“Johnson does not like low life!”
That was encouraging news for a young man who believed that literary methods had not materially altered since the days when Oliver Goldsmith wrote The Vicar of Wakefield.
The pen fell from my hand—it happened to be employed just then on a story dealing with life in a Pell Street opium-joint—and I said to myself: “Merciful heavens! must I devote my life to the delineation of what are called society types, simply because Johnson—whoever he may be—does not like low life?”
I think that if I had known then that low life was only one of a thousand things that could not meet the approval of Johnson, and that, moreover, Bonner was down on fast horses, stepmothers, sisters, matrimonial cousins, and brindle-pups, I would have thrown down my pen and endeavored to support myself in some other way.
But I did not know anything about the practical side of literature then, so I blundered on, wasting a great deal of time over forbidden topics, until I made the acquaintance of Jack Moran and others of his school, who welcomed me to Bohemia, and generously bade me share their treasure-house of accrued knowledge of editorial likes and dislikes. My low-life story—in my sublime faith I had written it on the flimsiest sort of paper—traveled from one office to another until it had eaten up $1.28 in postage and looked like Prince Lorenzo in the last act of The Mascot. Then, held together by copper rivets, it sank into its grave in the old daily Truth, unwept and unsigned.
I came across this forgotten offspring of my literary youth not long ago, and candor compels me to say that if Mr. Johnson had read that story and printed it in the Century Magazine he would not be to-day the dominant figure in the literature of our country that he is. My romance was not nearly as good as a great many that I have read in daily papers from the pens of clever newspaper men who know what they are writing about. In point of intense dramatic interest it was not within a thousand miles of the Sun’s masterly history of the career of George Howard, the bank burglar, who was murdered in the Westchester woods about fifteen years ago. The story of Howard’s life and crimes was told in a page of the Sun, I think by Mr. Amos Cummings, and if I could find any fiction equal to it in one of our magazines I would gladly sound the praises of the editor who was courageous enough to publish it.
I can afford to smile now as I recall the bitterness of spirit in which I used to chafe under the restrictions imposed upon us by the all-powerful barons of literature. I used to console my wounded vanity then by picturing to myself a bright future, when Johnson would stretch out his hands to me and beg me to place on the tip of his parched tongue a few pages of my cooling and invigorating manuscript. And with what derision would I have laughed then had any one told me that in the years to come I would be the one to accord to Mr. Johnson the honor which is his just due, and to recognize the wisdom which he showed in rejecting my story of low life!
A truthful portrayal of life among the criminal and vicious classes would be as much out of place in the Century Magazine as one depicting the love of a widower for his own cousin, whom he took out to ride behind a horse with a record of 2.53, would have been in the old Ledger; and I am positive that such a thing will not occur until after the close of the present literary dynasty.
There is an excellent reason for this prohibition, too. There are no people in the world who have a greater horror of what they consider “low” or “vulgar” than those who are steeped in mediocrity, and who, in this country, form a large part of the reading public. In England they are known as the “lower middle classes,” and they exist in countless thousands; but they have a literature of their own—Ouida, the Family Herald, Ally Sloper’s ’Alf ’Oliday,—and writers like George Meredith and Mrs. Humphry Ward and George Du Maurier pay no attention to them or to their prejudices. Nor does it seem to me that these writers are as grievously hampered by consideration for the peachy cheek of the British young person as they claim to be.
The fact that Johnson was down on low life made a deep impression on me, not so much because of what, I must admit, is a most reasonable and proper prejudice, but because I soon found that every literary man of my acquaintance was fully aware of his feelings in the matter, and therefore took pains not to introduce into a story any scenes or characters which might serve to render the manuscript unsalable in the eyes of the Century editors; and as years rolled on I could not help noticing the effect which this and other likes and dislikes of this literary Gessler had in moulding the fiction of our day and generation. And it is because of this Century taboo, which had its origin in the Ledger office, by the way, that I know of hardly a single magazine writer of to-day who has made himself familiar with the great wealth of varied material which may be found in that section of New York which it is the custom to refer to vaguely as “the great east side.”