Shall it die?
By no means. An America without the illustrated literary magazine,
dignified, respectable, certain to contain something that a reader
of taste can peruse with pleasure, would be an unfamiliar America.
And it would be a barer America. In spite of our brood of special
magazines for the _literati_ and the advanced, which Mr. Ford
Madox Hueffer praises so warmly, we are not so well provided with
the distributive machinery for a national culture as to flout a
recognized agency with a gesture and a sneer. But the family
magazine has undeniably lost its vigorous appeal, and must be
reinvigorated. The malady is due to no slackening of literary
virility in the country; indeed there has probably not been so
much literary energy in the country since the 'forties as now--not
nearly so much. Nor is it due to a lack of good readers. Nor, in
my opinion, to the competition of the journalistic magazine. The
literary magazine does not compete, or at least ought not to
compete, with its offspring, for it appeals either to a different
audience or to different tastes.
Roughly stated, the trouble is that the public for these excellent
magazines has changed, and they have not.
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