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NE cannot dip far into the history out coming to the conclusion that its traditions laid a heavy hand upon the development of a national literature. The pioneer world was at best a poor soil for the arts, and such small beginnings as might take root there were likely to spring from the seed brought overseas. English models molded the thoughts of our early writers, and if it took, as has been said, a hundred and fifty years to free our verse of the nightingale and the lark, it took even longer to free our literature from English forms and modes of expression. Even within the narrow limits of our models we circumscribed ourselves still more by a moral rigidity even straiter than that of England and by a superfinical propriety of speech all our own. Our early magazines were almost our only vehicles of literary expression. They considered themselves the upholders and guardians of the national conceptions of morality and good form, and though they were desirous of amusing and instructing their readers, they would amuse them without bringing a blush to the cheek of modesty and instruct them in such fashion as to strengthen their conviction of the rightness of the world in which they found themselves.

The difficulty with a standard like this is that it does not so much protect purity and elevate the thought as it cuts itself off from life and sincerity. Life in America a hundred and fifty years ago was a gigantic struggle to erect a new civilization and a new conception of liberty in the midst of wild nature, but no hint of its contests and tragedies found their way to the pages of the new magazines. There one read only insipid verse, love-tales even more insipid, manuals of etiquette, and moral homilies. In the last ten years there have come forth from that new pioneer region, the East Side of New York, more genuine literary sincerity and dramatic integrity than the first hundred years of American magazine writers gave to the world. The difference lies wholly in the standards of the two periods.

Between 1741 and the close of the century nearly fifty magazines were born in America, only deservedly to die. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Boston, which had grown prosperous, and to a degree had laid aside its older form of puritanism, with true Prussian persistence had begun to will itself the intellectual center of America. In a way Philadelphia disputed the claim, and for more than fifty years the struggle

between the two cities for literary supremacy saw a long line of periodicals rise and fall. Here and there in the South and the West various journals gave voice for a brief season to local ambition, while New York lay sadly between the two leaders, with only the old "Knickerbocker" of note, though entering into the heat of the battle with Poe jumping from one editorial capacity in Philadelphia to another in New York, and then back again, spitting right and left at all his contemporaries like an angry cat.

By the middle of the eighteenth century Philadelphia, with "Graham's" and "Peterson's" and "Godey's Lady's Book," easily led in prosperity, while Boston and other less intellectual centers, with their moribund journals, sneered at the pretensions of Philadelphia, and called her great magazines insipid. Philadelphia was unmoved. "Godey's," sneering in return, had the air of being from Missouri and wanting to be shown. Did n't its elegant steel engravings and fashion-plates adorn the tables of every parlor worth entering from Maine to the Western Reserve? Was n't it the palladium of virtue and propriety, and was n't it prosperous? Was n't it prosperous? It came about in the end that its publisher, in the fervor of his laudation, spoke reverently of it as "The Book." Indeed, this provincial, almost parochial, pride and jealousy made a national magazine, and therefore a national literature, impossible. New York showed these traits and invited little outside talent to brighten the pages of its journals. Indeed, many aspirants in New York itself said that the contributors of "The Knickerbocker" were as carefully selected as were the members of an exclusive club.

Local pride alone had fostered the magazines of the South and the West, and "the peculiar institution" of the South had further hampered its literary growth, for, keenly alive to the steadily increasing criticism of slavery, it had more and more shut itself up with the past; while the West had early shown the characteristic, surprising in a pioneer region, of being more puritanical and conventional than New England itself.

In later years the best of the New York men complained bitterly that "The Atlantic" would accept none of their work. Yet even though supreme in its own region, it was not prosperous. All Bostonians revered it and read it, but Boston was a town-meeting, bookborrowing community, where every one knew every one else worth knowing, and possibly many felt that it was scarcely worth while to subscribe for a magazine that sooner or later they could borrow from a friend or take up for a hasty perusal in some one of the many meeting-places where Bostonians were wont to congregate. It seemed far more to the point to save their money and, on dying, bequeath it to Harvard, and thus at one leap be numbered among the saints. Emerson complained of the few copies of "The Dial" that he was able to collect after the demise of that eminently Boston journal, and Higginson was astounded at the number of copies of "The Atlantic" that he had found in a small Western village. Boston had not accustomed him to so restricted a fellowship.

"Graham's" and "Godey's," as befitted their greater prosperity, and stung, perhaps, by the charge of being insipid, were kinder to notable literary men of other circles than were

their rivals, and frequently invited contributions from them; but though the great men, lured by the honorarium offered, usually accepted, they did so with much the same feeling that a traditionally haughty duke might be supposed to have on appearing at a housemaids' party. It was not the spirit that led to great literature. And nowhere was there a national consciousness.

Even before the days of "Harper's" and "The Atlantic" there had suddenly risen in the minds of such men of letters as America possessed the fear that soon there would be no Amer

contents they wished to purloin. Naturally, in the absence of international copyright laws, they were complacently easy in conscience, and the wails of native writers they hushed in the din of their loud praises of themselves as the bearers of the culture and wisdom of Europe to a country that yet possessed neither.

ican literature at all. It may seem to the reader a curiously illogical statement, but undoubtedly the successful institution of regular steam traffic between Liverpool and New York in the middle of the last century well nigh brought about that result. Europe had been far away; suddenly it lay almost at our doors, its literature ours for the mere taking. At once there sprang up in New York a host of weeklies that made it their only business to spread before the American reading public the garnered treasures of European magazines at no other cost than that of buying single copies of the periodicals whose

Not that the material loss to American writers

was great. In 1842, Lowell had exulted in the belief that he might hope to earn four hundred dollars

by his pen in the coming year, and six years later Bayard Taylor had considered the offer of the ed

itorship of "Graham's Magazine" at a thousand dollars a year as very handsome. About the same time the regular rate for all Philadelphia magazines except "Graham's" was said to be two dollars a page for prose and five dollars a poem. To its principal contributors "Graham's" was understood to pay twelve dollars a page, and though "The Knickerbocker" of New York had beaten that rate in special cases, to new writers it paid nothing at all, while the rating between the new contributor and the habitual one of merely local renown was very slight. Now, to the hosts of ambitious young writers who

gloried in seeing their names in print even at such normal prices as these it seemed wholly calamitous that soon there was likely to be no page left open for them at all.

and taking way of the editor of the time. There was nothing to do but to try again.

But with the coming of the weeklies made up of reprints of foreign magazines even this slight glory seemed doomed and American literature to be dying, and dying, as American labor was subsequently to die many times, through the advent of foreign cheap labor. Though the American authors cried out against the betrayal, the American reading public did not. They had, they felt, the inalienable right of all American citizens to the best, and in the absence of copyright laws, and with a national indifference

For to most of them the material gain had not counted. If one was stricken with the fever of writing, one was stricken, and that was the end of the matter; nothing could save one. "The Knickerbocker" might touch him with the accolade of acceptance, and he went proudly evermore. "Godey's" might accept his poem or little prose essay (unpaid for until published) by printing a notice of acceptance, and after months of waiting for its appearance, the writer might find in "The Book" a devastating note by the editor that read: "We have been looking over our collection of original poetry [or prose]. Some of these articles have been on hand so long that the authors may have forgotten them or given them to some other publications. We hope the latter." And that would be the end of the matter. True, the author, still hoping,

might subsequently find disjecta membra of his contribution appearing as parts of the editor's own wisdom in the "Editor's Table." That was only the pleasing

to ethical distinctions not covered by legal limitations or inherited traditions, they saw no harm in taking their intellectual food from

any table that

This

offered it. was Mr. Fletcher Harper's view, for subsequently he declared that, seeing an enormous reading public in America and at his disposal far more varied and attractive reading material in England than America possessed, he had determined to bring the two to

gether, though he had added frankly that his first object in starting the magazine that was to further this aim was to make it the feeder to his business as