With the immense reading public that exists in this land of popular education and enlightenment—a public which expands every year, as generation after generation takes its place in the ranks of life—there is room for all sorts of periodicals; and instead of these various periodicals being in rivalry, they actually raise up new readers for each other. Even the old fogy magazines have helped to prepare the way for honest bubbling thought and fancy and humor. They have unwittingly and unwillingly educated their readers for the Fly Leaf. The more literature is cultivated in America—the more writers with fresh opinions and experiences and ideas increase—the more readers there will be to encourage the treatment of ever new and wider aspects of the complex life of this vast and complex aggregation of people.
In the pages of these respectable domestic periodicals, old-fashioned folk, who lived before thought was let loose in the English tongue among respectable, law-abiding people, and who linger on to the confusion of poetry and new ideas and new interests, can still doze over profound articles on “How to Cook a Beefsteak” and fiction that has even less relevance to the comedy and tragedy of real modern life. But all inspiring literature is drenched in the spirit and vigor of Youth—even though the writers may be only belated boys. It is the New in eternal nature that entrances the imaginations of thinkers and poets. The day is coming when the periodicals now devoted to the dissemination of the platitudes and ideas of two or three generations ago will have to awaken to the fact that the Young Man and the Young Woman of this era demand the heart of life in their literature, or they will be compelled to give way to bolder spirits, such as are now gathering strength in every modern literature. Already the tide has set in. Hence the Fly Leaf.
The Fly Leaf belongs to this end of the century. It is essentially modern. It does not look to the future, however, with any affected fin de siecle weariness or ennui, but with the hopefulness and stirring courage of youth. It does not aim to be Decadent, or pin its faith to any particular Ism; although it will always be hospitable to art and beauty and truth from any quarter.
The Editor and his coadjutors are of the new school of younger writers, and they aim to unite free sincere thought with humor and fantastic whimsies and imagination; to be serious and amusing; earnest and honest; but never dull. The underlying purpose and inspiration of our efforts will be to strike this Modern note and awaken this broader Modern spirit, which marks the literature of our era off from all the ancient thought and literature of the world.
The Fly Leaf will deal with the Here and Now, with the aims and ideals of the Young Man and the Young Woman, with the drift and tendencies of American social and literary thought. It will embody the New Spirit of the age that is moving the literature of all the world, but it will be distinctively an American periodical.
The Fly Leaf hopes that in this struggle for the recognition of this broader spirit in criticism and the material of literature, and for the encouragement of American writers of ability, it will receive the cordial support of the younger generation of readers throughout the country.
THE NEW MYSTICISM.
The latest development of the new mysticism, or symbolism, or impressionism, which first came to us from the Continent, has just reached the Editor of the Fly Leaf from the pen of an old friend.
It appears that my friend had been reading Maurice Maeterlinck’s “The Blind” and “The Seven Princesses,” and he had come to the conclusion that a painful poverty of ideas was palpably wrapped up in a barren iteration of half meaningless and half ludicrous phrases. He then turned to Stephen Crane’s recently published “Black Riders,” thinking that symbolism might be a little more coherent and comprehensible in the alembic of the colder and clearer Anglo-Saxon intellect and imagination. He had heard Crane’s impressionistic book of rhythms spoken of in the inner circles of the New York and Boston literary world as a collection of startling psychological pictures—the Heaven and Hell of the human soul by flashlight. The Boozy Prophet, Crane has been called by a certain eminent critic—and there’s invitation to human nature in such a piquant characterization.