"The development of the magazine," he said to me, "has affected fiction in two ways. It has made it cheap and yet expensive, if you know what I mean.
"Novels written solely with the view to sensationalism are more than likely to bring discredit, not upon the magazine, but upon the writer. He gets his price, however, and the public gets its fiction.
"In my humble opinion, a writer should develop and complete his novel without a thought of its value or suitability to serial purposes. He should complete it to his own satisfaction—if that is possible—before submitting it to either editor or publisher. They should not be permitted to see it until it is in its complete form."
"But you yourself write serial stories, do you not?" I asked.
"I have never written a serial," answered Mr. McCutcheon. "Some of my stories have been published serially, but they were not written as serials.
"I am quite convinced in my own mind that if we undertake to analyze the distinction between the first-class English writers of to-day and many of our Americans, we will find that their superiority resolves itself quite simply into the fact that they do not write their novels as serials. In other words, they write a novel and not a series of chapters, parts, and instalments."
"Do you think that the American novel will always be inferior to the English novel?" I asked. "Is it not probable that the American novel will so develop as to escape the effects of serialization?"
"There is no reason," Mr. McCutcheon replied, "why Americans should not produce novels equal to those of the English, provided the same care is exercised in the handling of their material, and that they make haste as slowly as possible. Just so long, however, as we are menaced by the perils of the serial our general output will remain inferior to that of England.
"I do not mean to say that we have no writers in this country who are the equals in every respect of the best of the English novelists. We have some great men and women here, sincere, earnest workers who will not be spoiled."
Mr. McCutcheon has no respect for the type of novel, increasingly popular of late, in which the author devotes page after page to glowing accounts of immorality with the avowed intention of teaching a high moral lesson. He has little faith in the honesty of purpose of the authors of works of this sort.