Why is the modern party political journalism so bad? It is worse even
than it intends to be. It praises its preposterous party leaders through
thick and thin; but it somehow succeeds in making them look greater
fools than they are. This clumsiness clings even to the photographs
of public men, as they are snapshotted at public meetings. A sensitive
politician (if there is such a thing) would, I should think, want to
murder the man who snapshots him at those moments. For our general
impression of a man’s gesture or play of feature is made up of a series
of vanishing instants, at any one of which he may look worse than our
general impression records. Mr. Augustine Birrell may have made quite a
sensible and amusing speech, in the course of which his audience would
hardly have noticed that he resettled his necktie. Snapshot him, and
he appears as convulsively clutching his throat in the agonies of
strangulation, and with his head twisted on one side as if he had been
hanged. Sir Edward Carson might make a perfectly good speech, which no
one thought wearisome, but might himself be just tired enough to shift
from one leg to the other. Snapshot him, and he appears as holding one
leg stiffly in the air and yawning enough to swallow the audience.
But it is in the prose narratives of the Press that we find most
manifestations of this strange ineptitude; this knack of exhibiting your
own favourites in an unlucky light. It is not so much that the party
journalists do not tell the truth as that they tell just enough of it
to make it clear that they are telling lies. One of their favourite
blunders is an amazing sort of bathos. They begin by telling you that
some statesman said something brilliant in style or biting in wit, at
which his hearers thrilled with terror or thundered with applause. And
then they tell you what it was that he said. Silly asses!