II
Who but a Balzac will take a census of Greater Grub Street, enumerating its aristocrats, its well-to-do obscure bourgeois, its Bohemians, its rakes and evil-doers, its artisans and struggling lower classes? Among its citizens are the materials of a newer Comédie Humaine. The two personalities outlined above merely set a vague intellectual boundary to this world. In its many kinds and stations of workers Grub Street is as irreducible as nebulæ. Its aristocracy is to be found any time in that “Peerage” of Grub Street, the contents pages of the better magazines, where are arrayed the names of successful novelists, essayists, and short-story writers, of men and women who deal with specialties such as travel, historical studies, war correspondence, nature interpretation, sociology, politics, and every other side of life and thought; and here, too, are enlisted their morganatic relatives, the poets and versifiers, and their showy, prosperous kindred, the illustrators, who may be summoned from Grub Street to paint a portrait at Newport. This peerage is real, for no matter upon what stratum of Grub Street each newcomer may ultimately find his level of ability, this is the goal that was aimed at in the beginning. This is the Dream.
Staid, careful burghers of the arts, producing their good, dull, staple necessities in screed and picture, live about the lesser magazines, the women’s periodicals, the trade and technical press, the syndicates that supply “Sunday stuff” to newspapers all over the land, the nameless, mediocre publications that are consumed by our rural population in million editions. The Bohemian element is found writing “on space” for newspapers this month, furnishing the press articles of a theatre or an actress the next, running the gamut of the lesser magazines feverishly, flitting hither and thither, exhausting its energies with wasteful rapidity, and never learning the business tact and regularity that keep the burgher in comfort and give his name a standing at the savings bank. The criminal class of Grub Street includes the peddler of false news, the adapter of other men’s ideas, and the swindler who copies published articles and pictures outright, trusting to luck to elude the editorial police. The individual in this stratum has a short career and not a merry one; but the class persists with the persistence of the parasite. Grub Street’s artisans are massed about the advertising agencies, producing the plausible arguments put forth for the world of merchandise, and the many varieties of illustration that go with them; while the nameless driftwood which floats about the whole thoroughfare includes no one knows how many hundreds of aspirants whose talents do not suffice for any of these classes, together with the peddler of other men’s wares on commission, who perhaps ekes out a life by entering as a super at the theatres, the artists’ models, both men and women, who pose in summer and are away with a theatrical company in winter, the dullard, the drone, the ne’er-do-well, the palpable failure. At one end, Art’s chosen sons and daughters; at the other, her content, misguided dupes.
The free lance is bred naturally in New York, and thrives in its atmosphere, because the market for his wares is stable and infinitely varied. The demand he satisfies could be appeased by no other system. The very life of metropolitan publishing lies in the search for new men and variety. Publishers spend great sums upon the winnowing machinery that threshes over what comes to their editors’ desks, and no editor in the metropolis grudges the time necessary to talk with those who call in person and have ideas good enough to carry them past his assistants. Publicly, the editorial tribe may lament the many hours spent yearly in this winnowing process. Yet every experienced editor in New York has his own story of the stranger, uncouth, unpromising, unready of speech, who stole in late one afternoon and seemed to have almost nothing in him, yet who afterwards became the prolific Scribbler or the great D’Auber. Not an editor of consequence but who, if he knew that to-morrow this ceaseless throng of free lances, good, bad, and impossible, had declared a Chinese boycott upon him and would visit his office no more, would regard it as the gravest of crises.
New York provides a market so wide for the wares of the free lance that almost anything in the way of writing or picture can eventually be sold, if it is up to a certain standard of mediocrity. A trained salesman familiar with values in the world of merchandise would consider this market one of the least exacting, most constant, and remunerative. And it is a market to be regarded, on the whole, in terms of merchandise. Not genius or talent sets the standards, but ordinary good workmanship. Magazines are simply the apex of the demand—that corner of the mart where payment is perhaps highest and the byproduct of reputation greatest. For each of the fortunate workers whose names figure in the magazine peerage, there are virtually hundreds who produce for purchasers and publications quite unknown to the general public, and often their incomes are equal to those of the established fiction writer or popular illustrator.
New York has eight Sunday newspapers that buy matter for their own editions and supply it in duplicate to other Sunday newspapers throughout the country under a syndicate arrangement. Perhaps an average of five hundred columns of articles, stories, interviews, children’s stuff, household and feminine gossip, humor, verse, and miscellany, with illustrations, are produced every week for this demand alone; and at least fifty per cent of the yearly $150,000 that represents its lowest value to the producers is paid to free-lance workers. The rest goes to men on salary who write Sunday matter at space rates. This item is wholly distinct from the equally great mass of Sunday stuff written for the same papers by salaried men. Several independent syndicates also supply a similar class of matter to papers throughout the United States, for both Sunday and daily use. This syndicate practice has, within the past ten years, made New York a veritable journalistic provider for the rest of the nation. The metropolis supplies the Sunday reading of the American people, largely because it has the resources of Grub Street to draw upon. Syndicate matter is cheaper than the provincial product, it is true; but not price alone is accountable for this supremacy of the syndicate. By the side of the workmanlike stories, articles, skits, and pictures supplied by Greater Grub Street, the productions of a provincial newspaper staff on salary grow monotonous in their sameness, and reveal themselves by their less skillful handling.
The Sunday-reading industry provides a market, not only for writers and artists, but also for photographers, caricaturists, cartoonists, makers of squibs and jokes, experts in fashions, devisers of puzzles, men and women who sell ideas for novel Sunday supplements, such as those printed in sympathetic inks, and the like. It is a peculiarity of our country worth noting, that all our published humor finds its outlet through the newspapers. Though England, Germany, France, and other countries have a humorous press distinctly apart, the United States has only one humorous journal that may be called national in tone. An overwhelming tide of caricature and humor sweeps through our daily papers, but the larger proportion is found in the illustrated comic sheets of the leading New York dailies; and these are syndicated in a way that gives them a tremendous national circulation. The Sunday comic sheet, whatever one wishes to say of its quality, was built in Greater Grub Street, and there, to-day, its foundations rest.
In Grub Street, too, dwells the army of workers who furnish what might be called the cellulose of our monthly and weekly publications—interviews, literary gossip, articles of current news interest, matter interesting to women, to children, to every class and occupation. As there are magazines for the servant girl and clerk, so there are magazines for the millionaire with a country estate, the business man studying system and methods, the woman with social or literary aspirations, the family planning travel or a vacation. To-day it is a sort of axiom in the publishing world that a new magazine, to succeed, must have a new specialty. Usually this will be a material one, for our current literature deals with things rather than thought; it is healthy but never top-heavy. Each new magazine interest discovered is turned over to Greater Grub Street for development, and here it is furnished with matter to fit the new point of view, drawings and photographs to make it plain, editors to guide, and sometimes a publisher to send it to market.
Then come, rank on rank, the trade and technical periodicals, of which hundreds are issued weekly and monthly in New York. These touch the whole range of industry and commerce. They deal with banking, law, medicine, insurance, manufacturing, and the progress of merchandise of every kind through the wholesale, jobbing, and retailing trades, with invention and mechanical science, with crude staples and finished commodities, with the great main channels of production and distribution and the little by-corners of the mart. Some of them are valuable publishing properties; more are insignificant; yet each has to go to press regularly, and all must be filled with their own particular kinds of news, comment, technical articles, and pictures. Theirs is a difficult point of view for the free lance, and on this account much of their contents is written by salaried editors and assistants. Contributions come, too, from engineers, scientists, bankers, attorneys, physicians, and specialists in every part of the country. Foremen and superintendents and mechanics in some trades send in roughly outlined diagrams and descriptions that enable the quick-witted editors to see “how the blamed thing works” and write the finished article. The American trade press is still in an early stage of development on its literary side. It has grown up largely within the past two decades, and still lacks literary workmanship. To hundreds of free-lance workers this field is now either unknown or underestimated. Yet year after year men disappear from Park Row and the round of Magazinedom, to be found, if any one would take the trouble to look them up, among the trade journals. Some of the great properties in this class belong to journalists who saw an opportunity a decade ago, and grasped it.