Imagens da página
PDF
ePub

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY

JANUARY, 1905

"A READABLE PROPOSITION

ONCE more the Toastmaster rises to his feet, to offer New Year's greetings to the guests of the Atlantic. The table has become a long one, and the faces turned momentarily toward the Toastmaster are mainly those of Cheerful Readers. If any are secretly bored or rebellious at the bill of fare, they seem, at this kindly instant, gracious enough not to betray it. Most of them, as the Toastmaster fancies, for he is not sufficiently keen-sighted to see to the very end of such a table, and makes many a mistake in consequence! exhibit a tolerant willingness to be either edified or amused. And, indeed, both edification and amusement await them, the Toastmaster believes, as soon as his own little speech is over.

[ocr errors]

He chooses his text from one of those plain-spoken letters which evince the interest taken in the Atlantic by persons who have parted with their four dollars a year, and who keep, as they should, a sharp eye upon their investment. The letter is from a Wyoming sheep-herder, and here is one of its most pleasing sentences: "I would like you to know that you have one subscriber who has no kick coming, and who thinks the Atlantic is a readable proposition all right."

May the clear Wyoming sky long smile upon this solitary sheep-herder! May his flocks increase, and his vocabulary remain unspoiled! He has a discriminating taste. Or is it merely the liberal Western air which prompts him to utter what many other subscribers silently believe? After all, one can never tell who is going to like the gallant old magazine. The Toastmaster finds himself scrutinizing, with perhaps too frank an admiration, the persons who have the excellent habit of readVOL. 95 - NO. 1

ing the Atlantic in hotels and trains and electric cars. A pretty girl never seems so pretty, to him, as when she is carrying that bit of dull orange color; and the most prosaic middle-aged searcher after truth never appears in such imminent prospect of a radiant discovery as when cutting the Atlantic's uncut leaves. He remembers sitting once in an overland train as it coasted down the slope of the Sierras through the Bret Harte country. He was thinking of those brilliant early stories of Harte's which the Atlantic published, and was watching gloomily, all the while, a certain bishop who was reading the Smart Set. The train pulled up at a little station, and a muddy-trousered miner, looking for all the world like Kentuck, entered the car, stumbled past the comfortably extended legs of the bishop, and seating himself at the magazine table, promptly selected the Atlantic Monthly. The Toastmaster grew cheerful at once. He began to think of cogent reasons why the good bishop should prefer the Smart Set; and nothing could have persuaded him that the miner was not a Superior Person.

The odd thing is that it is impossible to guess where these Superior Persons are to be found. It is an illuminating experience to examine the Atlantic's subscription list in some city or town which happens to be well known to the investigator. To subscribe to this magazine is apparently no longer- as it was once said to be in certain newly settled communities a sufficient evidence of one's social standing. Many of the Best People who would be expected to take it evidently belong in the class who vaguely "see all the magazines at the Club;" while the Superior Per

sons who actually pay the four dollars are often to be found in the side streets and hall - bedrooms and lonely farmhouses. Other magazines, it is believed, have had the same experience in endeavoring to discover the exact habitat of the reading class. It is such readers, in truth, who form our only real reading class in this country. If the Atlantic continues to interest them, year after year, it is not because the magazine is a badge of respectability, but simply because it is found to be "a readable proposition."

The dictionaries give the bare outline of that finely American term, "proposition," but they do not even hint at the warmth and coloring given to it on the lips of living men. What a wholesome, venturesome, tempting Americanism it is! It savors of something coming even if not yet arrived; of something alive and not yet dead and done with. It suggests, indeed, unlisted stocks and extra-hazardous enterprises, rather than the commonplace security of a three per cent government bond. Such a bond is well enough in its way, of course, but what is its appeal to the imagination, after all, when compared with a "proposition"? The spirit of all the beckoning future is in that word, and yet with how deft a compliment does our Wyoming friend apply it to the magazine, as if he had realized upon his investment, and the potential pleasure offered by his subscription were already a known quantity!

With what an instinct, likewise, does the gentleman from Wyoming select his inevitable word when he speaks of the Atlantic as a readable proposition! "It is better to be dumb than not to be understood," said the lively Giraldus Cambrensis, who was a born magazinist, although of the twelfth century. When a magazine fails to be readable, it is as if a man failed in honesty or a woman in goodness. Its character is gone. There are tons of respectable printed material which is under no necessity of being readable: such as Doctor's Dissertations, Presidential Messages, books written in

the jargon of some special science, and journals devoted to some pet "ist" or "ism" of the hour. Most unreadable of all is the matter written with a painful effort to be read by everybody. Witness the average Historical Romance of the season! Not long ago the Toastmaster happened to overhear a worthy nursemaid exchanging literary confidences with the cook, apropos of a historical novel which was then the best-selling book of the minute. “Sure it's a fine book,” testified Maggie heartily, and then added, as if puzzled by her own ineptitude, "but somehow I ain't very far with it." Exactly. Neither was the Toastmaster very far with it. Between a book written to be sold by the hundred thousand and a book written to be put away in a drawer, like Pride and Prejudice and the first draft of Waverley, it is tolerably easy to say which is the more likely to prove permanently readable.

A good many readers, and not all of them nursemaids, either, have been complaining that the poetry published in American magazines is unreadable, too. Perhaps they ought to say "verse" instead of "poetry," for it is obvious that most poets nowadays are not working at their trade. Some of them are dead, others have gone into politics or playwriting; but the silence of the majority can be accounted for only on the theory that the poets are out on a sympathetic strike. Who can blame them? Poor pay, long hours, an apathetic public, and thousands of verse-writers ready to take the poets' places at any moment! The worst of it is that these very "scabs" - the word is used in its stern economic significance are all bent upon producing "readable" verse. They not only continue to rhyme

youth morning

truth warning

as the Autocrat humorously complained in these pages long ago, but they insist upon telling us all about their little emo

tions, with the tiresome particularity of a dull sportsman who persists in explaining just why he failed to bag that last bird. Their mind to them a kingdom is, and, as somebody has unkindly said of them, the smaller the mind the greater appears the kingdom. No wonder the public has grown callous to all this counting of the pulses and auscultation of the chest. The exploitation of insignificant personalities, bent upon securing publicity, makes verse as unreadable as the "society column" of a Sunday paper. No wonder that so many real poets continue to stay out on strike. But some day there will come along a modern hero in the guise of a strapping strike-breaker of a poet, who would rather work at his job than not, who, forgetting himself, believes that the world is a big world and a brave one, and who sings about it because he must, and not because he wants to make readable "copy." He will get all the patronage away from the clever verse-writers, and then the poets will begin to slink back, one by one, to ask for their old places. In the meantime the Atlantic tries to keep a sharp and welcoming eye upon anything that looks like a broad-shouldered strikebreaker sauntering down Park Street. Often it is deceived and finds that the new personage is only one more of those talented verse-writers, but still it keeps on watching.

What is it, after all, that makes a magazine readable? Must we not fall back upon the well-tested phrase, and say that "human interest" is the one essential quality? But the human interest must be real, and not assumed for revenue only. Two of the most uniformly readable newspapers in this country are the New York Sun and the Springfield Republican. Neither can be read without wrath or given up without a feeling that the world has grown duller. Both are vigorous, alert, and well written. They differ in their attitude toward most public questions; they differ in field, one being "metropolitan" and the other "provincial,”though which is the more truly provincial

[ocr errors][merged small]

as

It is this quality, is it not?- which, making due allowance for differences in range, perspective, and literary method, should also characterize a monthly magazine. The Atlantic has many competitors. The more the better. Each of them fulfills some public service peculiar to itself, even if it be only to serve as an "awful example." Each of them reaches many persons whom the Atlantic cannot reach without changing its character and aim. The colored illustrations of one, the unimpeachable innocuousness of another, the agility of a third in jumping to the majority side of every question, do not arouse the Atlantic's envy. It would like, indeed, to give its contributors a still ampler audience, because it believes that all of them have something to say which is worth listening to. But these opinions of its contributors are their own, the Toastmaster has pointed out more than once in his annual remarks, — and are not to be identified with whatever personal opinions may be held by the Atlantic's editors or publishers. Sydney Smith claimed that there were persons who would speak disrespectfully of the Equator; and some writers for the Atlantic have been known to approach with a freedom bordering upon levity such topics as Emerson, the Kindergarten, the New England Hill Town, Sir Walter Scott, the Philippine Commission, Lincoln's Vocabulary, the Tariff, and Mr. Henry James. This list might even be extended. There are, alas, live wires attached to all live subjects, as well as to some subjects that seem tolerably dead. The Atlantic has no Index of forbidden themes, and wishes all its writers to say what they think, subject to the general rules of after-dinner

courtesy. But it does smile occasionally over this identification of supposed editorial opinion with the signed opinions of responsible contributors. If an article appears in the Atlantic, it is because the contribution seems, in the fallible judgment of the Caterer, worth putting upon the table. If the boarders do not like it, the blame must be placed where it belongs. Probably the fault lies with the Caterer, but it is barely possible that it may lie, at times, with some prenatal or premillennial prejudices of the boarders themselves.

Our "readable proposition," then, is the discussion from month to month, by many men of many minds, of that American life which intimately affects the destiny of us all. If one wishes to study that life upon its external aspects, the advertising pages of any prosperous magazine give a bewilderingly rich impression of our material progress. There is scarcely a single physical activity or luxury, from drawing one's cold tub in the morning to setting the burglar alarm at night, which is not pictured and glorified upon these electrotyped pages. But something in us keeps obstinately asking:

"And afterwards, what else?"

For it makes little difference whether a man speeds in his new automobile over the new macadam to his new country house, man and machine and road and house exactly like the advertisements! or climbs wearily up to the hall-bedroom again at the end of a day's work, to console himself with a pipe and a book. Each man must sit down at last with his old self; with the old hopes, sorrows, dreams; with the old will to "win out" somehow; with that inner world, in short, which Literature interprets, and no hint of which appears in the advertising pages. A true mirror of life is what a literary magazine aspires to be. But it ought to reflect something deeper than the patented, nickel-plated conveniences and triumphs of a material civilization. It should also serve as a mirror for the ardors and loy

alties, the patriotism and the growing world-consciousness of the American peo

ple.

Any writer mistakes our people who does not recognize their fundamental idealism. Some of us inherit it from Puritan ancestors who were such idealists, it was said, that they had to hold on hard to the huckleberry bushes to keep from being translated. Others of us have brought hither a no less fine idealism, though it be the product of an alien faith and an alien soil. But it is everywhere in evidence, setting up popular idols and pulling them down, blundering here and righting a blunder there, questioning our present social and economic machinery, emphasizing party lines when they stand for something real, smashing them when trickery grows too apparent, and building everywhere with restless energy a new America out of materials that have never had time to grow old. Inn-keepers abroad and advertising panels at home unite in the declaration that "Americans want the best." It is a good symptom, and it has a lesson for the magazinist. Those periodicals which are obtaining the widest reading are those which present the most various, hopeful, and full-blooded pictures of the men and the vital forces that are daily creating for us a new world. Never were our life and the life of the globe so interesting. Never has it been harder to choose, from the wealth of possible material, the topics deserving treatment in the Atlantic month by month; or to select the writers best able to present, with authority and distinction, the deeper issues of the time. The magazine desires long to remain "a readable proposition." It surely will, if it continues in its own way to reflect and interpret, as all literature somehow succeeds in reflecting and interpreting, the fascination of life. itself.

Here, at any rate, is the "proposition" for 1905. A good deal of honest work is back of it. Some of the pages were written by Henry Thoreau as he sat at evening in the door of his hut looking out upon

Walden Pond. Most of them are written by contemporary scholars, scientists, novelists, poets, men of affairs, and men of letters. But all of them, as the Toastmas

ter ventures to think, are worth reading. He hopes that they will give pleasure, and that they may be thought no worse for being prefaced by a "Happy New Year." B. P.

THOREAU AS A DIARIST

BY BRADFORD TORREY

THOREAU was a man of his own kind. Many things may be said of him, favorable and unfavorable, but this must surely be said first, that, taken for all in all, he was like nobody else. Taken for all in all, be it remarked. Other men have despised common sense; other men have chosen to be poor, and, as between physical comfort and better things, have made light of physical comfort; other men, whether to their credit or discredit, have held and expressed a contemptuous opinion of their neighbors and all their neighbors' doings; others, a smaller number, believing in an absolute goodness and in a wisdom transcending human knowledge, have distrusted the world as evil, accounting its influence degrading, its prudence no better than cowardice, its wisdom a kind of folly, its morality a compromise, its religion a bargain, its possessions a defilement and a hindrance, and so judging of the world, have striven at all cost to live above it and apart. And some, no doubt, have loved Nature as a mistress, fleeing to her from less congenial company, and devoting a lifetime to the observation and enjoyment of her ways. In no one of these particulars was the hermit of Walden without forerunners; but taken for all that he was, poet, idealist, stoic, cynic, naturalist, spiritualist, lover of purity, seeker of perfection, panegyrist of friendship and dweller in a hermitage, freethinker and saint, where shall we look to find his fellow? It seems but the plainest statement of fact to say that, as there was none

before him, so there is scanty prospect of any to come after him.

His profession was literature; as to that there is no sign that he was ever in doubt; and he understood from the first that for a writing man nothing could take the place of practice, partly because that is the one means of acquiring ease of expression, and partly because a man often has no suspicion of his own thoughts until his

pen discovers them; and almost from the first a friend (Emerson as likely as any) having given him the hint - he had come to feel that no practice is better or readier than the keeping of a journal, a daily record of things thought, seen, and felt. Such a record he began soon after leaving college, and (being one of a thousand in this respect as in others) he continued it to the end. By good fortune he left it behind him, and, to complete the good fortune, it is at last to be printed, no longer in selections, but as a whole; and if a man is curious to know what such an original, plain-spoken, perfection-seeking, convention-despising, dogma-disbelieving, wisdom-loving, sham-hating, nature-worshiping, poverty-proud genius was in the habit of confiding to so patient a listener at the close of the day, he has only to read the book.

The man himself is there. Something of him, indeed, is to be discovered, one half imagines, in the outward aspect of the thirty-nine manuscript volumes: ordinary "blank books" of the sort furnished by country shopkeepers fifty or sixty years ago, larger or smaller as might hap

« AnteriorContinuar »