The Literary Shop, and Other Tales

by James L. Ford

It was not very long after the receipt of the letter which thrust upon my bewildered senses a nebulous comprehension of Mr. Johnson’s influence and importance in the domain of letters that a fuller recognition of his omniscience was wrung from me, all-admiring, yet loath to believe. Mr. H. C. Bunner had written a story called “The Red Silk Handkerchief” and sent it to the Century office for approval. The story contained a graphic description of the flagging of a train to avert a disaster, in which occurred the following passage:

“... and he stood by the platform of the last car as the express stopped.

“There was a crowd around Horace in an instant. His head was whirling; but, in a dull way, he said what he had to say. An officious passenger, who would have explained it all to the conductor if the conductor had waited, took the deliverer in his arms—for the boy was near fainting—and enlightened the passengers who flocked around.

“Horace hung in his embrace, too deadly weak even to accept the offer of one of dozen flasks that were thrust at him.”

Now an ignorant layman will, I am bound, find nothing in the quoted sentences that could possibly give offence to the most sensitive reader; but it was precisely at the point where the quotation ends that the finely trained and ever-alert editorial sense of Mr. Johnson told him of the danger that lurked in the author’s apparently innocuous phrase.

“Hold on!” he cried; “can’t you make it two or three flasks instead of a dozen?”

Well did the keen-witted Johnson know that to many a serious minded gas-fitter or hay-maker the spectacle of a dozen evil-minded and evil-living men riding roughshod through the pages of a family periodical and over the feelings of its readers would be distasteful in the extreme, if not absolutely shocking. Two or three flasks would lend to the scene a delicate suggestion of the iniquity of the world, just enough to make them thank God that they were not as other men are; but a dozen was altogether too much for them, and Johnson was the man who knew it.

It is only fair to add that the author very properly refused to alter his manuscript, and the story stands, to-day, as it was originally written.

It was the flask episode that really opened my eyes to the peculiar conditions which encompassed the modern trade of letters, clogging the feet of the laborers thereof, and while making the easy declivities about Parnassus accessible to every one who could hold a pen, rendering its upper heights more difficult to reach than they ever were before. And it was the same episode which finally proved to me Mr. Johnson’s leadership in contemporaneous literature—a leadership which he has held from that day to this by sheer force of his intimate knowledge of the tastes, prejudices, and peculiarities of the vast army of readers which the Century Magazine has gathered unto itself, and still holds by the closest of ties, and will hold, in my opinion, so long as Mr. Johnson remains at the helm, with his pruning-hook in his hand, and reading, with clear, searching eyes, the innermost thoughts of his subscribers.

The present literary era has given us many things to be thankful for, chief among which should be mentioned the enormous advance in the art of illustration—a blessing which is shadowed only by the regretful knowledge that literature has not kept pace with her sister art. Indeed, too high praise cannot be given to the proprietors of the great monthlies for the liberality and good taste which they have shown in raising the pictorial standard of their publications to its present high plane, from which it commands the admiration of all right-minded people. And if we are living in the Johnsonian age of letters we are also living in the Frazeresque period of art, for I doubt if any one man has exercised a wider influence in the field of modern illustration than Mr. W. L. Fraser, the maker of the art department of the Century. Nor should we forget his associate, Mr. Drake.