THE PRESS OF TO-DAY
If we were guiding an intelligent stranger from another planet through
our busy world, before what institution should we pause with greatest
anxiety to explain to our alien comrade its meaning, its value?
Perhaps before the church, yet when we remembered that the Bible and
other works of religion and poetry are in our homes, we could not
bring ourselves to tell our companion that the church is the heart,
the indispensable fountain of our religious life. The school then?
Maybe that, yet Knowledge spends in the school but relatively few
hours of her day-long ministrations. We might wax eloquent before the
hospitals, but they are only repairing some of the damages which man
and nature have inflicted upon a small part of the race, and it is
the healthy major portion of humanity that carries on the life of the
world and does whatever is worth doing. It would be simple to explain
the thundering factories whose din drowns the voice of the expositor,
to tell how in yonder building are made the machines that cut and
thresh the wheat that feeds the world, and how in the building beyond
are made the cars that bring the wheat from the fields to the teeming
towns. All these institutions are wonderful, all are essential in our
life. Yet greater than any, more difficult to explain, inspiring and
disheartening, grinding good and evil, is the press, from which our
visitor could see streaming forth thousands of tons of paper blackened
with the imprint of little types.
The stranger could see that. We should have to make it clear to him
that those types are turning over once a year almost all that man has
ever known and thought. The contemporary press is engaged in three
kinds of activity: the reprinting of old books, the printing of new
ones, and the printing of the magazines, periodicals, newspapers, and
other communications relating to the conduct of daily business.
The first activity, the printing of old books, is an unmixed blessing.
Every book, great or small, that the world has found worth preserving
is continuously revived and redistributed to our generation. Never
before were the classics of the ages so cheap, so accessible to the
common man.
Toward the second product of the whirling presses, the books of to-day,
our attitude may easily become too censorious or too complacent. It is
the fashion to slander the productions of one’s own age and recall with
a sigh the good old days when there were giants. But in those good old
days it was fashionable, too, to underrate or ignore the living and
praise the dead. When the Elizabethan age was waning but not vanished,
Ben Jonson wrote: “Now things daily fall, wits grow downward, and
eloquence grows backward.” And yet Milton, the greatest poet after
Shakespeare, was even then a young man and had not done his noblest
work. A century later Pope wrote:
Be thou the first true merit to befriend;
His praise is lost who stays till all commend.
Short is the date, alas, of modern rhymes,
And ’tis but just to let them live betimes.
No longer now the golden age appears
When Patriarch-wits surviv’d a thousand years:
Now length of Fame (our second life) is lost,
And bare three score is all even that can boast;
Our sons their fathers’ failing language see,
And such as Chaucer is shall Dryden be.
But Chaucer is more alive now than he was in Pope’s day, and both
Dryden and Pope are brightly modern in diction if not in thought.
Pope’s idea is not so much that his contemporaries are unworthy of
long life as that changes in taste and language will soon make their
work obsolete. He pleads for his contemporaries, yet like many another
critic he is _laudator temporis acti_, a praiser of times past and
done. His injunction that we befriend and commend our neighbor’s merit
before it speedily perishes is generous but fails to recognize that
merit, true merit, does not die. This is certainly true in our time
when books are so easily manifolded and come into so many hands that
there is little likelihood of a real poet’s work being accidentally
annihilated, or failing to find a reader somewhere in the world.
In the nineteenth century pessimism about current literary productions
was almost chronic, at least among professional critics. The Edinburgh
Reviewers and the other Scotch terrier, Thomas Carlyle, set the whole
century to growling at itself. Thoreau, with a humorous parenthesis to
the effect that it is permissible to slander one’s own time, says that
Elizabethan writers--and he seems to be speaking not of the poets but
the prose writers--have a greater vigor and naturalness than the more
modern, and that a quotation from an Elizabethan in a modern writer is
like a green bough laid across the page. Stevenson says we are fine
fellows but cannot write like Hazlitt (there is no reason why we should
write like Hazlitt, or like anybody else in particular). Emerson,
tolerant and generous toward his contemporaries, looks askance at new
books, implies with an ambiguous “if” that “our times are sterile
in genius,” and lays down as a practical rule, “Never read any book
that is not a year old,”--which being translated means, “Encourage
literature by starving your authors.”
As we have said, most of the great authors are dead because most of
the people ever born in this world are dead. And it is natural for
bookmen to glance about their libraries, review the dignified backs of
a hundred classics, and then, looking the modern world in the face,
say, “Can any of you fellows do as well as these great ones?” To be
sure, one age cannot rival the selected achievements of a hundred ages.
But the Spirit of Literature is abroad in our garish modern times; she
has been continuously occupied for at least three centuries in every
civilized country in the world. And, as Pope pleads, let us welcome the
labors of those whom the Spirit of Literature brushes with her wing.
So far as one can judge, a very small part of contemporaneous writing
has literary excellence in any degree. But a similarly small portion
of the writing of any age has had lasting excellence; and more men and
women, more kinds of men and women, are to-day expressing themselves in
print than ever in the world before. Since no one person has to read
many books, the world is not unduly burdened with them; it can read,
classify, and reject or preserve all that the presses are capable of
putting forth. “The trash with which the press now groans” was foolish
cant a hundred years ago, when Jane Austen satirically quoted it.[7]
And it is more threadbare now than it was then. There are alive to-day
a goodly company of competent writers of novels; I could name ten. I
believe, too, that there are genuine poets, though we do not dare name
young poets until they are dead. History and biography are, regarded
as a collective institution, in flourishing state, though, to be sure,
the work of art in those departments of literature as in poetry and
fiction, appears none too frequently. It is our part to join in the
work of that great critic, the World, encourage the good and discourage
the bad, and help make the best book the “best seller.”
It would be foolish to hope for that ideal condition in which only
authors of ability should write books. “Were angels to write, I fancy
we should have but few folios.” But writing is a human affair, and
human labor is necessarily wasteful. We have to endure the printing of
a hundred poor books and we have to support a score of inferior writers
in order to get one good book and give one talented writer a part of
his living. Thousands of machines are built and thrown away before
the Wrights make one that will fly, and they could not make theirs if
other men had not tried and in large part failed, bequeathing them a
little experience. A hundred men for a hundred years contributed to the
making of Bell’s telephone. We do not grudge the wasted machines, the
broken apparatus in the laboratory. So, too, when hundreds of minor
poets print their little books and suffer heartache and disappointment
for the sake of the one volume of verse that shows genius, we need
not groan amid the whir of the presses; we need only contemplate with
sympathy and understanding the pathetic losses and brave gains of human
endeavor. Numberless books must be born and die in order that the one
or two may live. We shall try to ignore the minor versifier as gently
as possible, to suppress the cheap novelist as firmly as we can, and
give our dollar for the good book when we think we have found it.
The third part of the printed matter published from day to day,
periodicals and magazines and newspapers, presents a complex problem.
It is in place for us to say a word about it, for this is avowedly
a guide to reading and not a guide to literature, and most of us
spend, properly, a good third of our reading time over magazines and
newspapers. Much depends on our making ourselves not only intelligent
readers of books but intelligent readers of periodicals and papers.
The magazine industry in America is colossal, and its chief support is
that amazing business institution, American advertising. The public
pays a big tax on flour, shoes, clothes, paint, and every other
commodity in order that advertisers may pay for space in periodicals
and newspapers. The periodicals and newspapers, in turn, pay writers
from a fiftieth to a twentieth of the income from advertising in order
to make the advertising medium interesting enough for people to buy it.
In this the magazine manufacturers are on the whole successful.
Perhaps there are sages and seers who can live content with bound
books and prefer that those books should be at least fifty years old.
I know of one man, a constant reader of poetry and philosophy, who
tried the experiment of retiring to his library and stopping all his
subscriptions to the current periodicals. The experiment was an utter
failure, because he was a man of active intelligence, and because,
in truth, the magazines, many of them, are very good. No less a
philosopher than Professor William James said in a recent article:
“_McClure’s Magazine_, _The American Magazine_, _Collier’s Weekly_
and in its fashion, _The World’s Work_, constitute together a real
popular university.... It would be a pity if any future historian were
to have to write words like these: ‘By the middle of the twentieth
century the higher institutions of learning had lost all influence
over public opinion in the United States. But the mission of raising
the tone of democracy which they had proved themselves so lamentably
unfitted to exert, was assumed with rare enthusiasm and prosecuted
with extraordinary skill and success by a new educational power; and
for the clarification of their human preferences, the people at large
acquired the habit of resorting exclusively to the guidance of certain
private literary ventures, commonly designated in the market by the
affectionate name of ten-cent magazines.’ Must not we of the colleges
see to it that no historian shall ever say anything like this?”
The possible failure, here implied, of universities to lead in the
subjects which they profess to study has already become actual in the
departments of English literature. Of this we shall say something in
the next chapter.
It is, however, the other side of the matter that is important. Our
best magazines are vital: they are enlisting the services of every kind
of thinker and teacher and man of experience, and they are printing
as good fiction and verse as they can get; certainly they are not
willfully printing inferior work. But it is not the fiction or the
verse in the magazines that is of greatest moment, even when it is
good. The value of the magazine lies in the miscellaneous contributions
on science, politics, medicine, and current affairs, which seem to me
of continuously good substance from month to month. And the literary
quality of these articles (the words I quoted from Professor James are
from a fine article printed in a popular magazine, _McClure’s_) is, on
the whole, just as high as the average in the old _Edinburgh Review_,
through which Sydney Smith, Lord Jeffrey, and others, with stinging and
brilliant essays, helped to reform that terribly brutal England of the
early nineteenth century.
It is easy to find fault with the magazines. You may say that the
_Atlantic Monthly_ is pseudo-literary and seems to be living on
the sweepings of a New England culture of which all the important
representatives died twenty years ago. You may say that the _Nation_
often sounds as if it were written by the more narrow-minded sort of
college professor. You may say that the _Outlook_ is permeated by
a weak religiosity. All the same, if you see on a man’s table the
_Atlantic Monthly_, the _Nation_, and the _Outlook_, and the copies
look as if they had been read, you may be reasonably sure that that man
appreciates good writing and has a just-minded view of public questions.
Of the lighter, more “entertaining” magazines there are, from an
ideal point of view, too many, and the large circulation of some of
the sillier ones indicates what we all know and need not moralize
about--that there are millions of uneducated people who want something
to read. It is, however, a matter for congratulation that some of the
best magazines, _McClure’s_, _Collier’s_, _The Youth’s Companion,
Everybody’s_, have large circulations, and that our respectable and
well-bred old friends, _Scribner’s_, _Harper’s_, the _Century_, are
national institutions.[8]
It is difficult to understand how the American magazine and the
American newspaper are products of the same nation; the magazine is
so honest and so able, the newspaper so dishonest and so ignorant
except in its genius for making money and sending chills up the back.
We will not waste our time by turning the rest of this chapter into
an article demanding a “reform” of the newspapers, but in the spirit
of a conscientious guide of young readers we will make two or three
observations.
The advertising departments of the American newspaper, with few
exceptions, differ from the advertising departments of all reputable
magazines, in that the newspaper proprietors take no responsibility
for the character of the advertisements. The magazines reject all
advertisements that the managers know to be fraudulent. The newspapers
do not reject them. Let the reader draw his own conclusions as to
the trustworthiness of his daily paper as a business institution and
a purveyor of the truth. When we have a generation of Americans who
understand the business dishonesty of the newspaper and what it implies
about the character of the news and the editorials, the newspapers will
be better in all departments. Meanwhile, all our writing about the low
quality of our daily press will have little effect.
In the matter of journalistic honesty in the news and editorial
departments, let us understand this: With few exceptions, American
newspapers are so irresponsible that no unsupported statement appearing
in them is to be counted on as the truth or as a fair expression of
what the men in the editorial offices believe to be the truth. Of
course, much of every daily paper is true, because the proprietors
have no motive in most cases for telling anything untrue. In order
to give some weight to these opinions I may say that for a number of
years I was an exchange editor and read newspapers from all parts of
America. Also, for a number of years I acted as private secretary to a
distinguished person whose name is often in the newspapers, and whose
position is such that no editor can have any motive, except the desire
to print a “story,” for connecting the name with any untrue idea. From
a collection of fifty clippings made from American newspapers in a
period of two years I find over thirty that are mainly incorrect and
contain ideas invented at the reporter’s or the editor’s desk; more
than ten that are entire fabrications; and five that are not only
untrue, but damaging to the peace of mind of the subject and other
interested persons. And under all this is not a touch of malice, for
toward that person the entire press and public are friendly. Imagine
the lies that are told about a person to whom the editors (or, rather,
the owners) are indifferent or unfriendly!
When one considers the energy and enterprise of the newspaper, it is
difficult to understand why there is not more literary ability, at
least of the humbler kind, in the news columns, the reviews and the
editorial comments. One reason is, perhaps, that the magazines take all
the best journalistic ability, so far as that ability consists in skill
in the use of language; any journalist or writer on special subjects
prints his work in the magazines if he can, and the newspapers get what
is left. Editorial writing is at such a low pitch that there are only
two or three real editorial pages in the daily press of the nation.
The reporting is often clever and quite as often without conscience.
The machinery for gathering world news is amazingly well organized.
Other kinds of ability are abundant in the newspaper office; and it
is a natural economic fact that the most debased papers, making the
most money, can hire the most talented men--and debauch them; while
the more conscientious paper, struggling in competition with its rich
and dishonest rivals, cannot afford to pay for the best editors and
reporters.
If the rising generation will understand this and grow up with an
increasing distrust of the newspaper, the newspaper will reform in
obedience to the demand of the public, the silent demand expressed by
the greater circulation of good papers and the failure of these that
are degrading and degraded.
We called in the opinions of one philosopher, Professor James, to
support our view of the American magazine. Let us summon another
philosopher to corroborate in part our view of the newspapers, to show
that the foregoing opinions are not (as some newspapers would probably
affirm if they noticed the matter at all), the complaints of a crank
who does not understand “practical” newspaper work. Our philosopher
will confirm, too, the belief of this Guide that the ethics of the
newspaper is of importance to the young reader. The newspaper is ours.
We must have it; it renders indispensable service to all departments of
our life, business, education, philanthropy, politics. We cannot turn
our backs on it; we cannot in lofty scorn reject the newsboy at the
door. It is for us to understand the constitution and methods of the
daily press and not be duped by its grosser treacheries as our fathers
have been. I quote from _The Outlook_ a letter from Professor George
Herbert Palmer, whose name will be found elsewhere in this book as
philosopher and translator of the “Odyssey.”
“_To the Editor of ‘The Outlook’_:
“SIR: May I make use of your columns for a personal explanation
and also to set forth certain traits in our press and people which
manifest themselves, I believe, in an equal degree in no other country?
“The personal facts are these: On June 16th I delivered a Commencement
address at a girls’ college in Boston, taking for my subject the
common objections to the higher education of women, objections
generally rather felt than formulated by hesitating mothers. Five were
mentioned: the danger to health, to manners, to marriage, to religion,
and to companionship with parents in the home. These I described from
the parents’ point of view, and then pointed out the misconceptions
on which I believed them to rest. In speaking of manners, I said that
a mother often fears that attention to study may make her daughter
awkward, keep her unfamiliar with the general world, and leave her
unfit for mixed society. To which I replied that in the rare cases
where intellectual interests do for a time overshadow the social, we
may well bear in mind the relative difficulties of subsequent repair.
A girl who has had only social interests before twenty-one does not
usually gain intellectual ones afterwards; while the ways of the world
are rapidly acquired by any young woman of brains. To illustrate, I
told of a strong student of Radcliffe who had lived much withdrawn
during her course there, alarming her uncollegiate parents by her
slender interest in social functions. At graduation they pressed her
to devote a year to balls and dinners and to what they regarded as the
occult art of manners. She came to me for counsel, and I advised her
to accede to their wishes. ‘Flirt hard, M.,’ said I, ‘and show that a
college girl is equal to whatever is required of her.’ This was the
only allusion to the naughty topic which my speech, an hour in length,
contained.
“That evening one of the ‘yellowest’ of the Boston papers printed a
report of my ‘Address on Flirtation,’ and the next day a reporter came
from the same paper requesting an interview. The interview I refused,
saying that I had given no such address and I wished my name kept
altogether out of print. The following Sunday, however, the bubble
was fully blown, the paper printing a column of pretended interview,
generously adorned with headlines and quotation marks, setting forth
in gay colors my ‘advocacy of flirtation.’
“And now the dirty bubble began to float. Not being a constant reader
of this particular paper, I knew nothing of its mischief until a week
had gone by. Then remonstrances began to be sent to me from all parts
of the country, denouncing my hoary frivolity. From half the states
of the Union they came, and in such numbers that few days of the past
month have been free from a morning insult. My mail has been crowded
with solemn or derisive editorials, with distressed letters, abusive
postal cards, and occasionally the leaflet of some society for the
prevention of vice, its significant passages marked. During all this
hullabaloo I have been silent. The story was already widespread when
my attention was first called to it. It struck me then as merely a
gigantic piece of summer silliness, arguing emptiness of the editorial
mind. I felt, too, how easily a man makes himself ridiculous in
attempting to prove that he is not a fit subject for ridicule, and
how in the long run character is its own best vindication. I should
accordingly prefer to remain silent still; but the story, like all
that touches on questions of sex, has shown a strange persistency. My
friends are disquieted. Harvard is defamed. Reports of my depravity
have lately been sent to me from English and French papers, and in a
recent number of _Life_ I appear in a capital cartoon, my utterance
being reckoned one of the principal events of the month. Perhaps,
then, it is as well to say that no such incident has occurred, and
that now, when all of us have had our laugh, the racket had better
cease.
“But such persistent pursuit of an unoffending person throws into
strong relief four defects in our newspapers, and especially in the
attitude of our people toward them. In the first place, the plan of
reporting practiced here is a mistaken one, and is adopted, so far
as I know, nowhere else on earth. Our papers rarely try to give an
ordered outline of an address. They either report verbatim, or more
usually the reporter is expected to gather a lot of taking phrases,
regardless of connection. While these may occasionally amuse, I
believe that readers turn less and less to printed reports of
addresses. Serious reporting of public speech is coming to an end. It
would be well if it ended altogether, so impossible is it already to
learn from the newspapers what a man has been saying.
“Of the indifference to truth in the lower class of our papers,
their vulgarity, intrusions into private life, and eagerness at all
hazards to print something startling, I say little, because these
characteristics are widely known and deplored. It apparently did not
occur to any of my abusers to look up the evidence of my folly.
I dare say it was the very unlikelihood of the tale which gave it
currency. I was in general known to be a quiet person, with no liking
for notoriety, a teacher of one of the gravest subjects in a dignified
university. I had just published a largely circulated biography,
presenting an exalted ideal of marriage. It struck the press of the
country as a diverting thing to reverse all this in a day, to picture
me as favoring loose relations of the sexes, and to attribute to me
buffoonery from which every decent man recoils.
“Again, our people seem growing incapable of taking a joke--or rather
of taking anything else. The line which parts lightness from reality
is becoming blurred. My lively remark has served as the subject for
portentous sermonizing, while the earnest appeal made later in my
address to look upon marriage seriously, as that which gives life its
best meaning, has been either passed by in silence or mentioned as
giving additional point to my nonsense. The passion for facetiousness
is taking the heart out of our people and killing true merriment. The
‘funny column’ has so long used marriage and its accompaniments as
a standing jest that it is becoming difficult to think of it in any
other way, and the divorce court appears as merely the natural end of
the comedy.
“The part of this affair, however, which should give us gravest
concern is the lazy credulity of the public. They know the
recklessness of journalism as clearly as do I, on whom its dirty
water has been poured. Yet readers trust, and journal copies journal,
as securely as if the authorities were quite above suspicion. Once
started by the sensational press, my enormities were taken up with
amazing swiftness by the respectable and religious papers, and by many
thousands of their readers. It is this easy trust on the part of the
public which perpetuates newspaper mendacity. What inducement has a
paper to criticise its statements when it knows they will never be
criticised by its readers? Nothing in all this curious business has
surprised me more than the ease with which the American people can be
hoaxed. One would expect decent persons to put two and two together,
and not to let a story gain acceptance from them unless it had some
relation to the character of him of whom it was told. I please myself
with thinking that if a piece of profanity were reported of President
Taft I should think no worse of President Taft, but very badly and
loudly of that paper. But, perhaps I, too, am an American. Perhaps I,
too, might rest satisfied with saying, ‘I saw it in print.’ Only then
I should be unreasonable to complain of bad newspapers.
“G. H. PALMER.”
FOOTNOTES:
[7] See page 42.
[8] They seem to be international institutions if one is to believe the
story of the English lady who, comparing the United States unfavorably
with her own country, said to an American: “You have nothing equal to
_our_ _Century_, _Harper’s_, and _Scribner’s_.” Those magazines publish
English editions.