CHAPTER IV THE JOURNALIST

I am dealing here with the English journalist, because in my opinion, after the English sportsman and the English man of business, there is nothing under the sun so wonderfully English and so fearfully foolish. The elegant and austere writer who gave us The Unspeakable Scot has said much which he no doubt hoped would lead people to believe that the British Press was entirely in the hands of Scotsmen, and that this accounted at once for its dulness and its continual advertisement of Scottish virtues. For my own part, I have no hesitation in asserting that Mr. Crosland's view of the situation is quite a mistaken one. In any case, it is obvious that, even if Fleet Street be, as Mr.[Pg 29] Crosland suggests, eaten up with louts from over the Border, the English journalist is not yet wholly extinct, and somewhere in the land the remnant of him stands valiantly to its guns. It is well known, however, that, as a fact, the remnant very largely outnumbers its hated rival, the proportion of Scots to the proportion of Englishmen on the staffs of most newspapers being probably no higher than as one is to three. So that for the stodginess and flat-footedness of the English newspaper—the epithets are Mr. Crosland's own—the Englishman is at least equally to blame with the Scot. Mr. Crosland's main complaint against the newspaper press of his country is that it lacks brilliance. So far as I am aware, it has never before been asserted that the function of a newspaper is to be brilliant. News is news all over the world. To write brilliantly of a dog-fight or of the suicide of a defaulting clerk may be Mr. Crosland's ambition in life, but most persons possessing such an ambition would transfer their finical attentions from the field[Pg 30] of journalism to that of belles-lettres. No doubt, if Mr. Crosland had his way, the morning papers, in which the soul of the average Englishman so delighteth, would be published from the Bodley Head or at the Sign of the Unicorn, or haply at Mr. Grant Richards's.

It is not my intention, however, to enter into a sort of ten nights' discussion with Mr. Crosland. He has had his say and taken the whipping he deserved. My business is with the English journalist; and while I shall not descend to personalities in dealing with him, I hope to show that his brilliance and liveliness and smartness, though much vaunted, are neither a boon nor a blessing either to journalism as a force or to society at large. I think that it may be fairly set down for a fact that the fine flower and consummate expression of English journalism is the halfpenny newspaper. At any rate, nobody would pretend to find in the halfpenny newspaper the sententious dulness and flat-footedness which are supposed to characterise the journalistic work of the Scot. The smartness[Pg 31] of the halfpenny press is indeed not even American. There is but one epithet for it, and that is English. Broadly speaking, its appeal is directly and exclusively to the bathotic. In England the bathotic has always had the majority in its grip. The majority notoriously has no mind. It is a thing of one emotion, an instrument of one stop. On that stop—the bathotic stop—the English journalist makes a point of playing. There has been a time in his history when he believed in the educative possibilities and duties of his profession. He long held with the Scot that the Press was a power, and that it was becoming that it should glory in being a power for the betterment of the race. After many shrewd searchings and commercial gropings, the English journalist discovered that the way to fame and fortune lay in the mastery of the bathotic stop. He learned to sing songs of Araby in one squalid key every morning, and he has since been able to keep a gig and out-circulate everything that considers itself possessed of circulation. He[Pg 32] has played, as one might say, old Harvey with the Daily Telegraph. He has put the Times to the shame of being a journal that "nobody reads." More than all, he has said flatly to the English people, "You are a rabbit-brained crowd, and here for your delectation and your coppers is the worst that can be written for you."

When England comes to her day of reckoning, in the hour when she shall see her own mischance and is fain to remember the names of her destroyers, none of them will seem to her so flagrant and so to be deprecated as the English journalist. "Behold," she will say, "the monster who convinced me that it was beautiful to split infinitives; that it was elegant to begin six paragraphs on one page with the blessed statement, 'A dramatic scene was enacted in Mr. Thingamybob's court yesterday'; that good books are to be worthily pronounced upon by sub-editors in the intervals of waiting for the three o'clock winner; and that, so far from being a reproach to one,[Pg 33] the bathotic was the only honourable and creditable attitude of mind."

If a man wish to perceive to what degraded passes the art of writing may come and yet retain the qualities of intelligibility and apparent reasonableness, let him peruse the morning papers and die the death. The reek and offence of them smells to heaven. They are a sure indication of the decadence of the English mind and of the cupidity and unscrupulousness of the English journalist. There has been nothing like them, nothing to compare with them, for cheapness and futility and banality in the history of the world. They are more to be fearful of than the pestilence, inasmuch as they spell intellectual debasement, the corruption of the public taste, and the defilement of the public spirit. Their very literal innocuousness condemns them. It is their boast that they may be read in the family without a blush. Their assumption of morality and puritanical straitlacedness is admirable. Beneath it there lie a licentiousness of purpose, a disregard for what is just,[Pg 34] and a contempt for what is decent and of good report which are calculated to make the angels weep. When one inquires into the personnel of the staffs by which these papers are run, one is confronted with exactly the kind of man one expects to meet. First of all, he is English, and as shallow and flippant and irresponsible as only an Englishman can be. The saving touch of seriousness does not enter into his composition. He neither reads nor thinks. Beer, billiards, and free lunches, free entry to the less edifying places of amusement, a minimum of work and a maximum of pay, constitute his ideal of the journalist's career, and he is always doing his best to live up to it. Of responsibility to anybody save his immediate chief, who, after all, is only himself at a little higher salary, he has not the smallest notion. His duty is neither by himself nor by the public. All that is expected of him is loyalty to his chief and to his paper, and it is his pride and joy that this loyalty is invariably forthcoming.

Very occasionally one hears that, in con[Pg 35]sequence of a change in the political policy of a newspaper, the editor of that paper has considered it to be his duty to resign his editorship. Probably not more than two such resignations have occurred in English journalism during the past twenty years. In both instances the self-denying editors have been held up by the English papers as sublime examples of honour and martyrdom. That there is nothing extraordinary in sticking to one's principles, even though it means loss of livelihood, does not appear to have dawned upon the lively English mind. Of course, it will be said that, if every member of the staff of a newspaper, down even to the junior reporters, were allowed to have beliefs and principles, and were not expected to write anything in antagonism to them, an exceedingly remarkable kind of newspaper would result. Compromise, at any rate on established matters, must be the rule of the journalist's life. On the other hand, I incline to the opinion that the English journalist is far too swift to acquiesce in[Pg 36] doubtful procedure, and that where the morals, good report, and high character of a paper are concerned it is better to have a Scotch staff than an English one. Nothing is more characteristic of the English journalist of to-day than the circumstance that he is literally without opinions of his own. He takes his opinions from his chiefs, just as his chiefs take their opinions from their proprietors, or from the wire-pullers with whose party the paper happens to be associated. In a sense it is impossible that it should be otherwise. Yet you will find that in the main Scottish journalists do have opinions of their own, and that somehow they manage to be loyal to them. For weal or woe the Scot is immovable and unchangeable as the granite of his own hills. You can never get him to see that half-measures are either desirable or necessary. He will not stretch his conscience nor palter with his soul for any man or any man's money. The Englishman is all the other way—that is why he makes such a nimble and even brilliant journalist.