THE MAGAZINES

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 151, 27 June 1914, Page 15

THE MAGAZINES

i DEMAND FOR BETTER WRITERS. American magazine editors and publishers have been discussing their wares, and "too many magazines" was the burden of their cry. At a meeting in Philadelphia, Robert Underwood Johnson, late editor of the Century, i spoke as a defender of the older magazines of national scope, those wmch he called the "quiet" magazines, as conj trasted with the magazines of the newer school. .He said:— "l he new type of magazine has no region of repose for the eye to rest upon. It reflects the neurasthenia of the day, the impatient pulling up of everything growing in our national life, to see if it is alive. Its writem attempt to take the Kiut;1 doin of Heaven by rush-line violence. This restlessnees of the maga/.mes is ,not less regrettable, since it us the coefficient of tho age." Mr. E. S. Martin, of the editorial staff of New York Life, speaking sit the same conference, expressed his* conviction that thiV is "a lunch-counter generation." In reading "we- take what we can get, where wo can find it, and hurry on." He added: — "The trouble with the magazines is thenreaders. The editors 'have to labour frightfully with the authors they ha-ve, to bring their work up fco grade. And the cost of producing an educated taste in millions of readers is frightful The great job of our day seems to be to feed the jnutitude with loaves and fishes— and automobiles. Our writers can't 'mucK-rake any more. That great industry is dead, and dear old Reticence slips back on the stage, to get every hand in the hou&e." Mr. M'Clure, of M'Clure's, deplores the death of men like Stevenson and Kipling. "They have no successors," he believes. A group of men like these exhausts the air for a time. It was in the summer of 189-1 that Mr. M'Cluro read Kipling's "Jungle Stories" and came to the conclusion that their author was to be one of the great figures in English literature. Kipling had several years before returned from India by way of tho United States, writing, on his way, a series of letters for the Allahabad Pioneer, the paper with which he had been connected. Tho great body of Kipling's wonderful early work — including "Plain Tales from the Hills.!' "Soldiers Three." and tho ' 'Phantom Rickshaw' ' — had already boon done. "Theso were the products," Mr. M'Clure observes, "of that prodigal period of early youth when the only thing that holds a genius back is that there are not hours enough in tho day for him to write down the stories that aro boiling in him." And yet Kipling was almost' unknown. Harper and Brothers refused to become hie publishers Mr. M'Cluro tells us: — "Ho was still writing with the free pen of the unknown man ; ho had achieved, as, yet, oniy a succes d'estime. Indeed, so far as the market was concerned, Kipling went slowly. For a long whilo his prices reriiained very moderate. Ho returned to England, dnd began to bo talked about there in 1889; but, as late as 1893, I was offered one of the 'Junglo Book* stories for £25. Five years later I paid £oQQQ for tho serial rights of 'Kirn.'