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head of the Drama Department of the Carnegie School of Technology in Pittsburgh, William C. Langdon, of the Russell Sage Foundation. It became a social matter as well as an art matter. Towns, cities, localities dug deep into the public treasury, and spectacles—suggesting a community of interest like the New Orleans Mardi Gras, but actually based on a more self-conscious attempt at celebration-have encouraged a type of drama requiring special writing. But the pageant is not the popular form of drama which will satisfy democratic Ameriica. Nor has the pageant changed the face of the American theatre.

But what it did help to do was to awaken in communities an art consciousness. Individuals began to take pride in materials out of which local drama might be constructed. In addition this interest in pageantry, which called on the co-operation of the amateur spirit, made people all over the country feel that in the theatre they had heretofore possessed no participatory voice. For the public was coming more to understand the theatre and the drama, through the reading of plays, through books on the drama's history, through extension lectures on the theatre, through increasing numbers of courses in the practice and theory of the art of the theatre. And they began looking on the picture in their minds of the ideal theatre, and then on the actual commercial playhouse in their towns as run by the commercial manager; they compared the plays they liked to read with the plays they were forced by the Trust's system of "booking" to witness season in and season out. And the impression was not favourable to the old régime.

This critical attitude is behind the secession which is going on now (1919) in the theatre. Drama groups all through the country have sprung up, and whether it be in Boston, New York, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and so on to the Pacific coast, the secession impulse is the same: a little theatre, managed by some radical artist, has sprung up. Apparently there is no compromise: the old theatre must go; the new theatre and the new art must reign instead. These theatres are independent of each other, though they exchange plays; they have no unifying idea which brings them close together; they are working in their separate ways, and upholding their own philosophies, which are not always philosophies in accord with the American

spirit. Being secessionists, they fly far afield in their interpretation of American life; they are youthful. But their presence has already pointed a way to a more national unity in the art of the theatre. They have called forth scenic artists of their own, and in Robert Jones the regular manager has found a treasure from the amateur ranks. They have created schools of playwrights, like the Washington Square Players, the Provincetown Players, the Wisconsin Players. But if they ever expect to have real influence on the theatre as an institution they have yet to bring themselves out of amateur execution into the dignified ranks of the professional.

The little theatre, per se, is a misnomer; it has been carried too far. Art has often been cramped in a thimble. The amateur has built a small theatre because the large theatre was unwieldy for him. But the future salvation of the theatre has nothing to do with size. The little theatre has encouraged the one-act play, of which form George Middleton and Percival Wilde have been excellent exponents, and Theodore Dreiser, with his Plays Natural and Supernatural, a surprising one; but though the one-act play has great possibility it is not to be the reforming element in the theatre. What really matters is that the public taste is having a free outlet in its amusement. It is showing the manager that amusement governed by the cost of production is bound to debar from the theatre much that is good, much that the American dramatist would like to do which is of an experimental nature, but for which heretofore there has been no outlet. These little theatres bring to mind the possibilities of regional repertory and regional circuits; they point to less extravagance of material in the theatre, more dependence, in scene, plot, and literary expression, on the imaginative aliveness of audiences. It is in such atmosphere, which must sooner or later be recognized by the theatre at large, that the future American dramatist will work.

CHAPTER XIX

Later Magazines

N an earlier volume of this history' will be found a record of

IN

the beginnings of periodical literature in America, and

some account of the many ambitious attempts made by magazine editors and publishers before the middle of the nineteenth century. Since 1850 individual mistakes and failures have been more numerous than before, but there have been a few successes, and magazines as a class have attained a position of great importance. In fact, it is hardly an overstatement to say that the rise of the magazine has been the most significant phenomenon in the development of American publishing. The reading of magazines has come to be far more common than the reading of books. Thousands of persons who would resent the imputation that they are lacking in culture read almost no books at all; and thousands more read only those which they obtain at a public library. No home, however, in which there is pretence of intellectual interest is without magazines, which are usually read by all members of the family. This gain in the prestige of the magazine is due in part to the desire of many readers to be strictly up-to-date, in part to clubbing rates and special offers which are presented with an assiduity that book publishers rarely equal, but chiefly to the better reason that the magazines offer the writings of the best authors, artistically printed and often admirably illustrated, far cheaper than such work can be purchased elsewhere.

This generosity of offering on the part of the magazines is made possible by an illogically liberal postal policy and by the development of modern advertising. A century ago, and even much later, a magazine carried but a few pages of advertising, I Book II, Chap. xx.

mostly announcements of books and articles of stationery. The great development of advertising did not begin until some time after the Civil War, and it perhaps reached its climax about the close of the century. At that time many magazines printed more advertising pages than pages of text. In an earlier day the magazine had derived its revenue from its readers-from yearly subscriptions and from the sale of odd copies. In order to meet expenses the subscription price was placed high, and this price, in turn, kept the number of readers down. Moreover, the fear of alienating subscribers led the publisher to continue on his mailing list many persons who were hopelessly in arrears. The printer's bill often consumed the greater part of the total income, and both editorial salaries and payments to contributors were meagre. The addition of a large revenue from advertising made it possible to cut the subscription price to the amount that would secure the largest circulation; for advertising rates are determined chiefly by the circulation, and if they can be made to yield enough the receipts from subscriptions become an item of minor importance. It is said that in some states of the market the blank paper on which a successful magazine was printed has cost as much as the publisher received for the edition. Contributors, editorial and office expenses, printer's bills, and profits were all paid from advertising. The receipts from this source were so large as to make possible honorariums to authors far greater than had been usual before, and large enough to tempt into the pages of the more enterprising magazines almost any writer whom the editor might desire.

Short stories, which have proved so important a part of American literature during the last fifty years, have almost invariably made their appearance in magazines. By far the greater number of novels by writers of distinction have been published as serials before they were issued in book form. A considerable amount of poetry, many essays, and even historical writings of scholarly importance have found a place in the better popular magazines.

These changes have been accompanied by the good and the questionable effects that always accompany the democratization of culture. It has been well that the patron of the newsstand should be able to procure, sometimes for so small a sum

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as a dime, a periodical that contained work by the best living authors. It has been a misfortune that magazines which called themselves literary should be in the control of men who valued literature chiefly for its indirect effect on advertising receipts, and who mixed contributions signed by great names with others whose merit was a showy and specious appeal to the mass of readers. Nor has the offer of high pay to contributors been an unmixed blessing. The great author who was aware that the editor cared more for his name than for literary merit has been tempted to print work that he must have known was unworthy; and the young man or woman just coming into notice has been persuaded by an exploiting publisher to write too hastily. All the phenomena just mentioned can, however, best be traced in connection with a brief survey of some of the more important magazines.

It will be impossible, in the brief space allotted to this chapter, to discuss or even to name all the magazines with which the student of American literature may find himself concerned. There have been informational magazines, which made much of the timeliness of their articles; scientific and professional journals, popular, semi-popular, and technical; journals of sports; juveniles; and many others not easily classified. The changes of greatest importance have been the death or metamorphosis of the old-fashioned quarterlies and other heavy reviews, and the rise of two groups of popular magazines. One of these groups is represented by the Atlantic, Harper's, Scribner's Monthly, afterward the Century, and Scribber's Magazine, which all pride themselves on maintaining the highest practicable standard of literary and artistic excellence; the other and later group is represented by The Ladies' Home Journal, McClure's, The American Magazine, and a number more which frankly make an appeal to the widest possible constituency of fairly intelligent readers.

In 1850 the chief quarterlies and reviews in existence were The North American Review, Brownson's Quarterly Review, The Christian Examiner, The New Englander, The Democratic Review, The American Whig Review, The Princeton Review, The Southern Literary Messenger, and The Southern Quarterly Review. The decline of the quarterlies had already begun in England, and of the American list named above but one lived virtually