And Others

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

IN one of the newspaper advertise“ And ments of the July Atlantic, Others.” I noticed that the fiction in that number was provided by several well-known writers " and others.” Is there no way of persuading magazines not to use that odious phrase ? It has done wearisome duty for many a year, and if no one else is courageous enough to protest against it, here is one of the “ others ” who will.

Let me begin with the free acknowledgment that the composer of magazine advertisements has a difficult task. Even Virgil, that unrivaled master of the decorative epithet, found it impossible to vary his phrases when he called the roll of his hei’oes. He fell back upon safe commonplaces, and made them all £‘ brave,” —

And Virgil’s task was comparatively simple. He was only constructing an imaginary catalogue of shadowy swordsmen of the Trojan War ; he had no living contributors to vex or please, no ticklish public to allure or repel, by his choice of adjectives. Where Virgil failed, your modern “ advertising man ” may well be pardoned for not succeeding; and yet, what distinction might the Atlantic not confer upon its contributors, if it could manage to diffuse the impression that none of them belong in the “ and others ” class !

None of us like to be grouped as mere Citizens upon the playbill ; it is infinitely more flattering to be a “ Star,” or what our friends of the vaudeville more picturesquely denote as a “ Head-Liner.” What long ambitions and hopes deferred, what intrigues and triumphs and “ brief authorities,” are represented by that petty difference in printer’s type ! Nor is the vaudeville artist your only headliner. Was your name, my dear madam, “ among those present ” last evening ? Mr. Howells, the founder of the Contributors’ Club, has sternly rebuked this frivolous desire to be “ among those present ; ” but it is at least more agreeable to be in that category than to be relegated to the ranks of " among others present,” at the very bottom of the society reporter’s list. Let us be either “ head - lined ” or ignored! There is something so rueful in those two words that follow the names of the winners in a horse race : “Also ran, Castor, Pollux, Mercury, Sixteen-to-One,” etc. Is this the best that Fate can do for us, horses and men alike, to post us up among the “ also rans ” ? “ So run that ye may obtain,” was the apostolic injunction ; but St. Paul was in this instance a trifle vague in his specific directions. If we knew precisely how to “ obtain,” trust us Americans for doing the running! We should appropriate all the headlines for ourselves, and leave the “ and others ” class to — the others.

After all, I suspect that my own dislike for this phrase is partly personal. I have a boy, known to his family and to the university which he very recently adorned as “ Bill.” I have succeeded in carrying him through school and college by pretty steady literary industry. Indeed, for thirty years I suppose I have been what is known as a literary hack,

— well bred, well broken to harness, sound and kind (and driven by a lady !), yet frankly a hack, and not a racer. My books have earned for me a fair income, and I have long contributed to the best magazines ; though whenever their features of the month were announced, my contributions have been in the “ and others ” repository. I have grown quite used to it, for I should not have been so reliable a hack if I had not been by nature something of a philosopher. I have comforted myself by watching the rise and fall of many magazine meteors, whose names have been printed in varicolored ink on the outside covers, where my own has never stood. But mine keeps its unobtrusive place in the table of contents year after year, while the “ day’s distinguished names ” appear and disappear. I have endeavored to be not only philosophical, but even poetical about it. In the days when we all turned Browningites I used to read Pictor Ignotus, and murmur softly — so softly, indeed, as to be quite inaudible — to the literary hero of the month : —

I tried to persuade myself that I was really a happier man, thus undistinguished and unadvertised.

This brings me back to Bill. A few months ago he published an historical novel. He began it, I believe, as a required college exercise, and finished it on a bet. It has already sold — I will not say how many thousand copies, for these paragraphs are not written to exploit the boy, but more copies than were ever sold of all his father’s books put together. He has “ become a name.” And, to come at last to my personal grievance, he had a short story (and oh, Billy, but what a poor one !) in a recent magazine, which happened also to contain a contribution by his father. The issue was advertised to contain stories by Rudyard Kipling, F. Hopkinson Smith, Bill Blank, “ and others,” — and I was one of the others. The boy seemed to think that this was rather a joke on him. At any rate, he sent me a box of cigars, — paid for, I trust, out of his publishers’ advances against the copyrights of his second (and unwritten) historical romance. But the incident has not lessened my animosity toward that offending phrase, and I wish the Atlantic might dispense with it.