III
JOURNALISM
The many waves of thought, the mighty tides,
The ground swell that rolls up from other lands,
From far-off worlds, from dim eternal shores
Whose echo dashes on life’s wave-worn strands.
The people who are connected with journalism in Australia, as elsewhere, fall naturally into three classes—managers, sub-editors, and newspaper writers. There are numerous subdivisions, but these are the three cardinal ones. The outside public does not always appreciate the value of the classification just given. The outside public may, therefore, in its tolerance, submit to be informed. For modern journalism has become a vast and comprehensive and complex thing. It touches every one, interests every one, more or less attracts every one, more or less mystifies every one. The man who is not an outsider, but who has had the lot to
See with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine—
who has been caught up and whirled round by the wheels, so to speak—should be able to claim the privilege of describing his observations and his sensations.
The managerial class is deserving of much respect, and usually gets all that it deserves. Its members are few, but its influence is undoubtedly great. Only a short account need be given of the character and abilities of the handful of men who either own or manage the great “dailies” of Australia.
For them the anonymity of the profession does not exist. They live much in the public eye. They collect the praise; they accept the flattery; they grow rich on the proceeds. The blame, when there is blame, is also theirs. But what terrors can the breath of outside criticism have for men who sell their papers at the rate of 30,000 or 40,000, or 100,000 a day? What profit is there in kicking against the pricks? These men who control the city newspapers form a separate oligarchy, and a powerful one. They are not troubled with any misgivings as to their own potentialities in the cosmos. They have a practical working knowledge of the world, and a vast confidence in themselves. Sometimes they know how to write, sometimes they do not. In any case it does not matter. Whatever brains they want they can easily purchase. They live in large mansions in the suburbs, arrive at their offices at eleven o’clock in the morning, go regularly to Government House, and deal in Napoleonic fashion with complaints from the sub-editor, with suggestions from the commercial world, with expostulations from aggrieved politicians, and with applications for increases of salary from unsatisfied members of the staff. They have won their way to big positions, and they know it. It is an excellent and a pleasant thing to be the proprietor or the manager of a large newspaper in Australia.
The sub-editors, again, form a class by themselves; they resemble the managers in that they are not really journalists. Possibly at some stage of their individual careers they may have been, but they are so no longer. As a matter of fact they are the sworn enemies of journalism. They stand like the British infantry at Waterloo—a sort of cold iron palisade against which the effervescence of youthful journalistic enterprise dashes itself in vain. They represent not so much the literary, as the commercial instinct of the paper. They are the outposts which a cautious management sets to keep watch against the Philistines. The sub-editor has tremendous responsibility and very little power. Therein lies the tragedy of his existence. Before he begins his long series of vigils under the electric lamp, he knows that while he will get no manner of praise if everything goes right, he will get short and decisive shrift if anything goes wrong. He knows this very well; and the knowledge makes him what he is.
A strange existence, a strange personality is that of the sub-editor. He seems to resemble the patient, sleepless Eremite of Keats’s last sonnet; he is always there, and he is always “watching with eternal lids apart.” It is impossible not to admire him. He must, to be in any sense worthy of his post, possess great abilities. The machine that he controls is vast, unwieldy, and yet sensationally rapid in its flight. The Rio Grande of Paterson’s Steeplechase did not require a touch half so firm or half so fine to keep him in his course. Of the thousand objectionable, offensive, libellous, dangerous, unnecessary or unwise things that come under the sub-editor’s notice every week, how many get past him? How many does he suffer to see the light of day? It is impossible not to admire the sub-editor, but it is difficult to like him. He must be a man without pity and without remorse. If he made allowance for good intentions, if he judged otherwise than by results, he would ruin his paper in a month. If he did not effectively discourage the swarm of budding writers who attempt to rush him, he would speedily have to cease publication. If he were not constantly saying unpleasant things, he would inaugurate a reign of chaos. And yet there are one or two first-class sub-editors in Australia who are well liked, and by none better than by their victims. It is a strange anomaly, but there it is. In any case it is a great tribute to the personality of the man.
Of the third class, the order of journalists proper, a great deal might be said. This class includes all those who get their living by furnishing copy to the newspapers of the country. They are a motley crowd; they number in their ranks representatives of all the professions, and of no profession at all. They embrace men and women of good social position, and men and women who are distinctly outside the pale. They have no definite organisation, no professional status, no formal rules of etiquette, no exclusive caste, no artificial barriers against membership. They have one standard of living, unorthodoxy; one bond of fellowship, Bohemianism; one passport to success, ability; one aversion, dulness; one insidious enemy, human nature; one unreliable friend—the world.
For these workers of the community there should be, in the aggregate, a feeling of considerable respect and of no little sympathy. Of respect, because in the mass they accomplish great things. The really first-class journalist showers a wealth of good phrasing, clever word-painting, wise discrimination, light fancy, brilliant humour, and saving common-sense on the breakfast-tables of a quarter of a million people each morning. He does all this and more. The result has come to be looked upon as necessary, obvious, mechanical, in a sense inevitable. It represents to the average reader the outpourings of a great machine. And a machine it certainly is, but one that is intricately fashioned, piece by piece, out of the minds and bodies, and hopes and fears, and personal gifts and graces of tens of hundreds of unrecognised writers. Unrecognised—the word that expresses always the salvation of the bad journalist, and always the detriment, or the ultimate ruin, of the good one.
These men are entitled to sympathy, or would be if they did not include in their ranks so many specimens of moral obloquy, so many hopeless outcasts from all the paths of reasonably sane and tolerable behaviour. Journalism makes a man acquainted with strange bed-fellows. Yet, taking it right through it contains probably more ability than all the rest of the professions put together, though possibly less knowledge than is to be found in any one of them. The newspaper writer, considered as a type, is always overworked, and always underpaid. Australia in this respect is no exception to other parts of the world. The men who labour behind the veil of anonymous journalism are rewarded for the most part with a living wage, and are swept out of sight as the new generation comes along. When their initiative goes, they go. Time is their deadliest enemy. Instead of fighting for them as it fights for the barrister and the medical man, it is constantly threatening them with loss of initiative, with loss of energy, with loss of brilliance. Honey is proverbially sweet for a season; but no one knows better than the journalist that the laurel which he wins this morning cannot last till to-morrow.
As to the products of this handiwork—what is to be said of them? The Australian newspaper has already developed a character of its own. Its place is somewhere between the startling sensationalism of New York and San Francisco, and the solemn impressiveness of the older London school. The representative editor balances himself between these two modes of journalism. He is seldom quite free from the English traditions, but he knows his readers; he knows that they, too, are somewhat under the influence of the older and more respectable associations; he knows that, while they have no taste for solid reading, and are always ready to be excited or amused, they have yet a contempt for machine-made sensationalism, for foolish and frothy elaboration, for staring capital letters, for shriekful epithets, for the flimsier kind of composition that rears itself on a basis of sand. Hence it may be that the press of the Commonwealth has followed, for the most part, a middle course, and has endeavoured to be neither too dull nor too picturesque. The effort has often resulted in insignificance; but it has now and again achieved great success.
For purposes of illustration it is not necessary to go beyond Melbourne and Sydney. The smaller capital cities, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Perth, are content as a rule to follow their leaders. Whatever is good or bad, or in any way distinctive at the centre, you will find reflected, though in a slighter and paler fashion, in the towns further north and further west. The same lines of demarcation hold good throughout the continent. In each city one morning paper calls itself “liberal” or “national,” while its rival goes one better, and styles itself “radical” or “democratic.” The word “conservative” has become a taunt, and is never an acknowledged title. The predominant tendency is for the younger and more democratic organ to go beyond its older and more serious competitor. The only important exception seems to be that in Perth, where the West Australian occupies a unique position. It is the accented mouthpiece of “groperism”; that is to say, of those privileged few who came to the State in early days, and monopolised as much of the earth as seemed worthy of their attention. Needless to add, these people are more conservative than they care to admit. The newspaper of their choice is singularly popular considering the circumstances. Under the guidance of an extraordinarily far-seeing and subtle-minded editor who has a rare faculty for flattering a democratic audience, while really ruling and guiding it—who knows also how to bend to the storm when to beat against it is no longer possible—the West Australian is more widely read, and more influential, to-day than it ever was, and that in the midst of a people containing a stronger socialistic infusion than is to be met with elsewhere in Australia.
It is in Melbourne and Sydney, however, that we get the most useful and instructive illustrations of the working of the journalistic machine. The Age and Argus in the former city; the Morning Herald and Daily Telegraph in Sydney, represent the best that Australia has yet been able to accomplish in this field of enterprise. The Age is referred to first because it claims, and with an emphasis that frightens contradiction, to have the largest circulation of any daily south of the line. Its political influence, though perhaps hardly what it was, has also to be reckoned with. The Age has been in existence just fifty-two years; it has been consistently fortunate in the men behind it. More especially it has been fortunate in its proprietor. It owes its power, its prestige, its circulation, its character, its very existence to David Syme, who is still, at a venerable age, an active, working journalist, and who has the distinction of being the most respected and the most disliked man in Australia—perhaps also one of the very best liked by the few who know him really well. That he has used his immense power fearlessly, and on the whole for good, is unquestionable. The present editor of the Age acts up to the policy of the proprietor. Never laying claim to pyrotechnical skill as a writer, and not giving too much rein to his imagination, he is yet pre-eminently shrewd, far seeing, clear-sighted, well informed, capable, and where business interests are concerned, inflexible as death itself. In private life no man could be more popular or more deferentially urbane.
The Argus suffers now, and has always suffered, from want of definite and decisive leadership. On its general staff it has had during the past ten or fifteen years more brilliant men—considered as reporters, at any rate—than any other daily paper in the English language. But instead of advancing to meet the times it has stood still, and talked impressively of many things. More particularly it has talked about the dangers of empiricism, and the responsibilities of the press. People read it, and will continue to read it, not so much for its opinions, as for the graceful manner in which most of its writers contrive to deal with the English language. For the rest its views on Imperialism and Free-trade fall on unwilling ears.
The Morning Herald is the oldest paper in the Commonwealth, and is built on the same lines as the Argus. It has done great things for the tone and temper of Australian journalism. Latterly, it has been showing signs of democratic restlessness that have caused its older admirers a certain amount of alarm.
The Daily Telegraph is the Mary Jane of Australian journalism. It is the most active, the most aggressive, the most tireless, the most sensation-loving, the most hysterical, the most shrill-voiced, the most daring, and the most inventive paper published on the continent. It is a slab of San Francisco tumbled down in the vicinity of Botany Bay.
This reference to certain leading journals brings up a large question—the question of the power of the newspaper press in Australia. Is it an excessive power? And how does it compare with the power of the press in other countries? So far as their political creeds are concerned, the Australians have been called a newspaper-ridden community. They are often too tired to think, and they let the paper think for them. The writer recollects calling upon a prominent official who had just returned to Melbourne after a visit for political purposes to England. The first, and almost the only observation this gentleman made, was that “They are not afraid of the newspapers in the old country.” It was this circumstance that had impressed him more than anything else, although during his absence he had been everywhere, and had seen a great deal. If you are a public man you must read and despise the papers. If you do not read them, you will miss something. If you do not despise them, they will worry the life out of you. The Age is the stock instance of a paper from which tens of thousands of adult, and supposedly intelligent voters have been content to take their opinions. This journal has made and unmade many Ministries. The Sydney Daily Telegraph is aspiring to fill the same rôle, but so far with not the same success. It is quite certain, however, that Australian newspapers of the larger class possess more influence in certain directions than is good either for themselves or for the community.
Another question very often debated is that of the fairness or otherwise of the press of the Commonwealth. Some of the leading journals have a habit of assuring the public that they are scrupulously fair; others discreetly say nothing on the subject; but almost every one has adopted an admirable and impressive motto which it places on view in a conspicuous place over the leading columns. The motto may be intended as a salve for the consciences of the management. There is a well-known story of a man who was not religious, but who always took off his hat when passing a church. Having paid that homage to his better instincts, he naturally felt more at liberty to cultivate his other ones. Having hoisted his motto, and having made obeisance to the abstract idea of fairness, the newspaper proprietor feels that he must not allow himself to be regarded as in any sense a bigot, or a moral fanatic. He has passed the church and taken off his hat. For the rest, there are the interests of his paper to think about. If these interests do not always coincide with the interests of individuals, the circumstance is much to be regretted—from the point of view of the individuals.
Some admirable diatribes have been uttered from pulpits and platforms, and from Supreme Court benches, on the subject of newspaper morality in Australia. During the hearing of a recent libel case in Melbourne, a learned judge lashed himself into a white-heat of indignation over the sinfulness of press writers who advocate views which they do not hold, and refrain from publishing statements which they do not like. His Honour found it hard to believe that such monsters could be discovered walking the earth in the guise of men. Similar sentiments have been echoed and re-echoed everywhere. There is nothing in the world quite so fine as the average man’s idea of what a newspaper ought to be. No matter what this average man may be prepared to do, or to advocate, or to believe himself, he is shocked beyond measure to find that even an influential newspaper may have commercial instincts, that it may not be disposed to love its enemies, that it may object to publishing statements which tell against it, that it may be both unable and unwilling to set an example of sublime innocence and spotless purity to the people who read its pages.
A newspaper’s virtue, like a woman’s, has a special meaning, and the meaning which outsiders attach to the word “virtue,” as applied to a newspaper, is not necessarily that which obtains within the craft. The goal which every management has in view is the goal of success—not spiritual or ethical, but hard, financial, and materialistic success. The proprietor’s virtue, the editor’s virtue, the writer’s virtue, are synonymous, among members of the profession, with the ability to produce a readable, a saleable, and an otherwise valuable article. No one blames a lawyer for advocating a cause in which he does not believe; no one censures a grocer for selling a brand of tea which he does not personally like; no one objects to a carpenter putting up houses in which he would not care to dwell. Why should the newspaper be accused of unfairness when it does what is best for itself? Like every private individual, it must keep within bounds. If it commits a transgression there is always the libel law. If it indulges in personal malice, there is always the gaol. The singular thing is that so many journals—particularly the patriarchs of Sydney and Melbourne—should be so anxious to assure the public of the excellence of their intentions. As though good intentions had ever a market value, as though the commercial instinct and the highest moral principles were not always and necessarily opposed!
What of the newspaper writer’s calling as such? Is it worth following? From the outside it looks attractive enough. Even from the inside it has its charms, meretricious and otherwise. There is a certain glitter and glamour about the profession, particularly in its early stages. The absence of class distinctions helps the journalist, and makes his work infinitely more agreeable. To a man with a real literary turn—or what is even better, a news’ instinct—promotion comes rapidly. He escapes the dull routine of other callings; he comes almost immediately into the larger portion of his inheritance. The reputation that blossoms towards the end of life, the rewards that come eventually, but with glacial slowness, the solid and sure gains of experience, all these are no part of his outlook. But he acquires in a few months a reputation and a standing that elsewhere are only the product of years. He steps at once into a wide and breezy circle; he is thrown into daily contact with the most interesting, the most notorious, and the most illustrious personages of the time. About the work itself there is a peculiar, mirage-like quality; it always seems to be pointing beyond the desert of daily drudgery, beyond the arid region of hack-work and small salaries, to the smiling country of fortune and literary fame. The young newspaper writer “never is, but is always to be, blest.”
There are many people who do not require to be warned against journalism; they drift into it, or fall into it, after chequered experiences elsewhere. But to the youth who has a choice of professions, and who thinks of choosing this one, a word of counsel may be tendered. There is no calling that makes such demands on talent, that asks so much, or that treats its tried servants so badly in the end. The man on the general staff of a big Australian daily, may for a year or two, or for a dozen years, have a good share of what the heart desires. He may have a degree of reputation, an amount of ready money, a following of friends; but the money, the friends, the reputation are all liable to vanish at brief notice. The more brilliant the writer is, the more quickly does he exhaust his stock of nervous energy. After the first few years, time, as already remarked, begins to work, not for, but against him; the more capable and the more talked of he is, the more insidiously do adverse influences begin to grow up. As a rule, his is not the temperament which weighs chances, or lays up store for the future: and when the day of his mental ascendancy is past, the management regretfully but firmly shows him the door.
The writer has in mind four representative Australian journalists whose abilities were, or are now, of the very highest. From the ranks of any profession, or from all the professions together, it would be difficult to pick in Australia four men who could boast in the aggregate a greater measure of natural or of practised ability. Each of these four has, time after time, charmed, interested, and amused, hundreds of thousands of perceptive and critical readers. Had they given half the same talent to law or medicine, to science or politics, each of the four would beyond doubt have become rich and famous. But what has happened? One of them, possibly the most brilliant of the brilliant quartette, died early, in some measure a victim to the hospitality and conviviality that his own unique personality and charm of manner invited. Journalists in Australia will not need to be told that the reference is to the late Davison Symmons. The other three are still living. One of them, whose work conferred lustre on the Sydney Morning Herald during the middle ’nineties, was in part the victim of circumstances, in part the prey of his own temperament. The knowledge that he was receiving 30s. or 40s. a column for his efforts, while worse writers in England were getting paid for theirs at the rate of shillings a line, drove him first to misanthropy, and afterwards to other things. The third of the quartette is the writer who is known throughout the continent by the pen-name “Oriel.” He is at the top of the profession; he is one of the few men in Australia who have combined social orthodoxy with newspaper brilliance; he has worked hard, and he has not thrown himself away. But what prospects of a tangible monetary reward are there for the gifted “Oriel,” or for writers like “Oriel,” in comparison with those which always await the cattle dealer, the rag merchant, or the bluffing attorney? The fourth of these typical journalists is he who disguised himself in the columns of the Melbourne Argus and chronicled cricket, football, and other small beer for quite a number of years. He might have continued to do so indefinitely, had not the accident of the South African war given him a reputation and a name.
These are only a few illustrations, but they will suffice. The individual who launches out on the inky way must be prepared to be judged critically on his merits, and to be treated without leniency or favour. He must submit, for a time at any rate, to do the bidding of a man who is also a journalist, and perhaps a less competent one than himself. He must throw his illusions overboard; he must learn to give and take; he must be watchful and ready, prompt to observe, and quick to act; and he must be prepared to go without the richer prizes that can be won in the warehouse, or in the domain of medicine, or at the Bar.
Yet, if the would-be journalist possesses certain qualifications, in addition to literary skill, he may be recommended to join the ranks of the unlisted legion. If he has a saving sense of self-restraint; if he has the faculty for seeing ahead; if he has a definite amount of moral stamina; if he can treat the profession, not as an end, but as a means to an end; if he can live through it and eventually rise above it—if he can do this, the press is his most perfect and his ideal medium. The monetary test is not the final one. The working journalists can at least take to themselves one or two reflections. The ways of the grocer and of the apothecary, of the lawyer and the bill-discounter, are not their ways. Government House may not know them, and the drawing-rooms of Toorak and Potts’ Point may forget their feet. But they have their consolations. They are the rebels and the outlaws, and yet a strange paradox—the entertainers, the instructors, the beacons of the whole reading world.