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OR a long time before going to the office I had thought of manuscript-reading for a popular magazine as likely to prove vastly interesting. I had thought, too, that it would be a simple matter: it was merely a question of being greatly delighted or of being intolerably bored. The great mass of contributions that lay between these two extremes, where one was neither greatly delighted nor intolerably bored, did not enter into my naïve calculation at all, though I was speedily to learn that upon this interminable plain of the commonplace the magazine must depend for its very existence. The scrub and sage-bush must in some way be camouflaged as a forest. The sacred groves of the Muses were far away.

Looking back, it appears to me now that as a "reader" my normal state of mind in those early days was one of doubt whether to recommend or reject the manuscript upon which I was for the moment engaged. Often the only solution was to pass the doubt on to the editor. He, having no other alternative, was compelled to make a decision. Perhaps at times he followed the suggestion of the old sea-captain before whom Conrad went for his examination for a master's certificate. In the oral examination to test Con

rad's practical knowledge of seamanship, the old man gave him a hypothetical case. With his ship on a lee shore in a gale of wind, from Conrad one resource after another was taken, until finally he was forced to confess that there appeared nothing more that he could do.

"You might pray," the old sailor said mildly. Perhaps the editor did sometimes pray. There was often great need.

Yet in its progress from reader to reader a doubtful manuscript was often transformed into a successful poem or story through the ingenuity of some one quick to recognize the possibilities that a change here or there might make. We were all keenly alive to the advantage of thus exercising our wits, and I am sure that we rejoiced more over the lost sheep thus saved than over the ninety and nine that came safely to the fold. And, to their great credit, the authors usually rejoiced with us. Frank R. Stockton was always ready to admit that his great short story must have gained vastly by the substitution of the title, “The Lady, or the Tiger?" for his original one, "The King's Arena." Mr. Carey had suggested the change, and Mr. Stockton, being at the time somewhere in Europe, was not consulted.

A new title was once used by us for a serial not so much for the sake of obtaining popularity for it as to disarm possible criticism for using it at all. We had published in the magazine Dr. Arthur C. McGiffert's life of Luther, a work that at first had aroused much adverse feeling on the part of certain members of the Roman Catholic Church, and later, at the suggestion of Dr. Henry van Dyke, Mr. Johnson, as a mollifying counter to the Luther, had secured for the magazine, as he has related in his "Remembered Yesterdays," Maurice Francis Egan's charming and unpolemic life of St. Francis Assisi, using as the title of the book, "Everybody's Saint Francis." Whether the title served its intended purpose of dispelling potential Protestant wrath I cannot say, but there was none voiced, so far as I know.

But changing a title was one thing; altering the structure of a story or adding a new ending was quite another matter. These, of course, we did not do without the permission of the author. We have saved lives that were hopelessly lost, and parted lovers who were on the point of living happily ever after, and all for art's sake and sweet reasonableness. THE CENTURY has never been averse to unhappy endings and a certain inevitable gloom, but it has usually protested against the distortion of life and plausibility for the sake of a possible sob at the close of a tale. The kind of change that we more frequently have made has been to ask for the omission of matter that has had no bearing on the motive or plot. One case I recall that was typical of many.

We had accepted a short story without noting in it any special weakness, but when we came to prepare it for the

press, always a severe test of a story's real quality, we found that almost at the beginning it began to wander into by-paths, and was nearly half finished before it resumed its direct course. Thereupon we returned it to the author, and, pointing out the fault, asked her to consider seriously the advisability of omitting the irrelevant paragraphs. We assured her, however, that whether she agreed to the suggestion or not, the story was definitely accepted.

The author kept the story nearly two weeks, and then returned it with the changes we had desired. She said that her heart had been set on the paragraphs to which we had objected, and she had been toiling to make them more clearly component parts of the tale, though feeling from the first that they were interpolations. She knew we were right, she added, but, oh, how she had hated to part with them! She had written them from her very heart, and had never done better work.

Her feeling is common enough to all members of the writing guild. In the fever of composition certain personal experiences and emotions flash through their minds, and they set them down as having a universal appeal. In the glamour of their coming unbidden they take on for their authors something of the strange mysteriousness of prophetic utterances. But the unsympathetic editor, having small interest in demoniac possession, but much in the demand of his readers for swift action, prunes them away.

The happy Victorians were more fortunate in their editors and readers. Those of us who are old can yet recall the content with which we settled down to the leisurely perusal no swift skimming of pages then!-of our few

rare books, lingering with delight where Dickens, breaking the thread of his story, mounted to the top of the stage-coach speeding through the frosty dawn, and showed us all the pleasant country-side awaking to the day; or where he skirted the thin ice of Victorian impropriety, and led Bella on through a thousand or more faltering, but happy, words to confess to her husband: "I think-there is a ship upon the ocean-bringing to you and me"- No, I will not say it. I cannot bring back with the confession that old reader's half-shamed, half-enraptured emotion at the author's daring, the break in his voice when he read it aloud, as he did so often in that day of few books and of many eager to read them. And when Thackeray, pausing for a while from the recital of the progress of his hero through the pitfalls of the world, affected his far-removed, ironic scorn of pride and folly and puppy love, did we not think it all very wonderful, and imitate the manner in our school and college essays, feeling ourselves very wise and disillusioned? Critics will tell you to-day that it was all padding-padding to fill out the prescribed number of pages for the weekly instalments of those feverishly awaited books. not believe them. These friendly loiterings by the way were the moments when the great writer took us into his confidence and poured out his most treasured thoughts-the wisdom and sentiment and wit of his commonplace-books, jotted down in flashes of exaltation. We, too, have our commonplace-books; but, alas! leisure has passed from the world, and editors and readers will have none of it; they demand only head-lines and swift action. "Fine old Leisure!" George Eliot

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apostrophized it, and through pages lamented that even in her day it was gone. gone. If she had but known ours!

But are we not, in our present-day impatience with detail and our eagerness to abridge all knowledge, in danger of leaving few classics to ennoble the age? I have never been obliged to condense a book that I greatly admired without the uneasy impression of being the breaker of the image of some possible new god in letters. In the editor's condensation of a potential work of art he retains the qualities that appeal to his own taste and judgment, but possibly eliminates those qualities that appeal to the man on the street. But a classic, Bishop Gore declares, is the adequate expression in a book of the best common mind of a whole community. It is impossible, he adds, to conceive of such a book to-day because the "common mind" is lacking except in small groups.

Certainly there is no longer a common literary mind. Make a Biblical allusion to-day to a group of educated young people, and you will read in their stare of incomprehension how far the Bible, in its merely literary aspect, is no longer a force to draw us together. An allusion to Dickens or Thackeray or Scott or George Eliot will serve equally as well to prove the same contention. We scorn the past, and lose all perspective; and our bestsellers, exalted for an hour, having no hold on the common mind, vanish in the next.

But I have no call to preach, having been led into the alien practice for the moment only by an uneasy conscience at the thought of all the fine sentiments I may have slaughtered and the perfect phrases I may have mangled

in the name of necessity or speed or apochryphal good taste. An apparently trivial detail in Conrad's "Typhoon" has long remained in my mind as an extraordinary example of his genius for portraying character in a mere incident. It was the moment when Captain MacWhirr, coming aboard the new Nan-Shan for the first time as her master, in the midst of the owner's expression of his confidence in him as the captain of so fine a ship, with a vague "Have you? Thank 'ee," abruptly walked away to the cabin door and pointed out the untrustworthiness of its lock. I myself had seen a ship's captain, just returned to his newly overhauled vessel, and, standing on the quarter-deck, unmindful of the glory of fresh paint and glittering varnish and brass, curtly call the attention of his crestfallen mate to a frayed seizing high aloft; and suddenly the thought came to me of the havoc an editor unacquainted with men of Captain MacWhirr's unimaginative type might have wrought in the book if the need of space or the desire to hasten the action of the story had led him to strike out the passage as an unimportant detail.

But no detail is unimportant if it has a special appeal for some reader, and it is in its multitude of such special appeals that a book approaches the status of a classic. No other great writer of fiction has displayed greater and more obvious faults than Dickens, but he had many facets to his mind, and in the transfiguring glow shed from these all men somewhere found the impulse for their own dreams and visions. He had, too, in a high degree that inexplicable something that made him what we are accustomed to call vaguely "a born story-teller." With

out that gift as an igniting spark no heaped-up mass of beauty and intuition and truth ever became a beaconlight to draw the hurrying feet of

men.

"Born within sound of Bow bells"the simple phrase, so wholly without significance and having no reference to any special incident that I can now recall, came to me in my earliest reading, and from that time to this, for some strange, mysterious, almost uncanny reason, has had the power to move me more deeply than any other collocation of words in the language. To the romantic boy who knew London only through Dickens and an unusually varied and incongruous group that ranged from De Foe and Marryat to the lives of Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard, London was the most romantic spot in the world, and to me those magical six words epitomized all its romance. I had had no desire to be born there, but with the most extraordinary longing I wanted to stand within sound of Bow bells and in fancy see all storied London pass before me. The words opened a window into another world.

It is the lack of some meetingground for the common mind that makes much of the fiction of the last two decades shadowy and unreal. The novels of Freudian complexes and subconscious reactions appealed only to a small group of protagonists, slightly augmented by those few who were only curious and those few who were bored by their own vacuity of mind. The later outburst, where disingenuous precocity came into the lime light and, like a posing Judic, "achieved incredible indecencies in modest black gown and white collar," could be interesting only to adoles

cence, and that only for a brief period, adolescence having more concern with emotion as a personal asset than as a spectacle. For a short time our young people have posed, and at times some what brilliantly posed, as new prophets in a world given over to sin, and proved their contention by turning their own minds inside out and displaying the roots of their moral aberrations.

There is, in consequence, no reason to despair of mankind. The heart of the world is sound; it always has been sound. If one must lay a finger on the cause of the evil that many of us think has fallen on present-day imaginative writing, the general revolt that has come to the world against all things under the heavens may serve as well as any. No one can refute the theory. And if revolt is in the air, trust adolescence to go as far as the next, and the young have recently done most of our writing of fiction and verse. Well, there they have gone rather far.

But already the mode is passing; the new mode no man can guess at. For there is no progressive growth to the novel, though bookmen have learnedly given us its history. The foundation lies in the primitive tale, but what type of building will rise upon that foundation at any given period depends mainly upon the ingenuity of its literary architects to depart from the type of the preceding, of which the age has begun to tire. In their revulsion the writers of our coming novels may go so far as a return to a new "John Halifax, Gentleman." Perhaps Ben Hecht or Sherwood Anderson may write it.

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So long as I read manuscripts, I think that I never really lost hope of

chancing upon one that was notable; for I was speedily to learn that the event would be only a chance, not a matter of habitual occurrence. In time the finding of a passably bright or amusing tale was an event: for the grist did not come to the mill. In a casual mental review of the long row of volumes of magazines that I have toiled over, I can recall few striking features in a literary landscape that on the whole was pleasing. If the burning bush of genius did not blaze on every page of the magazine, there was the assurance that one would always find dignity, wholesomeness, and good taste.

I remember, of course, the War Series, the lives of Lincoln and Cromwell, of Luther and Napoleon, the Siberian papers of Kennan and the California of the gold discovery, the English and French cathedrals, and certain striking novels. But these were mainly specially planned features, not ones that came to the office in the normal course of chance happenings, and which a reader would be in a way of coming upon unexpectedly. Of the latter sort I recall at the moment, among purely descriptive articles, none that stands out with more definite clearness than Lady De Lancey's "A Week at Waterloo," written at the time of the battle; and Louise Herrick Wall's "Heroic San Francisco," the story of her long walk through the city on the day following the great earthquake in April, 1906. At the thought of short stories there come to my mind at once Kipling's "The Brushwood Boy," Edwards's "Two Runaways," and Stewart's "The Dagger," though a careful review of the whole long list for nearly forty years might bring to light others that I