There is another variety of literature which I dislike, and which seems to have attained a ranker and more unwholesome growth in this country than elsewhere. I refer to those articles and books whose sole purpose seems to be the exploiting of men and women who are really unworthy of any serious consideration. The Johnsonian period is rich in specimens of this sort of work, and the future historian will marvel at the absurd prominence given in this enlightened age to people who have never accomplished anything in their lives, and who themselves evince the greatest eagerness to transmit to posterity authentic records of their failures.
“How I Lost the Battle,” by Captain Runoff, of the Russian army; “Driven out of Asia Minor,” by General Skates; and “Ever so Many Miles from the North Pole,” by Lieutenant Queary, are excellent examples of this style of literature; but a far lower depth was reached about two years ago, when the Harpers burst into enthusiastic praise of a young man named Chanler, who had announced his intention of discovering Africa, and proposed to awe and conciliate the ferocious native chiefs by performing in their presence various difficult feats of legerdemain which he had taken the pains to learn from a professional master in London.
What has become of that gifted young man for whom the Harpers predicted such a rosy future? Perhaps at this very moment he is seated in a deep, shady African jungle making an omelet in a high silk hat or converting a soiled pocket-handkerchief into a glass globe full of goldfish. I can picture him standing, alone and unarmed, before thousands of hostile spears. His eye is clear and his cheek unblanched. In another moment he will be taking rabbits out of the chieftain’s ears, and the dusky warriors will cower, in abject submission, at his feet.
There is one thing that can be said in favor of Mr. Chanler, and that is that up to the present moment he has not annoyed his fellow-creatures with any lectures or articles or stories descriptive of the wonders that he did not discover during his journeyings in the Dark Continent. His reticence is commendable, and should serve as an example to various windy travelers who “explore” during a period of eight weeks and then talk for the rest of their lives.
Verily this is a golden age for “fakirs,” quacks, and intellectual feather-weights, and my friendly advice to all who may be classified under any one of those three heads is to make hay while the sun shines, because, in my belief, the coming decade will see them relegated to the obscurity in which they naturally belong. But our little tuppenny gods and celebrities have kicked up so much dust of late years that they have contrived to obscure the fame of men who are infinitely better worth talking about.
Singularly enough, the American who achieved more with his pen than any one else in his generation is almost unknown to the majority of his countrymen and countrywomen, although our government paid an unusual tribute to his memory by bringing his remains back to his native land in a man-of-war. The man of whom I write was simply a reporter employed by the New York Herald to chronicle contemporaneous European history. It was he who told the civilized world the truth about the atrocities committed by the Turkish invaders of Bulgaria in a series of letters to the London Daily News—letters which became, in the hands of Mr. Gladstone, a weapon with which he aroused the popular feeling until the Beaconsfield ministry was swept from power and the Jingo spirit held in check while Russia carried on her “holy war” against the Porte. There is not a statesman or sovereign in Europe who does not know of the important rôle which this American reporter played in continental affairs at the time of the Russo-Turkish war. If you ask a Bulgarian or Montenegrin if he ever heard of J. A. MacGahan he will very likely say to you what one of them said to me: “Did you, an American, ever hear of George Washington? Well, MacGahan was our Washington, and there is not a peasant in all my country who is not familiar with his name.”
This countryman of ours, in whose achievements I have such a sturdy pride, died literally in the harness in 1879, and every year on the 9th of June, throughout all the land of which he was the acknowledged savior, the solemn prayers of the church are offered for the repose of his soul. It may be that he has won a higher fame than he would if he had lived to make himself known to the American public through the medium of the lecture platform, but nevertheless I often wish that his renown in the land of his birth were nearer in accord with his deserts than it is.
I doubt if any system, either literary, political, or social—unless it be negro slavery—has ever had a fairer trial in this country than has that of pruning-hook editing, of which I have treated in these pages; and that system may be responsible, in part, for the fact that three quarters of the fiction offered in bookstores to-day is the work of foreign writers, most of whom have been reared in the comparatively free and independent literary atmosphere of Great Britain, and have always addressed their books directly to the public instead of the editors of magazines. It is true that Smith or Mudie, whose influence in the book-trade is almost incalculable, occasionally refuse to circulate a novel out of consideration for the feelings of the “young person,” but such a proceeding is not nearly as disastrous to a writer as the refusal of his manuscript by all the magazines would be to an American. A ton of manuscript makes no more commotion when returned to its authors than the touch of a humming-bird on a lily-petal; but when a book like Esther Waters is cast out of an English circulating library it falls with a crash that is heard throughout the length and breadth of the three kingdoms, while the author and his friends, with a little assistance from the author’s enemies, make the welkin ring with their cries.
The recent discussion over “Trilby” and the action of its publishers in cutting out this passage and pruning that have given the public a little insight into the methods in vogue in our large literary establishments—methods which I have tried to explain in this book. The very fact that Mr. Du Maurier’s manuscript stood in need of the pruning-hook is, to me, proof positive that he never sat on the poets’ bench in the Ledger office or practised his profession under the rule of Dr. Holland.
It may be that at this very moment a great many American story-readers are asking themselves why it is that native authors who know their trade so well that the magazines will publish anything that they offer should be unable to write a serial equal to that of a gray-haired novice like Mr. Du Maurier, who, I will wager, knows absolutely nothing about the immortal principles which are the very lamps unto the feet of his American contemporaries. I shudder to think of what the world would have lost had the author of “Trilby” gone about his work with the Holland fetters on his wrists, the fear of the gas-fitter in his heart, the awful pruning-hook hanging by a single hair over his head, and the ominous shadow of Robert Bonner falling across the pages of his story.