“Now take another writer of the same name—zippy, peppy, up-to-date—a man who can sell his stuff to the Saturday Evening Post, than which there is no higher standard in our day and generation. Why, gentlemen, if Washington Irwin should turn over in his grave, I say without fear of contradiction, he would be absolutely and teetotally unable to recognize his own son, Will.
“And, gentlemen, consider for a moment, where this here imagination leads. If you depend on it for your raw material, you can’t go in and out among the people, notebook in hand and jot down what you actually see with your own eyes. No, sir, you got to work your old imagination for what you write about, and what does this lead to? Why, gentlemen, you all know that Edwin A. Poe, for instance, when he wanted to write about some raven or a skeleton in armor or something had to drink himself into a state of insensibility or worse before he could put pen to paper. That’s what they had to do.
“Think of those debased minds like James J. Whittier or William Wordsworth Longfellow or George Cullen Bryant, maybe, hiding in their wretched garrets or some place, taking shot after shot of hop, smoking opium, maybe, or worse, to keep their imaginations going to supply even the feeble demand for their hand-made output.
“That was bad enough, my friends, but things got going from bad to worse before they got better, and who made them better? Why, you, my friends, and me, the American business man. It was this way. The wide-awake business man of America began to employ the best writers, to write his ads. These writers dealt with facts, gentleman, facts, in their own inimical style, if I may say so, and the advertising sections of our great American magazines shortly rivaled in interest the stories and other fictional matter, so that it was the common custom of our business men to tear out the advertising section and keep that to read and throw the rest away.
“The editors and publishers of our great magazines found themselves paying good money for stories and for good white paper to print them on and it being torn out and thrown away, which wasn’t good business. This, gentlemen, was the lowest depths to which literature at last got, the apothesis of our literature, if you will pardon the use of a high-brow term.
“Then a smart, keen-witted American business man who happened to be editor of one of the magazines saved the situation, so to speak. He saw that literature had got anæmic. It was short on red blood corpuscles. It needed a transfusion of blood.
“So he put the patient face to face and shoulder to shoulder with the real force in American life, the advertisements—made a page ad face a page of so-called literature—cut the stories into strips and put a column ad next to a column of fictional writing.
“The name of this literary genius, I am creditably informed, was Cyrus H. K. Bok, and, believe me, the greatest surgeon of modern times, who saved American literature from taking the count in a fight to a finish was this same old Doc Bok.
“The result was not only that you couldn’t tear out the stories and throw them away without simultaneously and at the same time destroying the thing you wanted to read, and after you had read all the ads two or three times you simply had to give the stories the once over.
“And, moreover and likewise, the fictitious writers couldn’t keep on writing their imaginative bunk and get away with it. They couldn’t stack up some guff about a raven or a skeleton in armor against the real thing, like the Ginko Cigar or the Jimmy Pipe. If they tried to pull any Rip Van Winkle stuff alongside a smart talk about Hartenheimer’s Morestyle Clothing, the picture of the clean-faced young man—bright-eyed, square-jawed and everything—simply made old Rip look like three mutilated dimes.