For instance, a poet of my acquaintance once told me that he wrote a poem about “Thrifty Tom,” as he called him, who insured his life for a large sum of money, paid the premiums for two or three years, and then died, leaving his wife and children comfortably provided for. Now it happened that the great Scotch editor did not believe in life-insurance as an investment—the Ledger published no advertisements of any description in those days, so he was enabled to view the matter with an unbiased mind—and therefore he declined the verses, not wishing to promote the interests of a scheme which he could not indorse. And straightway the poet sate himself down and gave to his stanzas a comic snapper which told how “Idle Bill” proceeded to court and marry the widow, and passed the remainder of his days in the enjoyment of the money which the thrifty one had struggled so hard to lay aside for his family. In its new form the poem was sold to Puck, and the word went out to all the makers of prose and verse that Bonner was “down on life-insurance.”
Is there any demand for “good bad stuff” nowadays?
There is an almost limitless demand for it, and there always will be, provided the gas-fitters and the paper-hangers and the intelligent and highly cultivated American women continue to exert the influence in the field of letters that they do to-day.
The “good bad stuff” of the present era is printed on supercalendered paper, and illustrated, in many instances, with pictures that are so much better than the text that it is difficult to comprehend how even the simplest observer can fail to notice the contrast. Moreover the good bad stuff of to-day commands much higher prices than were ever paid during the Ledger period, and it is not infrequently signed with some name which has been made familiar to the public ear—if only by mere force of constant reiteration—and is therefore supposed to possess a peculiar value of its own. Nevertheless it is good bad stuff all the same, and can be recognized as such by those whose eyes are too strong to be blinded by the glare from the pictures and the great big literary name.
Don’t understand me to say that there is no good prose or verse to be found on those highly glazed, beautifully printed pages to which we of the present generation of readers turn for our literary refreshment. On the contrary, the modern magazines give us so much that is admirable, so many thoughtful essays and descriptive articles, that one wonders only why so much of the fiction which they offer should be of such poor calibre.
But the editors and publishers of the great monthlies know what they are about as well as Mr. Bonner ever did, and they know, too, the immense value of the good bad stuff which they serve to their patrons in such tempting and deceptive forms.
CHAPTER IV.
THE EARLY HOLLAND PERIOD.
When, near the close of the year 1870, Dr. J. G. Holland started Scribner’s Monthly, American letters entered upon a new stage of its development. The literary field was then occupied by the poets, humorists, and essayists of the Pfaff school, dwelling under the perpetual shadow of the Bonnerian maxims, and the occasional one of pecuniary depression; also a few men of the James Parton type who knew not Bohemia, and women writers like Mrs. Dallas.