The Contributors' Club

BEING myself a frequent contributor to periodicals, and the author of several books not entirely unknown, though of unequal and probably not of very great merit (if I am to judge by their small sale in the face of very favorable notices), I was struck by the confessions of a contributor in the August Club, because they afforded fresh proof of the unreasonableness characterizing most members of the literary profession. So far as I can make out, from his account of his experience, editors have taken a somewhat unusual interest in his work, and have made the exception in his case of writing him letters with their own hands, in the hope of softening the blow of rejection, giving him credit for what there was of good in his work, and encouraging him to try again. In this I see nothing very offensive; but my fellow-contributor appears to regard every one of those friendly attempts on the part of editors as so much gratuitous insolence and oppression. Now I have been through a checkered experience as a contributor to magazines, extending over nearly ten years, and have also served as an editor long enough to be thoroughly familiar with both sides of the situation touched upon. I confess that, as a contributor, I used to look upon the considerate explanations of editors very much as your August complainant does. I considered myself one of the most ill-used scribblers who ever put pen to paper. I was very apt to write sarcastic replies to editors who rejected my compositions with a few words of criticism or suggestion. And, indeed, there is no doubt that the mortification which young writers or novices in the art undergo, on finding their work declined, is a source of intense suffering which only time and resolution can abate. But one thing I had the sense to keep in mind, during my early struggles: and that was that, however editors might err in their judgment, I really was a beginner and probably had a great deal to learn. Therefore, resentful or not, I always pondered the advice I got, and I owe to it much of my advance towards success (for people assure me I am successful, though I don’t seem to be sure of it, myself). Now when I became an editor I was very glad that I had had so much modesty, for my eyes were soon widely opened to the inexhaustible petulance, freakishness, arrogance, and conceit of the class known as contributors, and it was a comfort to know that I, as a contributor, had possessed one saving grace. Whereas, before, I had known only a few persons imbued with the same grievance against magazines that I cherished, I now came into confidential relations with some thousands of similar aspirants; and I was at times very much disgusted with them. So absurdly unreasonable, so inconsiderate, so centred upon the agitations of their own little souls were they, that I often felt as if magazines, by exciting these people to write, were encouraging an alarming growth of insanity, which would neutralize whatever good their publications might be doing. I despised myself for having resembled them. And this, notwithstanding that I had met with treatment from editors far more annoying than any the confessing contributor relates; as I could prove, were I in the habit of publishing confidential correspondence.

The result is that the contributor’s stories impress me as pointless, except as showing lack of imagination on his part, He does not seem for a moment to have pictured to himself the position of the editor. For example, what is his ground of complaint against the editor who wanted to take his article but could not, on account of length, and wished to exchange it for another? He italicizes the word exchange. Was not that a proper word? I think it expresses the editor’s meaning exactly; he wished to bind himself, in a degree, to take some article from Mr. —, although he could not print the one then in hand. Again, the editor of an illustrated magazine liked one of —’s articles, and wished to take it. He asked him to call next day. Editors never do this if they have accepted a paper without reserve; so it is probable that Mr.— is mistaken in supposing that this editor said unconditionally, “ I ’ll take it.” Next day, the editor (who had some obligations to the proprietors of the magazine, or to his senior, if he was a subordinate) found that, on consultation with the other persons controlling the publication, he would be unable to use the article without illustrations. What should we think of a merchant, who published as a crying outrage the fact that he had offered B some goods for sale, and B had thought he would buy them, but on consultation with his partners found it impracticable to buy ? The contributor relates with quiet bitterness how, after his receiving back from the Daily — four articles which he then sold elsewhere, one of said articles was copied into the Sunday edition of the Daily —. But what does that prove, except that they were not suited to the daily paper? The editor of a Sunday edition often has nothing whatever to do with the week-day issues, and it is not incumbent on those in charge of the week-day issues to turn over MSS, to the manager of the Sunday edition, unless requested by the author to do so. The contributor leaves quite out of account this business aspect of the thing.

His most terrible recital, however, is about a junior editor returning a MS. which the senior editor of the same magazine accepted a year later, on its being sent again, I can give the Club the real history of that affair, and think it is proper and will be instructive to do so. The article was sent to the junior by a “mutual” friend. It was with pure sympathy and interest that the assistant examined it. The article was fall of merit; but in reporting upon it to the senior, the subaltern, knowing the crowded state of the magazine and the endless trouble which his chief experienced in squeezing in the monthly contents (which always overran the limit and had to be “cut down”), was obliged to say that he thought the sketch would need some compression in one portion. That was his opinion. “Then,” said the senior editor, “I cannot consider it, in the present state of the magazine.” That was a good business reason, which the senior was perfectly right in acting upon. I think the junior was wrong in his opinion, if it applied to the sketch solely as a performance ; but he was right, in view of the pressure upon the magazine’s space. He was hired to give opinions, and did so conscientiously; the senior had some faith in his judgment, and to a certain extent consulted it. If both had had to read every MS. submitted, how much time would have been saved by having an assistant? As to the sequel: the article was sent again, and came at a time when the managing editor did not feel the exigencies of space so keenly as before. When the junior saw it in print he was genuinely delighted. “ Mr. — has got in at last,” was his thought, with a thrill of pleasure at the success of a fellow-workman. Having examined nearly two thousand MSS. since reading Mr. —’s, he remembered only his favorable impression on reading it; the circumstances of the case came back to him on reading the confessions published in the Club eight months later. It is natural that he should feel some pain on seeing how his few hasty words, meant for good advice, had been treasured in the contributor’s mind for twenty months as an instance of offensive patronage. Does it not seem to you as if the contributor may have made a mistake, and done some injustice? The junior wrote to him as “ to some entire novice,” Well, according to his own account of himself he was a novice. Moreover, the junior had read previous MSS. from him, which were diffuse and poor, and showed him to be wanting in some of the qualifications of an acceptable author.

The trouble with writers in general is (1) that they cannot understand why their efforts don’t suit every one as well as themselves; (2) that they refuse consider the business relation of author, editor, and publisher, which may not be ideal, but is very plain and simple; (3) that they are offended when MSS. are returned with a printed form giving no special reasons, and that the necessarily imperfect and hasty attempts of editors to pave the way to success by advice infuriate the would-be contributors more than printed forms or even total and eternal silence would.

It is true that authors are subject to vexatious delays in printing, are sometimes underpaid, and are often virtually borrowed from by the retention of their capital (in the form of MSS.) for a considerable term without payment of interest. But these difficulties are not greater than the obstacles in almost every occupation, which people never dream of writing about. My own experience has been, that in spite of the wearing nature of my employment and all the troubles which beset an author, together with some unusual misfortunes, I have made a better living, and advanced more rapidly, than any one of my age among my acquaintances, during the same period, in other employments; unless they have had extraneous advantages of inherited wealth or opportunity, or extraordinary downright good luck. Since I have practiced editing, I have written for magazines and papers with which I am not connected, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not. Even the magazine on which I have labored as an editor could not always accept my contributions. But knowing, as I now do, the ceaseless and exhausting demands on the strength, time, sympathy, and patience of editors, I am simply amazed at the considerateness which they have in the main shown me, and continue to show whenever I add myself to the thousands of people who are bothering the life out of these much maligned gentlemen.

— I was much interested in those portions of the Contributors’ Club for August and September detailing the struggles and reward of two literary workers, and as my experience has had some peculiar points, I. send it as an addition to this entertaining series. Being possessed of a moderate salary that insures food, home, and clothing for my family and self, I use a natural inclination for pen work as a means to obtain books, papers, magazines, lecture tickets and pictures, and other articles of a like nature. I began writing for the press in July, 1869, and, when time permitted, have followed it quite steadily ever since. Having a curiosity to know how much my literary work brought in, I have kept a thorough account of my returns, and find that for the nine years ending July 1, 1878, my cash profits were twelve hundred and thirty dollars ($1230), and that I received seven hundred and fifty dollars’ ($750) worth of books and other literary emoluments. My highest cash year was 1877, when I received two hundred and sixty-nine dollars ($269); and my lowest, 1870, when fortune gave me but fifteen dollars ($15).

My literary work embraces poetry, stories, letters, and critical essays. Letters have paid me best in cash, stories next, and poetry third, though I find that the last year has brought a marked increase in the market value of my poems. Criticism has brought me the most books.

Of course I have enjoyed the delightful experience of receiving back what I considered very fair work, with the usual “respectfully declined” accompanying. In one instance, a strange circumstance attended the appearance of the poem rejected. I had sent it, with an intimation that, if used, I should expect payment, to a largely circulated and wealthy New York journal; I knew they paid for poetry and thought they might pay for mine, but the poem was quickly returned. I then sent it to another New York paper, which as quickly printed it, and I was considerably surprised to see it reprinted the same week of its appearance by the paper that had refused it a few days previously, — and reprinted shorn of its author’s name. Finding that my poems were growing more popular, I last year sent one that I thought good to a leading monthly. It was returned, and met the same fate in the offices of two other prominent magazines. I then gave it to a leading newspaper, and it appeared simultaneously with the monthlies that had refused it. Having access to a large and varied exchange list, curiosity prompted me to see how my poem compared in merit with those printed in these monthlies, as shown by the number of papers reprinting it, and the number reprinting poems from the magazines. The monthly richest in poetry contained five pieces, and one of these was reprinted by forty-five papers. This was the most popular magazine poem of the month. Four of the papers reprinting this gave the same honor to another of the poems in the same monthly, and one was reprinted twice. Two were not noticed at all. Counting every appearance of a poem as a vote for favor, this monthly had fifty-one. The other two magazines had four poems each, and had forty-three and thirty-six votes, while my poem had fifty-six. This result has been a subject of wonder to me, for I know my poem was not so good as some in the magazines, though I honestly believe it was better than several of them. I have no quarrel with the judgments of editors, though I do not always agree with them, but no two opinions are alike when every-day occurrences are to be judged, and editors are only men. I don’t think the true author will call an editor personally to account for disagreeing with his estimate of his work. A strange difference of judgment befell one of my poems not long since. I sent a young friend, who is editing a third-rate literary paper, a poem as a gift, and he returned it as “ not up to my usual mark; " I then sent it to a leading monthly, which immediately accepted it, and paid for it handsomely.

Regarding stories I have had a rather curious experience. I am a sailor, and during twenty years of roving about the earth have met with some startling adventures; I often use one of these as the foundation of a story, and, though the incidents are truthful, generally get the story back indorsed, “well-written but improbable,” whereas stories that I make as improbable as possible are quickly disposed of.

Though I have not written my play, I have thought of one, and my first novel is snugly enshrined in a camphorwood chest, standing in the dim, cob-web haunted shadows of the garret. Sometime, if life is long enough, I hope to write a successful sea romance, and, as I am pretty persistent, may succeed. Nine years ago, a copy of verses I sent to a leading magazine was returned, and I then determined to have a poem accepted by that journal; I accomplished the task, but it took seven years to do it.

I have not found the path of literature a thornless one, but I do not think it has more of these doubtful blessings than other callings. To me, beside being a necessity it is a pleasure; and yet I have had much to contend with, for I am that strange anomaly, a self-educated, literary sailor. As for success in literature, my opinion is that it takes, first, brains; second, careful work; third, persistence, to achieve it.

— I give my experience, by way of suggesting a resource which your “ confessing ” contributors have not thought of.

I began thirteen years ago by writing only what I felt impelled to put on paper, and making that as good as I could. But I soon found that a living was not to be gained in that way, and selected a profession which was more likely to offer a support without dragging a noble art through the mud. By day I was a clerk; but at night I studied law, rigidly excluding poetry and its relations till I could enjoy them freely. This lasted two years.

Then I lost my clerkship and was still some months short of admission to the bar, with urgent need of money. Under this pressure, I began writing to sell, and I wrote with a will. Good luck attended me. That, summer I sold some twenty articles, large and small, poems included. Most of these productions are poor affairs enough; and those that have any merit owe it to the fact that I sometimes forgot my chief object. They sufficed, however, to land me in a city of the far West, with fifty dollars in my pocket.

There were two of us; and before our cash was quite gone we determined to get other employment which would leave us free to wait upon the law on alternate days. We tried the newspapers first, making our round right merrily, and encouraged by everybody with Western good humor. At last one “ local,” who was going away for a while, offered to put us in his place. I shall never forget the dismay of the managing editor at this invasion by two over-confident tyros; nor his delight next day when he found that, with all our confidence, we had really improved his local page. Poor fellow, he met the fate of many a man along the border. At nine o’clock one morning he passed me with a jest and laugh; at ten I caught him in my arms as he fell with a bullet through his heart.

I certainly did some rough reporting. A prize fight on a sand spit of the Missouri in a driving rain; a stylish ball (no time for delay) in the cowhide boots with which I tramped the red clay of the Bottoms; the scene of an affray where every householder ordered us off as highwaymen or avengers of blood; and one or two tableaux where pistol flashes were too near for comfort, were among the things which I had the pleasure of noting down and writing up. In the evening there were all manner of gatherings: political meetings, balls, lectures, and dramatic entertainments; and I was surprised to find how soon I learned the necessary art of being everywhere at once. Still mistakes would creep in. I had the agent of the Peace Society scouring the neighborhood for me because I called him colonel in print; and the judge of our city court raised a great commotion because I made him talk rather comical Scripture in a prophetic account of a Sunday-school speech. I ordinarily closed the night’s work by scribbling, correcting proof, and getting up head lines for telegrams until three A. M. On alternate days I was free to read law and wait for clients. For the above services I never received less than five dollars per week, nor more than ten. Several times I made long trips through the prairies and backwoods of Missouri and Kansas, canvassing and corresponding for the paper. I liked this life, because it gave me an excuse to call on everybody and hear everybody’s story. Still it had its hardships. I walked over two hundred miles, with my coat and carpet-bag on a stick over my shoulder; and many miles were traversed in the sun when the thermometer marked very near one hundred in the shade. I had all manner of queer adventures. But I never quite got out of money, health, or heart; and I found opportunities, here and there, to write other things beside the required letters.

After that, I returned to the East, took a clerkship in the Census Office, and went to work writing at night. I wrote two novels, one of which was published by a weekly paper as a serial, some verses which effected a lodgment in a leading New York magazine, and a number of editorial articles under a regular engagement with a daily paper. For a while I was making at the rate of $2500 a year.

When the Census Office ran down, I was of course discharged; and at once opened a law office. But before a month had passed I received what the clergymen style a “call” to write editorials for a daily paper in the Northwest at thirty dollars a week. I accepted, unwisely perhaps, and for some six months duly ground out my column and a half or two columns per diem; but at last the proprietor took umbrage because the leading articles were rightly credited to me instead of himself, and I found myself adrift again.

After various futile efforts to get regular literary or legal employment, and a dip con amore with pen and tongue into a passing presidential contest, I set to work in earnest to make a living by writing stories, sketches, verses, and the like; and I failed there too. The immediate need of money made me write hastily. The more I tried to find the salable level of the weeklies, the surer I was to go under the surface altogether. My (financial) inspiration was like the tin pan tied to a dog’s tail. It made me go, certainly, and with energy, but not with much grace.

Just then I received an appointment as examiner’s clerk in the Patent Office, on the strength of a half-forgotten examination. Dropping literature, I began at once a zealous study of patent law, office practice, physics, and the useful arts; which resulted in carrying me up two grades within three months, and a third within the next year. During the three years of my Patent Office life and a succeeding year spent in the office of a firm of attorneys, I adhered, with very few exceptions, to my rule against writing anything until firmly established. The last year and a half I have been in practice for myself.

Thanks to this long preparation and subsequent hard work, I have felt for more than six months reasonably sure of a support for myself and family from my profession, without overwork. When I have no time for belles lettres, it is because I am making about three hundred dollars a month; and the months when I make much less I have plenty of leisure. Law and literature act as foils to one another. If my whole time were devoted to the former, I should weary of it at last; while the nervous strain of constant imaginative writing would be far from healthy. The one brings you into contact with practical men, practical business, and very practical, hard, logical knocks; the other makes your statements exact and neat, polishes even extemporaneous sentences, and lends a zest to life. I find the effects of my poetry in my arguments, and the effects of my arguments in my poetry; and both are benefited by the exchange.

Best of all, literary work retains for me all the delightful freshness of thirteen years ago. I come from toils which I like to those which I passionately love. One appreciates very keenly the pleasure of his. art when he returns from the draft of a specification, a hoarse tournament of logic, or the preparation of an answer in equity, to a quiet home and to the familiar (manuscript) volume of verse, where he may remold the old favorites and add the new fancies unhurried and at will. Now and then I jot down and send to some repository like the Contributors’ Club any fugitive critical suggestion or bit of information which seems likely to interest those who share my tastes. For longer articles, I have access to a certain magazine which pays nothing in money, but has never refused to publish what I send. Now and then I mail a poem or some other production to one of the metropolitan magazines; but I do not fret if it is rejected. I am leisurely getting my writings together and polishing them. Before a great many months I intend to have them published, volume after volume, in book form; and whether they win or fail they will have given me great pleasure.

Now my suggestion is not that all literary men should turn lawyers or solicitors of patents. But I think it would be far better for them and for their art if more of them would make their living in some way wholly unconnected with literature. The staff that is steadily leaned on will most likely bend in time; and who would not rather pick berries with our friends the woodland darkies, than write puffs, advertisements, and lampoons for a livelihood, or scramble to be first in at a murder?

— There are some books so very bad that they are good. To be very bad, a book must have originality in badness; when it has that, we can stand reading it, as we look with some interest at the woman who has dressed herself in man’s clothes and climbed down a skylight at midnight to rob us, but with none at alL at the common thief who, in ordinary daylight, has stolen articles from the garden clothes-line.

Esther Pennefather strikes me as the most utterly ridiculous hook of the season. And yet it has originality, a few very fine passages, and, with all its absurdity, a promise, to my mind at least, of better things in the future. Its originality is in its subject, which is that of the singular power one woman sometimes has over another. All the men may as well now retire, and read their newspapers; since they do not believe this. They are perforce retired from this book by the writer herself, since there is not in the whole volume a single man worthy of the name; nothing but a chorus of women, chasing each other madly along, doing the most extraordinary things for the most senseless reasons, from the first page to the last. Practical people may say at once (and end the matter) that there is no such power; but the fact remains that there is. Let questions be asked, and it will be discovered that there is scarcely a woman of strong, self-reliant nature who has not at some time or other been followed and besieged, with almost doglike humility, by some other woman, whose affection she never asked for, whose adoration she did not want. Mothers, surrounded and fenced off by their children, do not excite this worship; wives, not often. It is almost always the women who are not tangled in domestic ties who receive it; it is thrown at them whether they wish it or not. And, generally, they do not wish it.; in fact, it almost seems a necessary part of the performance that the worshiped one should remain indifferent, and care nothing for the worshiper.

Esther Pennefather must inevitably excite inextinguishable laughter; I have observed that the critics who have noticed it at all have politely advanced the supposition that the author was very young, and then, hiding their smiles behind their tall hats, have hastily retired. But I want to bring forward one passage on the power of love, one of the few passages that redeem the book, and give, to my mind at least, a promise. “ There is no one who has a right to take back love. There is nothing one’s friends can do, no meanness, no cruelty, no forsaking, that gives us a right to forsake them. Ah! what would become of us if God loved us as we love our friends? I believe, I believe without doubt, that love is redemption. We can love to the very end even those not worthy of love in this world, and we can carry that faithful love at last to the feet of God himself, and lay it down there, and he will give us back our own. No one can sin forever, whom one heart loves faithfully and purely; in some time that we cannot tell, love will gain its own.” Now it seems to me that there is a height of beauty and nobleness in that passage to which many a popular book, In all its sparkling pages, never attains.

To go back to the original subject, namely, a woman’s adoration of another woman. There is such a thing. I myself have seen tears of joy, the uttermost faith, and deepest devotion, in mature, well-educated, and cultivated women, for some other woman whom they adored; have seen an absorption for months of every thought. But — but! there is a monotonous certainty that follows on, which arouses to laughter the unregenerate masculine mind and makes it deny the whole (which is a mistake; it is there), namely, the certainty that once let loose an agreeable man in this atmosphere, and, ten to one, the whole cloudstructure topples over, its battlements dissolve, and the dwellers come out and act like everybody else—only more so. Those to whom I have referred are all married now, and happily married; they no longer care in the least for each other. And yet I know that there come moments when they sit apart and think of that old adoration which was so intense and so pure, so self-sacrificing and so far away.

— I have read and re-read with the greatest interest the paper in the August Atlantic on New England women, by M. E. W. S. Only a New England woman could have written it, and nobody outside of New England can possibly know how true is its description of one type of New England woman. Some of its touches are inimitable; as for instance, —

“She desirous of showing her foot! Perish all such rubbish! ”

But all this clever analysis is true of only one type of New England woman. There is another. Widely experienced men of the world know it. It has passed into almost proverbial mention among United States army men.

It is a woman in whom “ vanity, coquetry, or sentiment, call it what you will, which is so much a part of most women’s lives,” so far from being “ left out,” is the absorbing passion of her nature, to which she surrenders herself with an abandon of which no other woman in the world would be capable. The Frenchwoman would think it folly; the Southern woman call it bad taste.

Even here, however, the New England woman is intellectual; her very passion has a certain dash of Calvinism in it; her surrender is a step in inevitable logic; where the Southerner or the Frenchwoman vacillates, dallies, bestows some favors and withholds others with a fascinating reticence which seems far more virtuous than it. really is, the logical New Englander who has deliberately determined to have a lover or lovers has the whole thing clear in her mind. She sees that self-evident truths are self-evident truths, as well in love us in the first chapter of Euclid. She scorns the bad logic of the pretty Southerner, who slips along without much thinking, merely having a good time as she goes, and always meaning to stop before any harm comes to anybody; and the semi-sentimental semi-philosophy of the Frenchwoman, who is quite capable of choosing a lover as she would choose a gown, with reference to the season and her own complexion, and who would no more think of wearing one than the other after it had become shabby and unsuitable.

“ Life is real, life is earnest,” to the New England woman, even in her “ affairs of the heart; ” that expression, by the way, she would never use. She would consider it derogatory, belittling. Her lover is truly her “life.” Having accepted him as a lover and the fact of her having a lover as a fact, she sees that nothing now remains, or, consistently, can remain, except love, whole love, nothing but love.

She clings desperately to the ægis of respectability as long as she can. It is unspeakably dear to her; it hurts her pride sorely to be ill spoken of. Till the last minute she makes a courageous and eloquent fight, with Plato at her back; she can talk better and behave worse than any woman alive, the keenwitted, clear-headed New England coquette, and she generally keeps to the end a certain following of people who “ believe in ” her through thick and thin.

The worst of it is that sooner or later she inevitably gets her heart broken. No man’s passion can sustain itself for any length of time at the level of hers. He likes easier and safer love-making better. He feels terror where she feels only exaltation; embarrassment where she only glows with self-sacrifice. Very soon after his first wonder and ecstasy at the succumbing of this grand creature, head and all, to him, there creeps into his mind an uneasy wish, against which he struggles, that she would not be quite so recklessly in love with him. And this is the beginning of the end.

There are some broken-hearted women, dragging out deserted, ruined lives in Europe to-day, who know all this. Some of the direst tragedies this country has ever known have been wrought out by New England women.

The native New England lily (to continue Harrison’s gracious and eloquent simile) is by no means always white. On New England’s ruggedest hills, in her stoniest pastures, every July sees the glowing chalices of a lily red as the vestments of Romish cardinals, and as deeply stained with spots of fierce dark color as the leopard’s skin.

— During the last summer the spelling reform made evident progress, and it has now reached a stage where the public can coöperate with more definiteness than has heretofore been possible. The reform was started by the American Philological Association, and that body at its meeting held at Saratoga in July recommended the immediate adoption of the following new forms, which, it should be said, are in the same line with the changes which have given us frolic and music for the frolicke and musicke of our fathers. The new spellings are: Tho, thru, catalog, wisht, gard, hav, infinit, definit, liv, giv, ar.

The Spelling Reform Association met with the American Institute of Instruction at the White Mountains, and adopted the following rules for immediate observance: I. Use e for ea when equivalent to short e; as helth, welth. II. Omit silent e after a short vowel; as hav, giv, liv. III. Use f for ph; as filosofer, fantom. IV. Omit one letter of a final double; as wil, shal. V. Use t instead of ed when it represents the sound; as wisht, slasht.

These simple suggestions are not difficult of adoption, and there is reason to believe that they will come into immediate use in the public journals.

— One day of my summer leisure, last year, I looked over a pile of magazines that had, through pressure of occupation, been till then unexamined. Among them was the March Atlantic, in whose Contributors’ Club I spent some very pleasant moments. One of the happiest things in the world — of letters, at least— is to come unexpectedly upon some opinion or sentiment that harmonizes with what you yourself have long cherished, and whose want of supporters has long been a matter of secret surprise. I have called a discovery of this kind one of the happiest; let me also add, one of the most provoking. Here is somebody that ventures to say what you have only thought; instead of being one of many to agree with him, to say “ So do I” to his “ I think,” you might have been he, the one to speak first. Conviction, as if in revenge for long silence, put the matter to me somewhat after the foregoing fashion, but sympathy held out a friendly hand to the unknown champion of A Lost Love. Ten years ago had I read the book, with wonder at its searching power, its terse strokes, its pathos of suggestion rather than word. Is it not surprising that in all my hearing and reading of these years, not a word have I met in its praise, — not one, till now? Despite the private value I had set upon the book, not having the world’s or the critic’s praise to support mine, I had, when lending it, called it merely a good novel. To say truth, its heroine’s first name, Georgy, is very disagreeable to me, and the appositive of the title, A Lost Love, smacked of the sentimental; to display too great partiality for a work with that, name — where all were not landing it—might suggest the suspicion of some peculiar fitness to my own experience!

After Georgy Sandon has resigned Erskine to the woman whom he has so long loved, but through mischance misunderstood, she marries the man who had long ago loved her, but whom she had refused after once accepting, because separation had convinced her that her heart was not his, but devoted to Erskine, whom she met after her engagement. The union with this early lover, whom she respects rather than loves, and marries out of magnanimity, results in a negative kind of happiness; but even this lasts only three years, and Mrs. Anstruther is dead.

The author of this novel has a thorough understanding of lovers’ moods, motives, and impulses. When a person who has been apparently in the deep of love, having met with refusal or coldness, turns suddenly to a new object, how often do we hear, “He couldn’t have cared much for her,” or vice versa. But there is no truer proof of how much one has loved than the sudden transition of feeling. Ashford Owen takes the abrupt change in the direction of one’s affection as the evidence, not of previous shallowness, but of depth. A fine touch of nature is that in which Erskine, turning to leave the room just after his engagement to Georgy, looks, by chance, at a picture bought long ago for its strong resemblance to Constance, his first love. “ Now he felt provoked with himself for putting it there. That picture sobered him, and brought the involuntary thought, ‘ I am not young.’ Who is young before the recollection of a dead passion?” Here is another home thrust: —

“ Constance and Georgy were most inextricably blended together. He had firmly believed that to meet the former would have been to him a matter of the utmost indifference. He had cared for her once, very much, but he had never thought that he should feel so much at seeing her again. And he looked sadly back to that once, — then drew closer to the recollection of Georgy. He was in a state of mental polygamy just then, wherein many an impulsive nature may find itself.” But the master stroke is where it should be, — at the end. Constance, whom Erskine had so passionately loved, proved not heartless or unlovely, — as many novelists would have made her, to avenge the misplaced passion and the great sacrifice of Georgy, — but while meeting the demands of duty, perhaps, was still so much the world’s as to leave a great void, it may be inferred, in the heart of him who must have longed for the possession of a love as large as that he gave. The power of the closing scene lies in the subtile drawing of its characters. Nothing is said of incomplete harmony in their lives, but it is felt in eying the poise of the figures, in hearing the tone of questions and answers. One sentence is full of weight, and makes us think of some cases we have met, and do meet daily: “ It was early, perhaps, for a man still young to be looking forward so directly to his children.”

But now for the close itself. His little girl shows him what her mother has just given her, “ a heart and cross of mossed turquoise. As he bent down to see it, a vision came quickly across him of the room where he had given it, and of a wistful, loving face which looked up at him. It was a sad recollection, and he took the child’s hand, and pressed her close to him to dispel it. . . .

“ ‘ Constance, where has this come from? Don’t give it to Consy.’ ‘ Why? Does a tale hang thereby?’ she said, laughing. ‘ It was amongst the things Mrs. Anstruther left me so strangely.’ ‘ Mrs. Anstruther,’ he repeated to himself. ‘ Do you remember it? ’ ‘ Yes; I gave it to her.’ ‘ Ah, James, poor Mrs. Anstruther! I often thought how it would have interested me to have met her again. Poor Georgy! it is not good to have such a nature. . . . And so you gave her that. Was it on the day when you picked me up at the station ? ’ ' Yes,’ he answered, laying his hand on her shoulder, and looking at her lovingly. She noticed neither the touch nor the look just then. ‘Are you coming?’ ‘No, I cannot.’ ‘To-night, then?’ ‘ No,’ and he wanted to take the cross. ‘ Now do let Consy have it; her heart is set upon it, unless yours is, especially, too.’ Constance and her child went laughing off together, and her husband heard her beautiful voice singing snatches of a song, as she went down the staircase. He still kept the trinket, and his eye fell mechanically upon the church, where the woman who had loved him best was buried. . . . There is a wondrous equality here, if we did but know it. He had gained his desire, and she had lost hers, —and there was no great difference between them now. The sternest irony of fate may he in the fulfillment of our wishes.

“ We are all revenged some day; and she, if she had ever wished for revenge, had found hers now.”

— The conversation between author and publisher, in the Contributors’ Club in the August Atlantic, stimulates the attempt to discover and define, if possible, the real secret of literary hits. It is evident from this conversation, and authors and publishers already understood, that it is not literary merit, nor novelty, nor praise of critics, nor advertising, nor even, except in rare instances, the previous reputation and success of an author, that makes a book a success. In my opinion the secret of a literary hit was expressed by a young friend, herself a writer of no mean ability, when she said, “ The book that sells is the book that gets talked about.”

As the publisher says in the conversation alluded to, ‘‘it is always true in regard to a book that sells that it has merit of some sort.” It meets some precise need; it gives expression to feelings that are, vaguely and dumbly perhaps, growing in many human breasts.

Take, for instance, the books that have been the most decided literary hits of the past ten or twelve years. There is Gates Ajar. It has no special literary merit, and many very offensive blemishes of style, but it gave voice to feelings that were struggling in thousands of hearts in regard to questions of futurity and immortality. People, in the orthodox churches especially, hardly dared then to utter thoughts which, through the influence of the later, wide-spread newspaper and pulpit discussion of the subject, and through modern symposiums, have become common talk in these days. Then came Miss Alcott’s books, depicting a new but general phase of thought and emotion as represented in the lives of young girls awaking to a new sense of life and its responsibilities, through the general diffusion of a wider education. Then came Helen’s Babies, despised of all those who have no children of their own or who don’t like children. Those irrepressible babies ! That Toddie, with his “want to shee wheels go wound,” was perfectly irresistible to tens of thousands of parents, grandparent?, aunts and uncles, who have been tyrannized over by the same kind of invincible persistence in children. Then came That Husband of Mine, a most absurd book to make such a sensation as it did; yet it portrayed a certain phase of experience that is almost universal among families. Not a wife who read the book but laughed over it and remarked that she had experienced just such annoyances as were therein described.

And the wide popularity of these books was altogether owing to the fact that they were talked about. The Sabbath-school teacher or scholar who happened to read Gates Ajar at once began to speak of it to friends. The book that told about “a piano in heaven” forthwith became an object of curiosity; those who heard, being impelled by their own vague wishes for a little pleasanter idea of celestial existence than the old traditional one, all wanted to read about it for themselves. And so the knowledge spread. If any father of a family happened to read Helen’s Babies, he at once told his wife about it, or he asked of his neighbor, “ Have you read Helen’s Babies? ” “ No.” “ Well, it’s too natural for anything; you must certainly read about that dreadful boy Toddie; you will say it’s the most comical thing you ever read.” So his wife or neighbor remembers and buys a copy of Helen’s Babies, perhaps only to read and be completely disgusted with it. Then comes the other kind of talk, the disparaging kind, but equally good for advertising purposes. “ I can’t think what people see to admire in Helen’s Babies; it is the most sickening stuff I ever read; perfectly unnatural, and yet Jack and Susie B— are in raptures over it.” The little incident in That Husband of Mine where the wife tries to spare the cream at tea when a guest is present has done more to sell that book than the whole of the rest of the story. Every woman who reads it says to her neighbor, “ You must read That Husband of Mine; there is such a funny incident about ” — and here is related the creamjug episode; and so it goes. Talk, in the case of a book, is like leaven; it starts at a single point, or at many points, but it is propagated from particle to particle till the whole is leavened.

It is one of the most striking proofs of the wide diffusion of the doctrines of modern liberal thinkers that such a book as Mallock’s Positivism on an Island, or his New Republic, could have attained such a wide-spread popularity, for it is a sign how many people are talking or thinking liberalism.

The publisher who has the instinct, to discern this quality in a book, who has a kind of prescience of latent subjects of interest in the public mind, is the one who will recognize and secure the successful book when it is offered. Here also is the reason why perfectly new authors sometimes make a hit. They are the first to give expression to some particular phase of social interest.

Apropos of critics and book reviewers, I should think that in the interests of authors and publishers there is a great deal of choice among them, so to speak. Some book reviewers in a notice of a book will give such a synopsis of its contents as shall make readers feel perfectly satisfied and without desire to know anything more of the book. It is like a lecturer having his lecture published in full just preceding his advent. People’s curiosity is satisfied, and that is the end of it. On the other hand, some book-reviewers have the art of skillfully stimulating the reader’s curiosity. They express an opinion of the book without rudely unmasking the plot or revealing the motive of the story. Such reviewers are certainly the most useful to authors, and probably just as useful to the public.

— May I be permitted a few words in reference to the criticism by a Club contributor in the August number of The Atlantic upon your review of my book, The Antelope and Deer of America, which appeared in your March number? Your contributor is constrained to this criticism because in that review “ you help to disseminate a grave error into which” I have “ fallen concerning the area of country over which the blacktailed deer is distributed. ” In the work referred to I have stated that the true black-tailed deer (Cervus Columbianus) does not inhabit the Rocky Mountains, but is confined to the Pacific coast. Your contributor tells us that he has hunted through the country, from the Arkansas to the Yellowstone, and found the black-tail throughout that region. Had he examined the book referred to, he would have perceived that I say the mule deer (Cervus macrotis) occupies the Rocky Mountains from the British Possessions on the north to Mexico on the south, that its range extends west to the Pacific Ocean, and that in the Rocky Mountain region, where the true black-tailed deer (Cervus Columbianus) is not known, it is universally called by the hunters and settlers the black-tailed deer. May I be allowed to refer your contributor to page 94 of the work, if he has not time or inclination to look through the rest of it, where he will find the same matter repeatedly and Carefully explained ? If your contributor means to say that he found the Columbia black-tailed deer in any part of the Rocky Mountains, then indeed he has made an important zoölogical discovery, and he should lose no time in establishing his claim to it by a careful and precise description of the animal, and all will gladly unite in awarding him due honor. If he will produce a single tail from a black-tailed deer from that region which is not white all the way except a black tuft at the end, and which is not naked on the under side, then I will acknowledge my grave error with alacrity. The tail of the Columbia black-tailed deer is black its whole length and all around except about one third to one quarter beneath, and is well clothed with hairs on the under side. It is not flat and lanceolate in form, like the tail of the white-tailed deer (C. vergemanus, var. lucurus) found in that region, but is round and of very uniform size to quite near the end. Till such a tail is found in the Rocky Mountains I think you must be acquitted of disseminating " a grave error.” We are bound to presume that one who writes to correct grave errors on a special subject understands it thoroughly, and that he is perfectly familiar with Cervi macrotes and Cervi Columbiani and the characteristics which distinguish them, and it is to be regretted exceedingly that he did not state which of these deer it was that he found so abundant in the Rocky Mountains. If it was the former, then you helped to disseminate no error, for I state that they abound throughout that region, where they are called blacktailed deer; if the latter, then your contributor has made a new and important discovery, and I have fallen into a great error in common with many other good observers who are really familiar with both of these species of deer. Will he tell us which it is? — [J. D. CATON, Ottawa, Ill.]

— Mr. Henry James’s last volume, French Poets and Novelists, is the most perversely uncertain book of criticism I have ever read. No sooner have you pinned your faith upon some excellent sentences, breathing admiration for one of the French geniuses he discusses, than upon turning the leaf you discover another set of paragraphs concerning the same person, equally excellent, but bristling with censure. He never says one single admiring word without coming back, sooner or later, to take the life out of it with a thrust as keen as it is skillful. He is so anxiously impartial that, from beginning to end, we are never sure where he stands himself, like the countryman, who, upon hearing of a certain great fortune, fixed his eyes upon a fence and remarked thoughtfully, “ Well, if I had that amount of money, I wouldn’t live here, No, by George!—nor anywhere else! ” so in this volume Mr. James certainly is n’t here; no, nor anywhere else! In spite of his delightful style, therefore, I felt after reading these pages of his as if I would like to have a partisan admirer of each one of those French geniuses enter, take a chair, and talk to me for at least an hour, just to restore my balance.

Emerson defines a partisan as a narrow man who, because he does not see many things, sees some one intensely and becomes inspired by it. Now Mr. James sees so many things, sees so widely, that he loses, I think, the entirety, the plain effect of the whole. And, if we are not careful, he is such a wizard with his words that he will make ns lose it too. He will describe to you so accurately and beautifully the ten thousand nerves and muscles, their hues and purposes, that you will forget that your interest should be in the whole, not parts, and that the most perfect colored map known of the nerves and muscles is not, after all, the man. His book therefore, as a whole, is unsatisfactory. Every one can see how slight, insufficient, and hurried are some of these papers; like the one on Mérimée. And as for the one on the Theatre Français, — what shall we say of a man who, after proposing to bring before us, one by one, the principal members of that perfect company, rings down the curtain and goes home without calling forward the one who to ninetynine out of a hundred of us is by far the most interesting, namely, Sara Bernhardt? Then he gives us ever so many charming microscopic pages about a departed French lady of whom we have never heard, and only a patched-up account of George Sand! And so on. Finally, he really uses that reporter’s word “ enjoyable.” I am so pleased by this last that I voluntarily acknowledge the delightfulness of such phrases as “her serene volubility,” “the earthscented facts of life,” “ tragically uncomfortable,” and others like them, with which the pages are gemmed; his style certainly is delicious. Only, one resents even deliciousness when it is continually presented at the point of the bayonet.

The paper on Tourguéneff is a strong contribution, alas! to the “ Tourguéneff literature” of to-day. In it he says, alas! “ Nothing in my opinion cultivates the taste more [alas!] than to read him.” (The sighs are mine.) Mr. James has let himself out a breadth here. Wether he balances it with something terrible on the next page, as usual, I do not remember; but I will balance it with something which I consider terrible (although I presume he does not) from his own essay. It was so dreadful that I wrote it down. “ He [Tourguéneff] is a storyteller who has taken notes. If we are not mistaken, he writes down an idiosyncrasy of character, a fragment of talk, an attitude, a feature [yes, especially noses], a gesture, and keeps it if need be for twenty years, till just the moment for using it comes, just the spot for placing it.” Precisely. That is the way it reads, — a patchwork of facts, attitudes, and features. But where is the beauty? Where is the interest? Where is the passion? Where the continuity? And more than all, where is the happiness?

— Madame Récamier is a woman about whom there is in general a good deal of curiosity, and certainly Chateaubriand’? long devotion toiler is an interesting chapter of her life. It is known that the great poet first met her at a dinner at Madame de Staël’s. May it not have been at the dinner of May 28, 1817, which is recorded by Mr. Ticknor under that date in his Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i., p. 137? This is what he says: “ I dined again to-day at Madame de Staël’s. There were few persons there, but she likes to have somebody every day, for society is necessary to her. To-day, however, she was less well, and saw none of us. At another time I should have regretted this; but to-day I should have been sorry to have left the party for any reason, since beside the Duc de Laval and M. Barante, whom I already knew, there were Chateaubriand and Madame Récamier, two persons whom I was as curious to see as any two persons in France whom I had not yet met. The Duchess de Broglie, with her characteristic good-nature, finding how much I was interested in these new acquaintances, placed me between them at dinner, so that I had an opportunity to know something more of them. Madame Récamier must now be forty or more, though she has not the appearance of so much, and the lustre of that beauty which filled Europe with its fame is certainly faded. I do not mean to say she is not still beautiful, for she certainly is, and very beautiful. Her figure is fine, her mild eyes full of expression, and her arm and hand most beautiful. I was surprised to find her with a fair complexion, . . . and no less surprised to find the general expression of her countenance anything but melancholy, and her conversation gay and full of vivacity, though at the same time, it should be added, always without extravagance.

“ Chateaubriand is a short man, with a dark complexion, black hair, black eyes, and altogether a most marked countenance. . . . He is too grave and serious, and gives a grave and serious turn to the conversation in which he engages; and even when the whole table laughed at Barante’s wit, Chateaubriand did not even smile, — not, perhaps, because he did not enjoy the wit as much as the rest, but because laughing is too light for the enthusiasm which forms the basis of his character, and would certainly offend against the consistency we always require. It was natural for us to talk about America,” and so they talked about it, but “ he seemed rather to prefer to talk of Italy and Rome.”

This report of the meeting of these famous lovers leaves gaps which the romantic reader can fill at his pleasure. It is but meagre information that Chateaubriand’s “general tone was declamatory, though not extravagantly so, and its general effect that of interesting the feelings and attention, without producing conviction or changing opinion,” but there is no further light thrown on this event, important as it was in the history of sentiment. Chateaubriand’s solemnity at Barante’s jokes may have been due to other causes than the desire to live up to himself; he may have hated Barante for the moment. One can only wish that some sharper-eyed person had sat between him and Madame Récamier.

Here is Chateaubriand’s account of the dinner, possibly the one described by Mr. Ticknor, at which he met Madame Récamier (Mémoires d’ Outre-Tom be, vol. viii., p. 261): “ A few days later, Madame de Staël changed her lodging, and invited me to dine with her at the Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins. I went, but she was not in the parlor, nor did she even come down to dinner; but she still did not know how near her end she was. We sat down, and I found I had a place near Madame Récamier. I had not seen her for a dozen years, and then only for a moment. I did not look at her, nor did she look at me; we did not exchange a word. When, towards the end of the dinner, she timidly addressed me with a few words about Madame de Staël’s health, I turned my head a little and raised my eyes.” Here history ceases and raptures begin. In fact, Chateaubriand had seen Madame Récamier twice before, but only incidentally. The first time, he says, “ I hardly dared raise my eyes to a woman surrounded with adorers; ” and the next time, a month later, although Madame de Staël was talking, “I hardly answered; my eyes were fastened on Madame Récamier. I had never imagined anything similar, and I was more than ever discouraged; my admiration turned into vexation against myself.”