New York, November 24, 1865. ONLY a few weeks ago
a very intelligent and observant English- woman, who had been here about three months, said to me— breaking one of those thoughtful pauses in conversation which come at the end of a long drive—" I do believe that the reason that we misunderstand this country so much and abuse it so harshly is because we come here and find the same language, the same names, in fact that we are the same people, and therefore we are irritated by any little difference which attracts our atten- tion just as if we found it among ourselves. We go to France or elsewhere on the Continent, and whatever strikes us there as strange we accept without question as part of the peculiarities of a foreign people, which we may or may not like, but which is at least in place. Here we seem to think that we have the right to find fault if everything is not just as it is at home." I am very sure that this lady laid her finger upon one cause of what a generous trans-Atlantic correspondent of mine calls "the cat-and-dog life which, in spite of that individual liking which individual Englishmen and Yankees seem to have for each other, the two nations have led for the last fifty years." But there is another far more potent, because it is more striking in its manifestation, more general in its influence, and more continuous in its operation. It is the contrast between the journalism of the two countries. The moral, and even the intellectual condition of this country and its political purpose can be rightly judged, not by what editors and politicians say, but by what the people do. But unfortunately, though almost unavoidably, we are judged in Europe not by what we do, but by what editors and politicians say. For Europe the New York press is the " American " press, just as that of Paris and of London is the British and French press to us ; and so it happens that we are represented abroad by the public aspects of New York and Washington, which are of all places in the country the two that are least characteristic of the tone and tem- per of the society which has grown up here during the last two centuries. Enough, and perhaps too much, has been said in these letters about our politicians, but little or nothing thus far about that equally salient and significant feature of our public life, our newspapers.
It is of course quite impossible that at this day the newspapers which are published for and read by the mass of the people of a country like this should not represent in a certain sense the mind of that people. And in a certain sense the Press of New York does represent the people of New York, and even of the country at large. But it does not do this at all as the Press of London represents the British or that of Paris the French people. And this for a very striking and significant, although apparently para- doxical reason,—because its representative function is so general, in fact absolutely universal. Newspapers here are addressed to and speak for the entire population,— all sorts and conditions of men. And by this I do not mean that there are various papers published for various sorts and conditions of readers, and that the aggregate of these papers thus represents society in the aggregate, but that each and all of our papers are made for each and all sorts and conditions of readers. The press here is the most purely democratic of all our "institutions." Our hotels are one "insti- tution," our street-railways another "institution," and they we in theory and, it may be said, in fact purely democratic, as indeed hotels and railways are everywhere. Any man almost may dine at the London Tavern who chooses to pay the price of a London Tavern dinner, and so any man may take a first-class railway carriage. But the fact is that only people whose habits of life come within certain limits,—wide limits, if you please,—do sit at those tables and travel in those carriages ; and so it is in this country to a certain degree. But at the press the parallel stops. There are certain classes forming, if I am not in error, a very large proportion of the population of Great Britain, to whom the great London daily and weekly papers are no more addressed than to the people of British India or to the Maoris, and who do not even form part of the public for which the provincial papers are written. It is not
so here. An omnibus or a railway car in New York—to return to my illustration—is open to the whole public, and there are no first and second-class distinctions ; but the fact is that if you take some lines you encounter certain sorts of people, and if you take others, certain other sorts of people. "Let us take a Third Avenue car," said I to a friend one day. "No," he replied, with a smile, "I am going to take a Fourth Avenue car, like a gentle- man." There are some lines which ladies of certain tastes and breeding would never use, except in case of the direst necessity. So with omnibuses, but not so with newspapers. The man of the highest cultivation reads the same newspaper that is read by the lowest rowdy, and the rowdy reads his paper as regularly as the man of culture. The distinctions in journalism here are purely and only political, never social. The cultivated man and the rowdy read the same papers from necessity. They cannot consult their tastes. There are no others for them to read. Not many morn- ings since I passed, as I daily pass, a stand of hacks by the City Hall. More than thirty of these vehicles, all of which are coaches or barouches, were standing in a row parallel with the street, and close to the kerb. The drivers of all of them, with one exception, were sitting in the open doors of the carriages, with their feet upon the kerbstone, occupying the time as they waited for calls by readiug the morning papers ; and the papers which they read (I looked, although it was superfluous to look) were just the papers which Chief Justice Chase, or General Scott, or Mr. Longfellow would have read, must have read if they had been in the city,—the Times, the World, and the Herald; fewest of the first and most of the last. And of these hack-drivers, who to a man were Irishmen, three I remember positively, and I believe five, as they re- galed themselves with the morning's news, were having their boots polished by youthful members of the boot-black brigade, who knelt before them on the side-walk. I have again and again seen this, and I have seen a footman in livery sitting on the box reading to the coachman the same paper (I don't mean the same copy) that I knew was laid upon the breakfast-table of the mistress for whose appearance the carriage was waiting. Something like this may to a certain degree obtain elsewhere. What I believe is peculiar to this country is that people in the condition of life represented by the hackmen and the footmen take the best papers regularly, and are just as much a part of the public whom the publisher and the editor has to consider as the persons for whom the hacks and the private carriage were waiting. Between these two extremes lies the great mass of the public, and for the mean as well as for the extremes there is the same provision. This being the case, it will be seen that journalism, as it is conducted in Europe, is impossible here. Newspapers in the two countries have different aims and fulfil different functions. Suppose the Times, the Daily News, or the Telegraph were of necessity prepared to suit the tastes not of the classes to which they are now addressed, but to those of all the people of London out of the almshouse, including more than 50,000 Irish labourers, of whom ten years ago not a soul could read, the necessity being that if the average taste of this mass were not suited by those papers it would be by others, and those would go down for want of support, is it not safe to say that in the course of ten or fifteen years those papers would be lees agreeable reading to people of decent habits, not to say of cultivated tastes, than they are at present ? There are as good. leading articles, and even as good correspondence, sometimes in some of our papers as in any in the world,—strong, thoughtful, dignified articles, but they are comparatively rare. A leading article here is usually a rehash of news, hashed in the first telling, and mingled with vapid common-place or bombast, in the midst of which, however, there is in every paper save one, almost always discoverable, a good, sensible purpose. For although our public seems to have an unlimited capacity to swallow nonsensical talk, it has little patience with nonsensical action. As to our reporting, and the style in which our papers give general news, it is with rare exceptions as poor as possibly can be and be intelligible. No one knows this better than the editors themselves. I once praised to a managing editor the style of a well known man of letters here who occasionally wrote leading articles, and wrote them like a scholar and a man of the world, as well as clearly and with pur- pose. "Yes," was the reply, "his style is very fine, but it has no business in a newspaper. Three of his articles a week would kill any paper in New York." Another editor, the editor-in- chief of one of the most prominent newspapers in the country, being asked hen he was visiting one of our public schools to speak to the boys, in the course of his address warned them especially against the style of the newspapers, as being vicious and depraving in every respect. The teachers and some of the older boys smiled, but he was in earnest. Another reason of the inferior quality of may be able to judge what would be the tone of a press which our journalism, which is a consequence as well as a reason, is that would suit the average taste of the entire population of London, journalism here is pursued merely as the means of obtaining wealth —an Earl who translates Homer or a Chancellor of the Exchequer on the one hand, and a bare livelihood on the other. A successful counting one, and every costermonger and every cabman counting paper here ensures a fortune to its owners, and a handsome living also one. To this I cannot pretend. There does not seem to be while the fortune is making ; but subordinates of all grades, ex- any prospect of the establishment of a higher class of daily news- eept the highest, are paid miserably. I have heard with amaze- paper here. Journalism will rise here, but it will rise with the ment of the prices which your first-rate papers pay, and culture of the mass of the people. For every improvement in this of the generous way in which they deal with a valued con- country is a great improvement in its operation, every advance tributor. Our newspapers pay enormously for news, but their shows that millions have taken one step forward. publishers regard it as their business to see that as little as A YA.NIEEE. possible is paid for anything else. Therefore, with so wide a field for exertion, and so many avenues to competence, THE GRAPHOTYPE PROCESS.
if not to wealth, is it strange that able men shun journalism,
unless they are driven to it by "a divine setting-on,"—that in'- 16 Southampton Street, Dec. 4, 1865.
pulse to utterance and craving for power over men's minds which will not let a man rest in silence ? But even these men must live with some approach to what is comfort for men of culture, and so, unless they can obtain some ownership in a successful paper, they soon fall away from journalism. Instead of the plate being "lightly chiselled over," it is brushed It may, however, be asked, and with great pertinence, why are there not newspapers published in the United States for readers of the same taste and intelligence as are possessed by the classes for which the great London papers are published ? And
is not the fact that there are no such papers in the country to be case in any process which prints direct from the drawing.—I am, taken as undeniable proof that there are no such readers, or so D. C. Hrrciwoc
few that they are entirely without influence? To the last ques- tion, "No." There is, I believe, a very much larger number of
readers in this country than in any other, who would enjoy, and BOOKS. who crave, journalism of the highest class. Why, then, does
not the demand produce the supply ? Simply because of the --s-- diffusion of culture, and of the fact that those readers GUSTAVE DORE'S DANTE.*
are scattered over such a vast expanse of country. The MEssns. CassErs., PETTER, and GALPIN deserve credit, much populations of England and Wales and of our Free States are more credit than theywill we fear obtain, for this publication. There nearly equal, about 20,060,000. Your twenty millions produce a is real spirit in it, commercial courage, the sort of pluck aometimes certain number of readers who desire and can pay for a first-rate exhibited by the great Leipsic booksellers. Usually popular pub- newspaper. Our twenty millions produce even a larger number lishers, men who appeal to the mass of readers rather than any who have the same desire, if not the same ability, to pay. But of particular section in the mass, they have gone out of their way to those readers with you very few indeed are so remote from your produce in English a work such as the few who buy those things capital that they cannot read their newspaper on the same day on would sooner buy in its original Italian, to reprint in a popular forna which it is issued, while with us they are scattered over an an edition de luxe which only those will seek who care little for expanse of country so vast that papers sent from our great centres the popular taste. It is a bold attempt, whether it succeeds or of wealth and enterprise (we have no capital) are stale before they fails, and one which deserves a commendation we very seldom can be distributed to those who, if they were within a radius of bestow on the mere externals of a book, and it is just possible that twelve hours by rail from New York, would perhaps make it easy it may succeed. There is not much appreciation of Dante in Eng- to establish a really great newspaper there to-morrow. I say per- land, where his language is little known, and his mental attitude haps, because our interests are as widely diffused and scattered as has become almost incomprehensible ; but then there is apprecia- our intelligence and culture ; and this also operates against the tion of Gustave Dore, as there is of scarcely any other Frenchman, production of newspapers of a high class, which can only be and of all subjects for Gustave Dore the Inferno is the one most published at capitals, that is, at centres of interest. A news- perfectly suited to his genius. He is par excellence the paper must be read while it is fresh. An old newpaper is an draughtsman of the French grotesque, of the grotesque, that absurdity, a contradiction in terms ; and a newspaper grows old is, in which it is possible for humour—primary element in the here sooner than in any other country. Its life is not a day, abstract grotesque—to be entirely wanting. There is a bizarrerie hardly half a day. I have scores of times tried in vain to buy at of the horrible as well as of the comic, and it is in the former that the news-shops in the afternoon the newspapers of the morning, Gustave Dore consciously revels, like all genuine French caricatur- and have often asked in vain for them at the newspaper offices ists, from himself to the lowest furnisher of the Pont Neuf who themselves. The papas are valued only for their news. That draws the devil coquetting—devil being the skeleton kept in his glanced over, and the important items noted, sometimes only those studio as a lay figure and coquette an impudent model. The abominable headings read which serve the double purpose of table single objection which criticism ventures to offer to Dante's claim of contents and puffing advertisements, they are thrown aside, to his rank among the immortals is that his imagination was torn, burnt, except by the few who keep them for special pur- materialistic, and that also is, we conceive, the defect in Gustave poses. Therefore it is quite out of the question to tell a man Dore. When Dante would describe a villain suffering, he places three hundred miles from New York to wait till to-morrow for a him in some position in which his torture would excite the reader's good paper, when the telegraph brings all the news to the miser- pity, but that a certain unearthliness or bizarrerie, a sense that the able little sheet which he receives at the same time that the man emotions of earth have in such scenes no place, that pity is as in Wall Street receives his Tribune or his 2'imes. These matters misplaced as hate, love as fear, forbids the natural instinct to of distance and date are so much considered, that such weekly arise. When Gustave Dore would paint a villain suffering he papers devoted to literature and art as we have, they being of gives us his heels thrown up in agony to heaven, while the in- course dependent upon a somewhat cultivated, and so widely visible body is visibly writhing in the burning marl. The mind of scattered class of readers, are sent to press a week, ten days, and man has thought out no situation of torture worse than that sug- even two weeks before the day of their date of publication. gested in canto xix. and drawn in plate 45, suggested by Dante and Nothing is more common than the ridiculous cry in a railway drawn by Gustave Dore, and yet there is something in the material- ear, "Here's the — — for next week !" Why not for next istic conception, something else in the more materialistic en'- year? It is for the reasons which I have thus imperfectly, cution, which almost prohibits the natural emotion. Two hun- although I hope sufficiently, stated, that we have instead of a few dred years ago the spectator would probably have looked on first-rate daily newspapers, a thousand poor ones. Each paper is the drawing with horror, for he would have believed that torture, addressed to the whole population of the part of the country in that wicked horror of planned infliction, certainly sublime, and which it circulates, else it would not live. Consequently every possibly divine. To-day that feeling is absent, but yet the full reader has to be contented with what will snit the average taste of flow of criticism, the cold estimate of Dante's thought and Dore's the aggregate population around him, and that average is higher Cassell.or lower according to the advantages of his position. My readerCassell.Inferno. Illustrated by Gustave Dore. (Cory's Translation.) London:
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