THE SALAAM OF LIFE

The changing fortunes of popular magazines came to public notice last week when the best-known humorous publication in America was compelled to change from a weekly to a monthly. Thirty years ago, "Life" was a real force in the land. Its pronouncements on matters social and political were widely followed from week to week. Unlike the present vintage of satiric magazines, it provided in Gibson and his colleagues a commentary on manners that was not merely destructive. For the Gibson Girl and the Gibson Man, however they may "date" in modern eyes, stood as an ideal to young Americans of the nineties. But bit by bit "Life" had to die because it could not change its temper when chafing-dishes were banished from the sideboards of America for juniper drops and bitters. All that was still vital in "Life" was appropriated five years ago by the "New Yorker," and seasoned with the urbanities of a new Manhattan cocktail.

Other magazines have likewise fallen from popularity because the times have passed them by. In the eighties, "Harper's Weekly" crusaded almost single-handed against the pioneer racketeers of the Tweed Ring and won its fight by the efforts of the cartoonist Thomas Nast. And in the turbulent days of the Roosevelt campaigns, its drawings by Kemble crystallized the opinion of the opposition. But because "Harper's" could not remake its pages in the image of Baron Steiehen or Covarrubias, it had to die.

Indeed, the only magazines in America that have survived the change in manners since the virginal days of 1912 are the ones that have learned to trim their sails, both typographically and editorially. Some, like "Vanity Fair," have kept pace gracefully and insensibly; others, like the "Forum," pied the old type and came forth clad in a cover of boiler-room Roman the better to face hard facts. In every case, the age has made the magazine not the magazine the age. For with the passing of personal journalism and the great tradition of William Lloyd Garrison and Horace Greeley, the American press lost its crusading temper. Editors took it as their business astutely to tell their readers only what they liked to hear. When the old-fashioned virtues became museum-pieces, "Vanity Fair" and "Life" were careful merely to raise an eyebrow but never to frown at the human comedy.

As the old "Life" ends and the new begins, people will take down the dusty bound volumes reflecting that "Its foe was folly, and its weapon wit."