Advertising requires versatility of a high order. A newspaper writer, so long as he makes his articles interesting to the widest public, is not required to give too strict attention to technicalities—he writes upon this subject to-day and upon one at the opposite pole to-morrow. A writer for a trade journal, on the other hand, need not give pains to human interest if his technical grasp of the iron market, the haberdashery trade, or the essentials of machine-shop practice is sure. Moreover, each year’s experience in writing for a trade journal adds to his knowledge of its subject and makes his work so much the surer and simpler. But the writer of advertising must combine human interest with strict accuracy; his subject is constantly changing, unless he is a specialist in a certain line, taking advertising commissions at intervals. To-day he studies the methods of making cigars and the many different kinds of tobacco that enter therein; to-morrow he writes a monograph on enameled tin cans, investigating the processes of making them in the factory; and the day after that his topic may be breakfast foods, taking him into investigations of starch, gluten, digestive functions, diet and health, and setting him upon a weary hunt for synonyms to describe the “rich nutty flavor” that all breakfast foods are said to have. All the illustrative work of an advertising artist must be so true to detail that it will pass the eyes of men who spend their lives making the things he pictures. The Camusots and Matifats no longer provide costly orgies for Grub Street, sitting by meekly to enjoy the flow of wit and banter. They now employ criticism in moulding their literature of business. It was one of them who, difficult to please in circulars, looked over the manuscript submitted by an advertising free lance with more approval than was his custom. “This is not bad,” he commented; “not bad at all—and yet—I have seen all these words used before.”
An interesting new development of advertising is the business periodical, a journal published by a large manufacturer, usually, and sent out monthly to retail agents or his consuming public. In its pages are printed articles about the manufacturer’s product, descriptions of its industrial processes, news of the trade, and miscellany. Many of these periodicals are extremely interesting for themselves. There must be dozens of them in New York—none of the newspaper directories list them. Writers who are not especially familiar with the product with which they deal often furnish a style of matter for them that is valued for its fresh point of view and freedom from trade and technical phraseology. These publications range from journals of a dozen pages, issued on the “every little while” plan for the retail trade of a rubber hose manufacturer, to the monthly magazine which a stocking jobber mails to thousands of youngsters all over the land to keep them loyal to his goods.
This, then, is the market in its main outlines. But a mass of detail has been eliminated. In groups large and small there are the poster artists who work for theatrical managers and lithographers; the strange, obscure folk who write the subterranean dime-novel stories of boyhood; the throngs of models who go from studio to studio, posing at the uniform rate of fifty cents an hour whether they work constantly or seldom; the engravers who have made an art of retouching half-tone plates; the great body of crafts-and-arts workers which has sprung up in the past five years and which leads the free-lance life in studios, selling pottery, decorated china, wood, and metal work to rich patrons; the serious painters whose work is found in exhibitions, and the despised “buckeye” painter who paints for the department stores and cheap picture shops; the etchers, the portrait painters, and the “spotknockers” who lay in the tones of the crude “crayon portrait” for popular consumption—these and a multitude of others inhabit Greater Grub Street, knowing no regularity of employment, of hours, or of income.
IV
While its opportunities are without conceivable limitation, Grub Street is not a thoroughfare littered with currency, but is paved with cobblestones as hard as any along the other main avenues of New York’s life and energy. The Great Man of the Provinces, landing at Cortlandt or Twenty-third Street after an apprenticeship at newspaper work in a minor city, steps into a world strangely different from the one he has known. For, just to be a police reporter elsewhere is to be a journalist, and journalism is the same as literature, and literature is honorable, and a little mysterious, and altogether different from the management of a stove foundry, or the proprietorship of a grocery house, or any other of the overwhelmingly material things that make up American life. Times have not greatly changed since Lucien de Rubempré was the lion of Madame de Bargeton’s salon at Angoulême, and this is a matter they seem to have ordered no better in provincial France. To be a writer or artist of any calibre elsewhere breeds a form of homage and curiosity and a certain sure social standing. But New York strikes a chill over the Great Man of the Provinces, because it is nothing at all curious or extraordinary for one to write or draw in a community where thousands live by these pursuits. They carry no homage or social standing on their face, and the editorial world is even studied in its uncongeniality toward the newcomer, because he is so fearfully likely to prove one of the ninety-nine in every hundred aspirants who cannot draw or write well enough. The ratio that holds in the mass of impossible manuscript and sketches that pours into every editorial office is also the ratio of the living denizens of Grub Street. The Great Man of the Provinces is received on the assumption that he is unavailable, with thanks, and the hope that he will not consider this a reflection upon his literary or artistic merit.
So he finds himself altogether at sea for a while. No Latin Quarter welcomes him, for this community has no centre. His estimates of magazine values, formed at a distance, are quickly altered. Many lines of work he had never dreamed of, and channels for selling it, come to light day by day. To pass the building where even Munsey’s is published gives him a thrill the first time; yet after a few months in New York he finds that the great magazines, instead of being nearer, are really farther away than they were in the provinces. Of the other workers he meets, few aspire to them, while of this few only a fraction get into their pages. He calls on editors, perhaps, and finds them a strange, non-committal caste, talking very much like their own rejection slips. No editor will definitely give him a commission, even if he submits an idea that seems good, but can at most be brought to admit under pressure that, if the Great Man were to find himself in that neighborhood with the idea all worked up, the editor might be interested in seeing it, perhaps even reading it—yet he must not understand this as in any way binding ... the magazine is very full just at present ... hadn’t he better try the newspapers, now? For there are more blanks than prizes walking the Grub Street paving, and persons of unsound minds have been known to take to literature as a last resort, and the most dangerous person to the editor is not a rejected contributor at all, but one who has been accepted once and sees a gleam of a chance that he may be again.
If the Great Man really has “stuff” in him, he stops calling on editors and submits his offerings by mail. Even if he attains print in a worthy magazine, he may work a year without seeing its notable contributors, or its minor ones, or its handmaidens, or even its office-boy. Two men jostled one another on Park Row one morning as they were about to enter the same newspaper building, apologized, and got into the elevator together. There a third introduced them, when it turned out that one had been illustrating the work of the other for two years, and each had wished to know the other, but never got around to it. An individual circle of friends is easily formed in Grub Street, but the community as a whole lives far and wide and has no coherence.
What ability or skill the Great Man brought from his province may be only the foundation for real work. There will surely be extensive revising of ideals and methods. A story is told of a poet who came to the metropolis with a completed epic. This found no acceptance, so after cursing the stupidity of the public and the publishers, he took to writing “Sunday stuff.” Soon the matter-of-fact attitude of the workers around him, with the practical view of the market he acquired, led him to doubt the literary value of the work he had done in the sentimental atmosphere of his native place. Presently a commission to write a column of humor a week came to him, and he cut his epic into short lengths, tacked a squib on each fragment, and eventually succeeded in printing it all as humor, at a price many times larger than the historic one brought by Paradise Lost. Another newcomer brought unsalable plays and high notions of the austerity of the artistic vocation. Three months after his arrival he was delighted to get a commission to write the handbook a utilitarian publisher proposed to sell to visitors seeing the metropolis. This commission not only brought a fair payment for the manuscript on delivery, but involved a vital secondary consideration. The title of the work was “Where to Eat in New York,” and its preparation made it necessary for the author to dine each evening for a month in a different café at the proprietor’s expense.
This practical atmosphere of Grub Street eventually makes for development in the writer or artist who has talent. It is an atmosphere suited to work, for the worker is left alone in the solitude of the multitude. False ideals and sentimentality fade from his life, and his style takes on directness and vigor. Greater Grub Street is not given to reviling the public for lack of ideals or appreciation. The free lance’s contact with the real literary market, day after day, teaches him that, as soon as he can produce the manuscript of the great American novel, there are editors who may be trusted to perceive its merit, and publishers ready to buy.