RHADAMANTHINA IVRA.

Castigat auditque dolos subigitque fateri.

It was the custom of the Roman Prætor Urbanus when entering upon his duties to post up in plain view of the public a brief exposition of the principles which were to guide him in passing judgment during his year of office. It seems fit that the Philistine should likewise issue its own EDICTVM PERPETVVM setting forth the scope and ultimate purpose of such literary criticisms as may appear from time to time in its pages.

It is offenders only who are to be deemed worthy of Reviews in these columns and as the worst possible offence of which they can be guilty, since it includes all specific or lesser faults, is the bare fact of their existence in type, it will be our aim to hold up to the merited scorn of an outraged world the responsible progenitors of such unblessed offspring, the Publisher, and his partner in sin, the Author of the book.

In thus reversing that order in criminality which has hitherto obtained in the assizes of criticism we are moved by the consideration among others: the writing of any book, good or bad, is a matter of concern to its author alone so long as it remains in manuscript. Its merits or demerits have alike no existence to the public; however shameless its morals, feeble its plot or intolerable its dullness these are all equally powerless for mischief so long as it has not been put into type and launched upon a much suffering, helpless world. Then its career of evil begins. For this the Publisher is solely responsible; he and he alone is able to remedy the abuses which have long been calling out to heaven for suppression, by setting up some sort of standard as to the minimum of those defects which shall bar any manuscript whatever from his favorable consideration. What this minimum ought to be we shall take pleasure in enlightening him from time to time in these pages.

It may be urged that the weapon of scorn has been used and abused time out of mind; we reply that the objector is in error in one essential. The dart is an old one indeed, but its point has been blunted, not in the fattening tissues of this chief offender but on the scantily clad bones of his weaker accomplice, the much-abused author. In issuing an illegitimate book the Author is the victim of the sweetest and most pathetic fallacy known to men: he believes his work is good; while the publisher knows better. One is animated by love and nature, the other has only a lust for dollars. In such offenses as we are discussing, no less than in certain others needing no more explicit designation, it is not the deed itself but its exposure which calls forth the protests of a PHILISTINE public. Those Little Sisters in Sin, A Superfluous Woman and Bessie Costrell might have faded to oblivion in their swaddling clothes had no publisher been found to expose them to daylight.

It will be understood therefore that our column of Reviews exists, not to aid struggling authors or enterprising publishers to launch their craft upon the already crowded ocean of Literature, but as the Pillory where manifest culprits are exposed to the jibes of the crowd, to the end that others who are meditating like deeds may be warned by such penalty to desist. Nor need the idle stocks ever yawn in emptiness so long as upon his right hand and his left a man beholds such a richness of backs itching for the lash.

And since we have promised that instruction shall go hand in hand with castigation we will not close until we have pointed out for the future guidance of those who may wish to avoid one at least of the many by-paths of reprobation, that in any novel we regard the existence of page Four Hundred of readable type as confession on the part of both Publisher and Author that neither of them has yet learned the foremost and greatest of the arts of their trade—the art to blot.

De confessis sicuti de manifestis—supplicium sumendum est.

A TRINITY OF OFFENDERS.

1. THE LAND OF THE SUN, a third rate guide-book to Mexico, and incidentally a Touter for one of its Railways; by Christian Reid, a woman who once wrote a good novel, superfluously illustrated, 12mo. cloth, pp. 355. D. Appleton & Co., N. Y., $1.75.

2. LOVE IN IDLENESS, by F. Marion Crawford, author of ETC., etc., & etc., absurdly illustrated, crown 8vo., cloth, gilt-edge, pp. 218. Macmillan & Co., N. Y., $2.00.

3. ADVICE TO LITERARY ASPIRANTS—One Hundred Ways to Become Famous for One Dollar, by Mr. Arthur Lewis, illustrated, 12mo., pp. 247. Dodd, Rott & Co., N. Y., $1.00.

1. We are but too familiar, all of us, with the devices of the quack-medicine advertiser, his trick of getting us to read his puff in spite of ourselves. It is an old yet still successful dodge. The first sentence in a column of the morning paper promises a little ten minute romance. As we proceed our interest quickens. We inadvertently glance to the end to learn whether the hero is destined to the rope or the heroine reserved for the altar. There stands forth the mark of the Beast, “Butcher’s Bilious Bouncer, sure cure for the Liver, price ten cents.” According as nature has allied us to Democritus or to Archilochus we laugh or swear at our gullibility while we turn to some other item, but if fair-minded men we do not swear at the editor, for we know that he lives by letting for hire his numberless columns with no restriction on his advertisers save that their matter does not exclude his paper from the United States Mail.

It is far different, however, when trusting in an author’s name or at least in the imprint of a publisher of high standing, a man takes up a book which he has bought in the expectation of finding it a readable or at all events a genuine novel, but soon discovers it to be a string of sausages, whose thin membrane of such romance as it does afford exists merely to encase a solid stuffing of railroad advertisements, “scenic route” business and such secondhand truck. Yet of such is the Land of the Sun. Before reading it myself I tendered it to a friend in answer to his request for the latest novel. A few days after, he returned it saying, “It opens more like an advertisement of the Bullseye Parlor Car Company.”

Now it so happens that the people who made the book are also publishers of guide-books and among these of a guide-book to Mexico, eo nomine, it had been fitter and more worthy their own high standing had they not stooped to palm off such a farrago upon a man whose thoughts at the time were not how to get to Mexico nor what could be seen if he went there, but simply the means of beguiling an evening, lolling at ease in his smoking jacket.

As to the lady who was once equal to writing The Land of the Sky, one feels sorrow at her fall, and cannot help wondering if sin of this sort yields her either profit or pleasure.

2. If a reader were asked to single out some one publisher whose name should be guarantee that in buying a book one would get fair equivalent for his money, not in paper and ink alone, but in the stuff of its ideas, he would not often go amiss were he to name Macmillans. It is with double pain therefore that he resents being led astray into paying Two Dollars for such a trifling effusion as Love in Idleness. He is hurt not only by the one and one-half dollars lost in excess of any just valuation of the book, but also and perhaps by a less reparable loss of the confidence long deserved by the class of Macmillan publications. In short he feels that both publisher and writer have conspired to cinch him and the rest of the reading public, and here, too, the heavier share of the reproach must fall upon the man. If Mr. Marion Crawford, pluming himself upon such past achievements as Mr. Isaacs, chooses to value the weakling of his decadence at such extravagant figures that it must be listed at Two Dollars if it is to appear in decent type, there is surely no need that his accomplice be Macmillan. Doubtless there be publishers whose horns would be exalted were Crawford’s name to shine upon their title pages, but Macmillan is not of such cattle; he stands among the very topmost already, wherefore he should be above impostures.

The book is freely illustrated, but the pictures have nothing to do with the persons and incidents of the story.

3. As the editor of the Only Real Sure-Enough Chip-Munk so truthfully points out in his every issue, man is an imitative animal. But whether it is equally true that there are hundreds and hundreds of imitation chip-munks, all made like those calico cats that do duty as bric-a-brac, I cannot say. Yet the undisputed statement, made in such a solemn way, that man is imitative, must stand.

On ascending a certain beautiful little bay along the coast of Maine, the traveller is confronted by the startling legend, painted on the face of a great palisade: This is Belfast, the Home of Gringo’s Vermifuge—One Hundred Doses for One Dollar.

And to-day at Franklin, Ohio, as the train stops at the water tank one sees in the pasture opposite, an immense bill board, and on the board in gigantic letters are the words: This is Franklin, the Home of Jingo’s Advice to Authors—One Hundred Places to sell Manuscript, One Dollar.

That a place is needed to sell manuscript I will admit—in fact I am looking for such a place, but I only require one place, not a hundred. So I am suspicious of Mr. Jingo: I think that he offers just ninety-nine times more than is meet, and so I turn to Mr. Arthur Lewis of Albany, who has in the press a book with a title suspiciously like the Ohio publication. It is called Advice to Literary Aspirants—One Hundred Ways to Become Famous for One Dollar. Advance sheets of this work show that the author has expended considerable care on it. He marshals statistics to show that only one out of 97,621 of the men who write books ever secure even a tuppence worth of fame. In fact he proves that fame and good writing have no more to do with each other than Art and Truth, Virtue and Profession, Marriage and Constancy. He therefore concludes that the Literary Aspirant should secure his Fame first and launch his Literature afterward, and in this way take the tide at its flood and move on to fortune. To this end the gifted author gives one hundred ways of securing fame. He starts with Homicide and runs through to Arson and Bridge Jumping, giving incidentally fourteen different kinds of Scandal and how to bring it about.

In my own mind I have always made a distinction between illustrious men, famous men and notorious men, but Mr. Lewis avers that in our day and generation such fine shades are all obliterated by the bright iridescence of the standard dollar. An author, he says, succeeds only as his books sell, and if his name is on the lips of rumor, women especially will besiege the stores and demand his tomes.

Now we must admit that the fine sophistry that Mr. Lewis brings to bear is interesting, but is it Art? Further than this, does it fill a vacuum in the great economic cosmos of Letters? I do not think that it does, and therefore do not hesitate to flatly give it as my opinion that while the author is sincere, the publishers are moved by no other motive than to secure the money of ambitious young men and women, having first victimized Mr. Lewis for the cost of plates and the first edition. That the work, like all skillful sophistry, is inspiring to the young, there is no doubt, but the final effect of the book on society I believe will be damaging, and therefore I cannot conscientiously recommend it.