Thou art not conquered: beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson on thy lips and on thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.”
Trotwood loves to throw a bouquet—he believes they are more easily gathered in the sunshine around us and leave a more pleasant memory than some other things which might be cast, such, for instance, as bricks and stones. Especially does he love to throw them when they are intended for a lovely woman. And we have known her long—Miss Minnie McIntyre, editor of the new horse show paper, The Bit and Spur, of Chicago, and so we know whereof we speak when we say that in her class she is simply an “only,” and her monthly, The Bit and Spur, is a gem of its kind, and an inspiration. It is beautifully illustrated, its workmanship is the finest, and is the best edited magazine of its class in the whole country. If you love the horse shows you cannot afford to miss its monthly visits. This is written deliberately and with charity aforethought, and while it may have the flavors of the village sanctum sanctorum, yet when a woman gets into the strenuous fight around her and with her bright mind and pen rises to the very top, there is always growing in Trotwood’s garden a bouquet of sunflowers for her.
Concerning Southern magazines, it is the fact that none has ever been able to live in the South. We appreciated that fact with all its force when we launched Trotwood’s Monthly. But we think we have studied the situations thoroughly enough to know the reason of this: First, they have all been feeble imitations of Northern magazines—a field so well and ably filled already. Every section of our country has its own character, its own atmosphere, its own earmarks. People North and West, when they buy a Southern magazine, want the South to be in it—its stories, traditions, its sunshine, its fields, its very air. They want to hear of the land which is harvesting and sowing, while they are in the far-off snow, waiting to see the good, glad earth again; the land where the average farmer does not spend all he makes in the summer keeping himself and his stock warm in the winter; the land that is Southern—the great, undeveloped country of the future. Trotwood’s Monthly is trying to do this. In the second place, Southern people are not great readers. There are too many chances to get out of doors—any time and all the time. Like the petted children of indulgent parents, kind Nature does so much for them—they do little for themselves. And a child will never leave the joyous out-doors for the study, the schoolroom or the work shop. In literature the great South is but a child. But last and chiefest, no magazine has ever been launched in the South to supply a practical demand, instead of creating a supply. Sentiment is a great thing, but like blue litmus paper, it changes quickly if it meets an acid. And sentiment meets an acid every little while. Trotwood’s Monthly is supplying practical demand, not trying to create a supply, dependent on local sentiment. It is weaving the Southern atmosphere around a practical subject—a subject in demand all over the world, as our subscription list, which now has reached a goodly number in every State in the Union, in Canada, even to faraway Nova Scotia, in South Africa, Honolulu and Australia. Around this practical subject for which there is a positive demand, we will weave the Southern literature and life, and in that way do we hope to live. Sentiment alone will carry no magazine beyond the first year, and the story of the literature of every people—aye, of every literary workman among the people—is that the practical staff must go with the first efforts long before he who runs, learns how to read.
Trotwood’s Monthly is going slow, but with the staff of the practical for support.
Trotwood’s Monthly wants good stories and poems. Write them, but let them be life, for literature, if real, is but the true interpretation of life. Write of the life around you, not of that in some other State or country.