[Illustration]
I can not imagine any pleasant job so full of pangs, or any painful job
so full of pleasures, as the task of conducting a newspaper column.
The colyumist, when he begins his job, is disheartened because nobody
notices it. He soon outgrows this, and is disheartened because too many
people notice it, and he imagines that all see the paltriness of it as
plainly as he does. There is nothing so amazing to him as to find that
any one really enjoys his "stuff." Poor soul, he remembers how he
groaned over it at his desk. He remembers the hours he sat with
lack-lustre eye and addled brain, brooding at the sluttish typewriter.
He remembers the flush of shame that tingled him as he walked sadly
homeward, thinking of some atrocious inanity he had sent upstairs to the
composing-room. It is a job that engenders a healthy humility.
I had always wanted to have a try at writing a column. Heaven help me, I
think I had an idea that I was born for the job. I may as well be
candid. There was a time when I seriously thought of inserting the
following ad in a Philadelphia newspaper. I find a memorandum of it in
my scrap-book:
HUMORIST: Young and untamed, lineal descendent of Eugene Field,
Frank Stockton, and Francois Rabelais, desires to run a column in
a Philadelphia newspaper. A guaranteed circulation-getter.
Said Humorist can also supply excellent veins of philosophy,
poetry, satire, uplift, glad material and indiscriminate musings.
Remarkable opportunity for any newspaper desiring a really
unusual editorial feature. Address HUMORIST, etc.
So besotted was I, I would have paid to have this printed if I had not
been counselled by an older and wiser head.
I instance this to show that the colyumist is likely to begin his job
with the conception that it is to be a perpetual uproar of mirth and
high spirits. This lasts about a week. He then learns, in secret, to
take it rather seriously. He has to deal with the most elusive and
grotesque material he knows--his own mind; and the unhappy creature,
everlastingly probing himself in the hope of discovering what is so rare
in minds (a thought), is likely to end in a ferment of bitterness. The
happiest times in life are when one can just live along and enjoy things
as they happen. If you have to be endlessly speculating, watching, and
making mental notes, your brain-gears soon get a hot box. The original
of all paragraphers--Ecclesiastes--came very near ending as a complete
cynic; though in what F. P. A. would call his "lastline," he managed to
wriggle into a more hopeful mood.
The first valuable discovery that the colyumist is likely to make is
that all minds are very much the same. The doctors tell us that all
patent medicines are built on a stock formula--a sedative, a purge, and
a bitter. If you are to make steady column-topers out of your readers,
your daily dose must, as far as possible, average up to that same
prescription. If you employ the purge all the time, or the sedative, or
the acid, your clients will soon ask for something with another label.
Don Marquis once wrote an admirable little poem called "A Colyumist's
Prayer." Mr. Marquis, who is the king of all colyumists, realizes that
there is what one may call a religious side in colyumizing. It is hard
to get the colyumist to admit this, for he fears spoofing worse than the
devil; but it is eminently true. If I were the owner of a newspaper, I
think I would have painted up on the wall of the local room the
following words from Isaiah, the best of all watchwords for all who
write:
Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put
darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for
sweet, and sweet for bitter!
The most painful privilege of the colyumist's job is the number of
people who drop in to see him, usually when he is imprecating his way
toward the hour of going to press. This is all a part of the great and
salutary human instinct against work. When people see a man toiling,
they have an irresistible impulse to crowd round and stop him. They seem
to imagine that he has been put there on purpose to help them solve
their problems, to find a job for their friend from Harrisburg, or to
tell them how to find a publisher for their poems. Unhappily, their
victim being merely human, is likely to grow a bit snappish under
infliction. Yet now and then he gets a glimpse into a human vexation so
sincere, so honest, and so moving that he turns away from the typewriter
with a sigh. He wonders how one dare approach the chronicling of this
muddled panorama with anything but humility and despair. Frank Harris
once said of Oscar Wilde: "If England insists on treating her criminals
like this, she doesn't deserve to have any." Similarly, if the public
insists on bringing its woes to its colyumists, it doesn't deserve to
have any colyumists. Then the battered jester turns again to his machine
and ticks off something like this:
_We have heard of ladies who have been tempted beyond their
strength. We have also seen some who have been strengthened
beyond their temptation._
Of course there are good days, too. (This is not one of them.) Days when
the whole course of the news seems planned for the benefit of the
chaffish and irreverent commentator. When Governor Hobby of Texas issues
a call for the state cavalry. When one of your clients drops in, in the
goodness of his heart, to give you his own definition of a pessimist--a
pessimist, he says, is a man who wears both belt and suspenders. When a
big jewellery firm in the city puts out a large ad--
Bailey, Banks & Biddle Company
Watches for Women
Of Superior Design and Perfection
of Movement
all that one needs to do to that is to write over it the caption