placed a good many serial stories, and at pretty good prices, but
not generally so good as those the magazines pay the better sort
of writers; for the worse sort it has offered perhaps the best
market they have had out of book form. By the newspapers, the
syndicate conceives, and perhaps justly, that something
sensational is desired; yet all the serial stories it has placed
cannot be called sensational. It has enlarged the field of
belles-lettres, certainly, but not permanently, I think, in the
case of the artistic novel. As yet the women, who form the
largest, if not the only cultivated class among us, have not
taken very cordially to the Sunday edition, except for its social
gossip; they certainly do not go to it for their fiction, and its
fiction is mainly of the inferior sort with which boys and men
beguile their leisure.

In fact the newspapers prefer to remain newspapers, at least in
quality if not in form; and I heard a story the other day from a
charming young writer of his experience with them, which may have
some instruction for the magazines that less wisely aim to become
newspapers. He said that when he carried his work to the editors
they struck out what he thought the best of it, because it was
what they called magaziny; not contemptuously, but with an
instinctive sense of what their readers wanted of them, and did
not want. It was apparent that they did not want literary art,
or even the appearance of it; they wanted their effects primary;
they wanted their emotions raw, or at least saignantes from the
joint of fact, and not prepared by the fancy or the taste.

The syndicate has no doubt advanced the prosperity of the short
story by increasing the demand for it. We Americans had already