"Another evil influence is often alleged--the pressure the business office puts on the reviewer to be tender with novels that are lavishly advertised, but I have never thought there was more than a grain of truth in this. "Perhaps a publisher wouldn't continue to patronize a sheet that habitually blurted out the truth about his best sellers, but I really doubt that this was ever put to an issue. I don't believe the average book-reviewer knows any better than the average novelist the difference between a good and a bad novel. "It isn't so with the other arts. We have critics for those. Music, sculpture, painting--we know the best and get the best. "But, then, the novel is scarcely considered to be an art form. Any one can--and does--write a novel, if he can only find the time. It isn't supposed to be a thing one must study, like plumbing or architecture. "The novelist who wants to write a best seller this year studies the best seller of last year, and wisely, because that is what the publisher wants--something like his last one that sold big. He is looking for it night and day and for nothing else. He wants good carpenters who have followed the design that women have liked. Fiction is the one art you don't take seriously, and there is no one to tell us we should; there are no critics to inform the writers and the readers and make the publishers timid. "True, we have in this country two or three, possibly four, critics who can speak with authority, men who know what the novel has been, what it is with us, what it ought to be. One of them is a friend of mine, and I reproached him lately for not speaking out in meeting oftener. "His defense was pathetic. First, that ninety out of a hundred of our novels are beneath criticism. Second, as to the remaining ten that would merit the rapier instead of the bludgeon--'criticism is harder to sell than post-meridian virtue. I have tried.' "And he has to eat as often as any publisher. So there you are! People are not going to pay him for finding fault with something they are intensely satisfied with. It all comes back to the women. When their taste is corrected we shall have better novels. But not before then!" "Mr. Wilson," I said, "do you believe that the development of the magazine, with its high prices and serialization, has been harmful or beneficial to fiction?" "In the first place, the magazine hasn't developed," he answered. "It has merely multiplied--the cheap ones, I mean. And prices have not increased except to about a dozen of our national favorites. Where there is one writer who can get fifteen hundred dollars for a short story, or fifteen thousand dollars for the serial rights to a novel, there are a thousand who can get not more than a fifteenth of those prices.