day every event of human interest was so rapid during the civil war
and the stirring times immediately thereafter that many faults of form
and detail remained. The journalism of that period was a new
departure, and the men who created it had no precedent to guide them,
but all the time there was a steady and intelligent effort to improve
in all directions. The efforts of the leading men in the profession,
influenced by conditions and surroundings, resulted in the creation of
what were for a time known as schools of journalism--that is, one man
set up an ideal, and another man strived to create a journal of
another character. The aim of all was to publish the general news of
the day, but political influences were still strong enough to control
editorial policy, and ultra-partisan and sectional views were
incorporated in the record of events. There were still editors of
great power and influence in politics and public affairs, and they
tried to shape the current of the new condition by the force of
editorial writing. A number of editors, of both the old and new order,
for a time followed the policy of subordinating to partisan politics
all other features of the newspaper. They sought to make the press the
dominant influence in politics, and to do that they presented in their
journals only one side of public and party questions. They undertook
to think and to reason for their readers, and their partisan and
sectional views were reflected in the news columns of their papers. So
long as party feeling ran high this style of journalism was popular
and successful, but the newspaper, being in the nature of an educator
of the masses, soon set the people to thinking for themselves, and
created a demand for the news of public and political events without
the color of individual opinion. The change from intense partisanship
to partial or complete independence of editorial utterance has come
slowly, and is still under way. To-day there is no great daily
newspaper in the United States so entirely subservient to a political
party as to support any man or measure without question or protest.
Politicians fear this spirit of independence, and therein lies the
secret of the great power of the press in public affairs. The most
powerful and successful journals are those that combine absolute
fairness and honesty with independence.
So-called schools of journalism, in the rapid development of the
profession during the past twenty years, have merged into one general
system or plan, which is to get all the news and publish it. Journals
may be graded or classified by their treatment of news and their
judgment as to the intelligence and moral character of the reading
public.
A detailed record of the development of the mechanical part of the
newspaper business during the past thirty years would be almost a
synopsis of all progress in science and art. The newspaper printing
press of to-day, which prints, cuts, folds, and counts ninety-six
thousand papers per hour, with one man to operate it, is the
mechanical wonder of the age. It is justly regarded as the greatest
piece of machinery that the ingenuity of man has yet devised. Type is
no longer set by hand in the making of a newspaper, the letters being
formed from the metal direct and cast in finished lines by machinery.
Studying the perfection and magnitude of the newspaper printing
press of to-day it is difficult to realize that little more than half
a century of time and invention stand between this piece of mechanism,
that seems to work with human intelligence, and the Washington hand
press, upon which the production of printed sheets was a matter of
slow and arduous labor. The great metropolitan newspapers of to-day
are printed by monster machines weighing thirty tons, composed of four
thousand separate pieces of steel, iron, brass, wood, and cloth. In
the great printing-press factory of R. Hoe & Co. eighteen months' time
is required to build one of the modern presses, and the cost of it
would have more than paid for all the newspaper printing presses in
use in the United States at the beginning of the century. These
monster machines are known as quadruple presses, which means that four
complete presses have been built into one. When in operation, white
paper is fed to them automatically from rolls, and this paper, with a
speed greater than the eye can follow, is converted into the finished
newspaper, printed on both sides, cut into sheets, pasted together,
folded, counted, and deposited in files of fifty or one hundred at one
side of the press. White paper is fed to the press from two points,
and finished newspapers are delivered at two places on the opposite
side. An idea of the speed with which the work is done may be gained
by watching the printed papers fall from the folder. They drop so fast
that the eye, no matter how well trained, can not count them. These
presses have a capacity of ninety-six thousand four-, six-, or
eight-page papers per hour, and forty-eight thousand ten-, twelve-, or
sixteen-page papers. Their mechanism is so perfect and so carefully
adjusted that the breaking of a narrow band of tape in the folder, the
loosening of a nut, the slightest bending of a rod, friction in a
bearing, or any other derangement, no matter how slight, is instantly
apparent to the skilled machinist in charge.
[Illustration: OCTUPLE STEREOTYPE PERFECTING PRESS AND FOLDERS
(printing on both sides of the paper). Capacity 96,000 4-, 6-, or
8-page papers per hour; down to 24,000 24-page papers per hour. A,
paper rolls (Webb's), sometimes five miles long; B, printing
cylinders, each one carrying sixteen plates (pages); C, blanket or
impression cylinders; D, inking motion (fountain and inking rollers);
F, folding mechanism or formers (four of these); G, deliveries (four
of these); H, controlling lever; I, bar slitting, pasting, collating,
and collecting devices (between press and folders).
(We are indebted to the courtesy of R. Hoe & Co. for permission to
reproduce this photograph. This picture and the succeeding one
represent the most powerful and complete printing presses which have
been constructed up to date.)]
[Illustration: SEXTUPLE STEREOTYPE PERFECTING PRESS AND FOLDERS (with
color attachment for printing three additional colors on outside
pages). It prints per hour 48,000 4-, 6-, 8-, 10-, or 12-page papers,
36,000 16 page papers, or 24,000 14-, 16-, 20-, or 24-page papers--all
delivered folded, pasted, and counted. Also magazines with pages half
the size of the newspaper pages, one half the pages printed in four
colors and the other half in one color, at the rate of 48,000 of 8,
12, 16, 20, or 24 pages, and 24,000 of 28, 32, 40, or 48 pages,
delivered folded to page size, cut open at the heads, bound with wire
staples, and counted.
(We are indebted to the courtesy of R. Hoe & Co. for permission to
reproduce this photograph.)]
The white paper used in making the newspapers of to-day is
manufactured from wood pulp and is put up in long rolls, wound about
an iron cylinder that can be adjusted in place at one end of the
press. These rolls contain from two to four miles of paper, and weigh
from eight hundred to twelve hundred pounds each. As soon as one roll
is used up another is lifted into place, the loose ends of the two are
pasted together, and, after a stop of less than two minutes, the great
press is again belching forth finished newspapers at the rate of
sixteen hundred a minute, or two hundred and sixty-six each second.
Almost every invention and device of recent years in connection with
the use of electricity is in some way utilized in the production and
distribution of the daily newspapers. The evolution of journalism
having finally established the fact that the chief function of the
daily newspaper is to publish the news of the world, the problem of
the business is how to obtain the news surely, accurately, and
promptly. The ocean cable has taken the place of the sailing vessel,
the trained correspondent has succeeded the occasional contributor,
the electric telegraph and telephone have entirely superseded the mail
in the transmission of domestic news, and every event of human
interest throughout the civilized world is placed before millions of
readers within a few hours of its actual occurrence.
The collection of news is not restricted by any question of the cost
of obtaining it. Fifty years ago it was considered a remarkable feat
for one newspaper to obtain information of an important event in
advance of competitors. To-day it is a matter of comment if any
newspaper fails to publish all the news desired by its readers. If a
war is fought on any part of the earth there are reporters on the
firing line, and no expense is spared in collecting and transmitting
by the quickest method available full reports of any event of
world-wide importance. To-day the hiring of special trains, the
stringing of a special line of telegraph wire, the charter of a ship,
the fitting out of an exploring expedition, or any other great
enterprise in the way of collecting information for the newspapers of
the United States, is so much a part of the everyday business of
journalism that such things are accepted as a matter of course, or
cause no more than a passing comment.
Half a century ago the result of a national convention or election was
not known all over the country for weeks afterward. In the case of a
national convention to-day, telegraph wires lead from the convention
hall into the offices of all the newspapers in the larger cities. An
operator sits near the platform of the presiding officer, and with a
muffled key he sends over the wire a full report of the proceedings,
with a description of every incident of interest. At the other end of
the line is an operator at a typecasting machine receiving the report
and putting it into lines as fast as received. When a candidate for
President has been nominated, extra editions of the daily papers are
selling on the streets of cities a thousand miles away almost before
the applause for the winning man has died out in the convention hall.
The people of every city and town in the United States where a
newspaper is published would feel themselves cheated of their rights
if they failed to receive news of the result of an election by
midnight of the day on which the ballots were cast.
In enterprise and originality the journalism of America leads the
world at the end of the nineteenth century. As a profession, it
commands, with alluring prospects of fame and fortune, the services of
men of genius and learning. Those who enter it from choice succeed or
fail quickly. It is a life of activity, a work where energy and
intelligence are essential qualifications, and honor and honesty are
certain of reward. There is no enduring place in the profession for
hypocrisy, indolence, or mediocrity.
VALUE OF THE STUDY OF ART.
BY GEORGES PERROT.
Georges Perrot is one of the leading art writers and teachers of
France. Born in 1832, not far from Paris, he was graduated from
the École Normale about 1855, and was then for three years at the
French School at Athens. From his return to the present day he
has occupied, with honor and distinction, many positions in the
world of letters. At present he is a member of the Institut, an
officer of the Légion d'Honneur, a professor à la Faculté des
Lettres de Paris, and the director of the École Normale
Supérieure. He is best known to scholars outside of France by the
magnificent work on the History of Art in Antiquity, which he is
writing, assisted by Charles Chipiez, architecte du gouvernement,
and of which seven superb quartos have already appeared.
(Hachette et Cie.) In 1891, by a decree of the Minister of Public
Instruction, the study of the history of the fine arts was
introduced into a section of the studies pursued at the lycées.
In an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1899, Perrot
pleads for an increase of the time assigned to the study and for
its introduction into other parts of the curriculum.
I have translated those pages of the article which are of general
interest as a contribution to a subject which is deservedly
attracting the attention of American institutions of learning.
D. CADY EATON.
Written and spoken language, the language of which the signs are
words, is not the only language which man uses to convey his ideas.
There is also the language of forms, which, with no less clearness and
force, conveys the conceptions of the intellect and the sentiments of
the heart. We study the history and the literature of bygone people
for the purpose of acquiring a better knowledge of ourselves, and this
knowledge is secured by becoming conscious of the different states of
mind, to use a modern expression, through which our ancestors have
passed. Even the most elementary and the most remote of these
successive conditions are, unconsciously perhaps, represented in the
depths of our being by beliefs and customs for which the present order
and progress of civilization can not account.[16]
[Footnote 16: The highest education consists in the presentation
and in the acceptance of the purest ideas and the highest ideals
of all ages, whether they be presented in written or spoken words,
in songs of voices or sounds of instruments, in plastic forms or
glowing pictures, in humble lives or glorious actions. The
well-educated man should be the product and the epitome of the
best thoughts and sentiments the world has produced, for he
carries the responsibility of past centuries.]
Not to go back to the Quaternary period or to the cave dwellers, there
are many of these mental ideas or conditions which would remain hidden
from the inquiry of the historian if he were limited to written
testimony. One example may suffice: the discoveries of Schliemann, at
Troy, Mycenæ, and Tiryns have rescued from oblivion a primitive Greece
of which the Greeks themselves had preserved but a faint remembrance.
Thus has been given to the Homeric epoch a background of many
centuries. Now this Greece, contemporary of the Thutmoses and the
Ramses of Egypt, anterior to not only Grecian history but even to
Grecian tradition, could not write, but could work and use stone;
could hew wood and fashion it for carpentry; could mold and bake clay;
could melt and hammer lead, bronze, gold, and silver; and could carve
ivory. Every bit of material fashioned by the instruments of this
period has the value of an authentic document. How society was
constituted, the life that was led, what notions were held of the
hereafter--all these things are revealed by the marks the hands of man
have left upon everything he touched. The colossal walls of Tiryns,
the majestic funeral cupolas of Mycenæ, the divisions of the royal
abodes of which the outlines can still be traced on the surface of the
soil, and the arrangement of the sepulchres hidden beneath it all
testify. So, too, the weapons, the instruments, the vases, and the
jewels which have been found scattered about amid the ruins of the
buildings or buried in the tombs. Thanks to all these monuments, we
are beginning to recognize in a shadow which year by year glows with a
brighter light the features which characterized the world of Achæan
heroes of which the image, transformed by oral tradition and
singularly enlarged by power of invention, is reflected in the Iliad
and the Odyssey.
From these obscure and remote ages let us transport ourselves to the
Greece of Pisistratus, of Pericles, and of Alexander. Instructors of
youth tell of the losses which have been made, and of how small a part
of the literary work of Greek genius has escaped the great shipwreck
of antiquity. Should they not also indicate where precious supplements
of information may be found to fill the voids of written tradition?
There are many variations of important myths, hardly mentioned in
passing by obscure epitomizers of the lower centuries, which have
furnished to ceramic artists subjects for pictures which make us
acquainted with personages and with episodes of which writers have
hardly left a trace. But even if we had the works of the cyclic poets,
all of which have perished; if we had the lyric poets, of whom only
Pindar has survived, and Bacchylides whose fragments are to-day the
joy of Hellenists; if we had the whole of tragedy, of which we have
but the remnants; if we had all of that comedy which is represented
by Aristophanes alone; if we had all of the more ancient comedy, all
of the middle period and all of the new, with Menander who since the
Renaissance is the regret of all critics of fine apprehension--all
this poetry could not exhaust the multiple fecundity and the
prodigious richness of the imagination which created it. If malevolent
Fortune had decreed the destruction of every bit of Greek plastic art
we should have been condemned to perpetual ignorance of many aspects
and methods of the Greek soul. Is there anything in literature worth
the little clay figures of Tanagra in making clear how the Greeks
apprehended and enjoyed female beauty: how they loved it not only in
the noble and serious types of a Pallas or an Aphrodite, but even as
presented by the humble inhabitants of little villages in the graceful
_abandon_ of their everyday life and in the liberty of their most
ordinary attitudes? If we base an opinion of the religion of the
Greeks only upon the epithets used by poets in defining the gods and
upon actions they attributed to them, we run the risk of judging
wrongly. In contemplating their images we obtain clearer notions of
the ideas associated with each divine type. Alas! we do not possess
the great works of Phidias which according to men of authority made
men more religious--the Athene of the Parthenon and the Zeus of
Olympia. But even in the reduced copies of these two masterpieces
which have reached down to our time we can divine how the master
expressed in the one the idea of calm and luminous intelligence and of
supreme wisdom, and in the other the idea of that sovereign force in
repose and of that omnipotence, tempered by goodness, which were
conceived to exist in the sovereign of the universe, the father of
gods and men.
In subsequent paragraphs Perrot imagines the Greek statues of the
Louvre thus addressing a classical student:
"Young man, you who are studying Greece in Homer and Plato, in
Sophocles and Herodotus, do not pass us by so quickly. We also belong
to that Greece which you discern and which you seek in their writings,
of which not without difficulty you decipher the prose and the verse.
To understand and to love us, to read in our features the thoughts of
which we are the expression, to seize in the modeling of our flesh and
in the pure outline of our limbs the secret of the genius which
created us, no grammar nor dictionary is needed; only apply yourself
to the education of your eye. In this exercise, in this
apprenticeship, you will find a pleasure which will become more and
more keen as you become more capable of perceiving rapidly the finest
gradations. If you aspire to become an authorized interpreter of Greek
genius, do not fear that you may be losing time. When, by long and
affectionate intercourse, you shall have sufficiently entered into our
intimacy to be able at any given hour to evoke in your spirit, as
clearly as if we stood before you, a vision of the forms which shall
have become dear to you, then the images which shall be awakened in
your memories when you read the poets will be akin to those which the
same recitals and the same epithets suggested to the Greeks who saw us
born. To them you will be drawn by similarity of impression. You will
be nearer to them, nearer to thinking and feeling after their fashion,
at least by moments, than the most subtle grammarian or the most
learned Hellenist who never has seen us."
Turning from Greece to Italy, Perrot derives a no less striking lesson
from the statues of Roman emperors:
"Is there a lesson, though given by the most learned professor, that
could cause to live before us all the life of the Rome of the Cæsars
as do these effigies? In the long succession of portraits which
embrace three centuries of history the differences of times and of men
are contrasted more keenly and more vividly than in the recitals of
ancient authors or in the dissertations of modern erudites. Augustus
and Tiberius, Constantine and Theodosius, all bore the same
title--'imperator'; all were called consuls, Cæsars, Augusti, _patres
patriæ_, etc. Nevertheless, from the first to the fourth centuries the
supreme power was greatly modified. Volumes have been written to
explain the change, but there is nothing that makes it so clear as the
comparison of the images of these princes. Augustus, in perhaps the
most beautiful of all his statues, called _de Prima Porta_, has his
head, arms, legs, and feet bare. Over the soldier's short tunic he
wears a cuirass, and over it is thrown the military mantle of command.
He is represented as supreme chief haranguing his troops. Another
statue may represent him as a simple citizen, clothed with the toga
and holding in his hand the manuscript of the discourse he proposes
reading to the senate. The statues still show forth the Roman
Republic, at least the customs and the style of it. Most vividly is
the spirit and also the deception of the system perceived which, while
investing a single individual with a power almost limitless, affects
for two centuries a preservation of ancient liberties. Turn from these
to an image of one of the successors of Diocletian, one who preferred
to reside in Constantinople, the new capital of the empire. Do not
seek his image in one of the ceremonial statues where, by force of
routine, the sculptor may perchance have preserved classic rules; but
in monuments of another order, where the artist kept closer to
reality, in miniatures adorning manuscripts, in mosaics, in ivory
diptychs, etc. There you will find figures which have nothing left of
the simplicity and nobility which Rome borrowed from Greece, but
figures which in some particulars recall the old art of Asia, and in
others already announce the art of the middle ages. The head is
encircled with a diadem. The body and the limbs are entirely hidden by
clinging draperies which are very long and very narrow. The materials
which form this species of case are decorated from top to bottom with
rich embroideries in the shape of medallions, flowers, animals, and
even persons. There is no more deception; we are no longer in Rome;
fictions so long preserved have finally disappeared; the empire has
turned into an Oriental despotism.
"Between the two extremes of the series, how many degrees are there
which furnish the very best commentaries of history? The heads of all
the Cæsars, even those of Claudius, the accidental scholar, and of
Caligula, the wicked and witty fool, are aristocratic. They show the
nobility and the pride of race. You recognize in them the descendants
of those grand patrician families which at first seemed to hold
exclusively the right to give masters to the Romans. With Vespasian,
scion of a middle-class family pushing its way into second-class
public positions, the advent of a new order is evident. Vespasian has
the round and smooth, double-chinned face of the chief clerk of a
commercial or banking establishment. Trajan has the features of a
soldier who has probably pushed his way to the front from the ranks.
Hadrian, who turns his head to hear the better, whose bright eyes
gleam even in the marble, whose half-opened mouth seems in the act of
speech, shows the features of a learned and intelligent scholar.
Marcus Aurelius, with his bristling hair and beard, would be taken for
a Greek philosopher. In Caracalla's looks there is derangement. His
eye betrays that murderous and fantastic frenzy which seized more than
one emperor, especially of those who from early youth had been exposed
to the temptations of absolute power.[17]
[Footnote 17: There is a bust of Julius Cæsar in England of which
a cast or a copy should be by the side of every expounder of the
Commentaries. The presence of the bust would give new life to the
narrative, for there is more life in the marble than in the
writing. There are in the Louvre, placed side by side, three
representations of Nero which tell the story of the man more
graphically than the pages of Suetonius. The first represents the
youth, whose thoughts are pure, hopes bright, and resolves noble.
The second shows the conflict with evil and the beginning of the
triumph of sin. The third is so monstrous in its brutality and
lust that it must have been taken but a short time before the
catastrophe which terminated the matricide's career. Historians
may detail the circumstances of the fall of Rome, philosophers may
investigate the causes which led to it, but that hideous face in
the Louvre tells the whole story with a force so startling, so
instantaneous, that history and philosophy seem weak and wanting.]