Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/526

512 due to its being printed not in double columns, but with an unbroken line), and with all its peculiar excellence in literature and art, was a cheap magazine. Around it have sprung up a swarm of magazines, all cheap, all more or less illustrated in the style which it brought into vogue, and all of them seem to thrive. Their success is due to two facts, the desultory habits of reading which prevail now, and the demand for pictorial illustration.

The taste for intellectual recreation and amusement of all kinds seems to tend strongly in these two directions. The change in the character of dramatic entertainments, which is so much deplored by critics, is but a manifestation of the same tendency. People now don't like a tragedy upon the language and the characters of which they have to ponder, and the pleasure in which is to be derived from the poetry and the subtle conceptions of the author, and the careful embodiment of those conceptions by the actor. They like what are known to playwrights specifically as dramas—representations of every-day life that are enjoyable without the trouble of thinking; which are agreeable as a whole or in bits, each bit good in itself; of which they can enjoy any one act if they choose without troubling themselves about the others; and in which there are pretty women, handsome men, grotesque characters, fine costumes, and scenes which are pleasant pictures to look at and to remember. "Kosedale" is your model modern drama. Naturally, such people like for their literary recreation not a big book about one subject, but a magazine which can be read without care, can be taken up and laid down almost at pleasure, and without trouble as to continuity of interest or keeping up a train of thought. Serious subjects they are not averse to; that is, if they are not treated in too serious a way. They don't like to be preached at except on Sunday, and even then the preaching they find most interesting and most efficacious is not in the style of—nineteenthly, and to conclude. They believe, and with reason, that earnestness and truthfulness, even upon subjects of importance, need not be embodied in a dull and heavy style. The didactic way of the contributors to the old "Gentleman's Magazine" is altogether out of favor; and we even speculate now upon fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute, as if writer and reader were thinking the matter over pleasantly together. Anything else is left for hard students and thinkers who do it as their daily labor.

It is upon such a plan of a magazine as we have thus suggested rather than described that we have formed, which, successful as it was at the first, and steadily as it has grown in public favor, has thus far only begun to be what it is to be according to the purposes and well-founded hopes of its conductors.