Editor's Study.
THE complaint made by some critics that fiction suffers because of certain unwritten laws which exclude from periodical literature everything which might offend religious, partisan, or moral sensibility is not only baseless, but shows how little these critics know about magazine stories, which they are pleased to call insipid and colorless.
It is difficult to see how the free treatment of partisan or sectarian themes could enhance the attractiveness of either long or short stories; certainly in actual life we do not find that the agitation of questions that divide parties or sects suggests any romantic interest, appeals to any classical taste, or adds in any way to the general gayety.
Fierce religious or political conflicts in the past, remote from present prejudices, may lend themselves to the uses of fiction simply because of their dramatic interest; so may comparatively modern episodes of violent superstition, like that of the witchcraft delusion. But no novelist would be tempted into the field of contemporary political discussion concerning the tariff, or into that of theological disputation concerning sectarian differences in rite or doctrine. Yet the mighty and everlasting issues of the spiritual life and the exceedingly interesting social side of the political career are neither alien nor forbidden territory to the writer of fiction. There is open room for novels like John Ward, Preacher, and recently Margaret Sutton Briscoe has written a series of original and strikingly dramatic short stories, based on critical moments in the career of the Governor of a State. In England these fields have been extensively cultivated, and without offence.
Nor does the moral restriction in any way really confine the story-writer within narrow limits. Half a century ago, when romantic love furnished the main texture of short stories in our American magazines, writers might reasonably have complained of lack of freedom within so narrow a scope. At that time, too, the habit of reading the magazine, as well as books, aloud in the family circle generally prevailed, and the apprehension of peril to "the young person" was obviously more acute, as it was also more captious, quickly seizing upon and holding up to the publisher's reproach features which at the present time would pass unnoticed. The goody-goody story was not even then in favor, save for the uses of the Sunday-school library. The morality story of the Maria Edgeworth type, owing its existence to fear of the dangers of romantic fiction and to a desire to substitute therefor an unexciting diet, could not last. Formal morality, however indispensable, is a negative quantity in our human life; it must coexist with what is essentially good in character, but it sometimes coexists with hardness of heart and meanness of conduct. In itself it is not even interesting. A story written wholly or mainly in the interests of morality would indeed be vapid and "colorless"; but in the last half-century of magazine literature we challenge the critic to find a story of this sort. From the beginning of such literature in this country the romance has held its own.
In the early period it was, as we have said, confined almost entirely to love-stories, and these were usually written by women. It was especially at this period that the editor found it necessary to be on his guard against impropriety. "The young person" had a claim upon his vigilance. The trifling young man and the coquettish or designing young woman—used perhaps as foils to heroes and heroines of a more exalted type,—even the two simple young lovers, with no thought beyond their romantic passion, might easily in the hands of a weakly emotional writer become undesirable acquaintances for the scrupulous reader—certainly undesirable objects for youthful contemplation, though at the worst they might not match their predecessors in novels which were eagerly read by our grandmothers, but which would not be tolerated to-day,—not because of our greater morality, but owing to our advance in intellectual culture and refinement, as shown in the development of our literature in this particular field of fiction.
