DEAN STANLEY ON TIIE PRESS.
THERE are both "sweetness and light" in the Dean of Westminster, but when he is talking on subjects which interest without moving him, he tempts us sometimes to wish that he would give us more of the "light," and a little less of the "sweetness." His eulogy on the British Press, pronounced at the dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund on Saturday, was a great deal too florid. If he only thought what he said, without exactly believing it, he adopted an inartistic mode of expressing himself, for a speech should never be a hymn ; and if he believed it all, he gave a perfect, though involuntary, contradiction to the calumny that his mind is on all subjects of a sceptical turn. Praise of the painstaking displayed by English Newspaper managers in collecting accurate intelligence is fairly well bestowed, for they do take pains and spend money, and the owners of most foreign newspapers do not ; but Dean Stanley praises everybody con- nected with newspapers—managers, reporters, special correspon- dents, and leader-writers—with a heartiness which will make professionals smile. "I never knew what office meant," said an Under-Secretary one day, "till I saw that Colonel —, in talking to me, sat on the edge of his their;" and the Press men will think they never knew themselves till they saw how large they looked to Dean Stanley's imagination. In his view they are not only a priesthood, which they ought to be, but a priesthood with something of Apostolical succession or other mystical attribute about them. The Reporters are told that their profession is one of the oldest in the world, that some of them are numbered in the "noble army of martyrs," that St. Augustine carried sixteen reporters about with him, that their art perished with the fall of Rome, to revive in modern civilisation, and that their efforts are "laborious and self-denying," — which is true of all other men who earn their living, and by no means specially true of the present race of Reporters, who sometimes do their work splendidly, and sometimes scamp it as badly as cheap builders or advertising upholsterers. It is true, the Dean complains that speakers are sometimes misrepresented and have no redress, but that little drop of lemon-juice only serves to bring out the lusciousness of the honey. As for the Special Correspondents, they have taken to interviewing, and "the hunger and eagerness with which they devour every traveller, prince, or emperor, who passes across their path, well entitles them to as much credit for their indomi- table courage and industry, as those who have adventured them- selves on more difficult and arduous posts on the field of battle, or in the dangerous track of science." That is true enough of some correspondents on some occasions, but it is not true of the men who lie in wait for Emperors and Princes, and not true as a general description of men who are much more like Athenians as they appeared to St. Paul than heroes of any sort, and who enjoy in a great number of cases exceptionally pleasant lives. A Secre- tary of Legation in a great capital or a subordinate Minister in attendance on a travelling Sovereign does his work, and does it well, and so does a settled-down correspondent or a writer selected to report on a Prince of Wales's tour, but the one deserves credit for courage only as much as the other. He has a very comfortable life, with a good deal of colour and variety in it, sees a good deal of men worth seeing, hears news pretty early, can do work through gossip —a great privilege to competent men who understand the pleasures of laziness—and is not, as the world goes, badly paid. Sir Douglas Forsyth has been recently once or twice in danger, and is in danger now, but that does not prove that diplomacy is either a dangerous or an industrious profession. It is, however, about the Leader-writers that Dean Stanley grows most enthusiastic, is most carried away by the glory of his subject, and rises most loftily out of the regions of sense into those of poetry, using metaphors which would be strained if he were speaking of Napoleon planning Marengo, or of Von Moltke preparing for Sedan. "There are some chapters in the Koran called the Terrific Sums,' because it is said the prophet's hair turned white in a single night while he was composing them. I think the Terrific Suras' of our modern journals must be the leaders, composed at a moment's notice in the dead of night, on some heart-stirring event with results which may shake the nations. What responsibility, what labour can be greater than that ? I have been told by one who heard it from a master in the art, that he could only compare the effort of writing a leading article to the tension and energy compressed into the attitude of a crouching tiger." We have heard of the "young lions" of the Daily Telegraph, but the Dean believes, apparently, in the tigers of the Times. He doubtless admires Blake, and he should have perfected his metaphor by quoting that lunatic seer's ode to the beast whom the Dean thinks likest an English leader-maker:- "Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forest of the night !
What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry ?
In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the ardour of thine eyes ? On what wings dare he aspire— What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art Could twist the sinews of thy heart ? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread band form'd thy dread feet ?
What the hammer, what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain?
Did God smile his work to see ?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?"
"Did He who made us Deans, make thee ?" is obviously the idea of Dean Stanley, who proceeds to account for the grandeur which so much amazes him by attributing to publicists influences of which, we venture to say, they are generally unconscious. Leader-writers, particularly when they write at night—that is, in a great hurry, with too little time for reflection—are often "carried beyond themselves into colossal proportions," and are "inspired with a power not their own." "The writers of such articles know they are ex- pressing not their own caprices, but for the moment they are expressing, I do not say always the whole force of public opinion,
yet, the opinion of a corporation greater than they are ; and therefore, they are bound by every feeling of loyalty and honour not to betray or sully it by any frivolity or levity of their own.
They are inspired, also, by this still greater motive. They are influenced not only by the feeling of what is behind them, but by the feeling of what is before them. They know they are addressing the whole English people, but likewise the whole of the English-speaking people throughout the world. They know that the stone they throw into the water goes on with ever-widening circles until it reaches the antipodes." A journalist is, no doubt, conscious of his audience, as a barrister is conscious of his jury, or an orator of upturned faces, and he may be conscious also that most people or many people think as he does, but we confess we fail to see the in- spiration in either consciousness. The unseen faces daunt more than they inspire. There would be more inspiration, we should think, in the consciousness that he stood alone, that he was ex- pressing his own innermost thought, that he had to turn the world from its loved opinions to others he deemed more sound. The function of funnel is useful, but hardly deserves all this rhetoric, and we should have thought inspiration more likely to come to the loneliest eryer in the wilderness than to the most silvery of speaking-trumpets, though, no doubt, the conse- quent roar might not be so audible at the antipodes. That the presence of an audience can sometimes greatly excite an orator is, no doubt, the truth, but we should hardly have believed, except on the Dean's testimony, that the suppression of individuality, the consciousness of expressing the feelings of corporations greater than themselves, would elevate writers' souls, or raise their minds above themselves to colossal proportions. Does he seriously mean to say that Mr. Sterling, writing to express the opinion of the Corporation of the City of London, would be more inspired than if he were writing to express the opinion of Mr. Sterling? The Times might say he was wiser, and more moderate, and more cautious, but even the Times would hardly plead that the duty of reflecting opinion day by day developes inspiration. We should have said the special drawback to the power of a newspaper writer was the necessity, which an author need not feel, of being within range of to-morrow's readers, of saying nothing which they will set down as unpractical, or doubt- ful, or viewy, of expressing themselves to themselves, instead of expressing the teacher to them.
We do not see the use of these hymns to the Press, any more than we see the use of the sneers which used to be levelled at all men who wrote for pay. The profession is a very useful profession, and a very honourable one ; but there is nothing mystical about it, any more than about the Bar, or civil engineering, or a seat in Parliament. A professional publicist may be a man of genius, just as the Bar may produce a Follett, or civil engi- neering a Brunel, or Parliament a Pitt, but the profession is not full of geniuses at all. The average journalist is very like the average Member of Parliament, though usually, from his training, quicker-witted, bases his views on much the same facts, ex- pounds them in much the same way, and is exposed to every temptation but one in much the same degree. He has not to think of himself quite so much, because he is invisible to the public, and he therefore is less hampered by the necessity or imagined necessity of being always consistent with himself, but he is essentially much the same kind of man. He has a rather clearer knowledge of his subject than his readers, he can express himself with a good deal more definiteness than they can, and he has sometimes from much discussion a more accurate view of the consequences of events, but his only other advantage is that he is an expert talking to amateurs. The effort involved in expressing thought is in either case nearly the same. There have been journalists to whom writing was a slow pain—that certainly was the case with Albany Fonblanque—as there have been orators in whom extempore speaking was most difficult—e.g., Dr. Chalmers—but to most of them writing is a work from which they derive a little of the artist's gratification. They would much rather write than not write, just as most singers would rather sing than not sing. That journalists break down rapidly is true, and arises from the hurry amid which their work is done ; but that they, when in health, feel writing a burden is a Mr. Chillipish belief, with foundation only in individual cases. The quality of the work differs just as much as the char- acters of the workmen. As a rule, we should say admira- tion for it was generally misplaced ; that it was, on the whole, inferior to the good. writing found in books. It is much more interesting, but that is because the subject interests. There are, no doubt, occasional exceptions. The Times published in the spring of 1873 half-a-dozen articles in defence of M. Thiers and the Conservative Republic in France which were about as good as "leaders" could be,—convincing arguments expressed in a sinewy style very rare in newspaper literature ; but the Times' leaders " generally are and must be ordinary specimens of English writing, deriving most of their interest from their subject-matter, or their accurate reflection of common-place English feeling. Of leadership, in Dean Stanley's sense, there is seldom a trace, though, no doubt, the effect of articles is very often leading. We do not know a newspaper published in English in which the average writing is noteworthy for brilliance, and a great quantity of it is of a very slipshod kind. Indeed, very good writing,—as good, for instance, as the letters in which a correspondent of the Times who signed himself "An Englishman" attacked Louis Napoleon after the coup jrat, letters, as far as we can judge, distinctly superior in style to those of Junius—would by degrees bore their readers to inanition. People like curries now and then, but they know their own need when they ask for daily bread, and a very simple, mannerless writer, who every day told them something, would very soon be the favourite of the public. Leader-writing is not a work which one man can do as well as another ; on the contrary, it is work which many very able men cannot do at all ; but it is ordinary work nevertheless, like preaching, or lecturing, or writing despatches, and the attempt to elevate it into anything higher only misleads. Musicians are not semi-divine because Beethoven lived, nor is sermon-making a mystical function because Felix trembled before Paul. The tendency to bow down and worship the Press is but a specimen of the permanent tendency to bow down to power, and we do not like to see men like Dean Stanley, who are free from it themselves, giving to it in others the sanction conveyed in the invention of rhetorical explanations.
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