ideal of the paragrapher, and that
the notoriety the journalists bestow upon him is not the measure of
their acquaintance with his work, far less his meaning. They are good
fellows, those poor, hard-pushed fellows of the press, but the very
conditions of their censure, friendly or unfriendly, forbid it
thoroughness, and it must often have more zeal than knowledge in it.

X.

Whether the newspapers will become the rivals of the magazines as the
vehicle of literature is a matter that still remains in doubt with the
careful observer, after a decade of the newspaper syndicate. Our daily
papers never had the habit of the feuilleton as those of the European
continent have it; they followed the English tradition in this, though
they departed from it in so many other things; and it was not till the
Sunday editions of the great dailies arose that there was any real hope
for the serial in the papers. I suspect that it was the vast demand
for material in their pages--twelve, eighteen, twenty-four,
thirty-six--that created the syndicate, for it was the necessity of the
Sunday edition not only to have material in abundance, but, with all
possible regard for quality, to have it cheap; and the syndicate, when
it came into being, imagined a means of meeting this want. It sold the
same material to as many newspapers as it could for simultaneous
publication in their Sunday editions, which had each its special field,
and did not compete with another.

I do not think the syndicate began with serials, and I do not think it
is likely to end with them. It has rather worked the vein of
interviews, personal adventure, popular science, useful information,
travel, sketches, and short stories. Still it has 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 fict