OLD AND NEW JOURNALISTS
What we do, are, and suffer journalistically was determined for us in the
Nineties. The decade was the meeting-ground of opposing forces, and the
battle between them was largely fought to a decision before the end. In
1890 the old “solid” journalism—and it was very solid indeed—decidedly
enjoyed pride of place; the newer journalism was not too firmly
established; the newest journalism had conquered but an insignificant
portion of the weekly Press, and had gained no daily representative.
Ten years later the whole scene was changed. The old journalism was
manifestly stricken to death, though it took an unconscionable time
to die. The newer journalism—its most typical representative was _The
Star_—had advanced but slightly. The newest journalism—that of Alfred
Harmsworth and his imitators—was in the heyday of youthful vigour, very
much alive, and perpetually kicking. It is not easy to find a parallel
to a change so swift, so silent, and so complete—a change, moreover, so
powerful and various in its effect, for the newest journalism, with its
loud and simple Imperialism, its indifference to party ties, its lack of
interest in moral or religious questions, its intense concern in wealth
and the manifestations of wealth, has contributed as much as anything
to the digging of that great spiritual gulf which separates us from the
Victorian time.
At the beginning of the Nineties the older newspaper Press seemed to
enjoy all the prestige which had been its since Gladstone made a cheap
Press possible. The “great dailies” were not largely circulated, as
circulations now go; they were very cheaply conducted, by all modern
standards of expenditure; they had few interests, apart from politics;
they do not seem, to one who turns over the yellow files, conspicuously
well written. But they commanded an almost idolatrous respect. The
average of British mankind took his paper not much less seriously than
his passbook, and rather more seriously than his Bible. The journalist
himself might still, perhaps, be rather lightly regarded; there might be
men still who, like George Warrington, blushed when they confessed to
making an honest living out of pen and ink.
“I write,” said Warrington. “I don’t tell the world that I do
so,” he added with a blush. “I do not choose that questions
should be asked; or perhaps I am an ass, and don’t wish it to
be said that George Warrington writes for bread.”
But the same Warrington—a much more delicious snob than any in his
creator’s special book on that species—could indulge in such a rhapsody
on the Press as the following:
They were passing through the Strand as they talked, and by
a newspaper office, which was all lighted up and bright.
Reporters were coming out of the place, or rushing up to it in
cabs; there were lamps burning in the editors’ rooms, and above
where the compositors were at work; the windows of the building
were in a blaze of gas.
“Look at that, Pen,” Warrington said. “There she is—the great
engine—she never sleeps. She has her ambassadors in every
quarter of the world—her couriers upon every road. Her officers
march along with armies, and her envoys walk into statesmen’s
cabinets. They are ubiquitous. Yonder journal has an agent, at
this minute, giving bribes in Madrid, and another inspecting
the price of potatoes in Covent Garden. Look! Here comes the
Foreign Express galloping in. They will be able to give news to
Downing Street to-morrow; funds will rise or fall, fortunes be
made or lost; Lord B. will get up, and, holding the paper in
his hand, and seeing the noble Marquis in his place, will make
a great speech; and—and Mr. Doolan will be called away from his
supper at the back kitchen; for he is the foreign sub-editor,
and sees the mail on the newspaper sheet before he goes to his
own.”
That was the feeling about the Press in Thackeray’s time, and it was
still the feeling in the early Nineties; the sense of something almost
superhuman in its intelligence. Thackeray, as a kind of gentleman,
heartily scorned the newspaper people with whom he was thrown into
professional contact, but he had a vast respect for the final result of
all their efforts. To-day Thackeray, however gentlemanly, would not be
ashamed to acknowledge being or knowing a leader-writer, but on the other
hand he would sneer (as a fashionable thing to do) at the Press as an
institution. Thirty years ago the actual Thackerayan view prevailed on
both points, if a little weakened. There was still almost a sacredness
attaching to serious print. Men were so anxious to respect the Press
that they frowned on any tendencies to levity which might occasionally
be found. A journal purporting to give news and views had gravity
forced upon it. It is true that a great deal of licence was allowed
to the comic and periodical Press, which was, on the whole, much less
decorous than that of to-day. These publications, indeed, seemed to be
tolerated rather on the old respectable principle that, since there must
be wickedness, it is well to give it a definite outlet, so as to avoid
the evils of general contamination. These papers were, so to speak,
the journalistic _filles de joie_ who, by the sacrifice of their own
reputation, safeguarded the vestal innocence of the responsible sheets.
In their pages the reader could, if his tastes lay that way, find all
the spice, suggestiveness, and scandalous piquancy he wanted. In the
great dailies all was propriety and dullness. They were the work of the
shorthand reporter and the leader-writer. Home news meant Parliament,
public meetings, and police court “intelligence.” Foreign news meant (to
quote Mr. Balfour) the “dull and doubtful details of the European diary
daily transmitted by ‘our special correspondent.’” Leaders, broadly
speaking, meant comment on the speeches and the despatches.
The old journalism had a great tradition behind it. It was never, indeed,
quite what its eulogists would have us believe. There never was a time
when the feet of advertisers were not beautiful upon its staircases.
There never was a time when the proprietor thought of his paper purely as
a public institution. Indeed, the fact was rather that the proprietor was
so much of a tradesman that he restricted himself to the commercial side
of his venture. There were exceptions, of course, like some of the Walter
family, who took a very living interest in policy. But as a rule the
great newspaper plutocrat had little social ambition, and less interest
in home or foreign politics. Such a man knew that he was a Conservative
and a Churchman, or that he was a Liberal and a Nonconformist, or that
he was a Secularist and a Radical, or that he was a “kind of a plaid.”
But he did not greatly trouble about specific things political: he left
that to his editor. He “set” a general policy, and then looked round for
someone to carry it out: the someone soon showed whether he was going to
be a success or a failure. If he were a failure, the proprietor had the
misery of another trial; if he were a success, another name was added to
the list of “great editors.” The proprietor occasionally asked him to
dinner, much as Mr. Bungay asked his contributors to “cut mutton” with
him; but for months together the editor dictated policy without a hint
from above.
A man thus working for a mere salary—and that not exactly a princely
one, for Mr. Mudford’s five thousand a year on _The Standard_ was almost
the plum of the profession—might, one would think, get into all sorts of
bad courses in thus working practically without supervision. He might
well become a drunkard, or a lazybones, or a venal scoundrel. In fact,
every editor was a model of probity, and almost all the editors showed
great energy and ability. Commonly they developed a most romantic loyalty
to their papers and proprietors, and generally ended by dying of sheer
exhaustion in their service. But this was not the Victorian editor’s only
loyalty. Even more striking was his sense of what was due to the public.
He felt in his very marrow the obligation to serve the public to the best
of his ability, both as regarded information and counsel. If he thought
the mass of the public was right from his political standpoint, then it
must be kept intelligently right; if it was wrong, then it must be argued
out of its error. But he held it as a cardinal principle that the public
must not be merely bamboozled, still less misled by sheer lies, and
knowingly he never published false or distorted information. His comments
might be partial, but his news was honest. Such an editor never boasted
himself as a person of special integrity; on the contrary he generally
spoke in private with extreme cynicism, and was as far removed from
priggishness as a man could well be. Yet few bishops, priests, or deacons
held so firmly to professional duties and decencies.
It was part of the character of these men to be anonymous. Inside their
offices they were autocrats; outside they were less than nobodies; they
did not properly exist at all. Delane, ubiquitous and social-minded,
was the exception. The rule was rather represented by Mudford of _The
Standard_, who would see nobody at his office, and, when a Cabinet
Minister once pursued him to his private house, called to his servant
from the dining-room, “Tell Lord —— I am not at home.” Mudford’s offices
in Shoe Lane were fitted up with all sorts of secret passages to
enable him to enter or leave without notice, and though, by a perfect
intelligence service, he knew everything that was going on, he was
himself as invisible as the Mikado of old. Next to the editors, the
chief personages of the “great dailies” were the leader-writers. They
were often socially better known as individuals than the editor. But it
was considered bad form to be aware of their professional pursuits, and
nobody was supposed to notice if at a certain hour a particular man,
known to write for the Press, disappeared like the ghost of Hamlet’s
father when the cock crew. The old leader-writer generally belonged to
the class of man who, with a little more ambition and some money or
great family connection, would have gone into politics. He had usually
done well at his university. He knew a good many people of the “right”
sort. He belonged to a good club when it was something to belong to
almost any club. He was paid well. He was, on the whole, very lightly
worked, and his duties were no less pleasant than easy. Small wonder,
therefore, that newspapers had a large field of selection, and that
leader-writers grew grey in the service of particular papers. Almost
the only survival of this interesting class now active in the Press is
Sir Sidney Low, the author of _The Governance of England_ and a number
of other valuable works. The technique of daily writing probably never
reached a higher perfection than with him; he had a most uncanny power of
producing, as fast as his pencil (for he eschewed the pen, fountain or
otherwise) could travel over paper, an article strong in common sense,
coherent in argument, abounding in incidental felicities of quotation and
illustration, and delightful in its easy freedom and picturesqueness.
A rather heavier weight was the late Mr. S. H. Jeyes, who was for long
associated with Sir Sidney Low on _The Standard_. Jeyes was happy in
being exactly suited temperamentally to his medium. I could never think
of Sir Sidney Low as a true Conservative; but the other was as good a
specimen of the natural Tory as ever existed. His was not the Toryism
of mental inertia, still less of stupidity, for he had a brain of the
very first quality, and in spite of a tendency to indolence got through
an enormous deal of work; but both his temper and his philosophy of
life were wholly Conservative, and the Gladstonian Liberal, I fancy,
aroused in him an almost physical repulsion. Like Carlyle, he was much
more tolerant of the Mountain than of the Gironde, and a real Bolshevist
would probably have affected him less unfavourably than a constitutional
Socialist of the type whom the Bolshevist swallowed. He commanded a style
of massive strength, and had a curiously impressive way of smashing
some small antagonist in a line, much as one might settle the hash of
an annoying insect, and then passing on in careless unconcern to a
more important person or matter. Perhaps the mordancy of his style was
increased by his studies of Juvenal, of whose satires he has left an
extremely lively translation; he loved the Latin idiom, which he could
use with almost as much freedom as English, and his own manner savoured
of classic severity and compression. He lived just long enough to see the
beginning of the end of _The Standard_, to which his best years had been
devoted.
A feature of the old daily papers was a “light” leader on a literary
or general subject; here the hand of the political leader-writer was
seldom used, though Sir Sidney Low, whose range was extraordinarily wide,
has done some very charming things in this genre. A famous contributor
of _The Standard_ was Alfred Austin, whom many thought better in his
workaday prose than in his occasional verse. Austin seldom stirred from
his place near Ashford, in Kent, and was perhaps the only leader-writer
whose contributions were habitually transmitted by wire. Another charming
writer of these fancy leaders was Andrew Lang. Mr. Hutchinson has dealt
with him in a charming sketch in his _Portraits of the Eighties_, but
Lang’s hand was still discoverable by the discerning in the _Daily News_
of the earlier Nineties.
Such in the main was the “great daily”: an affair of a “great editor,”
talented leader-writers, and a few highly-paid correspondents in certain
big capitals. The rest of the staff were nobodies, inferior in education,
in social standing, and in professional status; and there was a sort
of Chinese wall, moral and sometimes even physical, between them and
the aristocrats. This rigidity was unfavourable to progress, and it so
happened that about the beginning of the Nineties the supply of really
“great editors” fell short. Mr. Buckle, of _The Times_, might, indeed, be
accounted such, but he had special difficulties in his way—perhaps the
chief of them was the great blow of the Pigott forgeries—and among the
controllers of the other “great dailies” (except the _Daily Telegraph_,
which has always been peculiar in having a most active and vigilant
proprietorial element) there was none of quite the same calibre as the
Mudfords and the Delanes. There was thus a deadness about the Press which
positively invited the invasion of a robust competitor.
The first who made a burst into that silent sea was Mr. T. P. O’Connor
with _The Star_; Mr. W. T. Stead’s experiments with the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ were not of long duration, and the enterprise of _The Echo_,
one of the earliest pioneers of popular journalism, was not specially
distinctive. _The Star_ may be taken as typical of the newer journalistic
school of the early Nineties. In those days it was a strange blend
of seriousness and flippancy. To the rather stodgy decorum of the
old-established papers it opposed a curiously insincere rowdyism. I say
“insincere,” but perhaps the better adjective would be “forced.” _The
Star_ was really not at all vulgar. On its literary side it stood for
the very opposite of vulgarity; the true vulgarity was on the side of
the staid and respectable critics. And in politics it was mainly for all
that was honest and of good report; one might smile at the enthusiasms
of a purely Cockney print for “Home to the village and back to the
land,” but one could not accuse it of an unworthy or trivial outlook.
But it tried with extraordinary strenuousness to give the impression of
vulgarity. In dealing with the gravest matters it affected a riot of
titular fantasy tending to scandalise the steady-going. On the whole,
it clung to the narrow range of subjects affected by the older papers,
but it dished up the meetings and despatches piping hot and with a
_sauce piquante_ of “bright” headline. The news of the “Wife Murder
at Stepney” might be substantially the same as in the ordinary paper,
but _The Star_ sought to induce cheerfulness by heading the paragraph
“Bullets for Mother.” A criminal who cut his throat while trying to
escape from the police was described as “A Scarlet Runner.” But this
jocularity was often too abstruse to be really popular. _The Star_
was staffed chiefly by clever and rebellious young men, most of whom
have since done well for themselves and perhaps for others, and they
were incorrigible in inferring, not only much mental alertness in their
readers, but a considerable acquaintance with the dead languages and
the French and English classics. Thus, if there happened to be a strike
of bakers settled by compromise, the glad news was pretty sure to be
announced under the headline “_Dough ut des_,” which might have delighted
a frivolous man of education, but could hardly have failed to leave the
ordinary proletarian (supposed to be the main support of the paper)
in a state of angry mystification. Suppose, also, that some gorgeous
Maharajah happened to come over to one of the recurrent royal pageants,
dropping diamonds wherever he went—“Lo! The Rich Indian,” the predestined
headline, might tickle an idle man who remembered the original quotation
and recalled the rest of the couplet. But to the brewer’s drayman
it would seem a mere gratuitous silliness. It was this disastrous
cleverness, perhaps more than anything else, which prevented the ultimate
victory resting with the newer journalism, and left the way open to the
newest school.
The newer journalism, however, set many of the fashions that still
prevail to-day. It broke up the old anonymity of the Press. Few people
would have been able at that time to say who edited _The Times_, _The
Standard_, or _The Morning Post_, who wrote those charming things on
golf and Shakespeare and the musical glasses, or who was responsible
for exalting “The Bells” or decrying “Ghosts.” But everybody knew that
Mr. T. P. O’Connor started _The Star_, that Mr. Bernard Shaw “did” the
music for it, that Mr. A. B. Walkley “did” the drama, and that Mr.
Ernest Parke, after a very short time, inherited Mr. O’Connor’s mantle.
The name of Mr. Parke at once suggests what was perhaps the feature
which most strongly differentiated the journalism of the early Nineties,
new or old, from that which was seen clearly to be most successful at
the end of the decade. I mean its unashamed preaching, its conviction
that it had a mission, and its content to risk being a bore if only
the mission could succeed. Ernest Parke was—I speak of him in the past
tense, though he happily remains in the present, because, while he is
still hale and vigorous, his massive and once golden head is no longer a
common object of the Fleet Street landscape—a journalist of a type now
hardly existent. To begin with, he was an extraordinary judge of ability
of any kind, and managed to surround himself, at singularly low cost for
the most part to his principals, with young men who have since either
earned distinction in letters or have gone to form the _cadres_ of all
the chief newspaper staffs of London. In the second place he contrived to
maintain all the realities of the sternest discipline with all the forms
of anarchy. The shyest new arrival soon fell into the habit of calling
him by his surname, and making jokes (not excluding practical jokes) at
his expense. Yet the terror of being found out by him in any slackness
or stupidity lay on the oldest inhabitant as much as on the rawest
recruit. He contrived to give the journalistic calling all the zest of
a joke with all the earnestness of a religious vocation. His interests
were singularly wide. Himself very far removed from the scholarly, he
had the keenest appreciation of all the newest things in literature and
the arts, and there was no better rough judge of good, sound writing. On
the other hand, he had the capacity of feeling deeply on all sorts of
odd things to which the bookish man is commonly indifferent. He could
work himself up—or perhaps he did not need working up—into a state
of frenzy over the “guzzling” and junketing propensities of various
public or semi-public bodies in the City of London. He waged deadly
war against all ill-treatment of animals. A workhouse “scandal” would
move him to extraordinary indignation. A police court sentence which
appealed to him as unjust or cruel would rouse all the generous Quixote
as well as all the original savage in him. But he did not, by any means,
think parochially—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, if
he thought parochially, he made the whole world his parish. Something
happening in Russia would excite him no less, in given circumstances,
than something happening in Mile End. He kept his eye as vigilantly on
the iniquity of the Turk as on the shiftiness of a minor Minister or
the advertisements of a bucket-shop fraud. The memory of his long duel
with the Rockefellers over “low-flash oil” still lingers with the older
inhabitants of Fleet Street. I happened to be out of England for some
years while this crusade was proceeding. My last uncloudy impression of
the Old Country was a placard at Southampton with some such words as
“Nearing Victory over Low-Flash,” and my first clear impression on my
return was another placard at Tilbury (a rather depressed-looking and
washed-out placard) bearing the legend “Another Low-Flash Horror—How
long, Oh Lord, how long?”—or words to that effect.
A vague and even rather bewildered kindness of heart, a noble indignation
against any sort of oppression, corruption, or insolence, a general
sympathy with the under-dog anywhere and everywhere—these Ernest Parke
had in common with a number of men who, lacking the essential sanity
which was at the bottom of his very English temperament, drifted into
mere faddism, humanitarian eccentricity, and anti-nationalism: the sort
of men who, to quote Mr. Chesterton, would first ask us to eat nothing
but vegetables, then tell us that it was wicked to consume even grass,
and finally ask, in a flush of noble sentiment, “Why should salt
suffer?” But Mr. Parke may well serve as the representative of a whole
class of editors, flourishing in the Nineties, who were not afraid to be
bores, and (by some miracle) succeeded in escaping the usual fate of the
bore. In ordinary life the man who insists on expounding his view of a
certain set of questions is shunned like the plague: business interest,
blood relationship, deep-seated esteem suffice not to win him toleration.
A boring newspaper is easier to avoid than a boring individual; the
remedy is simply not to buy it. The only conclusion, therefore, is
either that the public of that day enjoyed “damned iteration,” or that
the “damned iteration” was done with great art. The contrast between
the preaching journalism of the Nineties and the preaching journalism
of to-day cannot be better exemplified than by the history of two
agitations. In the Nineties there was an agitation against the Turk. The
British public was called on to express its feeling concerning a great
massacre of Armenians. It was invited to condemn “the dripping sword of
Abdul the Damned.” Now the Armenians, though an ill-used, were a very
far-away people; not one out of a thousand Englishmen had ever seen an
Armenian, or even framed any clear picture of the nature or geographical
disposition of an Armenian. Yet, after some weeks of newspaper agitation,
the whole country was ringing with indignation against the Sultan, and
Lord Rosebery’s retirement was hastened by the incompatibility between
his views on these massacres and those of the great majority of the
Liberal Party.
Contrast this agitation with that concerning recent Irish administration.
Ireland lies a few hours from England, and vast numbers of Englishmen
have friends among the Irish. The Irish question is not a remote affair
of foreign politics, but is most intimately connected with all our great
interests, as well as all our party feuds and intrigues. Whatever be
the exact truth about the situation, it is certain that the state of
Ireland has long been worse than it has ever been within living memory,
and it is equally certain that for a hundred years no such allegations
have been made against a British Government in regard to Ireland as the
allegations that are made to-day. But the newspapers which have the
clearest political interest in agitation do not agitate. Apparently
they are not without the wish to agitate, for they occasionally publish
strongly-worded articles. What they have lost is less the spirit than
the knack of agitation. That knack consists in merciless and unremitting
repetition, in what the ordinary man calls “rubbing it in.” The facts
have to be made clear, not once or twice, but seventy times seven.
The public has to be given no chance of forgetting and no excuse for
misunderstanding. The paper that would succeed in agitation must, in
short, be prepared to make itself a very serious bore. It must be
prepared to lose something in order to gain something. It must be ready
to sacrifice any reputation it may have with office boys and millinery
hands, who are not and cannot be made interested in politics. It must
even reconcile itself to the loss of a nice balance of headlines on
its main news page. Now the modern editor is far too much of an artist
to make these sacrifices. He is prepared to give Ireland some sort of
show if Ireland happens to be much in the picture. But even then the
eternal test match and the never-remitting golf championship cannot be
banished to the sporting page, and prominence simply must be found for
the pathetic little story about the “Thousand Million Dollar Baby,”
while the demands of local interest compel due attention to “Spooks in a
Norfolk Rectory,” and “Cat at an Eastbourne Whist Drive.” So Ireland’s
tale of woe flows through the paper like an Australian river. It is
easily traceable to the extent of a column; with some little difficulty
one finds an inch and a half of it under “Rembrandt for Ninepence” two
columns away; the mystery thickens when, referred to “continuation on
page seven,” one finds nothing there but a company meeting and “Are we
Immodest?” (continued from page eight); but finally the residue of the
Irish revelations is, by a lucky chance, run to ground on the City page
between “Butter Quiet” and “Copper Uneasy.” This is what happens when
Ireland is uppermost. At other times just nothing happens. When Ireland
does not deserve an important headline Ireland does not get one, and the
perfunctory paragraph is relegated to some back page, where a provincial
tennis match crowds it out.
Now the editor of the Nineties had none of this excessive respect for the
momentary and this strange disregard for continuity. Nor was he in the
smallest degree concerned about the symmetry of his news page. His main
idea was to make an impression, and an impression he certainly made. The
truth is that he felt himself less an artist in newspaper technique than
a prophet; often a Nonconformist by extraction, sometimes a secularist of
that Victorian type which was really more religious than the orthodox,
he was consumed with the idea that it was his business to put the world
right, and if he thought the world could be put a little more right by
letting an article run to five good columns, he could not bring himself
to hack it into two poor columns. He would rather leave out something
about a dog swallowing a will.
Curiously enough, the only newspapers which have not lost the knack of
propaganda are those which, in their origin, represented the revulsion
against propagandist journalism, and set out to supply simply “what the
public wants.” What I have called the newest journalism of the Nineties
(that is, the most solidly established journalism of to-day) has none of
the moral fervour of the Parkes and Steads. But it understands as well
as they did the importance of “rubbing it in”; and modern history might
well have run a far different course had such mastery of method been
associated with a more stable political philosophy.
This newest journalism is the child of two men—Alfred, Viscount
Northcliffe, and Mr. Kennedy Jones, M.P. The soul of it belongs to the
one, the body of it was moulded by the other. There were immediate
imitators, careful but uninspired, like Sir Arthur Pearson, and in the
long run all sorts of old papers abjectly copied the methods which had
brought them discomfiture. Other magnates, endowed with more character,
adopted the spirit while imparting to their productions a rather more
masculine note. But on the whole the great revolution in the Press
since the Nineties took its form from the personality of these two
men. The journalism represented by _The Star_ was half a joke and half
a crusade, with a commercial side to it. It was meant to pay, and no
doubt did pay up to a point; but its main motive was hardly a purely
commercial motive. The newest journalism, on the other hand, was frankly
businesslike: it set out to industrialise Bohemia, and succeeded. It was
as businesslike as a tea-shop: indeed, its progress was very like that of
the great tea-shop concerns. The tea-shops started with the lightest of
refreshments; the newest journalism started with the lightest of reading.
The tea-shop concerns went on extending and experimentalising until they
embraced every branch of the trade; they bought up old concerns and
started new ones; but to every acquisition and departure they imparted
something of their own original character. It was the same with the
newest journalism. Starting on crackers and sherbert, it worked its
way to fifteen-course dinners and vintage wines. But it has retained
throughout a certain singularity; and that singularity is the complete
standardisation of things of the spirit. The newer journalism carelessly
made a joke, sniggered over it, and then forgot all about it. The very
new journalism, on the contrary, treated a joke as a very serious thing,
in which it was right—a joke is a very serious thing. It decided against
certain classes of jokes. There must not be jokes about Nonconformists:
many advertising agents are Nonconformists. There must not be jokes
about Jews: many Jews are wealthy and prone to advertising; was not the
first advertisement on record that of a Frankfort Jew? Jokes against
“aliens” are, of course, permissible. On the whole, there must not be
jokes about the Church of England, though that is a less serious matter.
There must not be “unpleasant” jokes; otherwise the babies’ foods and
the condensed milks will not come into the advertising columns. Finally,
by a process of exhaustion, the right kinds of jokes are reached, and
by due experiment (prize competitions and the like) conducted with all
the seriousness of a Home Office analysis, it is found which particular
kind of joke brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number. This
discovery made, the joke is made the subject of mass production, and vast
stocks are poured out until the bookstall agents recommend a change. It
is much the same with news; the experts can tell within five hundred
the circulation effect of an ordinary murder, a “mystery,” a “poison
mystery,” a “poison mystery” with a “money motive,” a “poison mystery”
with a “love motive,” a divorce case with two eminent co-respondents and
no particular point, and a divorce case with one quite undistinguished
co-respondent and a strong “heart interest.” The business mind only
begins to haver when it reaches the rarefied atmosphere of high politics.
It inclines to the view that, war apart, foreign news is only useful
to give a certain distinction to a paper, but that home politics may
occasionally furnish the raw material for a really effective “stunt.”
The victory of the newest journalism over the old and the rather new is
only part of the general victory of standardisation and mass production
over the older and more individual enterprise. Everybody knows all about
what it has given the public—how it has placed every village much on a
news equality with the great towns, how it has given vastly increased and
diversified news services, how it has spread the habit of reading (if
not of thinking) over great classes which never glanced at a book or a
newspaper. It is not my business to discuss all this, which belongs to
the new century. More to the present purpose is to indicate what it has
destroyed, but what was still living and vigorous in the Nineties.
In the first place, it has destroyed that singular thing called editorial
responsibility, to which I alluded above. In the second, it has given the
newspaper the flickering unsteadiness of a cinema film, instead of the
fixity appropriate to the printed page; the paper amuses and interests
more, but instructs and leads far less. In the third, it has undoubtedly
debased the taste for really good and especially for really thoughtful
writing. But, above all, it has tended to render obsolete the prophet in
print, the man who feels a vocation to right wrongs, to preach crusades,
or to insist, in season and out, on the importance of principle. Such men
are now scarcely found in modern daily journalism, and if they were never
so numerous they would find difficulty in getting a hearing. They linger,
with increasing difficulty, on the weekly papers; they seem doomed to
eventual extinction; but when they go the world will be the poorer for
their loss. In the Nineties a notable specimen of this kind of man,
notable but perhaps scarcely brilliant, was Sir Thomas Wemyss Reid, the
first conductor of _The Speaker_, which attempted to be to Gladstonian
Liberalism what _The Spectator_ was to Unionism. His warm friend, Lord
Rosebery, has paid him as noble a tribute as journalist ever earned from
man of affairs. “His ideal of friendship,” says Lord Rosebery, “was
singularly lofty and generous. He was the devoted and chivalrous champion
of those he loved; he took up their cause as his own, and much more than
his own; he was the friend of their friends, and the enemy of their
enemies. No man ever set a higher value on this high connection, which,
after all, whether brought about by kinship, or sympathy, or association,
or gratitude, or stress, is, under Heaven, the sweetest solace of our
poor humanity; and so it coloured and guided the life of Wemyss Reid. His
chief works were all monuments to that faith; it inspired him in tasks
which he knew would be irksome, and which could scarcely be successful,
or which at least could ill satisfy his own standard. This is a severe
test for a man of letters, but he met it without fail.” It was perhaps
this sympathy, as well as his discrimination, which enabled Reid to
gather round him so brilliant a group of contributors; among them were
Mr. John (now Lord) Morley, Mr. J. A. Spender (the present editor of the
_Westminster Gazette_), Mr. Herbert Paul, Mr. James (now Lord) Bryce, Sir
Alfred Lyall, Mr. Augustine Birrell, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Mr. James
Payn, Mr. Henry James, Mr. (now Sir) J. M. Barrie, and Mr. A. B. Walkley.
Wemyss Reid detested above all things what was then called the new but
what I have called the newer journalism; he would have hated still more
the newest journalism; and he gave John Morley advice (which was at the
time rather resented) to keep strict control over the activities of W.
T. Stead. He did not believe in government by newspaper, and Stead’s
essay in connection with the mission of General Gordon more than ever
convinced him that the proper function of the Press was rather to check
Ministers than to dictate their policy. His _Speaker_ was ultimately not
a success, and if he is noted here it is chiefly because the journalistic
ideas for which he stood, as well as his politics, are still represented
by one of the most brilliant of his younger colleagues, Mr. J. A.
Spender, who now directs the _Westminster Gazette_, and there exemplifies
his old chief’s horror of sensationalism and love of balance.