A FEATURE OF EVENING PAPERS.
THE Pall Mall Gazette of Tuesday—a journul and a number chosen by pure accident, because this article was written on that day—offers a perfect example of a new evil which, in part without the consent of its conductors, is infecting journalism. All evening news is getting blood-coloured. The papers of the afternoon wish to be lively ; they are . anticipated as to all serious and most commercial news ; they fancy—or, it may be, know—that long reports would not attract their special public, and they fall back for entertain- ment upon the purveyance of horrors. We do not mean that they dwell aitfully upon horrible things, or supply details better left unreported, or in any way offend against good manners ; but they collect from the whole world telegrams or notices of crimes, suicides, disasters, or incidents intended to move either compassion or a sense of horror-struck surprise. No matter where the ghastly incident has occurred—in Hungary or Japan, South Africa or Denmark—it is at once reported, usually, we quite admit, in brief and direct words, as the incident of the evening.
On Tuesday, for example, in the Pall Mall Gazette, now perhaps the best of our evening papers, and certainly a most wonderful penn'orth of readable matter, there appeared on its middle pages some thirty separate announcements of new tidings, and of these seventeen were announcements of death, crime, disaster, or misfortune. We had An earthquake in Canada," an execution, the " Mysterious death of an aged vicar," the " Commencement of a honeymoon," with the bride drunk, "The death of Sir A. Orr-Ewing," " An infernal machine sent to Count Caprivi," "An arrest of 100 Anarchists," "Serious disturbances in Italy," "King Milan a bankrupt,"
"Bank managers indicted in New York," "Strange suicide at
Montpelier," "Attempted murder in Paris," "Tragedy on the Monaco line," "A serious charge of fraud," "Marriage of a bride in Cape Town only fourteen yew's old," the " Mys-
tery of Ardlamont," the "Suicide of a chastised boy," a murder with sensational details in Dublin, "Brutal outrage
by a son," and finally, "Two children drowned by their mother," all in the two central pages, for which, first of all, the evening papers are bought. Nor is this list in any way exceptional or peculiar to one journal. We venture to say that if any reader counts on any day the " headed " para- graphs in any evening paper, he will find that more than half —often more than two-thirds—are of the same kind ; that the world has been ransacked for them, sometimes at heavy cost, and that his general impressions from his paper are that bloodthirstiness is universal, and that dangerous accident or misfortune fills an appreciable space in all life. He never heave, if he reads for weeks, of anything pleasant ; and of the ordinary life of mankind, the life lie sees everywhere around him, he perceives absolutely nothing at all. The conspicuous persons are murderers and policemen, the leading events are disasters, and the chief subjects of interest are hunts for criminals usually, in the paragraphs, unsuccessful. A sombre yet over- bright colour, grey flecked with blood, is spread over the whole of each evening's intelligence.
We are quite aware that for much of all this evening papers are nearly irresponsible. They are provided with their news by a host of agents dispersed all over London and the world, whese business it is to send up incidents, and who find none to send except those of the character we have described. The world, in reality, is a very hum- drum place, the immense majority of the human race doing their business to-day as they did yesterday, and will to- morrow, in a style which, if it were described by ordinary penmen, no man would spend his penny in order to road about. He would get no distraction from such litetature, and it is ten minutes' distraction, not an hour's instruction, for which he seeks in an evening paper. He does not want to be told that the operations of agriculture have been carried on all day in India with advantage to crop prospects, or to hear that in the Western States, owing to fine weather, the classes of the " school-alarms " were on Monday most unusually well attended. He can only report incidents susceptible of brief record, and in nine cases out of ten there are no such incidents except crimes or disasters. If you glance over the whole world at once, as we do nowadays, the crop of these never ceases, and, accordingly, they pour into the offices endlessly, and are recorded almost perforce as the salient facts of the history of the day. The manager would give better news if he could; but these are the facts sent in, and he makes them, as is his business, as conspicuous as he can. We do not suppose he has the slightest thirst for slaughter, or any morbid cariosity about crime, or the faintest wish that news should be sombre instead of being cheerful. He would probably space-out a new dia. covery tending to multiply food for mankind much more gladly than a new dynamite explosion, and would as soon report that a community was greatly delighted as that it " was thrown into consternation," or "filled with excitement and regret." Nor are we about to moralise upon the "perverted taste " of the multitude of buyers. The old lady who "enjoyed her murders" was probably a very good old lady, and at least half the passion for exciting news is nothing but a desire to escape from the rather soporific effect of the usual, which is also the monotonous. We could pardon a man who read Mr. Fowler on Parish Councils in the morning —if there is such a man—for wanting in the evening the most startling murder, or the most sanguinary upset of a train pretty far off his home. One half at least of the gruesome stories are read by the majority with a shut imagination, and half the remainder are protected by that wall of selfishness which interposes between the brain and painful details as completely as between the heart and the mass of human misery. All we wish is to point out a new fact in our social civilisation, the supply of painful matter day by day and year by year as the staple of reading, and to examine, so far as we can, what its effects must be. They can hardly be wholly beneficial, and we are unable to resist an impression that, though they do not exactly demoralise, they do tend to deteriorate the general conception of the world's daily history. Cheerfulness is one main source of energy, and it is a little difficult to remain cheerful after reading an evening paper. It does not sadden so much as depress by its incessant revelation of misery which it is impossible to alleviate or help. The world seems so bad, so reckless, and so thick-headed. The effect is like the torment to any one interested in Brazil, of reading about her civil war, and recognising what the destruction of prosperity must be, and how little hope there is of a vivifying result to the sickening, sordid quarrel. We doubt if it is good to realise constantly how many men are given to murder, how little real protection there is against accident, how ghastly may be the fate, all in a moment, of the apparently happy. In some minds, no doubt, the effect may be healthy, for they may realise, as no preaching will make them realise, that "here we have no abiding city;" but on the majority we fear the effect is to increase the sense of the perplexity and complexity of life, the doubt which is not a doubt, yet has most of its bad effects, whether Heaven is really ruling; the feeling that, with so much wickedness and folly everywhere, it is wiser to be self- regarding and to let things drift. We have an idea—and a very strong one, though the reader must take it for what it is worth—that the reading of many railway accidents all over the world would render a railway director less and not more careful that accidents did not occur on his particular line. "An accident," he would involuntarily think, "is quite in the order of things, and occurs here, or occurs there, just as the lot falls. What is the use of losing dividends by so much extra precaution ?" The falsity of the impression, too, which is thus created, cannot but be injurious. The world is a world which goes on for the most part very quietly, with a great sameness in its daily life, an immense deal of work, and results not altogether incommensurate, considering that twelve hundred millions of people secure for themselves out of hard ground three, or at least two, meals a day. The world as depicted in evening papers, is by no means either so tame or so strenuous, and by just the amount of difference in the true and the false impression is the judgment of men deluded. It is, for example, solely due to the newspapers—though in this the morning papers must share the blame—that whole nations are under the impression that society, the heaviest of all masses in existence, can be upset by the attacks of a few hundred active Anarchists. What are they to the old society of "Assassins," who upset nothing except Omar de Lion's nerves ? Society can be frightened exceedingly, but it can no more be upset than the Himalaya can be bored through by the screaming rush of a railway train. The impression pro- duced is false, like the similar impression as to the range of disaster; and in all falsity there is, somewhere or other, loss of power. All such incidents—even the existence of Anarchy as a creed—are but ripples in the stream which never stops, and those who study ripples only, which is the necessary attitude for the moment of evening newspaper readers, will not only not become hydraulic engineers, but they will never understand rightly what the force of water in motion is. The seventeen paragraphs in the Pall Mall Gazette of Tuesday are, we dare say, all true. They are all more or less interesting to read, and we blame its conductors for none of them ; but their total effect is that of a world widely different from that which exists,—a phantom world in which there is no calm, no monotony, and no successful, steady work. It is as if astronomers were to take meteorites for the active forces of the universe, and " corposants " for its phenomena, and to report day by day or hour by hour an explpsion in the air, or a flaming at the masthead of befogged ships.
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