Turning the New Leaves
JANUARY, 1908
WHATEVER may be said in extenuation of magazine editors, it must be admitted that they confuse the calendar. They keep a private Christmas in midsummer, and Easter by the first snowfall. If the Atlantic’s editor wishes to say Happy New Year to the patrons of the magazine, he is forced to write in November the words which he would prefer to speak, two months later, at some real banquet of the Atlantic’s readers. A year ago, the Toastmaster remembers, he was writing his New Year’s greeting in a sunny window-seat in Florence. Two cabmen, lazily exchanging Tuscan epithets on the square beneath the window, distracted his attention as he meditated upon the Atlantic’s coming semi-centennial and composed with due piety a few paragraphs about Turning the Old Leaves. And he said to himself, “This is poor writing, but that may be the cabmen’s fault. At worst, it gives a good title for another January greeting, after the anniversary is over. That shall be called Turning the New Leaves.”
And so, in fulfillment of this year-old editorial engagement, Turning the New Leaves it shall be. After all the kindly wishes which the Atlantic’s semi-centennial has brought, and with the abundant space which the anniversary number devoted to the founders, no one will be likely to think that the magazine is unmindful of its past, or ungrateful for the tributes to its ancient achievements. We have been having a sort of family reunion, when the talk has turned naturally upon old scenes, half-forgotten incidents, and vanished personages; things dear to the family circle, although elsewhere unintelligible. But the reunion is over now. The old leaves have all been turned, gently, humorously, or with regret. The Atlantic for 1908 is waiting to be read, and it will be read because its subscribers enjoy what it contains to-day, and not because Ralph Waldo Emerson was a contributor to the first number.
Men and women who are alive and writing — not dead and famous — make the Atlantic what it is. They write as well as their fathers did. Excluding the first half-dozen names of the older generation, as representing heights of poetry and imaginative prose unreached to-day, the children write even better than their fathers, and they have a greater variety of interesting things to say. No one can have read the four articles in the November number, comparing 1857 and 1907 as regards the state of politics, literature, art, and science, without becoming freshly aware that we are living in a world of new conditions. Some things dear to Atlantic readers of the old sort have disappeared forever, but the life of America — which it is the object of this magazine to reflect and to interpret — was never so various, vigorous, and right-minded as it is this very morning. No one need dwell among the tombs.
A magazine cannot endeavor to offer the hospitality of its pages to writers representing these new varieties of training, conviction, and experience, without wounding some sensibilities. The Toastmaster gives the floor to many kinds of speakers. Sometimes, in truth, he gets anxious during their remarks and looks at his watch. Occasionally the audience, in turn, looks anxious, and possibly some one gets up and goes out. This has happened during 1907, as it will doubtless continue to happen, but the fact that there have been two new subscribers for every old one lost does not lessen the Toastmaster’s regret that tolerance for the other parish is still a plant of imperfect flowering.
For the Atlantic is not a club made up of an esoteric circle of people who use its pages for the exchange of congenial ideas. The Toastmaster once tried to picture it as a pension, where there were violets by each plate, indeed, as if it were a private dinner party, but where both Caterer and boarders were in reality quite aware that there were other pensions near by, clamorous for patronage. In his gloomier moments, the Toastmaster’s task appears to him as being not so much that of the Caterer and Announcer of a feast, as that of an Umpire, calling balls and strikes to the perfect satisfaction of neither the players, the spectators, nor himself. But the real umpire has printed rules for his guidance, and police protection after the game. The editor has neither. He is rather, let us say, a Picture Dealer, with certain private standards of taste in the back of his head, perhaps, but obliged to buy only such canvases as his capital will warrant, and to hang them in such a fashion as may reasonably be expected to attract purchasers, — all other canvases being “unavailable” for him. Yet one must remember that some of these harassed dealers — the joke of artists, and compelled to buy only what they could sell again — have nevertheless managed to form and to maintain a sound artistic taste in a whole community.
After all, the plain “$4.00 a year” printed upon the Atlantic’s cover is as good an image and symbol of editorial policy as could be wished. Subscribing to a magazine, like buying a picture, is a business transaction. Sentiment may have a share in it, but at bottom it is a question of getting and giving the worth of the money. Four dollars is a good round sum, — if one has to go out and earn it, as most of the Atlantic’s subscribers do. The notion that they belong to the leisure class is an amusing fiction, which dies hard. The great majority of them — and all of the Cheerful Readers, apparently — have to work for their four dollars, and they expect, month by month, a fair return upon their investment. If they do not receive it, they will surely begin to speculate with some of the Atlantic’s youthful and comely rivals, in spite of their respect for Fiftieth Anniversaries and for the reputation of distinguished dead contributors. And the Atlantic, preferring these clear-headed subscribers to any others, means to give them their money’s worth. The Toastmaster may be prejudiced, — even umpires and picture dealers have been known to be, — but he cannot help thinking that the writers engaged for 1908 are good enough company for the best authors and readers who ever sat around the Atlantic’s table. Turn the new leaves, and see.
B. P.