You inform me that you desire to be a journalist, and you are kind enough
to ask my advice. Well, be a journalist, by all means, in any honest and
honourable branch of the profession. But do not be an eavesdropper and a
spy. You may fly into a passion when you receive this very plainly
worded advice. I hope you will; but, for several reasons, which I now go
on to state, I fear that you won't. I fear that, either by natural gift
or by acquired habit, you already possess the imperturbable temper which
will be so useful to you if you do join the army of spies and
eavesdroppers. If I am right, you have made up your mind to refuse to
take offence, as long as by not taking offence you can wriggle yourself
forward in the band of journalistic reptiles. You will be revenged on
me, in that case, some day; you will lie in wait for me with a dirty
bludgeon, and steal on me out of a sewer. If you do, permit me to assure
you that I don't care. But if you are already in a rage, if you are
about tearing up this epistle, and are starting to assault me personally,
or at least to answer me furiously, then there is every hope for you and
for your future. I therefore venture to state my reasons for supposing
that you are inclined to begin a course which your father, if he were
alive, would deplore, as all honourable men in their hearts must deplore
it. When you were at the University (let me congratulate you on your
degree) you edited, or helped to edit, _The Bull-dog_. It was not a very
brilliant nor a very witty, but it was an extremely "racy" periodical. It
spoke of all men and dons by their nicknames. It was full of second-hand
slang. It contained many personal anecdotes, to the detriment of many
people. It printed garbled and spiteful versions of private
conversations on private affairs. It did not even spare to make comments
on ladies, and on the details of domestic life in the town and in the
University. The copies which you sent me I glanced at with extreme
disgust.
In my time, more than a score of years ago, a similar periodical, but a
much more clever periodical, was put forth by members of the University.
It contained a novel which, even now, would be worth several ill-gotten
guineas to the makers of the _chronique scandaleuse_. But nobody bought
it, and it died an early death. Times have altered, I am a fogey; but
the ideas of honour and decency which fogies hold now were held by young
men in the sixties of our century. I know very well that these ideas are
obsolete. I am not preaching to the world, nor hoping to convert
society, but to _you_, and purely in your own private, spiritual
interest. If you enter on this path of tattle, mendacity, and malice,
and if, with your cleverness and light hand, you are successful, society
will not turn its back on you. You will be feared in many quarters, and
welcomed in others. Of your paragraphs people will say that "it is a
shame, of course, but it is very amusing." There are so many shames in
the world, shames not at all amusing, that you may see no harm in adding
to the number. "If I don't do it," you may argue, "some one else will."
Undoubtedly; but _why should you do it_?
You are not a starving scribbler; if you determine to write, you can
write well, though not so easily, on many topics. You have not that last
sad excuse of hunger, which drives poor women to the streets, and makes
unhappy men act as public blabs and spies. If _you_ take to this
_metier_, it must be because you like it, which means that you enjoy
being a listener to and reporter of talk that was never meant for any
ears except those in which it was uttered. It means that the hospitable
board is not sacred for _you_; it means that, with you, friendship,
honour, all that makes human life better than a low smoking-room, are
only valuable for what their betrayal will bring. It means that not even
the welfare of your country will prevent you from running to the Press
with any secret which you may have been entrusted with, or which you may
have surprised. It means, this peculiar kind of profession, that all
things open and excellent, and conspicuous to all men, are with you of no
account. Art, literature, politics, are to cease to interest you. You
are to scheme to surprise gossip about the private lives, dress, and talk
of artists, men of letters, politicians. Your professional work will
sink below the level of servants' gossip in a public-house parlour. If
you happen to meet a man of known name, you will watch him, will listen
to him, will try to sneak into his confidence, and you will blab, for
money, about him, and your blab will inevitably be mendacious. In short,
like the most pitiable outcasts of womankind, and, without their excuse,
you will live by selling your honour. You will not suffer much, nor
suffer long. Your conscience will very speedily be seared with a red-hot
iron. You will be on the road which leads from mere dishonour to crime;
and you may find yourself actually practising _chantage_, and extorting
money as the price of your silence. This is the lowest deep: the vast
majority, even of social _mouchards_, do not sink so low as this.
The profession of the critic, even in honourable and open criticism, is
beset with dangers. It is often hard to avoid saying an unkind thing, a
cruel thing, which is smart, and which may even be deserved. Who can say
that he has escaped this temptation, and what man of heart can think of
his own fall without a sense of shame? There are, I admit, authors so
antipathetic to me, that I cannot trust myself to review them. Would
that I had never reviewed them! They cannot be so bad as they seem to
me: they must have qualities which escape my observation. Then there is
the temptation to hit back. Some one writes, unjustly or unkindly as you
think, of you or of your friends. You wait till your enemy has written a
book, and then you have your innings. It is not in nature that your
review should be fair: you must inevitably be more on the look-out for
faults than merits. The _ereintage_, the "smashing" of a literary foe is
very delightful at the moment, but it does not look well in the light of
reflection. But these deeds are mere peccadilloes compared with the
confirmed habit of regarding all men and women as fair game for personal
tattle and the sating of private spite. Nobody, perhaps, begins with
this intention. Most men and women can find ready sophistries. If a
report about any one reaches their ears, they say that they are doing him
a service by publishing it and enabling him to contradict it. As if any
mortal ever listened to a contradiction! And there are charges--that of
plagiarism, for example--which can never be disproved, even if
contradictions were listened to by the public. The accusation goes
everywhere, is copied into every printed rag; the contradiction dies with
the daily death of a single newspaper. You may reply that a man of sense
will be indifferent to false accusations. He may, or may not be,--that
is not the question for you; the question for you is whether you will
circulate news that is false, probably, and spiteful, certainly.
In short, the whole affair regards yourself more than it regards the
world. Plenty of poison is sold: is it well for you to be one of the
merchants? Is it the business of an educated gentleman to live by the
trade of an eavesdropper and a blab? In the Memoirs of M. Blowitz he
tells you how he began his illustrious career by procuring the
publication of remarks which M. Thiers had made to him. He then "went to
see M. Thiers, not without some apprehension." Is that the kind of
emotion which you wish to be habitual in your experience? Do you think
it agreeable to become shame-faced when you meet people who have
conversed with you frankly? Do you enjoy being a sneak, and feeling like
a sneak? Do you find blushing pleasant? Of course you will soon lose
the power of blushing; but is that an agreeable prospect? Depend on it,
there are discomforts in the progress to the brazen, in the journey to
the shameless. You may, if your tattle is political, become serviceable
to men engaged in great affairs. They may even ask you to their houses,
if that is your ambition. You may urge that they condone your deeds, and
are even art and part in them. But you must also be aware that they call
you, and think you, a reptile. You are not one of those who will do the
devil's work without the devil's wages; but do you seriously think that
the wages are worth the degradation?
Many men think so, and are not in other respects bad men. They may even
be kindly and genial. Gentlemen they cannot be, nor men of delicacy, nor
men of honour. They have sold themselves and their self-respect, some
with ease (they are the least blamable), some with a struggle. They have
seen better things, and perhaps vainly long to return to them. These are
"St. Satan's Penitents," and their remorse is vain:
_Virtutem videant_, _intabescantque relicta_.
If you don't wish to be of this dismal company, there is only one course
open to you. Never write for publication one line of personal tattle.
Let all men's persons and private lives be as sacred to you as your
father's,--though there are tattlers who would sell paragraphs about
their own mothers if there were a market for the ware. There is no half-
way house on this road. Once begin to print private conversation, and
you are lost--lost, that is, to delicacy and gradually, to many other
things excellent and of good report. The whole question for you is, Do
you mind incurring this damnation? If there is nothing in it which
appals and revolts you, if your conscience is satisfied with a few ready
sophisms, or if you don't care a pin for your conscience, fall to!
_Vous irez loin_! You will prattle in print about men's private lives
their hidden motives, their waistcoats, their wives, their boots, their
businesses, their incomes. Most of your prattle will inevitably be lies.
But go on! nobody will kick you, I deeply regret to say. You will earn
money. You will be welcomed in society. You will live and die content,
and without remorse. I do not suppose that any particular _inferno_ will
await you in the future life. Whoever watches this world "with larger
other eyes than ours" will doubtless make allowance for you, as for us
all. I am not pretending to be a whit better than you; probably I am
worse in many ways, but not in your way. Putting it merely as a matter
of taste, I don't like the way. It makes me sick--that is all. It is a
sin which I can comfortably damn, as I am not inclined to it. You may
put it in that light; and I have no way of converting you, nor, if I have
not dissuaded you, of dissuading you, from continuing, on a larger scale,
your practices in _The Bull-dog_.