One very striking literary tendency of to-day is the worship of the English author in America and the hissing of the American author in London. And this proves that American literature is scarcely more popular in England than it is at home. But may not American publishers after awhile take up a London hissing and use it as an advertisement. Hissing is surely a recognition, and proves that an author has not been wholly neglected.
The novel, whether it be of classic form or of faddish type, makes a mark upon the mind of the public. Fiction is a necessary element of modern education. A man may be a successful physician or a noted lawyer without having read a novel; but he could not be regarded as a man of refined culture. A novel is an intellectual luxury, and in the luxuries of a country we find the refinements of the nation. It was not invention but fancy that made Greece great. A novel-reading nation is a progressive nation. At one time the most successful publication in this country was a weekly paper filled with graceless sensationalism, and it was not the pulpit nor the lecture-platform that took hold of the public taste and lifted it above this trash—it was the publication in cheap form of the English classics. And when the mind of the masses had been thus improved, the magazine became a success.
One slow but unmistakable drift of fiction is toward the short story, and the carefully edited newspaper may hold the fiction of the future.
WHITELAW REID
THE PRESS—RIGHT OR WRONG
[Speech of Whitelaw Reid at the 108th annual banquet of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, May 4, 1876. Samuel D. Babcock, President of the Chamber, was in the chair, and proposed the following toast, to which Mr. Reid was called upon for a response: "The Press—right or wrong; when right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be set right.">[
Mr. President:—Lastly, Satan came also, the printer's, if not the public's devil, in propria persona! [Laughter.] The rest of you gentlemen have better provided for yourselves. Even the Chamber of Commerce took the benefit of clergy. The Presidential candidates and the representatives of the Administration and the leading statesmen who throng your hospitable board, all put forward as their counsel the Attorney-General [Alphonso Taft] of the United States. And, as one of his old clients at my left said a moment ago, "a precious dear old counsel he was." [Laughter.]
The Press is without clergymen or counsel; and you doubtless wish it were also without voice. At this hour none of you have the least desire to hear anything or to say anything about the press. There are a number of very able gentlemen who were ranged along that platform—I utterly refuse to say whether I refer to Presidential candidates or not—but there were a number of very able gentlemen who were ranged along that table, who are very much more anxious to know what the press to-morrow morning will have to say about them [laughter], and I know it because I saw the care with which they handed up to the reporters the manuscript copies of their entirely unprepared and extempore remarks. [Laughter.]
Gentlemen, the press is a mild-spoken and truly modest institution which never chants its own praises. Unlike Walt Whitman, it never celebrates itself. Even if it did become me—one of the youngest of its conductors in New York—to undertake at this late hour to inflict upon you its eulogy, there are two circumstances which might well make me pause. It is an absurdity for me—an absurdity, indeed, for any of us—to assume to speak for the press of New York at a table where William Cullen Bryant sits silent. Besides, I have been reminded since I came here, by Dr. Chapin, that the pithiest eulogy ever pronounced upon the first editor of America, was pronounced in this very room and from that very platform by the man who at that time was the first of living editors in this country, when he said that he honored the memory of Benjamin Franklin because he was a journeyman printer who did not drink, a philosopher who wrote common sense, and an office-holder who did not steal. [Applause.]