by A. C. Allenson

Originally published in May, 1922 issue of Writer's Monthly. Now in the public domain.

A writer who has made good in the magazine world recently had persistently bombarded the editor of a celebrated magazine with his short-stories. He was not exceptionally conceited about his work, but thought it not half-bad. The editor, the rejections notwithstanding, thought much the same. The youngster wrote attractively, had the dramatic instinct, could work out a plot with some originality, so, because of the promise shown, the editor departed from his customary rule of refraining from criticism.

"Write about pleasant things," he advised.

The aspirant went home and again looked through the piles of stories that had not landed—stories he had labored upon, chopped and changed, re-shaped and polished, until he had given them the best that was in him. They were good— he admitted frankly; they were unsaleable—that was suffciently established; and they were gloomy—he hadn't realized it so clearly before.

Virtue was not triumphant, his heroes and heroines found the sledding extremely bad, they came heavy croppers, undeservedly, and had no vindication whatever. The wicked flourished right up to the end like green bay trees, and the good were male and female. Jobs, robbed unreasonably of their all, set out on dung heaps to scrape their boils and to listen to exasperating sermons from their friends. But they were much worse off than Job, for the wise builder of that grand drama took care that Job should come out right in the end, so he made friends come along with pieces of money and gold rings, and fortune hustle up with sheep and camels and oxen and asses by the thousand, to say nothing of seven lusty sons and three lovely daughters. A real heart-cheering ending, is that of Job, the kind that delighted the heart of the famous Bishop who used to steal his cook's penny novelettes for the sake of their thrills.

The writer of the stories that had failed realized that instead of bringing cheer to the hearts of his readers his work would excite exasperation, for he was giving nobody his just dues, neither hero, heroine, nor villain. It is bad enough that this should happen in real life without its being dished up in recreational reading. One does not desire to spend one's holiday hours in a dissecting room, nor even in the most ornate of funeral chapels, and when the average magazine reader takes up his favorite periodical he wants something that will give him an agreeable hour or so, pleasantly amuse him, and not leave him foaming at the mouth because his sense of square dealing has been outraged.

The writer of fiction is much in the position of a storekeeper with something to sell. He may put a few little self-pleasing frills around the purpose, but his main object is to find a market, and exchange the creation of his brain for currency. Along comes one of the proletariat, with money in his pocket which he desires to lay out on adornment. He is in search of something "really nifty in the way of a tie," and he finally picks out a purple one with salmon-pink dots liberally scattered all over it. The store man is one of those pestilential persons who knows better than you do what you want, and he insists that the dark blue or the subdued shade of brown would be much more suitable. So persistent is he that the prospective purchaser goes out in a huff, and buys his purple plus salmon-pink tie at the rival establishment. Some writer will hold up inky hands in pious deprecation of the suggestion that his "Art" is on all fours with every-day commerce, but experience will convince him that the relationship is very close. The writer must satisfy his clients, write about pleasing things, the alternatives being to quit the game, publish at his own expense, or hire a hall.

Why in so many instances do writers at the outset of their careers choose gloomy or tragic topics? Probably the reason is that the beginner starts out to spin from the wool of his own experiences, and from those experiences he naturally selects those that have been most impressive to him. Some unhappy event has scored itself deeply on his life—a problem that worked out unsatisfactorily, a sharp disappointment, an undeserved rebuff at the hands of Fate, business reverse, death. Like another Ancient Mariner, he wants to buttonhole all the sundry and tell the direful tale of his slain Albatross. It meant so much to him personally that he cannot understand that it is neither interesting nor attractive to the rest of the world. He forgets that in the school of human experience there is just one alphabet, one grammar, one general education; that what he himself regards as unique and epochal is common to mankind and not a bit thrilling. The general run of humanity gets much the same deal at the hands of life, and has no desire to have the unpleasanter parts of it rehashed in recreational reading.

The sob-sister is close kin to most of us, and we know just what Joe, the Fat Boy, in the Pickwick Papers, had in his mind when he whispered to his agitated old mistress: "I wants to make your flesh creep."

A well-known critic declared some time ago that if an unknown Thomas Hardy were to submit another "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" to a modern magazine he would have to write a different ending to it before it would get by; the editor would not stand for a tragedy that closes the life of Tess so fearfully, no matter how logical the conclusion, or how true to life. If the Immortals do take the helpless souls of men and women as things of sport, or experiment upon them to see how greatly they can suffer before breaking, the average magazine reader does not desire to look upon the picture. Who wants to mix the philosophy of the writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes with his fiction? The world does not believe, in the first place, that all is vanity and vexation of spirit, and does not want to believe it, in the second.

And one may say this, knowing full well that the sublimest stories the world has ever listened to have been those of men and women who have achieved splendid victorious Immortality out of apparent failure. Their way has been through Gethsemane's midnight gloom, the gray dawn of Pilate's Judgment Hall, the dark loneliness of Calvary, and these, the Captains of Salvation, have been made perfect through suffering. True, some masterpieces have been tragedies, but the gloom did not make them masterpieces—it was a combination of masterful story with masterful handling, but this sort is rarely produced, and almost never by the amateur. Milk comes before strong meat.

"A worshipper of the great god Success," is a jibe often hurled by the envious at those who have achieved success, or are seeking it. One need not be a worshipper of Success to believe it to be eminently desirable. After all, it is better to succeed than to fail. The American, for good or ill—and few can doubt for good—has been trained and taught to believe in success, to strive for it, whether it be in national affairs, business pursuits, sports, or in any other department of his life. One might almost say that the realism of Hardy's novels could not spring from a New World location. The gloomy Wessex atmosphere—the monotonous wind-swept and cloud-shadowed moor and down, their long unbroken undulations, dotted with torn and wind-racked trees and lone, dark pools; the poverty-haunted cottages of the laboring folk, the dull isolation of the farm houses—has in it inseparably and inescapably a thousand years and more of bad laws, oppressive landlordism, servitude, and, the offspring of these, a hopelessness drear and chill as the fogs that sweep over them. In this land of ours is a different atmosphere; its legends are of success, few of evil days and failure; its great history has yet to be made and written; it is separated by a wide rolling barrier of sea from the Old World's heritage of feud and wrong; it has clear skies, knows equality and freedom that the older World has but vaguely dreamed of. Youth, corporate or individual, has its own dreams and hopes and ideals, and when these pass, youth has gone.

"We are saved by hope." So the apostolic writer declares with profound insight into human life. What wonder, then, that the spirit of a people should be mirrored in its literary likings and aspirations?

To some it may be a heart-saddening reflection, but one suspects that if the average Saturday evening crowd in one of our average towns could be corralled, and the choice offered them between seeing a performance of Hamlet or beholding Charlie Chaplin of earlier days being made the target for custard pies, about sixty per cent would vote for Charlie; perhaps thirty per cent would choose Hamlet—and long for Charlie; the remaining ten per cent would honestly ask for Hamlet. Frankly, the average American is not high-brow, and has no aspiration to be, and this is not at all pessimism but cheery fact. He goes through grammar school, and, perhaps, high school, learns a trade, likes to sit on the bleachers eating peanuts and loudly dilating on the criminality of umpires, appreciates a stirring movie or an exciting, snappy tale that livens him up. There are those who jibe at the success of H. C. Witwer, but the fact that he puts his work over shows that he is furnishing what no small section of the reading public demands. Before he wrote his Ed Harmon stuff he had a long record of writing non-success, simply because he was not giving what was wanted. He was writing what he fancied was the right kind of thing, but later switched to what the public thought was the right kind of thing, and it hit the magazine world between wind and water.

The average magazine reader, not being a dead one himself, has no desire to read about dead ones; an optimist by birth, breeding, and environment, he has no kind of use for pessimism, but likes to see and hear and read about pleasant things. And who should blame him?

And, to come to the conclusion of the whole matter, have not men and women, in this tough workaday world of ours, troubles enough of their own to face every day, painfully perplexing problems to solve, sorrows and disappointments to meet, that make for grimmest pessimism, without having them in their recreational pursuits? What does the tired mother, her endless work eased for a little time in the evening, when the children have been put to bed and she has an hour or two for herself, want with problems and pessimism? Probably she knows a great deal more about them than the writer ever dreamed. She needs something to cheer her up, something that will take her away from her cares for a time, ease the burdens, bring smiles to her face and gladness to her heart. Let the little shop girl in her tiny hall bedroom have her glorious tales that will transport her to Fifth Avenue, Newport, London, Paris, or Rome; let her be waited upon by lordly butlers and footmen and stately maids; let her be made love to by magnificent millionaires, millionaires with steam yachts and gorgeous cars, polo ponies and more houses than they know the addresses of. The world she moves in is mean and tawdry enough; there is all the stuff that makes for pessimism there; let her dream awhile. What does the tired business man—our old familiar friend—want with other people's fictional troubles? He has all that he wants, and more, or what makes for pessimism—home and office cares, and anxieties over the perils that threaten his laden argosies at sea. He would give all the problem stuff in the world to be abroad the lugger, the wind and spray in his face, adventures about and ahead of him, if only in vivid, care-forgetting imagination. Contrast! This is what they all want, something that is different from the ordinary run of life, and yet is life, just the same. It should be the aim of the story writer to spread the magic carpet before his readers and thereon transport them to another world. Placidity is not needed; the course of true love need not run smoothly; let it have its delightful turbulences.

"Sandy and I have lived together forty years, and ne'er a speck o' trouble," said the dear old lady to Doctor Chalmers.

"Dreadfully monotonous, I'd think," replied the Doctor. But let the writer see to it that in the end there is "port after stormie seas."

Surely anything that makes life easier, sweeter, less care-ridden, is worth while, and—to make an unpessimistic ending to this deliverance—it pays. If you must write pessimism, don't write it for the magazine—put it in a novel. It may make you famous. And it may not.