British readers are not unacquainted with the American newspaper press, as, not to mention the numerous extracts from transatlantic papers in the columns of London journals, the merits of that press formed, but a few years ago, a topic of controversy between two London Quarterlies. But of American magazines and reviews they seldom hear any thing. This is certainly in no degree owing to the scarcity of these publications, for they are as numerous, in comparison, as the newspapers, have a very respectable circulation, (in some cases nearly four thousand,) and that at the not remarkably low price of four or five dollars per annum. Neither is it to their insignificance at home, for their editors make a considerable figure in the literary world, and their contributors are sufficiently vain of themselves, as their practice of signing or heading articles with their names in full would alone show.[47] Indeed Willis's idea (so ridiculed by the Edinburgh,) of a magazine writer becoming a great lion in society, is not so very great an absurdity if applied to American society. Nor is this due to the fact that their topics are exclusively local; for there is scarcely a subject under heaven of which they do not treat, and a European might derive some very startling information from them. The Democratic Review, for example, has a habit of predicting twice or thrice a-year that England is on the point of exploding utterly, and going off into absolute chaos.[48]
"Perhaps," interrupts an impatient non-admirer of things American generally, "it is because they are not worth hearing any thing about." And this suggestion is not so far from truth as it is from politeness. Considering the great demand for periodical literature in the New World, one is surprised to find it so bad in point of quality. Not that the monthly and quarterly press is disfigured by the violence and exaggeration that too often deform the daily. Over-spiciness is the very last fault justly chargeable upon it. In slang language, it would rather be characterised by the terms "slow," "seedy," "remarkably mild," and the like. Crude essays filled with commonplaces, truisms, verses of the true non Di non homines cast, tales such as shop-boys and milliners' girls delight in, and "critical notices" all conceived in the same spirit of indiscriminating praise, make up the columns of the monthlies; while the one or two more pretending publications which now represent the quarterly press, are of a uniformly subdued and soporific character.
Now the first phenomenon worthy of notice is, that this has not always been the case. It was very different eight or nine years ago. The three leading cities of the north, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, had each its Quarterly: the Knickerbocker, a New York magazine, boasted a brilliant list of contributors, headed by Irving and Cooper, and its articles were frequently copied (sometimes without acknowledgment,) into English periodicals. This change for the worse is worth investigating, at least as a matter of curiosity.
"I don't know that it is a change for the worse," says a prim personage in spectacles. "If your periodical literature dies out entirely, you need not be very sorry. I shouldn't be if ours did." And then come some murmurs of "light," "superficial," "unsound," and more to the same effect.
"My good sir, this in the face of Maga! not to mention the Quarterly and the Edinburgh. With such faits accomplis against you, what can you say?"
"I don't believe in faits accomplis. They are the excuse of the timid man, and the capital of the unprincipled man. Fait accompli means, in plain English, that 'because it is so, therefore it ought to be so'—a doctrine which I, for one, will never assent to."
"Well, there is something in that last position of yours. We will condescend, therefore, to argue the question. Let me ask you, then,
"First, Do you see any primâ facie improbability in supposing that a man may write a very good essay, who could not write two good volumes octavo; or a racy and interesting sketch, who could not put together a readable novel; or a few graceful poems, without having matter enough for a volume of poetry?
"Secondly, Is a treatise necessarily profound, because it is long; or superficial, because it is of practicable dimensions?
"Thirdly, When you use the term 'superficial,' do you really believe and mean to imply that periodical writers are in the habit of discussing subjects which they do not understand? Would you say, for instance, that Macaulay's reviews denote a man ignorant of history, or that Sedgwick knows less geology than the man who wrote the Vestiges of Creation, or that Mitchell knew less Greek than Lord Brougham?