Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/340

314 The restriction has not disappeared, nor has it been unduly relaxed. It is not desirable, and never will be, that anything should appear in a magazine for home reading which could not properly be read aloud to any audience, so far as a moral consideration dictates the propriety. There is no occasion for regret on the part of publisher, editor, or reader because of such a restriction. And it is important to add that writers are quite unconscious of the limitation.

The complaint that magazine editors stand at the gates of the Temple of Literary Fame to guard its sanctities, and that they are constrained by financial considerations to favor mediocrity at the expense of genius by the exclusion of everything original and unconventional, is not made by writers who are doing great work in contemporary literature, but by those who, unsatisfied with the ample liberty of the realm of letters, desire an unusual license, which in the degree that it approaches insolence is surely alien to genius. There is a certain hauteur which belongs in common to childhood and to genius, but it is gracious and in harmony with ideals; it is not a parade of vulgarity.

The editor has no conventional shibboleth which he imposes upon the aspiring writer, and no avoidance of life's realities save through an instinct which rules him as it does all sane readers. Art may disclose what nature veils, by giving it new veils, but it does not uncover any dark under side which nature insistently hides. It avoids what the Greeks called "the Unspeakable."

The very complexity of a refined literature introduces new perils. Indeed, what the editor has now chiefly to guard against is an atonic æstheticism. It is easy to exclude vulgar slang, wanton profanity, and shameless vice; this almost does itself. But paganism is more insinuating than the frank Gothicism of barbarians or the more modern naturalism. It is something even more softly alluring than paganism, this oversensuous refinement, which so easily blends with every charm and grace literature and art have won from the development of ages. Sometimes it surreptitiously even borrows from the stores of naturalism elements which it mystically veils and which gleam through the nice phraseology like the heat-lightnings of a summer twilight. In the effects thus produced there is neither true beauty nor beautiful truth. The art is not under the control of the self-centred spirit; yet an almost Titanic force and subtlety may be engaged in the defiance of all heavenly powers—in which case the soft allurement and the nice, self-conscious phrasing are displaced by really fulgurant elements, and we confront a genius whose dread power may create a mirage lifting up to mortal view the spectacles of the lower world.

Evidently this kind of literature—both the oversensuous and the Tartarean—whatever degree of imaginative power it may have, belongs to the book rather than to the magazine. The exclusion from the magazine in this as well as in many other cases is not from any regard to "the young person," but from a consideration of fitness, having in view the general audience. Any one can see that the translation of a novel by Zola would not have been suitable for magazine publication, since, however rigidly edited and adapted, the lowering atmosphere would have remained, and the ugly view of the under side of human passions. Fortunately in English and American literature very few writers of great genius have desired to occupy this field, so diligently cultivated by the French masters of fiction; with us the whole region has been abandoned to second and third rate authors, whose courage is only daunted by the caution which a sane public opinion enjoins. Titanic work is justified only by Titanic genius like that of Thomas Hardy and of Algernon Swinburne.

In general, the leading writers of fiction produce the kind of work best suited to magazine publication, so that there is no schism between the magazine and genius; and this is as true of short stories as it is of novels.

Considering the kind of criticism passed by certain writers upon contemporary magazine stories, we are compelled to think that these critics never read the stories. At least they have no adequate conception of the development of the short story during the last twenty years. It is easy without any real knowl-