A child's guide to reading

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:

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.”