Adventures With the Editors: With a Reëxamination of an Ancient Inquiry: Why Are Manuscripts Rejected?

I

SOME may say that an unknown writer’s manuscript is strictly his own affair; its inglorious rejection no more than a matter of a grievance, of fists feebly brandished, in somebody’s hall-room. This, I venture, is to speak hastily. We, the Public, as Tooley Street would say, imaginably have an interest in that penurious youth who hangs so palely on the comings of the postman; and if we have, then so, we may be sure, has the great Editor himself, conceal it how he may.‘Your favorite magazine’ — in the candid language of the publishers’ announcement — cannot live by famous names alone; upon the editor’s ability to find new wheat sometimes in the chaff-heap of a morning’s mail depends, in no small degree, your readiness and mine to sit in at his periodical banquet. Surely it is not by chance that the most widely bought magazine in the world to-day is that one which has shown the greatest genius in the discovery of the meritorious unknown.

The meritorious unknown: it is to him, clearly, that our interest is confined. What, then, is there to discuss? Between us and the hordes of pale young men and women who thirst to get at us, the editors stand, as we know, as the necessary great wall, separating merit from its lack. And it is bread and meat to them that they shall be a good wall, — circulation and advertising and new parlor chairs to them to keep their gates in the right places, and never to become confused about the secret passwords. The discovery of a new star is the editor’s perpetual yearning, no less; this it is on which he bases his demand for a rise in salary, this that he will relate to his grandchildren in his declining years. And still is it charged that he bungles the great quest to which we, the Public, have assigned him? Well, we know better.

In ‘With the Publishers’ departments, in occasional ‘write-ups’ by friends of the management, even in solid books with cloth covers, we have actually been permitted to glimpse the editor at his labors. Wise, kind, a nourishing father and infallible, checks of vast denomination eternally in his hand, we see him toiling in divine patience over the meritless offerings of Chillicothe or Butte; and when, in a blue moon, his hawk-eye detects in some ten-thousandth manuscript the shy incipiences of merit, with what eagerness does he claim it for his own, with what passion of pride proceed to nurse it through the green-sicknesses of youth! Merit, it is observed, is a perfectly tangible and measurable thing, like blond hair or fifty per cent of alcohol; and the pale young man has n’t got it, that’s all. Where then is the problem?

Yet still the unknown Rejected continue their mutinous murmurings; and still their chant is that the evidences in the case have always come from a single side of the wall. Unlike the editors, they control no general media of self-expression, they say; if they claim merit unrecognized, how and where may they say so? And even when the lucky unknown has ceased to be unknown, when he has become courted and run after and might find listeners to any tale he cared to tell, it is alleged that he has generally remained silent here. Prosperity has soothed away the old insurgency: let bygones be bygones, as they say. Why then should we not voluntarily meet the complaint, offering these unknown, for once, the voice they crave, if only to be rid of them? In no other way, it seems, shall we hope to shut them up. Suppose we let them rail, this once, to their heart’s content; and do we, for our part, honestly engage to listen, if perchance we may detect among their wild innuendoes some stray thought or concept of possible value to us: to us, the Public, that is, who shall read no word of print except what some editor has first approved.

II

Why are manuscripts rejected ? First let the editor explain it to us, all in order.

Perhaps the fullest recent exposition of the editorial point of view, within my knowledge, appeared in The Bookman of 1911, in a series of contributed articles. An especially interesting paper launched this series, a paper called ‘The Short Story Famine,’ in which it was demonstrated that, since the death of O. Henry, the editors were finding it impossible to get even tolerable stories with which to fill their blank spaces. A succeeding article dealt briefly with editorial personalities; but a third struck straight to the heart of our present inquiry, by showing how totally unfit was the nameless material pouring daily upon the bowed head in the sanctum. Typical passages were cited from would-be contributors — ludicrous, human, true, incredible passages, completely showing up the strange popular delusion that anybody can write who is willing to take the time off from more important matters, The judicial compiler of these passages allowed his evidences to speak for themselves. But on the whole the irresistible inference emerged that manuscripts were rejected because they were written by seamstresses who had lately taken a correspondence course, or hardware drummers who were willing to fill orders for wire-nails or epic poetry with equal promptness and dispatch.

Months later the writer returned to his thesis: perhaps himself feeling that his first effort had not quite exhausted its possibilities, perhaps prodded on by soured scriveners here or there. This time he went at his task in thoroughgoing fashion, under the caption, ‘Why Manuscripts are Rejected.' To be positively fair and effective, he here gives to the army of the rejected space such as they have seldom enjoyed. He honorably records their bitter charges: —

1. That editors lack a reasonable faculty of discrimination.

2. That they have prostrated themselves before the wooden idol of Big Names.

3. That they have made arbitrary and prohibitive rules as to length, subject, endings, and so forth.

Further, he sets down, though with proper caution, that ‘it cannot be gainsaid that once in a while’ each of these arguments is valid ‘in certain local applications.' Fairest of all, he quotes literatim from some anonymous militant in ‘a western publication,’who denies passionately that he is speaking for ‘writers of the chambermaid or hostler sort.' ‘I am arguing,’says this one, ‘about college graduates or of those widely experienced in life, of great writers who were continuously rejected for years, like Kipling, Porter, Conan Doyle, Jack London, and a dozen other immortals.¹ I am arguing for, I believe, thousands of real, virile, original authors, dead and living, who had to beat down the prohibitive requirements of modern fiction editors.'

And finally, our editorial spokesman, advancing considerably beyond the seamstress and hardware-drummer standpoint, surprises us by declaring: ‘No impartial editor will deny that every now and then a short story revealing undoubted worth will be rejected by him.'

Here we have new thoughts, and complicating; the automatic acceptance of merit, and rejection of its lack, recedes a pace toward the theoretic ideal. Yet we know that if merit is rejected, even though only every now and then, there must be a sound reason for it; and our authority, having set up the fierce hints of the Rejected, at once proceeds to crush them with the editorial truth. We learn that the official reasons for the occasional rejection of merit are three in number, as follows : —

1. The editor has lately bought other fiction manuscripts of similar intrinsic character.

2. The editor is overstocked with fiction manuscripts of all characters.

3. The story, though meritorious, is unsuited to the policy of the editor’s particular magazine.

Sound and intelligent reasons, I doubt not, long familiar to unlucky writers through the medium of the vague but courteous rejection-slip. And yet, in a directly controversial connection, I, for one, find the allegations somewhat disappointing. To silence the rebellious unknown forever, it was necessary merely to hold up their arguments one by one and destroy them in full view of the audience. But what I and the Western writer expected to learn specifically at this point was, why future immortals have so much trouble in getting over the wall, why London and the other fellows were ‘continuously rejected for years.' Must we honestly try to feel that the reasons of overstock and policy assigned above completely answer us?

Suppose we seek to apply these reasons directly. Take the sufficiently common case, often enough brought to light: the case of a writer who at one moment, say in 1905, has a trunkful of manuscripts which he cannot sell, and a little later, say in 1908, has a trunkful of orders (more or less) which he cannot fill. Clearly there is food for inquiry in these cases, speculation genuinely interesting to students of such matters. But when we seek the official explanation of the lightning change, we are offered the surmise that the magazines of the world must have been, in 1905, all overstocked with manuscripts, or with manuscripts of this particular writer’s ‘intrinsic character,’ while by 1908, they were so direly in need of just such manuscripts that they were eager to pay over the most enormous prices for them. Or else that, between 1905 and 1908, the magazines of the world completely revolutionized their policies (whatever they may be) — all heading, by some astonishing coincidence, straight for our writer and his peculiar ‘type.’ Or, if we find neither of these explanations fully satisfying, there is nothing for it but to fall back on the simple and lucid hypothesis from which we set out. That is to say, the writer under consideration had no merit in 1905, and so was properly rejected; but by 1908 he had acquired merit, and then the editors were glad to accept him.

To many, I dare say, this last surmise will seem the soundest of the three. Some of us, it is true, may question even this. We may have felt that writers grow slowly in sureness and technique; that they ripen gradually in wisdom; but that the courted genius to-day was rarely the ungrammatical hardware drummer of year before last. But perhaps we are wrong here; perhaps it is true that writers put on and off merit like a shirt, that they master their trade suddenly, like learning to ride a bicycle. But in that case, what must we say of instances where there has been not even an hour’s interval for the acquisition of merit; where, in short, the editorial right-about-face has taken place upon a single identical manuscript?

Here is an item dealing with the first acceptance of a writer now well known. I found it straying in a newspaper, where it seems completely to have escaped the attention of the editorial explainers of the rejection of merit every now and then.

‘The first real literary success of Kathleen Norris, author of “Mother” and “The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne,” was the acceptance of a story by the Atlantic Monthly. “This story,” she says, “had been the rounds of the magazines, but when it finally appeared in the Atlantic I received four letters from editors, to whom it had previously been submitted and by whom it had been rejected, complimenting me upon my work and asking the privilege of considering my next story. One of these was Mr.—, of—’s Magazine. I wrote him thanking him for his praise, and told him that the story had been submitted to him on such and such a day, and had been returned with a printed note of thanks a fortnight later.”’

Why were these things so? The gentleman’s explanation of his interesting situation is unhappily lost to us. Somewhere here is clearly the heart of the whole matter, the soul of the Rejected’s rebellion; and yet just here, most unfortunately, the editorial explanation shows a tendency to thin away into mist. Why, indeed, are manuscripts rejected? At a growing loss, we may find our eyes now reverting to the explanations set up by the editor’s enemies: in particular to that poisonous charge that he ’lacks the reasonable faculty of discrimination.’ But this involves too complete a revolt from our point of departure to be entertained for a moment without the amplest evidence. The expert discriminator, in the grip of famine, deliberately spurning the food for which he starves! We shall require original facts to convince us of this.

I do not know where original facts of this sort could be searched for more fairly, or our inquiry better pursued, than in the log-book of a writer who has experienced the comedy from both sides of the wall, and has therefore viewed all these matters from various angles of vision. If the log-book here examined happens to be my own, that is only because this is the book with which I am most familiar. I, too, have felt some of that reticence and reluctance of good fortune which I mentioned above. Yet to make a contribution here, one must be personal, without apology; and I shall gladly forego my pleasant privacy and risk an appearance of ungraciousness which is far from my feeling, if some account of my own vicissitudes, by shedding light into the darkness, may hereafter make for sounder understanding among our great triumvirate—the seeking editor, the yet more seeking writer, and us, the Public, for whose edification all the trouble is being taken.

III

In the month of December, 1910, I found myself with two book-manuscripts accepted for publication. One of these manuscripts was an old story, begun five years earlier and much toiled over, which was to accomplish little except the painful cutting of my literary teeth. The other was Queed, then lately finished. Publication being still far off, no funds were coming into the till; and it is well known that the hoardings of a retired newspaper man are not indefinitely elastic. At this time, I had acquired considerable experience, over and above the two bookmanuscripts. I had been writing fiction in leisure hours since my twentieth year, in which year I sold my first story for money; and in the decade following, though my output was much circumscribed by the necessities of earning a living, I had sold not less than a dozen or fifteen stories to magazines of good standing, out of perhaps twice as many written. So now, fortified by the publisher’s cordial commendation of my latest work, I readdressed myself to the writing of short stories with positive expectations of results.

It very soon developed that I had reckoned entirely without my host. I discovered that I was not competent to earn my living by writing short stories: the reason being that the editors would not buy them. In the months between November, 1910, and May, 1911, I wrote and sent out, I find, eleven stories; and of these but three found acceptance anywhere — one going to a magazine of the second rate, and another, oddly enough, winning a prize in a ‘blind’ contest among some 15,000 manuscripts. But speaking in the large, I could not sell my stories. Few seemed to find them meritorious at all; throughout that winter of 1911 they were going begging the rounds of the leading magazine offices of the country. And by chance it was just at this time — namely in January, 1911, when I had not as yet sold a single story — that I read the first of the Bookman articles, and learned that there was a short-story famine abroad in the land.

The situation was calculated to interest me, economically and otherwise. Here was a story famine going on on one side of the wall; here was I, on the other side, staying out of bed to produce stories, the best and likeliest I could; and there, thirdly, were the editors, obviously preferring starvation to the consumption of my wares. Having devoted by now many years to trying to learn something about writing, and with some success behind me, I could not regard my case as completely disposed of by the examples of the seamstress and the hardware drummer. I could not assure myself that all the magazines were overstocked with fiction, hearing these loud complaints of just the contrary state. Nor could I flatter myself that all the magazines had lately bought stories of the same ‘intrinsic character’ as mine, or that they found mine, though meritorious, subversive of their policies: for if that had been the case, the editors could so easily have written me to that effect, thereby showing that they liked me. But the fact was that my stories, in this year 1911, commonly returned to me accompanied only by a printed slip: that mark which is (or should be) the clear intimation that the editor has seen in the would-be contributor no qualities worth his time to encourage.

This may be the place to make it clear that one unknown writer, at least, saw but little of that Ideal Editor, the wise almus pater, whose portrait we seem to catch in the editor’s accounts of himself. In the scattering dealings of a dozen years, I came in contact with but a single editor who showed any direct or continuing interest in me. One other there was, indeed, who wrote me friendly letters with the stories he sent back; but unluckily this one made a point of explaining to me, toward the end, that his interest in me was due to the kindness of O. Henry (whom he discovered, he said), who had praised my published stories to him, and recommended me, back in 1907. This gentleman rather went out of his way, it seemed, to make me feel that so far as he could see, heaven knew, there was little in my work itself to say a good word for me. The only editor who seemed to feel on his own account, in those days, that I was capable of writing stories to help out the famine, was Mr. Charles Hanson Towne, whom (like O. Henry) I never saw, but to whom I here make grateful acknowledgment. Along among the confraternity, Mr. Towne consistently encouraged me, in years when editorial encouragement was considerably important to me.

But to return to 1911, it is time to face frankly that thought which must have been for some time swelling in the reader’s mind. That is, that I have blindly passed over the obvious explanation of my situation, namely, that my stories of that time were actually devoid of all merit, and so were quite properly rejected. Now, it would be embarrassing to have to contest the native strength of this explanation, particularly as even to the writer’s partial eye the work in question never seemed extraordinary in any way. But the fact is that I have found it impossible to believe that my stories that year were entirely contemptible; for in the following year, by one of those odd tricks of time and chance, these very stories were receiving high praise from the editors themselves.

The situation of a writer who suddenly emerges over the wall is well enough understood. It is full of humors. Here is Robinson, vainly knocking at editors’ doors for years. He writes a book, which luckily lands among the best sellers: and lo, next morning, his ante-chamber is full of editors. He, the despised, learns the sweets of courtship: old lords and enemies have become his lovers. Robinson is pleased with the turn of affairs: for one thing, he can now pay his landlady; it is his triumph of vindication, succulent revenge. At the same time, being quite conscious that he is the same man he was last year and very much the same writer, he will naturally expect to hear some explanation of all this sudden adoration, some air of continuity preserved in the gratifying somersaulting. He will expect to hear his new admirers state frankly that they — or rather their assistants, who are always responsible, I find — must have been making some pretty bad mistakes last year; or at the least to find them contending that he, Robinson, having sallied out and won a large following for himself, is in a very different position, commercially speaking, from his position last year. But the editors, to Robinson’s astonishment, say neither this nor anything else. They avoid the past altogether; or perhaps they have forgotten it, Robinson the unknown being merely effaced by a new entity, Robinson the ‘headliner,’ or ‘top-notcher,’ born full-grown. And Robinson, if he intends to cling to his own essential unity with himself, will have to set afoot his own investigations.

What will he ascertain then? From such overtures and correspondences as naturally follow what is called a ‘sudden success,’ let me adduce, from my own log-book, three exemplary episodes.

My book Queed, which I had finally completed in August, 1910, was published on the sixth of May, 1911. On the eleventh day of May, 1911, a distinguished editor in New York wrote to me expressing his pleasure in discovering a new writer, and desiring to know if I did not have some stories on hand. I did have some stories on hand: five of them I had but lately offered to him, and received back again, each with a printed slip bearing the editor’s own signature in facsimile. So I pointed out these facts to my admirer; saying that, while I hoped to learn more and more about story-writing as I grew older, I could not feel that I had improved much since the preceding week, when one of my latest stories, as good as I knew how to make it, had been rejected by him without any signs of approbation.

Meanwhile, the slight lack of unity and coherence in its interior administration had been discovered in the magazine office; and I had a second letter from the editor, and then a third, suggesting that I should send back my rejected stories in order that he might determine whether or not he had a joke on his (anonymous) assistants. But I could not see, nor did he prove able to tell me, why, assuming that success had given my stories a sudden new merit, I should share these fruits of success with one who had so consistently declined to help me make it. So we parted, friendly. I did not send the stories back to him; the question of possible mistakes by his assistants was left open; and we have nothing positive to go on here but the editor’s own instinctive assumption that the writer of the meritorious book — given technical equipment — would be quite likely to tuck away something or other meritorious into his shorter efforts.

My experience with a second magazine was much more illuminating. This magazine had actually accepted a story of mine in earlier days, underpaying me for it, I regret to report, after two months’ wait. This was deemed by me to constitute an unusually favorable basis for further relations; so in September, 1911,I yielded to the blandishments of the editor — certainly one of the best known in America — and sent him three of my old stories, which he duly bought and published. Later, in asking for more, this editor wrote me that my stories, on publication in his magazine, had been ’tremendously successful.’ Yet in the year before, he (or his assistants) had rejected one of these very stories, together with several others not, I think, inferior. I naturally wondered why, if my 1911 stories were of a sort calculated to make a tremendous success (as he said), he had not more clearly perceived these possibilities in 1911, when such perception would have been more valuable to us both. I asked the editor why this was, and I must say for him that he, alone among his peers, honestly and manfully set to work to resolve my doubts. And, because he was honest and manful, he did resolve them, fairly meeting the precise question raised by the Western insurgent quoted above. He wrote me in these words: —

’I think I can tell you why editors so frequently reject the earlier and often the best work of writers [italics mine]; it is because any new writer who sends in first-class work, sends in work that is very different from what editors are used to. That is the reason Kipling’s work was rejected by the—s, when he brought his great body of books from India.’

It was not easy indeed for me to think of myself as a writer of such bold and original genius that my merits went singing high over the editors’ heads. Nevertheless, I felt, and I feel, that I was here laying hands upon a truth of the first interest to our inquiry. Here certainly was an explanation of why manuscripts are rejected, and of the prevailing short-story famine, which the editorial spokesman in the market-place had failed to give us. I deem it a matter of honorable obligation to pass it on to the Rejected, and to that public which as yet they cannot come at.

Nor does this candor lose anything by contrast with the attitude of my third sample editor, who felt somewhat more keenly his obligation to support the tradition of chief-editorial infallibility. This one addressed me in March, 1912, stating that he and his associates had been reading ‘with a great deal of pleasure and envy’ my stories in another publication. As a seeker of truth, I felt compelled to ask this editor why, then, had he and his associates rejected three of these very stories in the preceding year. His reply to my not, I trust, unnatural query proved to be a perfect statement of the official platform. He wrote:—

‘The fact that three of the stories, which appeared in —s, were returned by—s [that is, by us] is probably not so much of a puzzling phenomenon to me as it is to you. Indeed there are several causes which may have been responsible for or have contributed to the return of the manuscripts. The most likely of these is that the limited space at the command of the fiction department at that time did not permit the use of stories of this length. It is also possible that there may have been on hand a number of stories of a similar character; and another reason might be attributed to the lack of judgment of our readers, as I have yet to find a reader who is infallible. Still another cause might be that the judgment of the editors in charge of the fiction at that time was opposed to this particular kind of story.’

Few will fail to note how religiously this schedule of reasons follows that laid down in the handbook articles quoted above. But what struck me most in the letter was the tendency of its author to refer the whole issue to somebody else — to ’the lack of judgment of our readers,' to the judgment of the editors ‘at that time,’ and so forth. For it chanced that four of my stories between January and May, 1911, had been rejected by this editor personally, with his initials on the rejectional notes; and one of these four, at least, was one of those stories he now described himself as reading elsewhere ‘with a great deal of pleasure and envy.’ How could this editor (not his readers, associates, or assistants, but this man himself) read with pleasure and envy in 1912 the identical story which he had not thought worth printing in 1911? I couldn’t understand; nor has he ever told me. For when I wrote, in the scientific and researching spirit, to inquire, he withdrew in a dignified silence, designed, I fear, to show me up to myself as merely a bothersome crank, too full of petty rancors to let bygones be bygones.

But I did not mind the editor’s stately rebuff particularly. I felt that I had now learned to thread my way for myself. Like the little boy who had prayed for help from above when he seemed to be lost in the woods, I felt that I could say, ‘Nem’ mind, Lord. I can see Aunt Jinny’s house now.’

Let no one misunderstand this, or misconceive anything I have here written about my present good friends, the editors. I appreciate, and sympathize with, their many difficulties. I know, of course, that they do their best to be a good wall; and the stereotyped reasons they assign for the rejection of manuscripts do apply, I need hardly say, in the large majority of cases. All that we have been seeking to discover here was whether there was not still another reason, not sufficiently published and admitted by the editors, which yet applied in an important minority of cases. And irresistibly the conviction has been forced upon us that such a reason does, in fact exist, and that it does apply decisively and unfortunately.

Our conception of the editor has necessarily shifted as we have approached him closer. We see him at last as man, with man’s incertitudes. We observe him vacillating, doing strange things. We watch him pursuing with fifteen cents a word the writer he kicked down stairs last year, showering encomiums to-day on the little tale he did not want at any price yesterday. And winning his confidence at last by the chance of success, we find him actually admitting certain little foibles, not mentioned in his public remarks on the dearth of good fiction; perhaps only conceding that his assistants are not infallible; perhaps going so far as to say that if a writer is very good, very original, the editors are apt not to notice his merits.

So we seem no longer able to avoid the truth of that unwelcome charge of the Rejected, namely, that the editor sometimes lacks the reasonable faculty of discrimination. By the authoritative evidences we seem compelled to state positively that the editor makes mistakes, — no one knows how often: bad mistakes, which deprive us, the Public, of the ‘earlier and often the best work’ — as the editor wrote me — of writers whom we should be very glad indeed to read; which deprive the editor himself of the new feather in his cap, the coveted pearl in his crown of glory; and which rob the meritorious unknown, not merely of the means to pay their keep, but of that recognition which is surely not less dear to them.

IV

And what then? To criticize people for being human, like the rest of us, is a waste of time, unless we are ready to point some remedy for their inadvertencies. What can good editors do to minimize their costly errors of judgment ?

Obviously a difficult and delicate question, which I for one would not venture to answer with authority. And yet, from the evidences, certain suggestions for improvement do gradually emerge, which perhaps might be roughly summarized as follows: —

1. That the publishers should secure as their editors and readers the most discriminating men securable.

2. That these editors, when they recognize merit, however disguised, however struggling or faulty, should forthwith cease to sit and mourn over the short-story famine, but actually proceed to encourage and foster the merit in question, according to the theory of the Ideal Editor.

3. That the editors shall at all times treat the unknown with scrupulous courtesy and fairness, never taking advantage of him just because, in that year, he happens to be unknown.

It might be worth while to amplify a little these three possible clauses of a new compact.

A magazine being, not an eleemosynary patron of the arts, but a business institution conducted for profit, its proper task, on the whole, is to supply what the public wants; and it is quite true that nobody on earth really knows what the public wants. But at least we can say that one trained man intuitively comes a little nearer to the priceless secret than another. One possesses a little more imagination than his brother, a little wider outlook and greater sensitiveness, a somewhat broader ability to enter into the tastes and feelings of people far other than himself. This trained man, having large and sound standards within himself, would make a more discriminating editor than his colleague. And if he would be a more expensive man, he would yet not be so expensive in the long run as his cheaper rival. In most businesses the importance of the buyer is fully recognized and rewarded; the buyers of manuscript are exceptions to an established principle in being, I believe, for the most part small-salaried men. It would seem that the magazine owner might do well to hold to the rule that goods well bought are half sold, rather than seek to economize at the source and origin of all his profits.

This more sensitive buyer of manuscript, free of the limitations and prepossessions of his narrower brother, would undoubtedly see merit sometimes where another would see nothing but an ‘ unhappy ending,’ or 3000 words too long. And this merit — whether mathematically four-square with his so-called policy or not — would please him instinctively, and he would jump at the opportunity of encouraging and developing it. There is a contrary theory, I know well. Mr. Howells himself has told us that the editor, finding himself charmed by some unknown contributor, ‘may hide his pleasure in a short stiff note of acceptance’; he speaks approvingly of the wholesome effects of‘a smart brisk snub’; while on the other hand certifying that ‘the contributor may be sure that he [the editor] has missed no merit in his work.’ If the contributor could indeed be sure of this, then doubtless the rest might follow. But unluckily there does not seem to be any such assurance.

From my own experience, and with due allowance made for the self-complacence usual to writers of the second and third grades, I feel sure that what the unknown of merit chiefly needs is direct editorial encouragement. He will get, doubtless has got, smart brisk snubs a-plenty; and an encouraging letter from the discerning editor will not only help to show him that the sanctum’s choice among fictions is not altogether the sealed mystery it had sometimes seemed, but will directly aid him, by pointing out his errors, to do better, come nearer ‘availability,’ next time. And the editor, for his part, will be building up friendly personal relations with a growing circle of meritorious unknowns, a few of whom will be pretty sure some day to reward him well for all his trouble.

When the editor is discriminating, when he is systematically encouraging to merit of all sorts, he might — thirdly — be on his guard not to take too much advantage of the immense superiority of his position. This, unfortunately, does not follow axiomatically. Through strategic strength and association, the editors, as is well known, have evolved a code of procedure, binding as law and altogether in their own interests: a code under which, for instance, they take an unlimited free option on the young writer’s capital, his manuscript, holding it up one month or ten, if they prefer, and paying him, in case of acceptance, after as long an interval as they like. These extremes, of course, have always been avoided by a few magazines of the better class; with the intensifying competition among publishers, to say nothing of such influences as the recently organized league or union of authors, they tend naturally to disappear. But unhappily there are other and subtler instances of an editor’s willingness to take advantage: instances of downright bad treatment, I fear, bad faith even, understandings made and not kept — things the more galling to the unknown in that they so clearly betray the indifference of strength to the complaints of the weak and despised.

I have particularly not wanted to seem to be rolling up here a mere list of grievances against the editors, men who, I repeat, are usually doing the best they can under considerably perplexing circumstances. Citations are unnecessary; doubtless men’s opinions will always differ as to what is just and equitable and what is not. I will merely risk the statement that if the now successful writers of the country chose to make public to-day some of the experiences and correspondences of their undiscovered days, some of them might give well-known editors some considerably embarrassing moments. And that surely is a pity; it is a pity for any man, in any business, to leave behind him a wake of bitterness or ill-feeling. And it is so absurdly easy for an editor to make a friend of an unknown writer; and they do say that sometimes the unknown of one year is next year very well known indeed.

There is one thing more. In the struggle of the unrecognized writer to get a hearing, it has seemed to me that the great weakness of his position is that the editor has always found it so easy to bury his mistakes. The successful writer, that is, too readily disconnects himself from his unsuccess. The editor, forgetting how he kicked Robinson about last year, approaches the new-famous one with an air of hearty geniality and an offer of $500 for the story he could have had at one tenth the price last year, and thank you very much besides. And Robinson gives a few flattered laughs and pockets the check. It is, of course, the human and pleasant thing for him to do; but undoubtedly it makes things harder for the brothers he has left on the other side of the wall. What is there here to make an editor search his heart?

Suppose, instead, that Robinson felt strongly his own uninterrupted continuity; that he retained his ‘classconsciousness,’ so to say, as a writer; and that he therefore addressed his distinguished visitors somewhat as follows: —

‘Gentlemen, you come to me at last, impelled — may I say? — by the thought that you can make money out of me, and asking to share in a success which I should never have made if I had had to depend on you. I greet you and thank you for your few kind words. As a man, I must live, as a writer I must write, and as a successful writer I must indeed have an outlet for my wares. But if you will excuse me, gentlemen, it is not my purpose to be bought and sold about like a sack of old potatoes. In short, such of my old stories as I still consider up to my best standard I shall now offer to the Favorite Magazine, which took an interest in me, was fair and friendly and kind to me, at a time when you made a different decision as to my general desirability as an acquaintance. Now, gentlemen — really, excuse me! There is no use telling me to let bygones be bygones, for, you see, nothing at all has really gone by. We’re all the same men we were last year, and I am very much the same writer.’

I venture to say that the editors, after listening to such remarks as these, would return introspective to their sanctums, thinking Robinson indeed a queer grudging crank, yet unconsciously resolved to scrutinize alt unknown manuscripts with a wider sympathy forever thenceforward.

Does that seem a fanciful hope? I have evidence that it is not.

From the record of the past as it occasionally comes to light here and there, I cannot doubt that there are today a considerable number of unknown young men and young women writing stories which you and I would be glad to read, who yet cannot succeed in getting these stories under our eye. Not by lack of merit, but only by somebody’s misunderstanding of the secret passwords, they cannot get over the wall. I have felt, and I feel, my kinship with these unknown young men and women. I remember that the manuscript of Queed, which was destined to change my personal fortune as a writer, was rejected by the first two publishers to whom it was offered; and I must realize that if two more publishers, or four or six more, had similarly refused me, I might to this moment have remained on the unhappy side of the wall. Hence I have felt it a matter of duty to contribute my experiences to my unknown brothers, believing as I do that with light alone comes better understanding.

The conflict between editors and undiscovered writers is age-long and irretrievable, like that of cattlemen and sheepmen. I have no hope of seeing a millennium in which editors shall speak fulsomely of the daily offerings of manuscript, and the Rejected praise with one voice the editor’s justice, mercy, and acumen. Much smaller gains would be acceptable here; but these we have a right to hope for. One of those editors whom I mentioned above told me long afterward that my letters to him — commonplace enough letters, as we have seen, pointed only in stating plainly what every writer thinks or has thought—had furnished him with the jolt of his career. He said that he had always been a better reader of manuscript because of them. And I felt that this statement from that solitary man had justified all my researches, and rewarded me for all my pains.