THE LITERARY SWEAT SHOP.

Bill Nye dead.

Eugene Field dead.

Bob Burdette forgotten.

Mark Twain lecturing for a living.

Bret Harte a reminiscence.

Danbury Bailey a memory.

So then they have gone to their account—the princes of humor and song. All have their reward of silence. Some already stand in the deepening shade of oblivion. The language of earlier eulogy would have some reference to the sheaves they bring to their harvest. The more sharply real imagery of to-day calls for a change of figure, and substitutes for sheaves the black bundles of the clothing district that we see borne by pallid women in cotton drapery, with needle-pricked fingers, on Saturday mornings. For the sweat shop has engulfed them all. They fed the yawning demand for “copy” till their rest came.

It is a strange sequence of change from the time of American didactics, when literature thought and spoke as a child, with the simplicity of childhood and single aims. Deeper soundings have been made in every department of letters than the pellucid ripple of the Osgood-Hemans-Longfellow days afforded. A dozen of our poets have told more that is in human hearts than the Sunnyside group ever gauged. Riley has quickened more smiles and tapped more tears than Poe with his property Niobes and his taxidermist shudders put in the verse that ranked him among our immortals. The humor that bubbled in Artemus Ward, Showman, was clarified and made high proof in the satire of Burdette and the Danbury man. The child songs of Field are truer than those of Willis and Sigourney and the Cary sisters. Bret Harte in the stately march of Miss Blanche’s monologue and the “Saber cuts of Saxon speech” made more vivid war pictures than all the trumpeters of the abolition period. The paragraphers succeeded the phonetic spellers in the field of humor and bettered their instruction. The short story writer took the place of the two volume novelist, and the poetry of direct appeal superseded the didactic inheritance wherein classic types were represented by domestic lay figures scarcely more automatic.

The successive groups—the paragraphers, the short story builders, the dialect poets, the feulletonists, the humorists of the Bailey and Nye school, met the same fate. Prosperity opened its jaws and nearly all have disappeared therein. The making of monumental newspapers was the fatal suction in which each group was lost. Riley celebrating Hoosier scenery in dialect bouts rimes and Mark Twain “moving wild laughter in the throat of death” on the lecture platform, are survivals. The multiplex Hoe has done the business for each succeeding phase of American sentiment and humor since the magazines degenerated into compends of crochet and pseudo-biography.

In Mr. James L. Ford’s “Literary Shop” the author reads a severe lesson to the young people who have ambition to write and be printed. They should do newspaper work, he says. The desire for covers and immortality is reprobated. It is to much more that they should know life, and especially the life beyond the confines of the barbed wire fence that shuts out the odorous East side of the metropolis. But Mr. Ford does not tell his young people of a literary shop that stifles more genius than the verse works in Jersey City or the anglomaniac reminiscence mills on Union Square. He has forgotten the metropolitan paper that counts its pages by the ream. What the exclusive clique-ridden magazine discourages by closed doors the Sunday maelstrom swallows alive. The glory of bigness is the destruction of individuality in literary work. The brand of the sweat shop is on all the yawning jaws consume—like the slaver cm the boa’s feast.

The successor of the humorist and the domestic poet is the caustic free lance of the little magazines. The reaction is a sequence of the unreasoning greed of the sweat shop. The bibelot is born of the surfeit of the big newspaper. Readers seek it out—stawed with too much for their money. And it is a hopeful sign for individuality in literature that a clean cut idea is valued for a time more than quantity of words on paper, even if the latter have the vanishing magic of a name.

Tonnage has had its day in the literature of America. The product of the literary sweat shop is taking its rank with the other things commercially dear to the money changers and despised of all Philistines.

William McIntosh.