, did not fail to note the
fact that in this very editorial the American Monthly had
allowed itself to mention the name of its most valuable
contributor. " Now we believe the use of names," it
said, " to be quite compatible with the character of every
respectable periodical. First, because if an article be
worthy of publication, it is worth acknowledging; and
second, because every particle of fame or notoriety is so
much stock-in-trade or capital. Certainly, it is no com-
pliment to a subscriber to say that he will esteem an article
with a name superior to that without one which is of
more worth. It may require more philosophy to judge
impartially, but how much greater is the compliment
to the reader." So little was the Pearl obsessed by the
genteel tradition of letters and so convinced of the prac-
tical advantages accruing from the publication of names,
that her conduct was scandalously commercial. Not only
did she affix to articles the names of writers (that is, the
important ones ! ) but she shamelessly blazoned them upon
the cover and followed each with a list of his best-known
works.

This practice was later continued by Graham's and
others. The devotee party scornfully though hotly con-
tested every step of the way — those who entered the
convent of letters should drop their worldly names at the
door. So much had both editors and authors parted with
their carefully exploited sanctities under the compulsion
of crude human nature and of cruder commercialism,
that by 1844 Godey's called attention to the growing
fashion of magazines' featuring authors as writing for
them only. " We have had several applications lately
to write for us exclusively. We now say to one and all,
we do not wish to make any such arrangements. It is
impossible for a writer to vary from month to month
enough to please the patrons of a particular magazine."
Nevertheless, Godey's yielded to the fashion in the case
of the extraordinarily popular Miss Leslie, and at a later
date similarly advertised Marion Harland as writing for

MAGAZINE NOTIONS DEAD AND DYING 315

no other publication. Ever powerless were the Vestal
Virgins to turn back the steady sweep of the invading
barbarian! By 1848 a New York magazinist of English
training was writing thus of American magazines to an
English periodical :

Their editors make a considerable figure in the literary
world and their coniributors are sufficiently vain of themselves,
as their practice of signing or heading articles with their names
in full alone would show. One of the superficial peculiarities
of American magazines, is that the names of all the contribu-
tors are generally paraded conspicuously on the cover, very
few seeking even the disguise of a pseudonym. The number
of most " remarkable " men and women who thus display them-
selves in print is really surprising. Willis's idea, so ridiculed
by the Edinburgh, of a magazine writer becoming a great lion
in society, is not there so great an absurdity.

But Still the really elegant magazines, sustained by the
consciousness of high literary purpose, clung to the purer
view of the ministry of letters. The Atlantic toward
the end of the next decade and Putnam's about the middle
of it, held their torches high. Said the latter in opening :

We pray the reader to enter, and pardon this delay at the
door. Within he will find poets, wits, philosophers, critics,
artists, travellers, men of erudition and science — all strictly
masked, as becomes worshippers of that invisible Truth which
all our efforts and aims will seek to serve. And as he turns
from us to accost those masks, we remind the reader of the
young worshipper of Isis. For in her temple at Sais upon the
Nile, stood her image forever veiled. And when an ardent
Neophyte passionately besought that he might see her and
Vvould take no refusal, his prayer was granted. The veil was
lifted and the exceeding splendour of her beauty dazzled him
to death. Let it content you, dear reader, to know that be-
hind those masks are those whom you much delight to honour
— those whose names, like the fame of Isis, have gone into
other lands.

At the close of the first volume, this lyric nonsense was
somewhat elucidated. Behind it lay a policy diplomatic
and, alas ! commercial. The editors announced that their
conviction had been that their best aid would come from
younger writers with names yet unknown, and they had

3i6 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

determined to present these on a perfect equality with
iUustrious contributors whose names alone would grant
an audience — for in literature the newcomer is always
treated as an intruder. This illa^iical rhapsody, then, had
been only literary hocuspocus to conceal the fact that the
major part of their contributions were to come from new
and hence not high-priced writers. Alike equivocal was
the position of the other aristocratic magazines. Says
Scudders' Lowell:

Articles in the Atlantic as in the North American were un-
signed, but the authorship was for the most part an open secret.
The North American used to print a little slip with the author-
ship of the separate articles set against the successive numbers
of the articles; and this slip although not inserted in all the
copies sold or sent to subscribers, was at the service of news-
papers and the inner circle. The authorship of the principal
articles of the Atlantic always leaked out. The authors them-
selves sometimes were glad of the privacy, as they thought it
secured them more independence and possibility of frankness.
"For myself," wrote Lowell in 1859 [from the editorial chair],
" I have always been opposed to the publication of authors'
names at all." The practice of withholding names publicly con-
tinued till 1862, when the index at the end of the volume dis-
closed the authorship, and in 1870 the practice was begun of
signing contributions.

Nevertheless, Lowell knew perfectly well that the
authorship of his principal articles always came out ; and
he not only counted upon its doing so but recognised it
as an asset. Pleasant is it also to observe that his busi-
ness dealings were squarer than his mental processes.
" You must be content," he wrote to a contributor. " Six
dollars a page is more than can be got elsewhere, and
w^e only pay ten to folks whose names are worth the other
four dollars." The contributor might indeed have been
content, for in those times many writers were both name-
less and penniless too. This was Lucy Larcom's experi-
ence with her most famous poem. " The little song
Hannah Binding Shoes was brought into notice in a
peculiar way — by me being accused of stealing it, by
the editor of the magazine to which I had sent it with a

MAGAZINE NOTIONS DEAD AND DYING 317

request for the usual remuneration if accepted. Acci-
dentally or otherwise, this editor lost my note and signa-
ture, and then denounced me by name in a newspaper as
a * literary thief ess ' ; having printed the verses with a
nom de plume in his magazine without my knowledge.
So far as successful publication goes, perhaps the first
I considered so came when a poem of mine was accepted
by the Atlantic Monthly, and as the poet Lowell was at
that time editing the magazine I felt especially gratified.
That and another poem were each attributed to a different
person among our prominent poets, the Atlantic at that
time not giving authors' signatures." The anonymity
of the articles, remarked Higginson somewhat wryly,
caused many amusing mistakes, " although in time the
errors might be cleared up if people cared enough to find
out." It would seem, then, that for all its high-sounding
justifications anonymity was merely a means of advertise-
ment, a way to get the contributions talked about. Here
was a most subtle method of serving the high gods and
the low gods at once.

The uncomplimentary notion that a reader's attention
must be constantly stimulated by the thought that per-
haps the article he was reading had been written by some
important personage, was held by the Nation also. It
said in 1866: " An article of which the author is known
is hardly ever judged on its merits. If he is still obscure
most people will not take the trouble to read what he
says; if he is famous, they will devour the veriest twaddle
that comes from his pen and insist on fresh supplies
every day." The latter seems permanently true, although
there exists of course no compulsion upon a magazine
to publish even signed twaddle unless it desires to do
so, and the Nation was far from proposing to publish
twaddle of any kind. But if it were ever true that
obscure magazine writers were skipped without being
read, it would not have been possible for any authors to
become famous by reason of their magazine work — and
owing to the extreme limitation of the book market

3i8 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

through the lack of international copyright, most Ameri-
can authors in the nineteenth century won their repu-
tations in the magazines. It is apparent that they re-
fused to blush unseen by their praisers, even if, by the
policy of some high-class editors, they were at times
compelled to waste their sweetness in the air of the most
cultivated regions. No journal would contend for
anonymity now on precisely the old basis. But for the
larger part of the century, no editor saw that this was
as absurd as if a theatrical manager should insist that
his actors all go nameless, since some had to play the
small parts.

The Nation's canon of unsigned contributions went
hand in hand with that of absolute editorial control.
" All expression of opinion," said Mr. A. J. Sedgwick in
retrospect, " were avowed as those of the paper itself ; and
all articles and reviews were paid for to be published by
the paper and to be revised and amended both for style
and occasionally for matter. This rule used to be re-
garded as the secret of good and responsible journalism,
as it was once of quarterly reviewing.'' And this quo-
tation brings us to the history of that vexed and delicate
question, the '* editorial privilege " of magazines.

Historically, editorial' policy is the child of editoral
partisanship. The earlier magazines were constantly as-
serting that all political and religious controversy would
be rigorously avoided. It is a pity that editors ever
deemed themselves compelled to forget that the title
selected for their particular literary product was meant
to signify a general storehouse of literary commodities,
whose reason for existence was its unrestricted variety.
That a magazine should seek to occupy a particular field
and appeal for subscribers by reason of doing so, is only
common sense; but it does not appear why any further
editorial policy is desirable. Unfortunate is it for litera-
ture and for American civilisation that the magazines
of the nineteenth century, could not, and afterwards
would not, hold to the position stated in the American

MAGAZINE NOTIONS DEAD AND DYING 319

Magazine and Historical Chronicle (Boston, 1743-46),
whose motto was Jucunda Varietas. ** The encourage-
ments that compositions of this nature have met with in
Great Britain from people of all ranks and different
sentiments in religion, politicks, etc., has induced us to
begin the Publication. Our readers will do us the justice
neither to applaud nor blame us for the right or wrong
opinions, sentiments, or doctrines that may from time
to time occur in these pages, because we are to be con-
sidered as meer reporters of facts. All our praise, if
we deserve any, wdll be that of collecting carefully,
abridging with judgment and preserving the most perfect
impartiality."

But such an Arcadian state of simplicity was not long
allowed to exist. By the opening of the century, editors
of magazines were beginning to feel, in the growing
competition of newspapers, that they must identify them-
selves with political parties or forfeit support. The
National Magazine (Richmond, 1 799-1800) gave one of
the earliest indications of the tendency. " The American
people have long enough been imposed upon by pretended
impartiahty — it is all a delusion. It is as incongruous
for a publication to be alternately breathing the spirit
of two parties as for a parson to preach to his audience
Christianity in the morning and Paganism in the even-
ing. Every editor who is capable of soaring above the
flattery of villainy and the adulation of power has too
much at stake to admit of neutrality. Animated by a
zeal for the Republican cause and stimulated to exertion
by a perfect abhorrence for governmental fraud and
usurpation, I shall in the subsequent, like the preceding
numbers, select and introduce such facts and arguments as
will tend more directly to break the talisman and remove
the mask of federal delusion and imposture.''

In the record of this magazine, the historian of the
nineteenth century may read the entire history of "edi-
torial privilege." Its stated object was to transmit to
posterity the most valuable productions of the American

320 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

pen already published, and it at once began editorially
to winnow them! So lofty was its ideal that in the be-
ginning it even refused original effusions, and it turned
an obdurate shoulder to " a selection from trifling
amusements." When it discovered that it could not sur-
vive on so stern a regimen, it began to introduce lighter
essays but it retained, in the wider field, its rigid edi-
torial policy of partisanship. It edited everything, to the
top of its bent, and nothing was permitted to intrude into
even so frankly frivolous a subject as Feminine Garrulity
(on which both political parties might supposedly unite)
that could possibly be interpreted as supporting the
" Federal Delusion.''

The idea that it was necessary for a magazine to main-
tain a rigid policy and subject all its contributors to cen-
sorship, once started, gained momentum rapidly. Edi-
tors, even when they avowed themselves free from party
bias, as rigorously maintained a personal one. Our mag-
azine history is full of abortive attempts to establish pub-
lications where vigorous writers denied admission to the
current press might have some place to go; and the new
magazines had no sooner sprouted than the radicals turned
conservative and the ex-excommunicates began to excom-
municate on their own account. Even Poe, Ishmael as
he was and with, also, his larger vision of the destiny
of the magazine than any of his contemporaries, de-
manded to be literary dictator in the periodical he pro-
jected. The Stylus should present an aristocracy of
brains alone without regard to political or religious creed,
yet continuity and marked certainty of purpose were the
prime requisites of a magazine stamped with that indi-
viduality essential to its success. This was attainable
only where one mind alone had, at least general, control ;
"and experience had shown him that in founding a journal
of his own lay his sole chance of carrying out his peculiar
intentions. Lowell, also, beHeved that a magazine should
have but one editor. He wrote to Briggs that bitter ex-
perience on the Pioneer had shown him that only thus

MAGAZINE NOTIONS DEAD AND DYING 321

could individuality be preserved — and we shall see that
when he became authoritative editor of one, he, like Poe,
made purely personal exactions, petty and large, upon
his contributors in the name of general good taste and
judgment. By the middle of the century, so fixed had
become the idea that it was necessary for a literary maga-
zine to maintain a rigid policy, that Bristed made it the
chief basis of his complaint against the habit of gratui-
tous contributions upon which most of our magazines
were compelled to exist. " The gratuitous contribution
destroys all homogeneousness and unity of tone in the
periodicals of America by preventing them from having
any permanent corps of writers. The editor must now
and then be under the disagreeable necessity of paying
for an article if only to carry off their ordinary vapid
matter, but not often enough to make it an object to a
good writer to attach himself to the concern. The unpaid
writers, since the editors want variety and the writers
the justification of their vanity, are migratory and appear
in the greatest number of periodicals possible. Accord-
ingly, it is not uncommon for a periodical to change
its opinion on men and things three or four times a year.'*
Out of all the benefits of an international copyright which
would enable editors to pay every contributor, he thought
that the greater homogeneousness which they could then
maintain was the chief. Considerations of common hon-
esty and of permitting a literature to be self-supporting
were less important than preserving the artistic and in-
tellectual integrity of a periodical!

A high-class magazine as the repository of opinions
to which it was not committed and for which the editor
assumed no responsibility was still far in the future.
Knick, as we have seen, had stoutly maintained but the
one opinion that it should express no opinions whatever;
and Harper's had followed suit. Putnam's did not long
exist to demonstrate its, at best, only partial adherence
to the doctrine that a magazine of high and national
tone might venture to voice ideas not held by the popular

322 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

majority; other journals of free opinion and owning no
special allegiance, did not live long enough to disturb
the conviction that Knickerbocker had followed the only
safe path open to a literary magazine of general circu-
lation. Bulwarks of civilisation, like the North Ameri-
can, could shelter no poisonous or radical growths ; they
were supposed to endorse every doctrine they dissemi-
nated. Norton wrote to a friend when he and Lowell
took control of the magazine that they intended to secure
expression for the nation's clearest thought; but both of
them were thoroughly imbued with the prevalent editorial
notion that no thought was clear which they w^ere un-
willing to follow. Henry Adams and Henry Cabot
Lodge terminated their brief careers as editors of the
Review because the owners would not sponsor an incendi-
ary article in 1876 in favour of voting independently.
Yet Mr. Howells says that Adams imparted such amazing
life and go to the magazine that his predecessor Lowell
generously declared that the new editor was making the
old tea-kettle realise that it was of the same race as the
steam-engine. The vigour was entirely owing to the
occasional novelty of a radical opinion in the North
American. It was, indeed, because the magazine had
been made a monthly and could discuss questions while
they were still debatable and thereby provoke a clash of
opinion, that it became a live issue. Many subscribers
thought the pillars of society w^ere crumbling when the
rash Mr. Rice harboured the ravening Ingersoll in a tri-
angle discussion with Gladstone and Cardinal Manning,
upon the evidence for Christian belief. Perhaps it was
the spectacle of the North American being purchased
upon the news-stands by thousands of non-subscribers,
just as if it had been some casual and ordinary journal,
which made the first large dent in the editorial convic-
tion that a magazine was under the necessity of fathering
its children. Yet the Asylum idea, promulgated by the
American in 1743 and so long discarded, was by no means
resumed even in the newer journals. Some which an-

MAGAZINE NOTIONS DEAD AND DYING 323

nounced that they intended to discuss ideas ran the nor-
mal course from radical to conservative as they became
established, the process being decidedly hastened by the
increasing shift of editorial concern from the subscriber
to the advertiser. The protestants often ended by being
as thoroughly " edited " as the partisans. Toward the
end of the century the great outbreak of the little maga-
zines came as a protest against the suppression on the
part of the established ones of all convictions which
were new. And, in general, protestant or partisan, if the
editor did not agree with the author, or did not care
to seem to do so, the latter might take his wares else-
where. Holmes in one of his later prefaces to the Auto-
crat comments upon the great change in the expressibility
of new opinions since the Atlantic articles first appeared:
" One may express his doubts upon anything now," he
says, " so long as one does it civilly." To this it should
be added, " and so long as one was a Holmes." The
condition was summed up by a member of The Contribu-
tors' Club in an Atlantic for 1900.

I know a periodical which counts its subscribers by hun-
dreds of thousands which will not risk the loss of a hundred by
printing an article, otherwise pronounced to be wholly satis-
factory, in which the doctrine of Evolution is assumed as true.
The editors, the directors, the very office-boys admit that doc-
trine; but there is a haunting fear of some shadowy subscriber
in the Middle West who might be offended. " The policy of
the office" is to be colourless. But to have literature or art,
you must have a basis of belief (whether the belief is right
or wrong) and belief has colour. It has been found — we have
brilliant instances of it among our great magazines — that
astonishingly useful work may be done inside of the most re-
stricted limits. When so much can be done and has been done
within these safe walls, why risk influence and power, says the
editor — for mere circulation is an immense power — by going
beyond them? The "safe" view is not calculated to foster
literature in its widest or in its best sense.

The Contributor's complaint is abundantly confirmed
in the lives and letters of authors. It had been the prac-
tice of both editors and publishers to preserve the ortho-

324 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

doxy of their writers. Possibly no editor had ever gone
the length Holmes pictures in one of his Autocrat poems:

scowl howl scoflF sneer

Then a smile, and a glass and a teast and a eheer

strychnine and whiskey, and ratsbane and beer
For all the good wine, and we've somo of it here,
In cellar, in pantry, in attic, in hall,
Down, down, with the tyrant that masters us all! J
Long live the g^y servant that laughs fop^ao qIH,

But with the editor's habit of allowing the author to
discover only in print the alterations which his conscience
or his policy or his preference demanded, there is no
reason why he should not have done so. In ante-bellum
days, editors had gone quite as far as in one direction
at least. Parke Godwin says it was the common practice
of publishers in the thirties and forties to mutilate im-
portant passages concerning slavery in the foreign works
they had appropriated. Even the Atlantic, then flying
the anti-slavery banner, walked a tight-rope. Lowell
wrote to Higginson in 1859, ^' Editorially I am a little
afraid of John Brown and Ticknor would be more so."
If the adults of Philadelphia were never allowed to come
upon the word " slavery " in their periodicals, the young-
sters of Boston were similarly shielded from mention of
another evil — it is said that one could never speak of
death in the pages of that phenomenally successful peri-
odical, the Youth's Companion. All the magazines in our
Victorian era had their forbidden topics in common and
each had its own in particular. Not only must the Young
Person be kept uncorrupted from the world but the sensi-
bilities of the old must not be shocked. Even the re-
formers, as we have so frequently seen, had rigorous
limitations of their own; or those who were not editors
encountered, in the periodicals which admitted them, a
definite dictum of So far shalt thou go and no farther.
Lowell, having so often refused to toe the mark as
contributor, insisted that Stedman do so; and Holland
himself anathematised for creating a confusion in the

MAGAZINE NOTIONS DEAD AND DYING 325

realm of morals, sought in the Century to make Stedman
voice his own idea of the immorality of Whitman. In
1882 Curtis wrote to Norton: "I have resigned the
editorship of Harper's Weekly. My article upon Folger's
nomination, despite my request, was perverted and made
to misrepresent my views and to make me absolutely
ridiculous. The blow to me and to the good cause is
very great and not exactly retrievable. To-day I am
thought by every reader of the paper to be a futile fool.
The thing is so atrocious as to be comical.'* The Weekly
promptly confessed the mistake whereby the editorial
had been edited, and Curtis withdrew his resignation.
Gail Hamilton had often to defend her contributions to
preserve them from verbal alterations which she thought
damaged the integrity of her ideas. " I always lay out
my work by reducing my editors to subjection," she
wrote in 1887, having been on the crest of success long
enough to conduct aggressive warfare. " It is impossible
to accomplish anything so long as an editor is liable to
pop up at the critical moment with a will of his own;
when he is properly subjected, the rest is easy! " With
the " policy of the office " and the natural conservatism
of the periodicals of the nineteenth century, such an inde-
pendent and vigorous thinker as she must have frequently
collided. It is not improbable that every voicing of a
new idea in the entire century of magazines, represents
a compromise between author and editor.

That an author should be made to say other than he
believed or say it in a fashion other than he intended, is
a survival of the pontifical past of print. Charles Reade
in his Memoirs suggested the main reason for this when
he was polishing off the editor of Once a Week (London)
for tampering with his text. ** I have been obliged to
tell him that he must distinguish between anonymous
contributions and those in which an approved author
takes the responsibility of signing his own name. An-
swer— That with every wish to obhge me, he cannot
resign his editorial functions. Answer — That if he

326 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

alters my text I will publicly disown his alteration in an
advertisement and send no more manuscript to the office.
On this he seems to be down on his luck a little. For he
confines himself to ending my last number on the feeblest
sentence he can find out, and begging me to end the tale
as soon as possible, which, of course, I shall not do to
oblige him. But all this makes me feel that I am a very
quarrelsome man or that some other authors must be
very spiritless ones. Is it not monstrous that a person
whose name does not appear should assume to alter the :
text of an approved author who signs his name?" i

Here is the situation all stated. Authors as a class
have been willing to make all concessions to editors to
get into print. Some of these concessions were in defer-
ence to what the editors thought the public would de-
mand, and some to what they themselves demanded. The
editor's fight for subscribers compelled him to preserve
the orthodoxy of his authors, but the author's desire for
publication need not have compelled him to yield to the
editor's exactions in matters of taste. In America, he j
did so in the earlier magazines because he knew the editor |
to be his superior; and when the time arrived that this j
was no longer the case, the editorial hab^it had been con-
tracted. But aside from this, the American editor seems
to have felt from the beginning that he belonged to a
more responsible class than the author, and continued,
perhaps unaware, the habit of treating him as " a rogue
and a vagabond " who should be grateful for slipping into
good society, even when the position had become some-
what reversed and the author was the more socially re-
sponsible person of the two.

In the history of our magazines one is struck with the
continuous arrogance of the editorial attitude, not only
in matters of opinion and taste but in property rights.
It was not merely that even the most scrupulous editors
made changes and asked permission after the articles had
appeared in print. But it seems to have been taken for
granted that the author voluntarily severed all connection

MAGAZINE NOTIONS DEAD AND DYING 327

with his manuscript when he sent it to the office. If re-
jected, it was not returned or it was carved up for the
Editor's Table in anonymous sHces; if accepted, the
author need not be notified or paid or thanked, unless he
were important enough to deserve the unusual recogni-
tion. He had committed his offspring to a Charity
School, and should be thankful if it received lodging and
was clad in the uniform of the concern ; or he had handed
it over to a Finishing Institution where its deportment
was so corrected or its features so remoulded that " to
recognise one's own child again " on its reappearance
was considered flattering to the father. " The coolness
with which an editor would graciously accept an article
and print it without a word of thanks or a cent of pay-
ment," writes Congdon, " was even then irritating, though
we did not expect anything else. Now it would be re-
garded as a piece of swindHng." Congdon was writing
his reminiscences in 1880, yet at that time there were
plenty of lesser magazines still pursuing the tradition of
an editor's right to a submitted manuscript. Even now
there is no law against arbitrary editorial changes, and
some authors who have recognised their offspring with
indignation have appealed to the courts in vain. Notions
of literary property have now, it is true, become less con-
fused, and in some magazines even alteration in copy has
come to be regarded the dishonesty and impertinence it
really is. But this last seignorial right is dying hard.
And chiefly it would seem to be on account of the spirit-
lessness of authors of which Reade speaks. Sufferance
had too long been the badge of all their tribe and they had
too often informed the editor that it would be considered
a favour to print. " The favour of giving room and
circulation to a man's ideas," said the Mirror in 1844, '* is
growing now into a salable commodity — the editor even
charges rent for his columns instead of hiring a tenant."
The custom of editorial alterations in America is a
heritage from the days when an editor's chief business
was to provide his own material, other material being.

328 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

entirely lacking or being furnished by writers frankly
inexperienced. To prune and patch whatever manu-
scripts came in at that unplentiful period was a step
necessary to the generally anonymous publication, quite
aside from the editor's own particular tastes and whimsies
or the policy of the magazine. But apparently editors
became fastidious just as soon as they could afford to
be, and began to impose their own notions of perfection
upon the material of their contributors. Theophilus
Parsons of the United States Literary Gazette wrote to
Longfellow in 1824: " I think you will not be offended
by my sincerity in saying that while all the pieces you
have sent me would be creditable to any journal, they
are susceptible of improvement, from alterations calcu-
lated not to supply deficiencies but to remove imperfec-
tions." The next month he is writing, obviously in re-
sponse to a remonstrance, " Some of my alterations please
me now no better than they please you." Theophilus
Parsons never demonstrated his right to give directions
to Longfellow; but Bryant, editor of the New York
Review, was in a more assured position when he altered
the poems of R. H. Dana. Yet perhaps the length to
which he felt himself entitled to go and the fact that he
published first and then asked permission, may both indi-
cate how much remained of the editor's notion of his
prerogative when his earlier necessities no longer existed.
" You will see in a copy of our magazine which I send
you that I have changed your crow to a raven. I do
not know that you will like the metamorphosis but it is
a change only in the title." Here, because of a pseudo-
poetic preference for an English word of hallowed usage
and without even being able to plead metrical considera-
tions, he converted some homely and accurate observa-
tions about a crow into a pointless misfit. A little later,
he Bryantised another of Dana's poems. "As you
seemed to give me leave to make alterations, I have taken
the liberty. But I found it impossible to alter two lines
which would not agree in measure without altering several

MAGAZINE NOTIONS DEAD AND DYING 329

of the neighbouring lines. I have also ventured to make
some changes where the sentences were continued from
one couplet to another ; and in other cases where I thought
the idea not sufficiently brought out, I have taken the
liberty to simplify it a little. But you will see all the
mutilations I have made when you receive the journal."
Many letters of the same nature he wrote to Dana; and
what was going on in the case of Dana was the fate of all
the poems he admitted to the New York Review. They
were all less or more adapted by Bryant from the authors
who had written them.

Holmes, who filed his poetry to the last degree before
it left the workshop and who could not have failed to
know himself the most careful artisan in America, felt
particularly aggrieved by the editorial function. He
wrote to James Freeman Clarke in 1836: "The four
things were all published in the American Monthly, and
when I found one of my offspring alterated and mutilated
in the magazine, I determined not to write any more at
present.

What care I though the dust is spread

Around these yellow leaves,
Or o'er them his sarcastic thread

Oblivion's insect weaves.

My pet expression in the two last-quoted lines was
changed by the New York editor on his own responsi-
bility into * Or o'er them his corroding thread,' which
occasioned much indignation on my part and a refusal
to write until he would promise to keep hands off." He
was sending a poem to Clarke for his Western magazine,
and added, " if you print, print correctly." He says he
was as much harassed by the carelessness of printers and
proof-readers as he was by the pains of the editorial staff
to improve his work. On one occasion when he sent a
poem in his neat precise handwriting, he wrote to the
editor : " Poems are rarely printed correctly in news-
papers. This is the reason why so many poets die young.
Please correct carefully." To Griswold on Graham's he

330 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

wrote with the manuscript : " Do you want my poem ?
If so, what will you give me for it? And can it be pub-
lished in your magazine word for word, letter for letter,
comma for comma?" In later hfe he had no occasion
to complain of unauthorised alterations, yet he had ap-
parently no illusions as to the reason for his immunity.
*' My Dear Young Lady," runs a letter in 1892, " As
to your literary questions, I do not see how you can help
yourself if an editor alters your papers, except by be-
coming so important to him that you make it a condition
of publishing your articles that they shall not in any
way be tampered with. I remember writing an article
for the North American Review many years ago in which
the editor claimed his editorial right to change things to
suit himself, and altered just one word, — for the worse.
I submitted. Long afterwards, when the article was re-
printed, I altered it back again as it was at first. I be-
Heve editors do claim that right until their contributors
get too important to be interfered with, and I think all
you would get by complaining would be to find the door
of that particular periodical closed against you."

It is amusing to recall that Willis, doubtless the mutila-
ter of a million manuscripts ( for most of which he paid
nothing), violently quarrelled with his co-editor Morris
because the latter had altered his punctuation. Willis,
who thought that he had emancipated notions of that
inexact science, wrote once to a printer, " If I insert a
comma in the middle of a word, do you place it there
and ask no questions." Both Leland and Lowell took
themselves very seriously as arbiters of taste. Said
Leland in 1857 in a letter to Griswold, the former occu-
pant of his editorial chair on Graham's: " I have found
out that by editing such an affair conscientiously and
properly, one can do a great deal toward improving the
tone and quality of popular writing — that a literary
editor can in fact do as much as several school masters,
so far as teaching the art of writing is concerned. It is
really a matter of regret to see that so many editors seem

MAGAZINE NOTIONS DEAD AND DYING 331'

to care so little for this, or in fact for anything but them-
selves." In 1858, Lowell wrote to Norton about editing
the Atlantic: " I cannot stand the worry of it much
longer without a lieutenant. To have questions of style,
grammar, and punctuation in other people's articles to
decide, while I want all my concentration for what I am
writing myself — to have added to this, personal appeals
from ill-mannered correspondents whose articles have
been declined, to attend to — to sit at work sometimes
fifteen hours a day, as I have done lately — makes me
very nervous, takes away my pluck, compels my neglect-
ing my friends, and induces the old fits of blues. To be
editor is almost as bad as being President." He had
written to Higginson concerning the insertion of one
word, an insertion which he thought would be more
diplomatic, " I never allow any personal notions of mine
to interfere, except in cases of obvious obscurity, bad
taste, or bad grammar." He thought he was adhering
to the same ideals when he came to edit the North Ameri-
can, but in 1866 he was writing to Stedman: " We do
not ask that our contributors should always agree with us
— except in politics ; of course, there, the Review must be
consistent. But otherwise anybody who has ideas is
thrice welcome." Stedman must have been amused when
some months later he wrote about this same article : " I
shall take the liberty to make a verbal change here and
there, such as I am sure you would agree to could we
talk the matter over. I think, for example, you speak
rather too well of young Lytton, whom I regard both as
an impostor and as an antinomian heretic. Swinburne
I must modify a little, as you will see, to make the Rcviezv
consistent with itself. But you need not be afraid of not
knowing your own child again." Lowell would have
been genuinely surprised to hear that a later generation
would regard such alterations, " to make the Review con-
sistent with itself " and with Lowell, not only as de-
priving personal opinions of all value and interest, but as
dishonest.

332 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

The Atlantic sanctum in its authoritative days always
wielded a busy blue pencil. Higginson says that at a
period when he used to spend days and weeks on single
sentences, he would find his careful composition hashed
by the editor. " I wish to be understood as giving a
suppressed but audible growl/' he wrote to Underwood,
" at the chopping knife which made minced meat of my
sentences. It is something new. I don't think I tend
to such very long sentences ; and it isn't pleasant to think
that they belong to such a low order of organisation that
they can be chopped in the middle and each half wriggle
away independently." Higginson polished his prose as
assiduously as Holmes did his verse ; and the corrections
made in his manuscript were prescribed merely by a dif-
ference of taste and not by any considerations of nicety
and clarity, as was the case with the shaggy and crude
sentences of Mrs. Stowe. These, Mr. Howells said, had
almost an appalling correctness by the time he had finished
with them. And, too, Mrs. Stowe was quite conscious
of the raw chunks in which her careless writing was pro-
jected and never minded any amount of carving to make
them presentable, being anxious only about the ideas and
the emotion which she felt herself to be merely a mouth-
piece for. Fields emphatically believed that an editor
should be a refining force. Some correspondence with
Stedman on the subject of the latter' s most famous poem
is interesting. Fields wrote to Stedman : " Bravo ! Pan
in Wall Street couldn't be better. In the line, * Though
pants he wore of mongrel hue,' I hope you will substitute
the word trousers — pants being a word below the rank
of so excellent a piece." Stedman answered Fields:
" Pants is an American vulgarism and no mistake — but
you are a poet yourself, and if you'll just try to alter
that stanza with anything else to preserve the effect,
you'll appreciate the exigencies of the case. Pants may
be tolerated when you recollect that Pan is in a Yankee
street and guise, and observed by a Yankee — but choose
according to your judgment (which I most sincerely re-

MAGAZINE NOTIONS DEAD AND DYING 333

spect)." Fields had his way. Stedman may well have
remembered the episode when he wrote in 1874 to
Howells, then the editor of the Atlantic: " You know
I can write correct, finished, aesthetic sonnets and qua-
trains— can do it every day, but am tired of such work.
Don't you think we bookmen, as editors, might profit by
Browning's line, * He o'er-refines — the scholar's fault ' ?
I don't believe that either you or I would have printed
The Heathen Chinee, coming from an unknown author;
it is so very different from the polished level of Miss
Hunt, Mrs. Thaxter etc. Yet it would have been a
good thing to print."

If Stedman's employment of " pants " in a poem grated
on the fastidiousness of Fields, one may imagine the long
row-royal of the robust Mark Twain with his editors.
To escape explosion he once let off steam in a letter which
he wrote but did not send. Through the corrections,
paragraph by paragraph, he went. " Do you think that
you have added just the right smear of polish to the
closing clause of the sentence? Plain clarity is better
than ornate obscurity. I have not concerned myself
about feelings, but only about stating the facts. Else-
where I have said several uncourteous things, but you
have been so busy editing commas and semi-colons that
you overlooked them and failed to get scared at them.
It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours.
You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would
take some of the rigidity out of it. And you ought to
use it sometimes ; that would help. If you had done this
every now and then along through life, it would not have
petrified. You really must get your mind out and have
it repaired; you see for yourself that it is all caked to-
gether. * Breaking a lance ' is a knightly and sumptuous
phrase, and I honour it for its hoary age and for the
faithful service it has done in the prize composition of the
school-girl, but I have ceased from employing it since I
got my puberty, and must solemnly object to fathering
it here." Some time afterwards Mr. S. S. McClure had

334 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

a project to start a magazine with Mark Twain as editor.
In a letter setting forth his determination that he would
not have anything to do with a magazine that intended
to be comic, he added : " I shall write for this magazine
every time the spirit moves me ; but I look for my largest
entertainment in editing. I have been edited by all kinds
of people for more than thirty-eight years; there has
always been somebody in authority over my manuscript
and privileged to improve it; this has fatigued me a
good deal, and I have often longed to move up from the
dock to the bench and rest myself and fatigue others. My
opportunity has come, but I hope I shall not abuse it
overmuch. I mean to do my best to make a good maga-
zine; I mean to do my whole duty and not shirk any
part of it. There are plenty of distinguished artists,
novelists, poets, story-tellers, philosophers, scientists, ex-
plorers, fighters, hunters, followers of the sea and seekers
of adventure; and with these to do the hard and valuable
part of the work with the pen and the pencil, it will be a
comfort and joy to me to walk the quarter-deck and
superintend."

Mark's enthusiasm fizzled out entirely when he found
that as well as sitting in judgment upon the work of
others he was expected to sit at an editorial desk and
superintend all the practical details of getting out a
magazine. And this brings us to another reason for
editorial alterations.

The architectural exactions of magazines, with their
practical problem of space, have necessarily made editors
pragmatists. The last-moment requirements of make-up
have often been less flexible than the conscience called
upon to meet them. Into the Procrustes bed of the
available inches all articles must be fitted. Doubtless
they have been lopped oftener than lengthened, but
authors have complained of filling as well as of filing.
A contemporary magazine which eschews verse has an
inalterable law that an article must be made to end at
the bottom of the page. The serviceability of verse to

MAGAZINE NOTIONS DEAD AND DYING 335

patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw was early recog-
nised. Possibly that was the reason, as much as the
equally prudent humanitarian one, why the early maga-
zines so soon gave up the habit of printing all their verse
in a department at the end. In the matter of stanzas
The Lord High Executioner appears often to have made
the punishment fit the crime, even to the extent of boiling
in oil. Not all poets were treated with the consideration
given to Stedman when Fields wrote him, " I will print
your poem so soon as I find a niche for it." The eternal
predicament which makes the editor a space-server found
a unique remonstrant in the person of John Hay ; yet novel
as the situation was, the author's accusation of unintelli-
gent condensation was the customary one. For four
years the Century had been printing the Hay-Nicolay
Lincoln. Most people thought the magazine had been
more than generous in allotting space for the series of
forty articles; and Hay heartily agreed with them, al-
though it utilised only a third of the mammoth work.
" I see," he wrote, " the Century folks have whacked
about all the life out of the November instalment. But I
approve every excision large or small that brings us nearer
the end. My complaint is that they are printing too
much. As it is, they cut out about every third para-
graph, • destroying the significance of a chapter without
gaining materially in space. I avoid calling there when
I go to New York, as our interviews are invariably dis-
agreeable."

In his autobiography Mr. S. S. McClure, while he
takes on the one hand a very temperate position about
editorial infallibility, shows on the other an unshaken
confidence in the editor's right to insist upon changes.
Professional readers for magazines, he says, become in
time the victims of their own taste and successes, and the
absolutely open mind is rare with them. Yet he appar-
ently refused to allow other editors to consult the exigen-
cies of space — admittedly an impersonal necessity con-
fronting an editor — while he himself was exercising his

S36 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

editorial function in a matter of opinion. " I told Steven-
son I would publish The Black Arrow (for the News-
paper Syndicate) if he would let me omit the first five
chapters. He readily consented to this. Like all writers
of the first rank, he was perfectly amiable about changes,
and was not handicapped by the superstition that his
words were sacrosanct. I never knew a really great
writer who cherished his phrases or was afraid of losing
a few of them. First-rate men always have plenty more.
Only writers of inferior talent and meagre equipment feel
they are lowering the flag if they consent to any changes
in their manuscript." Thus does Mr. McClure astutely
muzzle all barkers. Object to my changes, says he, and
confess yourself second-rate. Yet it is interesting to
note that if the editors accepting his syndicate service
had had their way, every one of the first twelve Sherlock
Holmes stories would have been trimmed — especially
as it was not until the entire series had been published
that the stories really caught on with the public.

As the century drew to a close, entered another disturb-
ing element. With the exploitation of advertising, the
magazine author's path grew more straightened still.
This phase of the editorial function is ticklish in the ex-
treme and one may not rashly venture upon it, either
with wise saws or with modern instances. Of these lat-
ter they are plenty, and some that are more amazing than
fiction; but the prudent historian does not walk into a
beehive.

Even theoretically, the problem is acutely complicated.
Certainly, it is too much to ask of breakable bones that
an editor deliberately saw off the bough he is sitting on.
His once haunting fear of the man in the Middle West
has been largely supplanted by his fear of the man in the
back-districts of his own periodical. As long as editor
and advertiser are agreed on basic principles, it is plain
sailing. There shall be no free advertising in the literary
pages, and nothing paid for at space rates in the advertis-
ing columns ought to be attacked in the literary ones,

MAGAZINE NOTIONS DEAD AND DYING 337

either explicitly or by implication. These two would
seem to constitute a simple and definite rule of thumb;
but unfortunately the thumbs are all fingers. The rub
lies in the implications and here is infinite room for mis-
chief. And here the scribe resolutely shuts up his
drawer of facts and launches boldly upon frank extrava-
ganza.

Let us imagine that Dr. X. has discovered that tuber-
culosis is spread by insanitary handkerchiefs and longs
to inform an afflicted world of his incalculable discovery
by means of its periodical of widest circulation. The
editor agrees with him and scents a double edition.
" Publish ! " cry the handkerchief-makers elate. " It
means more handkerchiefs ! " But hold, the doctor wishes
to substitute thin sheets of sulphuretted asbestos. " Pub-
lish and we withdraw our advertisement ! " they chorus
as one man. Meanwhile, all the advertising sanatoria
have prepared a protest. *' The linen handkerchief is the
symbol of civilisation itself! What will become of the
laundresses? How dare the editor gratuitously exploit
the asbestos industry? Let him recollect that there are
a hundred advertising sanatoria to one asbestos plant,
and he will see that even a quadrupled edition will not
repay him for the loss of their insertions year in and
year out ! " Meanwhile, too, a council is instantly called
by the Cotton Planters Association. A silly doctor, it
seems, thinks he has discovered that handkerchiefs are
responsible for the spread of tuberculosis and the nosey
magazines will soon be wanting to feature him.. If there
are to be no linen handkerchiefs, what will become of
the broad cotton-fields of the South! He must be kept
from disseminating his perfectly fallacious theories.
But now the Asbestos Trust, formed over night at the
prospect of a limitless market, waits upon the editor —
reinforced by the Sulphur Trust, which has also grasped
the fact that sulphur will now enter a million homes
denied to it before. Together they demand that the edi-
tor give widest publicity to a discovery so priceless to

338 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

humanity, or they will back a competing periodical on a
larger scale than ever before attempted and run him out
of business. Even Mark Twain might be moved to pity
by the predicament of the poor editor.

But positive implications are not the only sources of
trouble; there are negative implications also. The sensi-
tiveness of advertisers to all literature but their own is
daily increasing. It has occasioned many delicate dis-
criminations, and will occasion many more. (Here, too,
the prudent historian must discard his facts and resort to
extravaganza.) Paste-um (Please observe, this is a fic-
titious name — there really is no such article ! ) may pro-
claim in the most pointed terms the injuriousness of
coffee, yet no writer may confess to one heart-beat the
less through indulgence in the cup that cheers but ener-
vates, without protest from coffee firms. No heroine
may proudly voice the superiority of hot-water heating
over steam, as do the ladies in the advertising pages, or
shyly confide to her future lord that she will fry with
clean cotton-seed oil instead of that nasty lard. This
is all a part of that mysterious moral discrimination ex-
hibited in wider realms, — by which, for instance, ob-
scenities in prose become sanctities in verse, or things
winked at in musical shows become blinked at in prob-
lem plays, or the ubiquitous union-suits of Commerce
become Comstocked in art. But the discrimination
though inexplicable is at least definite, and if one may
not know what is what, he may at least memorise the
where and when. Since psychology has become the hand-
maiden of business, however, advertisers are ceasing to
be content to move in the old rut of simple prohibitions
in the literary pages of magazines. An ounce of free
suggestion is now seen to outweigh a pound of precept
at space rates. Judged from a broad viewpoint, the re-
fusal of heroines of high-class fiction to chew gum is
damaging to the vested interests of some of our most
prodigal advertisers ; and authors must not be allowed to
restrict the healthful habit to sales-ladies and office-boys.

MAGAZINE NOTIONS DEAD AND DYING 339

Why should not the thousand cereal-foods unite in a
common demand that no hero eat eggs for breakfast? —
the hen does not advertise. All this is only a fancy pic-
ture — but if it be not now, yet it will come ; the readiness
is all.

This may, however, be for the best in the long run.
As advertisers have made our numerous magazines pos-
sible, it may perhaps yet be owing to their sensitiveness
and their widening vision that we shall reach final edi-
torial emancipation from the fetich of editorial responsi-
bility. Editors will find it physically impossible to figure
out for themselves the manifold chances in each manu-
script for possible disturbance to the hair-trigger mecha-
nism of commerce, and after a time they will find it equally
impossible to have each manuscript viseed by their entire
advertising constituency and decide between the con-
flicting claims. Perhaps advertising, a Moses unaware,
will yet lead out of the land of bondage the magazine
which has done so much to promote. It is well to take
a hopeful view. For this retrospect into the history of
editorial responsibility must have demonstrated how
firmly fixed is the notion in the editorial mind. Not
until the editor is rigidly edited by the advertiser does
it seem that it can be uprooted.

What with alterations of editors for aesthetic reasons,
for moral reasons, for their own commercial reasons, and
for the commercial reasons of advertisers, the periodical
writers of the nineteenth century have continuously quav-
ered one song, " Change and decay in all around I see,"
and unanimously longed for the editor that changed not.

CHAPTER XIV

THE END OF THE CENTURY

The end of a century is undoubtedly society's most self-
conscious period. (Just watch next time and see if there
is not something about it that goes to the head!) It is
to movements what New Year's Day preceded by Watch
Night used to be to good Methodists — a time for retro-
spect, for self-searching, and for good resolutions. One
looks before and after and pines for what is not.
Whether a new broom sweeps clean or not depends upon
the sweeper, but certainly it will always whisk up more
dust. Then, too, the periodic discussion arising at this
date as to just when the century ends only prolongs the
crisis; it does not dissipate the excitement it produces.
Just as some little boys take a month in getting ready for
Christmas and a month in recovering from it, so society
has a period of shake-up and shake-down in the closing
decade of the old and the opening decade of the new
century. It is perhaps fortunate that it comes no oftener
than once in a hundred years.

So it proved in the history of American magazines.
In this period two hundred and fifty thousand regular
monthly buyers of periodicals became two millions, and
the reader of one magazine became the devoted devourer
of half a dozen and more. We are not, however, so
much concerned with his New Year resolutions as with the
various factors which caused him to make them. Chief
of all (how horrid to find it was nothing more spiritual !)
was their new cheapness. The honour for bringing this
about was afterwards hotly contested, and Mr. Walker
of the Cosmopolitan always maintained that his plans

340

THE END OF THE CENTURY 341

were betrayed by a printer (as Benjamin Franklin claimed
his had been with the first magazine) to Mr. McClure
and to Mr. Munsey. Thus the record reads at any rate :
McCltire's Magazine appeared May 28, 1893, at fifteen
cents a copy; the Cosmopolitan in July at twelve and a
half; Munsey's in September at ten cents. As of these
three, Mr. Frank A. Munsey was first in the publishing
field, let us take his story up first. Here is an abstract
of it, as he delivered it in a speech at a dinner given to
his staff in 1907, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his
entrance into the magazine world.

The Argosy, a juvenile weekly, began life in December, 1S82.
I had four thousand dollars in prospect and forty dollars in
cash; one room for an office, an eight-dollar table, two wooden
chairs, and an ink-bottle. My plans had all gone wrong, and I
was lucky to find, at last, a publisher who agreed to bring it out
and retain me as editor and manager. It failed in five months.
I borrowed three hundred dollars; and as editor, advertising
manager, office-boy, and chief contributor, I began to try to
pump life into it. It had made its regular appearance for some
years before I could procure any credit with which to advertise.
Then I spent in five months ninety-five thousand dollars in ad-
vertising it. All the while writing at midnight my six thou-
sand words a week. Success came, or rather what I thought
was success until I found out my mistake ; but beyond a certain
point I could not lift the circulation. I assumed that the trou-
ble was with a juvenile publication ; and decided to demonstrate
it by getting into the adult class. Consequently I started, early
in 1889, Mimsey's Weekly, the predecessor of the magazine. It
lasted two and a half years and lost over one hundred thousand
dollars. I made up my mind that a weekly was " a dead cock
in the pit." There are a few successes to-day, but I think they
are accounted for by the activity and fertility of the business
office rather than by a genuine and spontaneous circulation.
The weekly paper, once so great a feature in American publish-
ing business, began to decline with the incoming of the big
Sunday newspaper; where there is no Sunday newspaper in
Europe, the weekly still thrives. After many experiments with
the make-up of the Argosy, I had concluded that nothing would
save it and that it must be moulded on other lines. I have
never thought it terrible to change a publication as often as con-
ditions warranted, or to make the change as radical as I pleased.
I did not know yet what to do with the Argosy, but in 1891
I changed Munsey's Weekly into Munsey's Magazine. The

342 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

< ■/ / \

change of a worthless weekly into a monthly may not seem
much, but it was this change which made the magazine the
leading factor in modern publishing. I launched it at twenty-
five cents and at this price ran it for two years, while I studied
the problem why out of eighty millions of people there were
not over two hundred and fifty thousand magazine buyers. Was
the Sunday paper crushing the life out of the monthlies as well
as the weeklies? I began to analyse the magazines. They
seemed made for ansemics and their editors editing fdr them-
selves and not for their subscribers. Living in an artificial
literary world, they got out publications which wofuUy lacked
human interest. On the other hand, the Sunday newspapers
appealed to everybody; and their price was five cents against
five and seven times that for the magazines. The several at-
tempts to float cheaper ones had been only weak copies of the
old kind. I became convinced that both the price and the
magazines were wrong for a wide circulation. If a magazine
should be published at tein cents, and made light, bright, and
timely, it might be a different story. I worked out my idea
and took it to the American News Company. They did not
relish it, said the scheme did not leave them a sufficient margin
of profit for handling it. The price they finally offered was so
low it would have throttled me. No one had ever succeeded in
circulating a magazine over their heads, but I decided to try it.
I would deal directly with the newsdealers of the country. No
human being except myself believed I could win out. I had no
money and men with plenty of it had failed. But I thought
that it wasn't money "which would win the fight, but the idea
of giving the people what they wanted and giving it to them
at the right price. God only knows how I managed it ; I don't.
I sent out ten thousand circulars to newsdealers telling them of
the change to ten cents and telling them that they could not get
the magazine through the News Company. I asked them to
send their orders direct to me. I hoped and expected there
would be orders. None came. Then the American News Com-
pany called on me and held out the olive branch. When I had
been negotiating with them, I had told them they could have
the magazine at six and a half cents; but when they had kept
silence for three weeks, I advanced the price to seven. What
had caused them to call upon me was this new price and some-
thing I never suspected. They had received orders from the
whole ten thousand dealers ! I had an edition of twenty thou-
sand and no visible means of distributing it, but I refused the
price they now offered. They must come to my terms. As the
day of issue swept nearer, my tension increased to the break-
ing-point. But that issue was distributed in ten days, and I
doubled it before the month was up ! In the issue I had begun

THE END OF THE CENTURY 343

those "plain talks to the people," now so customary; and I
had something to talk about. Six months afterwards, I changed
the Argosy to an adult magazine — its fifth change in eleven
years. But it had one more change to undergo. In 1896 it
became an all-fiction magazine, a type which it created and
which has since become one of the most successful in the field.
It became the second largest magazine in the world in point of
circulation and of earning power. Munsey's is the first (1907).
My six magazines — or rather seven, as one is issued in two
sections — are all the result of my analysis of the situation in
1893. If there has been any luck about it, I do not know where
it comes in. It was a fight all along the line.

Fortunate, too, is the historian in having, to fall back
upon, Mr. S. S. McClure's own account of his activities.
These summarise a period of expansion and revolution
which makes, by contrast, the mild innovation of the
journals of Opinion seem but the first faint stirrings of
life and all previous circulations but premonitory ripples
of a great flood.

For three summers, Mr. McClure says in his auto-
biography, he peddled coffee-pots in the Middle West,
and gained thereby a very close acquaintance with the
people of the small towns and the farming communi-
ties— the people who afterwards bought McClure's
Magazine. All these people, he found, were interested
in exactly the same things or the same kind of things
that interested him. Thus, in after years, he had little
sympathy with the distinction made by some editors —
" This or that was very good, but it wouldn't interest
the people of the Middle West or of the small towns."
These, like the people of New York or Boston, were in-
terested in whatever was interesting; and as he felt him-
self to be a fairly representative Middle-Westerner, they
would be interested in whatever interested him. His
associate-editor, Mr. John Phillips, and his business-
manager had both been on a college paper with him in
Illinois ; and thus it may be admitted that the Ohio Valley
would not regard the new magazine as an exotic.

The Century he thought was typographically far and
away the best American periodical, and when he came to

344 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

get out the Wheelman for the Pope Manufacturing Com-
pany, it much resembled a thinner edition of his ideal.
After a while Colonel Pope decided to buy the Outing
and merge his periodical into it, and Mr. McClure thought
the combination wouldn't work very well for him. He
left and went into the Century office, then the uttermost
limit of his ambition. But here one day he had a higher
vision. A newspaper syndicate service was in the air
at the time — indeed, the New York Sun had already
made a tentative experiment in that direction — and Mr.
McClure worked out a plan for one. When he started
to put it into operation, he found the editors as cool about
the project as the authors had been warm. Finally,
however, he persuaded several important newspapers to
take the service, of stories and articles^ at eight dollars
a week. For a long time after he inaugurated it, his
actual capital was the money he owed authors. The older
editors regarded the project with some anxiety — they
all believed that there would never be any new magazines
in the world, that Harper's and Century and the Atlantic
would consume all the stories that would ever be written
in America, and consequently there would not be enough
to go around if he went on using them up in his syndicate.
It was about eight years after he had founded the busi-
ness that he began seriously to consider founding a maga-
zine. The success of the Ladies' Home Journal at ten
cents made him think a cheap popular magazine might
thrive ; and the new development of photo-engraving had
*^just made such a scheme feasible. The impregnability
of the older magazines was largely due to the costliness
of wood-engraving. Only an established publication with
a large working capital could afford illustrations made
by that process. The Century, when he was working
for it, used to spend something like five thousand dollars
a month on its engraving alone. Not only was the new
process vastly cheaper but it enabled a publisher to make
pictures directly from photographs which were cheap,
instead of drawings which were expensive.

THE END OF THE CENTURY 345

Early in 1892, Mr. McClure continues, he and Mr.
Phillips began active plans to launch a new fifteen cent
monthly. After eight years of the hardest kind of work
in the syndicate business, he was only $2,800 ahead;
important rivals had appeared, and the only practical
expansion v^as in the direction of a magazine. Their en-
tire capital was $7,300. But in place of capital, they
had a great fund of material to draw from. The maga-
zine at first was to be made entirely of reprints of the
most successful stories and articles that had been used in
the Syndicate, and for a year or two it would have to live
on what profits the Syndicate afforded.

The outlook was not promising, but it proved worse
than he feared. For just before the first number came
the great panic. They could collect no money from the
newspapers for their service ; and in the general cut-down
of running expenses everywhere, a luxury like stories and
articles was one of the first things the newspapers dis-
pensed with. Of the twenty thousand copies printed for
the first number, twelve thousand were returned to them.
The eight thousand they sold netted them only $600,
and the paper and printing had cost thousands. Then the
next month another woe trod upon" the heels of the first.
The Cosmopolitan cut to twelve and a half cents, two and
a half under McC I lire's. They had reckoned that it
might be a year before another cheap magazine came into
the field. Nevertheless, though always on the edge of
failure, they got through the hard winter somehow. The
next summer they were losing a thousand a month. By
cutting the text from niney-six to eighty-eight pages and
reducing the size of the illustrations, they reduced the loss
somewhat ; but all the while they were slipping back.

In this crisis Conan Doyle, Miss Ida Tarbell, and Na-
poleon tided them over. The first volunteered to lend
them some money, and the second wrote a life of the third.
The year 1894 was a Napoleon year; the Century had
announced Professor Sloan's Life of Napoleon; the
Cosmopolitan soon joined the combat; and Mr. McClure

346 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

commissioned Miss Tarbell overnight to run down to
Washington and whip up a biography to go with a re-
markable collection of portraits he had found there. Miss
Tarbell had just written, in Paris, her careful studies of
the life of Madame Roland, and knew the period. The
Middle West proved more interested in the stop-gap than
in the Century's Life which had been some years in mak-
ing ; and it doubled the circulation of McClnre's within a
few months. But Miss Tarbell as a circulation-maker
was only just flexing her capable fingers. Quite as
casually and quickly, Mr. McClure decided that some new
portraits she had found of Lincoln needed a frame-
work, and she winnowed the interested Middle West for
anecdotal material. Napoleon had brought their sub-
scribers from forty to eighty thousand ; Lincoln increased
them from one hundred and twenty in August, 1895,
to two hundred and fifty in December. Thus in thirty
months they reached a circulation in excess of the Cen-
tury, Harper's, and Scrihner's; and soon they were to be
greater than all three combined. The only fly in their
ointment was the old advertising rate. With their in-
creased circulation, they were losing four thousand dollars
a month. Peace hath its defeats the same as war ! But
in 1896 they had changed all that, and were clearing five
thousand a month.

Reviewing the earlier history of the magazine, Mr.

r McClure thinks that the intimate and human note which

/ - went straight to the Middle West heart was struck in the

/ very first number. The Real Conversations — in which

j distinguished persons interviewed distinguished persons

— and the Human Documents — in which the portraits of

V the (same proceeded by consecutive stages from the cradle

^--to the grave — converted, for the Middle West, mere

names into near neighbours. Their popular science

articles, he thinks, were of a more serious nature than

those in any preceding magazine. The wide acquaintance

with writers and their possibilities which the Syndicate

had given him seemed to him his chief asset and his real

THE END OF THE CENTURY 347

capital ; furthermore, he could, with syndicate and maga-
zine combined, tempt them with a wider pubHcity than
they had ever received before. His industry was untir-
ing; for a series of portraits of Bismarck he ran over to
Germany. As boundless was his fertility in devising new
schemes to conduct personally to Middle Western farm-
yards remote aristocrats. (Holmes wrote to Mrs. Stuart
Phelps Ward in 1893 that he would be delighted to dis-
cuss " Time and Eternity " with her and her husband as
suggested, but as to saying anything on those subjects
to be reported, he would as soon send a piece of his spinal
marrow to those omnivorous editors. *' So you see, I
am quite obstinate — not to be lured or Mac-lured.")
As for stories, he had, in addition to Conan Doyle, cap-
tured Kipling and Anthony Hope also. To discover the
value of all three, one might not, perhaps, need to go so
far as to sell coffee-pots in the Middle West, yet Mr.
McClure says that Harper's had refused every tale in the
four early books of Kipling, that it took him a year in
the Syndicate to gain recognition for Conan Doyle, and
that no American editor had thought enough of Hope to
bring him across the \vater.

The special character of the American cheap magazine
as we now know it — wrote that keen and reflective Eng-
lish observer, Mr. William Archer, in 1910 — is mainly
due to one man, Mr. S. S. McClure. He invented and
developed the particular type. The style of article which
has made its fame is a richly documented, soberly worded
study in contemporary history, concentrating into ten or
twelve pages matter which could much more easily be ex-
panded into a book ten or twelve times as long. Its
method is to present, without sensationalism or exaggera-
tion, facts skilfully marshalled and sternly compressed,
and let them speak for themselves. Here is Mr. Mc-
Clure's account of the inception and evolution of the type

About 1897 the talk about trusts had become important and
the common people took a threatening attitude toward them —
and without much knowledge. We decided that the way to

348 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

handle the trust question was not by taking the matter up ab-
stractly, but to take one trust and to give its history, its effects,
and its tendencies. The mother of trusts was the Standard Oil.
Miss Tarbell had lived for yeaj;s in the heart of the oil region,
and she undertook to prepare some articles on its history.
When they heard of our project, Mr. H. H. Rogers of the
Standard Oil sent us word through his friend Mark Twain that
they would gladly help us in securing material. Miss Tarbell
spent nearly three years on the work before the first chapter
of it was printed. The first important result of the articles was
the nation-wide realisation that the railroad rebate was the
great weapon of the Standard Oil. Simultaneously began the
articles of Mr. Steffens on municipal misgovernment. We gave
him a roving commission, and he visited the cities. What he
found made me begin an investigation which proved that life
and property in the United States were less secure than in
other countries. I went on trying to arouse public opinion.
StefTens's work dealing with the corruption of State and city
politics was a feature of the magazine for three or four years.
His articles were the first accurate studies of this nature that
had then appeared in an American magazine. To secure the
accuracy which alone makes such studies of value, I had to
invent a new method in magazine journalism. The fundamen-
tal weakness of modern journalism was that the highly spe-
cialised activities of civilisation were very generally reported
by uninformed men, and what experts had to say was seldom
interesting. I decided to pay my writers for their study rather
than for their copy — to put them on a salary and let them
master their subjects before they wrote about them. The prepa-
ration of the fifteen articles of the Standard Oil series took five
years ; they were produced at the rate of three a year, and each
one cost us two thousand dollars. Of course, the subjects that
will repay an editor for so expensive a method are few and
important.

Thus the origin of what was later called the muck-raking
movement came from no formulated plan to attack existing in-
stitutions, but from wishing to take up with accuracy and thor-
oughness some of the problem.s that were beginning to interest
people. The method of dealing with public questions which
distinguished McClure's was developed gradually. My desire
to handle such questions came largely, I think, from my frequent
trips abroad. In my many rapid trips for material of all kinds,
I had noticed certain differences in the attitude of people here
and abroad regarding public service and the connection between
business interests and government. I was desirous of finding
out why, in American cities as distinguished from American
States, the debasing and debased part of the population should

THE END OF THE CENTURY 349

have a predominating influence in nominating and electing offi-
cials. A study of the methods of organising governments in
England and Germany made me understand the basic causes of
the inefficiency and corruption of governments in American
cities. It was the indifference of the average American citizen
to public questions.

The spirit which actuated all this may be illustrated by
a McCliire editorial, January, 1903. *' We did not plan
it so; it is a coincidence that this number contains three
arraignments of American character such as should make
every one of us stop and think. The Shame of Min-
neapolis, the current chapter of the Standard Oil, Mr.
Ray Stannard Baker's The Right to Work, it might all
have been called The American Contempt of Law. Capi-
talists, workingmen, politicians, citizens — all breaking
the law or letting it be broken. Who is there left to up-
hold it? The lawyers? Some of the best are hired for
that very purpose. The judges? Too many of them so
respect it that for some error or quibble they restore to
office or liberty men convicted on evidence overwhelm-
ingly convincing to common sense. The churches ? We
know of one, an ancient and wealthy establishment, which
had to be compelled by a Tammany hold-over health-
officer to put its tenements in sanitary condition. The
colleges ? They do not understand. There is no one left
— none but all of us." Where could one find more mean-
ing, more control, more passion packed in so few words !
It was not to be expected that the novelty of a magazine
campaign on corruption, both contemporary and specified,
could intrude itself into a jolted community without op-
position. As frequently happens in- this amusing world,
a proposed reform makes strange bed- fellows. The out-
cry against McClure's delightfully anticipated the pretty
spectacle, a decade later, of the well-supported matron and
the well-supported cadet uniting against woman's suf-
frage. Alike the matronly New York Evening Post and
Tammany denounced the articles as altogether commer-
cial. The latter called the campaign a mercenary defama-
tion of the fair name of our glorious land; the former

350 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

(equally, though more wittily, reminiscent of time-worn
oratory) called it a fight for God, for country, and for
circulation. Godkin and Curtis and Dr. Holland in their
long and admirable agitation in their magazines for Civil
Service Reform, had really gone the limit of safe and
well-bred magazine interference with public affairs —
to attack specific institutions and mention names was to
drag in the dust the white samite of literary journaHsm! J
And from the White House came ringing the customary !
picturesque epithet, with which its occupant, agog like
Kipling for the galvanizing word, was in the habit of
branding all mavericks. McClure's wore proudly its new
and sanctioned title of Muck Raker, and doubtless joined
in the chuckle which went up from many earnest-minded
Americans and observing Englishmen after their first
gasp of indignation. For the accusation, ungracious as
it was from one professional reformer to another, was
conspicuously ungrateful also. It was the public con-
cience which McChire's had striven so earnestly to arouse
with an army of shocking facts that eagerly seized upon^
the President for leadership. " The historian of the fu-
ture," wrote Mr. Archer, " may determine how much of
the ' uplift ' that distinguished the Roosevelt administra-
tion was due to the influence of the McClure type of
magazine. It seems to me certain that Mr. McClure
paved the way for President Roosevelt and potently ^
furthered the movements with which his name will al-
ways be identified."

Not the least of the services of the McClure type of
article was its contribution to the final demise of the j
Young Person. More and more ailing as the old century
drew to its close, this fragile and exquisite illusion ap-
parently entered her last stage at the commencement of
the new. For the family-circle was to be startled with
ruder accents than the McClure Shame of the Cities or
the Cosmopolitan Treason of the Senate. Young ladies
had no sooner heard that politicians and policemen slipped
into the saloon on the next block than they were ac-

THE END OF THE CENTURY 351

quainted with the hitherto unsuspected tidings that it had
a Family Entrance into which other beings shpped. And
such revolutionary disclosures came not only from the
militant magazines of which no fine sense of the sanctity
of the Young Person could be expected, but even from the
Ladies' Home Journal (Shades of Ruth Ashmore!).
Made deaf at last by all this noise to the elegant reticence
becoming a daughter of Mrs. Hale and Godey's Ladies'
Book, this periodical actually began to give parents in-
struction upon certain aspects of the education of their
children! What would dear old Knickerbocker have
said? He would probably have said that he could have
told you so ; that he knew what was coming the moment
a gentlemanly magazine so far forgot itself as to ven-
tilate opinions. The next step in the inevitable degenera-
tion would, of course, be the ventilation of vices! No
opinions at table and no ugly facts before the Young Per-
son were the cornerstones of Society-as-it-Should-be.
An amusing anecdote or so with the wine and cigars, and
later a farce from the French dexterously diluted of
course for female companions but patent to the cognos-
centi — you could banish her from the one and as for the
other, why every Young Person, thank heaven, had an
innate purity! Indeed, in a sense and with all humility,
the Young Person, one might say, was the noblest work of
God and man alike! Man had been His co-worker in
this perfected being which had eyes but saw not and ears
but heard not. — So might Knick have said, shaking his
silvery locks over the departure of all civility from a de-
generate world. Well, thanks to McClure's, there are no
longer any Young Persons. Nor will it console any one
who grieves to reflect that there never were any. It was
all so charming. Nor will it console them to hear the
opinion of that obsessed Mr. Archer, admiring Ameri-
can magazines for a frankness of speech which the Eng-
lish ones do not possess. '* It is one of the striking fea-
tures of the magazine of the McChire type that that
though distinctly * family ' productions so far as fiction

352 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

is concerned, they deal freely with social topics of the
utmost delicacy, without either frightening their subscrib-
ers off or achieving any ' success of scandal.' I have
never seen an article in McClure's or in any magazine of
its class that was not perfectly fit to be read by any one
who could conceivably wish to read it."

There is a reason economic and a reason temperamental,
Mr. Archer thinks, why there are no such articles in Eng-
lish magazines. They have neither the circulation nor
the advertisements which would enable them to pay for
such social investigation. But the main reason is the
English law of libel. An American editor said to him
quite simply, " We carry libels in every number " ; but the
mildest of the progressive American cheap magazines
would beget in England a crop of libel-suits. For the
McClure type eschewed the generalities which preceding
moralists had exclusively engaged in, and mentioned
names and cases. The difference between a moralist and
a muck-raker is a simple but significant one — a muck-
raker is a moralist who specifies. Mr. Archer remarks
that the law of libel seems to be as inefficient in America
as it is over-efficient in England; but the contrast is not
so much legal as spiritual — an American shrugs his shoul-
ders at an accusation which in England would blast a
man's whole career. " We do not wish to spend our
energy," said Collier's Weekly j " in exploiting facts which
cannot personally offend a human being " ; yet if you do
offend and the person has money enough to go to court
in England, a libel-suit follows. It is not because Ameri-
cans are more afraid of libel-suits, for judges here as in
England could exclude the damaging evidence if that were
our attitude. Partly it is an un-British indifference to our
reputation and partly it is an equally un-British sense of
humour. Where everybody is illegally libelling every-
body else, 'tis folly to be squeamish. For the same rea-
son, Americans are not even exacting of their pound of
flesh; what's the sense of being a Shylock when the next
time the other party may have you on the hip? Mr.

THE END OF THE CENTURY 353

John Adams Thayer says that once when Everybody's
made a plate of J. P. Morgan from a steel-engraving, they
found the copyright law allowed the original publisher to
claim one dollar a copy for every impression they had
made. The publisher pranced over to see them, and they
had a most interesting afternoon. They were liable for
seven hundred thousand dollars !

;x^^he new process of photo-engraving made possible the
cheap illustrated magazine; but as in a short time many
cheap magazines were in the market, it by no means ac-
counted for the enormous circulation of a magazine like
McClure's. Illustrations that cost one hundred dollars

^^ud required a month's time could now be had by all of
them for ten dollars and in one day. " The revolution in
the art of engraving, not to say its destruction," said the
Independent editorially in 1895, " is threatening a change
in the conduct of monthly magazines as well as of news-
papers. It seems probable, however, that the higher-
priced magazines will not find it wise to reduce their price
to the figure of Cosmopolitan and McCliire's. They will
wish to maintain that higher, purer literary standard
which succeeds in securing the best but not the most nu-
merous readers. They cannot change their constituency
beyond the comparatively cultivated class that appreciates
them. They cannot therefore enormously increase their
circulation and so their advertising income by reducing
their price." To which McClure's replied : *' Less than
one-seventh of the illustrations in last month's Harper's,
Century, Scribner's are engraved on wood. There must
be some merit besides cheapness in a method that is em-
ployed for more than six-sevenths of the high-priced
monthlies. On the other hand, we must seek elsewhere
for a reason for the cheap magazine. Will the editor of
the Independent tell us where any editor can secure a
higher, purer literary standard than is maintained by our
list of writers?" The list that followed included most
of the names before the English-speaking public. Thus
it was apparent that the difference in standards was not

354 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

one of height but of kind. Anybody who wished might
call it purer, anybody who wished might call it less con-
ventional. It was not a difference of so-called appeal to
pure culture, for McClure's and Cosmopolitan each had
a notable art series. It was not even a difference in edi-
torial enterprise or in careful and costly research. The
Century, some while before the era of cheap magazines,
had sent George Kennan and an artist on a two years'
tour of Siberia to secure the articles on Russian prisons
and the treatment of political exiles which caused the
proscription of that magazine from the Czar's dominions.
The travel articles of Harper's, for which it had long
been famous, had despatched observers with pen and pen-
cil to the outposts of the world. The difference between
the two sets of magazines simply consisted in the fact that
the majority of the American people thought the McClure(
type moved closer to contemporary life and was seeking
not only to illumine but to raise and support. The cheapl
magazine in itself was no new idea. In 1872 and in con-
servative Boston a ten cent periodical, American Homes,
was started and was making a national success when the
Boston Fire destroyed it utterly. The new tone of in-
timacy and neighbourly helpfulness which became the
special characteristic of the cheap magazines and to which i
even some of the older high-priced periodicals " lowered /
their dignity " as time went on, seems to have been in-/
troduced by that mighty mother of magazines, the City of/
Brotherly Love, as she got her third wind. Mrs. Hale ofl
Godey's had whispered cosily in the female ear, Graham's^
had chucked a continent under the chin; but it remained
for the Ladies* Home Journal to embrace warmly the uni-
versal world.

Established in 1883 by Cyrus Curtis, it was edited io\
half a dozen years by his wife under the name of Mrs.
Louisa Knapp. But its astounding success began about
1890 with the advent of Mr. E. W. Bok. Before this
time the occupation of an editorial chair had been accom-
plished without shaking the earth. But the Himalayas

THE END OF THE CENTURY 355

heard at once that he was the youngest and highest-paid
editor in America. He immediately began that series of
novel series which effected the introduction of everybody
to everybody else and placed the two hemispheres on a
family basis. He did not go forth to the family-circle
as the mid-century Harper's had done; he inscribed the
circle around himself like Richelieu holding the maiden
Julie. Nobody could step outside of it unless he stepped
off the planet. Unknown Wives of Well-Known Men,
Unknown Husbands, Famous Daughters of Famous Men,
How I Wrote This and Did That — everybody who was
somebody and everybody who was nobody were soon en-
gaged in counting his or her pulse-beats to a breathless
world and to the tune of the periodical's increasing circu-
lation. One touch of Mr. E. W. Bok had made the whole
world kin. It seemed as if the possibilities of the genre
might never be exhausted, and the public might go on
clamouring forever, or until the Nieces of Absconding
Bank-Presidents and the Cousins of Royal Governesses
had satisfied the last urgency for world-fellowship in the
latest Bok-awakened Madagascar metropolis. The fever
for fellowship spent itself in time, of course; but the two-
fold result upon the conduct of magazines seems likely
to be permanent. Readers expect buttonholing if not
manhandling, and editors have come out of their cloistered
retirement. Even editors of some of the older magazines
which prided themselves on being far from the madding
crowd no longer desire to remain violets by their mossy
stones. As for the editors of the new cheap magazines,
they looked upon Mr. Bok and at once did likewise. Per-
sonal publicity became the proof of aggressiveness and
enterprise. It was part of the advertising age. About
the time when " Charles Frohman Presents " and " Henry
Savage Proffers " became household phrases conned by
lisping children from the billboards of America, Mr.
Munsey was publishing in his own handwriting his own
opinion of his magazine as a cover-design. A few years
later even Mr. Alden of Harper's was protesting in the

356 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

North American that the wise editor never sought to
suppress originality and that if the Middle West wanted
to call him a matron he didn't mind. As for the militant
magazines, they vibrated with an electric current sped
from editor to reader, wherein dynamo called to dynamo
in no uncertain tones.

All this was much increased by the vogue of the cult
magazine, which by its very nature was a personal utter-
ance. The cult magazines were all slender things, merely
embodied voices like that pocket prima-donna who was
once heralded as " Little but Oh My ! '' The run of these
was a measles with which the face of the whole country
broke out. The germ-carrier was the project of two
Harvard youths who published while at Cambridge a slim,
artistically printed semi-monthly called the Chap Book.
It was a side-product of the Celtic Revival in England, and
purposed extending to Victorianised America the new
wine of the Yellow Book, of Aubrey Beardsley, George
Moore, and Yeats. In a short while all the early num-
bers were exhausted, and its deserved success was so great
that it moved to Chicago where it would have freer air
and no time-stained institutions standing in the way of its
sunlight. There it flourished for four years; and as it
remained a substantial and literary rarity until the last, its
fortuitous death was universally regretted. So was the
death of its first joyous offspring, the Lark, which twit-
tered gleefully at San Francisco from 1895 to 1897.
This stopped, apparently, because its editors — Les Jeunes
— wanted to grow up. Some of them afterward did
grave and valuable things in periodical literature, but
many of the carols of their light-hearted infancy were
such melodious madness that the world gladly stopped to
listen. The Chap Book had numerous progeny, however,
that would have scorned to be brother to the Lark as
much as to own so conventional a parentage as the new
Irish movement in an effete literature. All over the
country they sprang up, by preference on rocky soil and
where weeds might choke them. The intention of the

THE END OF THE CENTURY 357

cult magazine was to be a voice crying in the wilderness.
There were at least one hundred and sixty-two of them,
crying to the flinty echoes " Repent ! Repent ! " and liv-
ing on locusts until their lungs gave out, though from
want of proper food only. Chief of them was the Philis-
tine, Printed Every Little While for the Society of the
Philistines. This was an association of Book Lovers
and Folks Who Write and Paint. Their object was to
destroy the phantom of a false dawn, and their settling
at East Aurora, New York, was thought by many to have
been the result of exploring the map for a village of
symbolic name. " In literature he is a Philistine who
seeks to express his personality in his own way," ran an
early announcement. " We ask for the widest, freest,
and fullest liberty for Individuality — that's all." This
proved both wide and full, and it made free with every
established Thing. Begun among the earliest of the
fadazines, it alone continued its voice well into the next
century. Its voice was robust. Its sub-title was A
Periodical of Protest, and it is admitted that one can-
not protest in a whisper. Its editor, Elbert Hubbard, did
more, though in a field less wide, than Mr. Bok or Mr.
McClure or Mr. Munsey to deal the editorial tradition of
reticence a body blow; to develop that arrestingly and
grippingly personal tone which was becoming character-
istic of the American sanctum, and to demolish the last
vestige of the pose which Boston culture had bequeathed
American letters. The only one of the four who had any
literary gift, who went on lecture tours, and was the
fortunate possessor of a disputed personality, his voice
naturally carried the furthest. A cult is like a protoplasm
— it subdivides while you are looking at it ; and the Philis'
tine, like all the other little magazines, died because its
offspring ate up the available audience. But their earnest
iconoclasm made many people do some thinking of their
own, and they were yeasty affairs which leavened a vast
deal of our inherited stodginess ; they had their day and
went their way and left some thoughts behind them. In

^58 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

/ the history of American thought they are consequently

/ of considerable importance, but to the history of the

/ American magazine they contributed chiefly one more

/ factor in the growth of the personal note at the end of the

\,^^^entury.

A case very much in point is the gradual emergence of
Mr. John Brisben Walker of the Cosmopolitan, from a
private citizen conducting a business enterprise into the
fierce light that beats upon a throne. Born in Rochester,
New York, in 1886, a clergyman's child, the Cosmopoli-
tan, as befitted its parent, was conservative and domestic.
Consisting largely of translations and with full page re-
productions of paintings, it had a Children's and a House-
hold Department which often gave recipes. (Can you
picture the contemporary Cosmopolitan thus parentally
engaged, even if fathers of families are not what they
were ?) In the beginning, it threw in as an extra induce-
ment to those impervious to the seductions of a home
missionary at two dollars and a half a year, a Letter and
Bill File, the cost price of which was only twenty-five
cents less. But its Cincinnatus days departed in its second
year when it moved to the metropolis, and its sea-change
was complete when Mr. Walker coming from the West
stumbled over it in 1889. Somewhat later it made an
attempt to recapture its rurality by moving out of town
again, but dalliance with the great city had forever al-
tered its ancient Rochestrian ideals. Having put its hand
to the plough, it turned back to the sidewalk. But this
was later still, and under the convoy of Mr. Hearst —
whose energetic and sophisticated personality is, geo-
graphically considered, perhaps even more remote from
the magazine's first parent than was that of its second.
As a matter of statistics, however, it may not be generally
known that Mr. Hearst is a clergyman twice removed;
or that the Cosmopolitan once dispensed recipes on the
best methods of keeping the household sweet and clean.

But to return to Mr. Walker and the far side of the
century mile-stone, when the worldly career of the future

THE END OF THE CENTURY 359

magazine was as yet undreamed. The new editor made
haste discreetly. He replaced the Household Department
with one on Social Problems conducted by Edward
Everett Hale (ominous forecast of the Suffrage move-
ment!) and the Children's Department with Book Re-
views by Professor Brander Matthews (fitting symbol
of the discarded parochial past!); and added the de-
partments In the World of Arts and Letters, and The
Progress of Science, conducted by many hands. These
were all admirably administered, and the last-mentioned
was particularly serviceable in bringing the readers closer
to contemporary activities. Contenting itself for a while,
too, with articles illustrated by portraits and other docu-
mentary records — like the Lady Riders of Washington
or The Woman's Press Club of New York — it little by
little branched out into other illustrative fields. Its early
reproduction of famous masterpieces happily metamor-
phosed into richly illustrated articles on Recent Art.
About the year 1897, the magazine reviewed its ten years
of life. At its birth, the total number of magazines did
not greatly exceed the figures of the present edition. The
rapid increase in circulation had proceeded in equal steps
with the manifestation of a new attitude of a magazine
toward its readers. It considered itself a co-operative
affair in which the chief party was the public. Mr.
Howells and A. S. Hardy were associate-editors and
Professor Boyesen and Dr. Hale were regular contribu-
tors and advisers, but the best associate and adviser was
the reader himself. As with the other magazines which
in the last decade of the century reduced their price, this
endowment of the public with a personality it had never
before possessed was found to have its editorial exactions.
Whether the flattered reader required reciprocity or felt
that at least propriety demanded that he demand it, or
whether the necessities of the new appeal to social and
civic consciousness dictated greater directness (for how
can one receive an actual punch from an invisible shoul-
der?), or whether it be that heartier fellowship is inherent

36o THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

in lowered prices and in the poorer class in general, or
whether it was all a part of that new world-note of genial
camaraderie inaugurated by the Ladies' Home Journal
which caused the public to clamour for the countenances
of the makers of its shoes and its talcum powders — let
it be for psychologists to decide. At any rate Mr.
Walker, like the rest, w^as no longer satisfied to be seen
through a glass darkly; and, as with the rest, the new
face-to-faceness was startling to conservatives. The
vestibule of his magazine became his inner holy of holies
— whence heart-to-heart confessions of the policies and
material within doors issued in crisp sermonettes in large
print. It had become the fashion. But those who had
followed Mr. Walker's widening vision were not sur-
prised to see him identify himself with an attempt to
construct an international language. The founder of the
magazine had not projected an all-world parish. Mr.
Walker offered the President of the United States twelve
thousand dollars to cover the expenses of a commission
to report on the idea ; and when President Harrison finally
decided that it did not come within the limits of his juris-
diction, the Cosmopolitan undertook it single-handed.

The new attitude of social obligation, taken by Mc-
Clure's and the Cosmopolitan toward the end of the cen-
tury, may perhaps be best illustrated by the magnificent
though abortive attempt of the latter to found a national
university. In August, 1897, this announcement ap-
eared :

For five years we have published the magazine at a reduced
price, which the publishing world regarded as a step certain to
result in failure. It was an educational movement of far-
reaching importance. We have now arrived at another stage
in the evolution of the magazine. We enlarge our sphere, and
take in hand the organisation to provide for the intellectual ne-
cessities of those who seek enlightenment and growth, and yet
have not had the means for entering the universities. The Cos-
mopolitan University vail provide a course of studies worked
out with reference to the real needs of men and women in the
various walks of life; designed to produce broader minds, and
give greater fitness for special lines of work, and also to make

THE END OF THE CENTURY 361

better citizens, better neighbours, and happier men and women.
At the head of the organisation will be placed an educational
mind of the first ability. All instruction blanks, examination
papers, official circulars free. No charge of any kind will be
made to the student, all expenses will be borne for the present
by the Cosmopolitan. No conditions, except a pledge of a given
number of hours of study. Work is to be formally begun in
October.

It proved an electrifying announcement. A month
and a half after this statement — necessarily indefinite,
the editor admitted, since plans had not yet been formu-
lated — almost four thousand students had enrolled. In
two weeks more, the number was almost six thousand;
in another eight it had doubled. What was to be done
with this vast horde of day-workers who desired to burn
the midnight lamp! In the meantime had arisen other
troubles beside that of feeding the multitude with limited
loaves and fishes. President Andrews had just left
Brown University on account of some differences of opin-
ion between himself and the trustees, and Mr. Walker an-
nounced that the magazine had secured him to direct the
Cosmopolitan University with a Board of Advisors.
But now President Andrews had been requested by the
trustees to withdraw his resignation, and he in turn felt
himself compelled to ask Mr. Walker to release him.
The change completely disarranged all their plans for
organisation, and others must be worked out as speedily
as possible. Meanwhile the students kept on mounting^
prodigiously ; applications from all over the country swept
toward Irvington-on-the-Hudson like a white tidal wave.
The magazine had felt that the appropriation of one hun-
dred and fifty thousand dollars which it was able to make,
should be divided into annual instalments of thirty thou-
sand each. They had regarded the sum as ample to sup-
port the institution for five years. But the number of ap-
plicants had made it entirely inadequate, and they were
forced to ask that all students who were able to do so
should pay a fee of five dollars per quarter. This did not
daunt or even diminish the recruits, who cried aloud from

2^02 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

every remote hamlet for a college education by corre-
spondence. By May the ambitious band had become nine-
teen thousand. Swamped, the magazine still floundered
with the flood. Another thousand in August compelled
the discarding of all former plans and the formation of
new ones. But such emergencies had become normal by
this time, and the magazine hoped that the experience of
the first year — so unsatisfactory to their educational
staff — would be of service in the second which it now
undismayed began. At the end of that period, however,
it threw up its hands. It would do what it could, but
its means did not allow it to take care of the twentieth
part of the applicants. The Government should establish
a National Correspondence University, and it would pre-
sent a bill to Congress to that effect.

It had been a magnificent and generous undertaking.
Of course, the usual number of sedate periodicals whose
cooler projects allowed no opportunity for failure, and
that large body of persons who cannot believe in the sin-
cerity of a philanthropist until he has bankrupted himself,
saw in it only ingenious advertising. Elderly people
found it but another manifestation of the deplorable
stridency of cheap literature — one could not imagine the
Knickerbocker doing such a thing. It was all a part
of this end of the century chaos which had hurtled ma-
trons and letters into the market-place! Perhaps more
than anything else, even more than the articles of ex-
posure inaugurated by McClure's, the Cosmopolitan Uni-
versity marked that the old ideal of a literary magazine
was as dead as a dodo. It was an ideal derived from
England and was embodied by the early Knickerbocker
better than by any other successful American magazine
not mainly of the review type, although possibly it might
be found at its best in the short-lived Arctxirus. Polite
comment on polite affairs. Moncure Conway summed
it up once in the early eighties, " An English magazine
is a circular letter addressed by a scholarly man to a few
hundred friends."

THE END OF THE CENTURY 363

As this modest history of the magazines but aims to
round off the century conveniently, it may not mention
some of later birth. Nor may it follow the fortunes of
Everybody's — born in 1899 under other auspices — ex-
cept incidentally and as indicative of the new advertis-
ing movement. Some account of this is found in Mr.
John Adams Thayer's life-story, Astir.

With a few notable exceptions editors do not make magazines
financially successful. It is far more difficult to secure a capa-
ble advertising manager, and he will demand and probably re-
ceive twice the editor's salary. The business of my depart-
ment, which had totalled a quarter of a million at my coming,
had now a yearly volume of twice that amount. It was the
hey-day of advertising. One day in the president's office I saw
the architect's drawing of a massive stone edifice fourteen
stories high, to be built for and devoted solely to the business
of the Butterick Company. Facetiously the treasurer remafked,
" Look at your new building ! " As treasurer, he knew that
my department had made it possible. When we bought the
magazine property, the price of the advertising was $150 a page
— one dollar per page per thousand circulation being the recog-
nised rate among general magazines, though an extra twenty or
even fifty thousand is often given for good measure. With a
showing of three hundred thousand now, we could ask $300 a
page, as we had doubled our circulation in a year. We stood
upon this healthy footing when Frenzied Finance began to
increase our circulation to the merry tune of fifty thousand
copies a month.

To the innocent bystander, the adjective " healthy "
may seem here to carry a peculiar implication. Does not
health, he may query, increase as circulation increases?
But the fact is, Everybody's was mortally threatened with
a rush of blood to the stomach. The reader who resents
his present serfdom to the advertiser will grimly appre-
ciate the predicament. The magazine had fed itself up
so, with its vital nourishment, that apoplexy threatened.
(If that is a mixed figure, make the best of it!) The
curious situation was startling in its modernity — to be
dying of good health. But it was not absolutely novel
for all that. Even before the old Scribner's had in-
augurated the reign of the advertiser, the phenomenon

364 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

had been forecast. It was as early as 1865 and the place
was Chicago, which at that period scorned advertising,
in the most elegant and approved literary fashion. There,
Mr. Fleming tells us, the Little Corporal, a juvenile, had
made an unexpected hit. It proved the first Chicago
periodical to attract national attention and the first
juvenile in the country to be read by children everywhere.
Its circulation grew to be enormous (its twelve numbers
cost one dollar — almost the first genuine instance of low
prices), but it came a cropper with its advertising. The
advertisers, who at that early date were nearly always con-
fined to local firms, refused to allow the rate to be in-
creased; an out-of-town circulation, however large, is of
no benefit to us, they said. With a small circulation there
had been a profit at this low rate, but after a certain point
every additional copy was printed at a loss. It was this
same condition which threatened Everybody's when Law-
son jumped the circulation; and it was met by increasing
the selling price until the advertising contracts should ex-
pire and a higher rate could be arranged. The reader
who resents the power of the advertiser will again grimly
appreciate the symbolic nature of the solution. It is al-
ways the Ultimate Consumer that pays, he may mutter
wearily — as at present he picks his vexed way from gob-
bet to gobbet of text through the welter of advertising
matter ; and as, from page nineteen to page thirty-two to
page forty-seven to page sixty-three the moving finger
turns and, having read, turns on.

" In less than a year," says Mr. Thayer, " we an-
nounced on one occasion an edition of one million. The
demand for back numbers was incessant ; and we printed
a little pamphlet called The Chapters That Went Before.
Mr. Lawson had worked a miracle in the circulation, and
we beheld the wonderful vision of becoming a great maga-
zine property without the long hard preparatory struggle
of a Mitnsey or a McClnre. But so enormous an increase
in copies without a corresponding increase in advertising
rates meant ruin. We finally decided, contrary to cus-

THE END OF THE CENTURY 365

torn, to announce an immediate increase without notice to
$400 a page, and later we established a $500 rate. Then
we decided if we would meet the circulation we must raise
the price to fifteen cents a copy. To raise the subscrip-
tion price of a magazine is an important step, and when
to make the change was the problem. The attorney for
H. H. Rogers of Standard Oil fame suddenly wrote the
American News Company, that if they distributed our
magazines and put them on sale, he would begin an action
at law. I saw this was the moment, and the free adver-
tising given us by the Standard Oil was so immense that
the edition though large was swept from the news-stands
on the day of publication."

Unique in every way was Mr. Lawson's series of
articles. Twice blessed is he who, getting all, gives noth-
ing. When Mr. Lawson finally made up his mind to at-
tack the evils of high finance (much assisted to his deci-
sion by the perseverance of the editor), he announced
that it was his intention to do it for nothing and further-
more to advertise his articles in the newspapers at his own
expense. What magazine could help but admire so
thorough and so canny a reformer, who felt his motive
must be as far above suspicion as gay -bird Caesar thought
his wife ought to be? He demanded only that Every-
body's offer a prize of fifty thousand dollars for the best
essay on Frenzied Finance at the end of its run; but,
says Mr. Thayer naively, " we eventually persuaded him
there were more effective ways of advertising." The
end of the run found them normally issuing from five to
six hundred thousand copies a month, and after it finished
they retained the bulk of this circulation.

** While our first cover was not particularly artistic, it
was different from all other magazine covers and caused
comment by reason of its sentiment and novelty — it
represented two hearts cut in a birch tree. The cover
designs cost us much effort but they assisted the impres-
sion which promptly got abroad that Everybody's was
different from the common run." Thus light-heartedly

366 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

does Mr. Thayer mention the inception of the stupidest
feature of the cheap magazine — the candy-box cover.
It is a picture in Httle of the fate that awaits all display-
advertising. Fired by the example of Everybody's all
the cheap magazines hastened to be " different " and
ended in all becoming just alike — their old distinctive
cover forgotten and their trademark destroyed. In this
mad work of self-obhteration the high-priced magazines
followed — only Scrihner's being wise enough, in keep-
ing her complexion through all changes of her adornment,
to preserve her individuality. The cover-design Mr.
Thayer refers to was attractive; and had they and the
rest of the magazines contended themselves with the story-
telling picture or one which had reference to some chief
feature of the contents within, there would have been
no objection — although not to be eternally confronted
in the old magazines even with such covers is a welcome
relief. The fancy cover had appeared timidly about
1896. The Cosmopolitan sported one of the earliest, but
the novelty was apparently regarded with disfavour and
soon disappeared. McC lure's printed several of their
Lincoln portraits during the run of the Lincoln articles,
and also had printed portraits of several of their authors.
This innovation was followed, conservatively, by symbolic
female figures representing the months. Thus slowly
the virus began until it had developed complete and rabid
feminisation. In the meantime, within the covers of the
cheap magazines a process of auto-intoxication was going
on. The theatrical departments had become permanent
fixtures, and the unending procession of actresses' por-
traits had got well under way. Then arrived the lament-
able hour when no home was thought complete without a
Christie or a Gibson girl. And then the deluge! The
chorus-isation of the cheap magazine was complete, and
the day of the artist model had dawned. With no other
variety than that afforded by seasonable costume, char-
acterless as wax dummies in store-windows, telling no
other story than their own insipid prettiness, they sim-

THE END OF THE CENTURY 367

perea incessantly and incongruously from the covers of
magazines all sense and entertainment and serious en-
deavour within. Even the railroad and news-stand
trade, whose jaded eye this eternal exploitation of cherry
cheeks and rosy lips is doubtless meant to ensnare, must
have shortly familiarised itself with all possible combina-
tions of the female features. Few things in the publish-
ing world are more depressing than those books for the
Christmas trade wherein favourite artists gather together
their magazine covers for the year in one awful record of
smirking fatuity. We shall look back upon this exhibi-
tion of American taste with as much humiliation, diluted
with humour, as upon our " lambrequin and drape "
period. Here, if you please, is the magazine's one fin de
Steele feature of the end of the century!

For the rest, what a record is that which American
magazine literature presents to the twentieth century!
Magazines have now become so numerous as to defy any
account of them beyond mere classified enumeration.
To this stage of easy support has America advanced
through a century of short-lived attempts. There are
nearly two thousand titles of incomplete and unfinished
magazines which perished of starvation — and the list
itself is incomplete, for the names of many gallant young-
sters have been lost forever. The splendid endeavour
is as significant of our intellectual and social vitality as
is the splendid achievement. How they have broadened
and enriched American life! What incalculable contri-
bution have they made to the growth of human sym-
pathy and companionship ! Thanks to them, history will
for the first time possess a complete record of human
thought and activity. Thanks to them, men and women
are enabled to live wiser and happier lives.

Nor does this tell the entire story. " I desire to con-
fess frankly,'* writes Mr. H. M. Alden of Harper's, " that
in literature the book and not the magazine is the supreme
thing; but the first encouragement of the greatest writers
has come from the magazine ever since the time of Poe,

3'68 THE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA

and the magazine has been participant of such glory as
literature has shown." That the magazine has a hundred
times multiplied the audience of authors is apparent to
everybody. Not so well understood is it that they have
been of as great social as monetary value. They lifted
the author to a recognised place in society which in spite
of prominent exceptions he did not occupy in America
until the day of their success. When I was young, wrote
Edmund Clarence S.tedman, New York looked with dis-
trust if not with contempt upon working writers. News-
paper salaries were very low, and a man who got his
living by writing was in the same class as a man who
got his living by acting. He was almost forced into
Bohemia. And speaking of the brilliant and erratic
company at P faffs, he concludes: "If there had been
a Century, a Cosmopolitan, and a score of other paying
magazines, I suppose they would have been as conserva-
tive as our modern authors and would have dined above
stairs and not under the pavement." And, finally, one
cannot reiterate too often the material debt of American
literature to the magazine. The lives and letters of
authors cry it in and between all the lines — but for the
magazine very few could have lived to tell the tale. " It
is only with the modern development of the newspaper
and the magazine," says the House of Harper, " that
authorship may be said to have become a lucrative pro-
fession." We are apt to think of our literary hand-to-
mouth period as long ago — so radical and immediate
was the change wrought by the International Copyright
Act. But that past is not so shadowy as shady. So
late as 1881 the Century was saying, " Not many promi-
nent American novels have of late years reached the
reader in the first instance between book-covers." And
if this might be said of novels, what of the rest of books?
Before the Committee of Congress appointed to inquire
whether any real need existed for the proposed copyright,
Mr. Dana Estes said in 1886: "For two years past,
though I belong to a publishing house (Estes and

THE END OF THE CENTURY 369

Lauriat) which emits nearly one million dollars' worth
of books per year, I have absolutely refused to entertain
the idea of publishing an American manuscript. It is
impossible to make the books of most American authors
pay unless they are first published and acquire recogni-
tion through the columns of the magazines. Were it
not for that one saving opportunity of the great American
magazines, w^hich are now the leading ones of the world
and have an international reputation and circulation,
American authorship would be at a still lower ebb than
at present."

PERIODICALS MENTIONED

Alliance, 283

America, 203

American, i

American Homes, 354

American Mag. and Histori-
cal Chronicle 319, 322

American Mag. of Useful and
Entertaining Knowledge,
72, 187

American Monthly, Boston,
72-74, 138, 313

American Monthly, New
York, 48, 119, 123, 125, 329

American Monthly, Phila., 65,
98

American Moral and Senti-
mental, 6

American Museum, i, 21, 24,
26, 133

American Musical, 134

American Review, 144-145

American Review and Liter-
ary Journal, 109

Analytical Repository, 257

Anglo-American, 71

Arcturus, 127, 129, 141, 362

Argosy, 203, 341

Atheneum or Spirit of the
English Magazines, 71

Atlantic, 126, 127

Atlantic, 46, 69, 71, 154-177,
t86, 205, 206, 212, 219, 221,
237, 240, 251, 274, 296, 300,
310, 316-17, 323-24, 331,
332, 333

B

Ballou's Pictorial, 83

Banished Briton and Nep-
tunian, 71

Baptist Missionary Messen-
ger, 257

Barnum's Illustrated News,
124

Bibliotheque Portraitive, 63

Boston, 4, 5

Boston Quarterly, 264

Broadway Journal, 96, 106,
126, 145-147, 275

Brother Jonathan, 136

Brownson's Quarterly, 264

Burton's Gentlemen's, 89-91,
189

Cabinet, 42, 63

Californian, 204

Casket, 91

Century, 71, 167, 171, 202, 216,

217-18, 240, 242, 244, 251-2,

287-311, 325, 335, 343, 344
Chap Book, 178, 203, 356
Chicago, 307
Child of Pallas, 179
Christian Advocate, 261, 266,

278, 286
Christian Disciple, 129, 263
Christian Era, 261
Christian Examiner, 129, 230,

263, 264, 278
Christian History, 256

370

PERIODICALS MENTIONED

371

Christian Monitor, 257
Christian Observer, 2.^7, 284,

286
Christian Reflector, 261
Christian Register, 261, 284
Christian's, Scholar's and

Farmer's, 8, 9
Christian Science Monitor,

261
Christian Union, 275-281, 282
Churchman, 259, 286
Churchman's, 257
Club-Room, 64-65
Collier's Weekly, 352
Columbian, ia-15, 133
Columbian Phenix, 60
Commercial Review, 184
Companion, 179
Congregationalist, 261, 278,

282, 286
Corsair, 135, 136, 235
Cosmopolitan, 340, 350, 354,

358-62, 366
Cosmopolitan, An Occasional,

183
Critic, 114

De Bow's Monthly, 185, 295

Delineator, 305

Democratic Review, 141, 142-

43, 148, 150, 264
Dial, 50-54, 80, 125, 154, 192,

205, 263
Dial, Chicago, 203
Dollar Magazine, 93
Dwight's Journal of Music, 80

Emerald, 30, 42, 62
Emerson's, 206, 214-15
Evangelist, Hartford, 257
Evangelist, 253, 273, 277, 286
Everybody's, 3^53, 363-366
Every Saturday, 165, 166, 169

Examiner, Richmond, 138,
193

Farmers' Weekly Museum
and Lay Preachers' Gazette,
56-58

Forum, 171

Frank Leslie's Popular
Monthly, 83

Freeman, 146

Galaxy, 167, 216, 223

Garden City, 306

Gem of the Prairie, 201, 306

General or Historical Chron-
icle, I, 15

Genius of Liberty, 197

Genius of the West, 198

Gentlemen's, Burton's, 89-91,
189

Gentleman and Lady's Town
and County, 17, 18

Gleason's, 83

Godey's, 75, 92, 95, 97, 103-
108, 145, 156, 197, 232, 244,

314
Graham's, 91-103, 122, 141,
148, 156, 221, 232-234, 241,
244, 247, 314, 329, 330

H

Halcyon Luminary, 131

Harbinger, 80 '""->

Harper's, 71, 156, 162, 167,

206, 209-211, 221, 232-255,1

287, 289, 296, 299, 307, 308,

310, 321, 354 y

Harper's Bazar, 243, 249

Harper's Weekly, 169, 170,

209, 245, 249, 325
Harper's Young People, 203
Harvard, 205

Z1^

PERIODICALS MENTIONED

Hesperian, 199

Hive, 178

Home Journal, 136-138, 162

Hours at Home, 218, 289

Huntress, 181

Illinois, 201

Independent, 221, 267-27J
281, 282, 284, 286, 296, 353
Instructor, 5

Journal of Philosophy and the
Arts, 67

Journal of Speculative Philos-
ophy, 50

K

Key 178

Knickerbocker, 91, 96, iii,
1 14-123, 129, 139, 140, 162,
186, 189, 192, 240, 245, 322,
351, 362

Ladies, 75, 103 _

Ladies' Companion, 92, 94, 148

Lady and Gentlemen's Pocket
Magazine of Literary and
Polite Amusement, 42

Ladies' Home Journal, 169,
344, 355

Ladies'' Magazine and Reposi-
tory of Entertaining Knowl-
edge, 19-21

Ladies' Repository and Gath-
erings of the West, 197

Lakeside Monthly, 202

Lark, 356

Ledger, Chicago, 203

Ledger, New York, 83, 140,
221, 243, 245, 303

Lippincott's, 216, 296, 309

Literary Cadet, 19s

Literary and Philosophical
Repertory, 55

Literary and Theological Re-
view, 129

Literary Gazette, Cincinnati,
196, 198

Literary Gazette, New York,
70

Literary Magazine and Am-
erican Register, no

Literary Review, 126

Literary World, 128

Littell's Living Age, 71, 209

Little Corporal, 203, 364

Lowell Offering, 81-82

M

McClure's, 341, 343-354, 366

Magazine of Ecclesiastical
History, 257

Magnolia or Southern Appa-
lachian, 183

Massachaisetts, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 21,

Massachusetts Quarterly, 263

Medley, 200

Mercury, New York, 221

Metropolitan, 179

Mirror, Boston, 63

Mirror, Cincinnati, 198-199,

201
Mirror, New York, 74, 106,

119, 131, 132, 136, 145, 189,

327
Miscellany, Boston, 75-77
Missionary Journal, South

Carolina, 261
Monthly, Boston, (ij
Monthly, Philadelphia, 8, 23
Monthly Anthology and Bos-
ton Review, 28-32, ()2, 63,

259
Monthly Chronicle, 75
Monthly Magazine and Am-

merican. Review, 109

PERIODICALS MENTIONED

373

Monthly View, i.
iMunsey's, 341-43
Munsey's Weekly, 341

N

Nation, 221-228, 271, 317-318
National, Richmond, 134, 187,

319-320
National Era, 78, 135, 193-195
National Press, 136
New American, 23
New Englander, 53
New England Galaxy and

Masonic, 45
New England, 2
New England, 46-49, 69, 70,

^ 79

New England Quarterly, 61

New Jersey Repository, 26

New Western, 198

New York, 24-25

New York Monthly, 23

New World, 91, 121, 136, 139,

140
Nightingale, 3, 26
Niles' Weekly Register, 180
North American Review, 28-
41, 62, 65, 67, 70, 71, 75, 78,
81, 125, 164, 179, 183, 188,
192, 222, 228-30, 263, 322,

330, 331
Nova Scotia, 26

Observatory, 270

Observer, Baltimore, 114,

I 79-1 8 I
Observer, 271
Old and New, 263, 292
Omnium Gatherum, 63
Ordeal, 43-45
Our Young Folks, 165, 169,

306
Outlook, 263, 281, 286

Panoplist, 257, 259
Parlour, 198
Pearl, 79, 314
Pennsylvania, 9
Peterson's, 94, 232
Philadelphia Magazine and

Review, 6
Philistine, 114, 357
Philanthropist, 193
Pioneer, 77-78, 148, 155, 205,

320
Pioneer, San Francisco, 204
Polyanthos, 41-45
Port-Folio, 86-89
Princeton Review, 273
Printers' Ink, 303
Puritan, 270
Putnam's, 156, 162, 186, 205,

221, 228, 231, 240, 249, 291,

3IS» 321

Q

Quarterly, Boston, 54, 142
Quarterly, New York, 145

R

Recorder and Telegraph, 260

261
Red Book, 180
Remembrancer, 260
Review, New York, 129, 328
Review and Athenaeum, 116,

117, 126, 127
Riverside, 292
Round Table, 40, 214, 219, 221,

224, 230, 271-72, 276, 278
Royal American, 16, 32
Royal Spiritual, 257

Salmagundi, 89, 1 12-14
Sargent's, 148

374

PERIODICALS MENTIONED

Sartain's, 78, 147, 156, 221,
232, 233

Scribner's-Century. See Cen-
tury

Scribner's, 301, 309, 366*

Simm's Southern and West-
ern Monthly, 183

Something, 63

Southern, 295-96, 97

Southern Christian Register,
182

Southern Literary Messenger,
145, 147, 148, 183, 186-190,
199

Southern Quarterly Review,
183, 185, 186

Southern Review, 182, 183,

295
Souvenir, 193
Stylus, 189, 320

Theological, 2^7
Theological Magazine and Re-
ligious Repository, 260
Town, 114
Town Topics, 181

United States Literary G
zette, 65-66, 70, 328

U

United States, 10, 25
United States Christian, 256
United States Gazette, 95, 123,
233

Visitor, 96

y

w

Watchman, 261, 278
Waverly, 305
Weekly, Boston, (i2
Weekly, New York, 221
Weekly, Philadelphia, 10
Weekly Museum, 22
West American Monthly, ic
Western Lady's Book, 196
Western Messenger, 190-93
Western Minerva, 198
Western Monthly, 201
Western Monthly Review, ic
Western Review, 200
Western Spy, 196
Woman's Journal, 176, 243
Worcester, 22

Young Man's, 257

Youth's Companion, 73, 20,

324

Z

Zion's Herald, 261, 266, 278
Zion's Watchman, 266

14 DAY USE

RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED

LOAN DEPT.

This book is due on the lasf Aatt» c*^^^^j u^i ! t

RETURN CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT

TO— i^ 202 Main Library

LOAN PERIOD 1
HOME USE

2

3

4

5

6

ALL BOOKS A/VAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS

1-month toans may be renewed by calling 642-3405

1-year loans may be recnarged by bringing the books to the Circulation Desk

Renewals and recharges may be made 4 days prior to due date

K%^ —

fEfr

STAMPED BELOW

sjio-i%<:

i RECClRflPR 11985

"MWY 551985

i ^■eiHRc APRi7iqa'

S —

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELE"
FORM NO. DD6, 60m, 1 /83 BERKELEY, CA 94720

^^^^^PMM GENERAL LIBBARY-U.C. BERKELEY

iV^X

i

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY

,)•;•,•/•

m^^S^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^-^