“I read your story through yesterday, and was so much pleased with it that my first impulse was to take it to the _Century Magazine_. Indeed, I would have done so had I not remembered at that moment that Johnson does not like low life; so you had better try one of the daily papers.”
That was encouraging news for a young man who believed that literary methods had not materially altered since the days when Oliver Goldsmith wrote _The Vicar of Wakefield_.
The pen fell from my hand--it happened to be employed just then on a story dealing with life in a Pell Street opium-joint--and I said to myself: “Merciful heavens! must I devote my life to the delineation of what are called society types, simply because Johnson--whoever he may be--does not like low life?”
I think that if I had known then that low life was only one of a thousand things that could not meet the approval of Johnson, and that, moreover, Bonner was down on fast horses, stepmothers, sisters, matrimonial cousins, and brindle-pups, I would have thrown down my pen and endeavored to support myself in some other way.
But I did not know anything about the practical side of literature then, so I blundered on, wasting a great deal of time over forbidden topics, until I made the acquaintance of Jack Moran and others of his school, who welcomed me to Bohemia, and generously bade me share their treasure-house of accrued knowledge of editorial likes and dislikes. My low-life story--in my sublime faith I had written it on the flimsiest sort of paper--traveled from one office to another until it had eaten up $1.28 in postage and looked like Prince Lorenzo in the last act of _The Mascot_. Then, held together by copper rivets, it sank into its grave in the old daily _Truth_, unwept and unsigned.
I came across this forgotten offspring of my literary youth not long ago, and candor compels me to say that if Mr. Johnson had read that story and printed it in the _Century Magazine_ he would not be to-day the dominant figure in the literature of our country that he is. My romance was not nearly as good as a great many that I have read in daily papers from the pens of clever newspaper men who know what they are writing about. In point of intense dramatic interest it was not within a thousand miles of the _Sun’s_ masterly history of the career of George Howard, the bank burglar, who was murdered in the Westchester woods about fifteen years ago. The story of Howard’s life and crimes was told in a page of the _Sun_, I think by Mr. Amos Cummings, and if I could find any fiction equal to it in one of our magazines I would gladly sound the praises of the editor who was courageous enough to publish it.