§2
The world of newspapers and the life of newspaper men are for the most part vulgar, and therefore delightful. I mean vulgar in its exact sense: it is a word neither of praise nor blame, both of which are foreign to philosophy. O thrilling, delicious, childish world! The other day, from a green glade in the country, I telephoned to a newspaper office. “City room, please,” I said. The connection was made, and as the receiver was taken down, I could hear that old adorable hum, the quick patter of typewriters, voices on the copy desk tersely discussing the ingenious minutiæ of the job. No man who has dabbled, ever so amateurishly, in that spirited child’s-play outgrows its irrational and cursèd charm. Over miles of telephone wire that drugging hum came back to my ear, that furious and bewildering pulse of excitement which seems so frantically important and really means so little. O world so happy, so amusing, so generously emotional, so exempt from the penalty of thought! World that deals with quaintly codified and abstracted notions of life! How idle to ask whether newspapers tell the truth! With truth they have little concern. Their trade is in facts; like all prosperous tradesmen they are reasonably conscientious. To belittle newspapers for not telling the truth is as silly as to regard them as training-ground for literature. Literature and journalism rarely overlap.
For the newspaper world, that vast, brightly coloured, contentious, and phantasmagoric picture of life that it evolves for its readers, is mostly a spurious world evolved for hurried and ignorant people. It is a world so happily out of touch with the world of philosophy that when, on rare occasions, the newspapers get wind of the things that philosophers habitually and calmly discuss, it causes a terrible to-do in the headlines. The world of newspaper thinking is almost the last resort of the truly childish in heart. With princely accuracy is it called “the newspaper game.” Children are not friendly to philosophy, nor hostile. They are simply not aware it exists.
And the game of newspapers, which I greatly love, being at heart no philosopher, is enormously important. The prevailing temperament of its players is worth careful study. The mere existence of newspapers is a proof of the religious instinct among men, that passionate interest in one another which implies that we are all gossips together. Gossips are people who have only one relative in common, but that relative the highest possible; namely, God. There is truly some strange analogy between church and press. Whether it is the successful newspaper’s taste for making itself clerical in architecture, or the successful church’s appetite for front-page controversy; whether it is that they both make the cruellest and deadliest of enemies if annoyed; whether it is that the newspaper carries on the medieval church’s lust of persecution; or that they both mobilize for war sooner than any one else; or that both are vehicles of great realities, but vehicles so gorgeously mechanized and ritualed that the passenger has almost been forgotten—whatever the basis of the analogy may be, I am not sure; but I feel it to be there.
Journalism, like every skilled métier, tends to become a sort of priesthood. All such professional groups admit with cynical or humorous readiness, inside the circle, truths that it is unmannerly to gossip abroad. But now and then some happy member feels he has absorbed enough hokum to last him for a reasonable lifetime. He has enjoyed, perhaps even profited by, the sharp childishness of that way of life. He escapes for a time, with aspiration to think it over. He wearies of the tragic ingenuity of men at concealing their real thoughts. There are no longer any codes of manners to be considered, any possibly tender readers to be sheltered, any powerful patrons to be placated. Of course genuinely detached thinking, even if it were possible, is likely to be discouraged; for detachment is always assumed to be malignant. But, anyhow, let’s be at least like so many houses in the suburbs, semi-detached.
Yes, there is a sort of spring fever of the soul, a seizure when, in moments of golden tranquil intuition, we see Lucretius’s “coasts of light.” We would hope to savour, as he bids us, not merely the honey that is greased round the rim of the cup—the honey of our daily amusement and distraction—but even the chill purging wormwood of the draft. Suddenly the quotidian employ, the haggling scruples of detail, seem strangely insignificant. Languor and lassitude and uneasy hankering pervade the spirit—an intimation of unearthliness. There is passion to go seeking “those things that are requisite and necessary.” In Walt’s noble phrase, “to sign for soul and body.” Then, unashamed of the hunger and trouble of human spirits, it seems irrelevant either to chaff or to praise the dear farce of life. One dreams of uttering only some small granule of broken truth, something more than the jocund trickery of the press.
Every philosopher is a humorist who has been squeezed. And the newspaper man, odd as this may sound, is not the least appropriate student to pursue the wingy mysteries in divinity. For he is kinspirit of the parson in this, that church and press are perhaps the two professions that have most frankly regarded themselves as separate estates, above and apart from the common man. The priest esteems himself the vicar of God. The pressman appoints himself vicar of News. The priest transmits to the congregation as much of God’s doings as he thinks will be not too embarrassing for them to hear. And the newspaper man lays bare that portion of the event which he considers the public will be most anxious to pay for. Both are anthologists.
For some time I had been saving clippings of newspaper stories about recent religious controversy. I meant to sit down some evening and read them through, patiently, to see how much humane sense I could winnow. But I found I could not force my eyes through them. For the sake of record, to notify the quaintness of mankind, I copied down a few of the headlines. “Christ Held Divine or Illegitimate: Dr. Pettingill Makes Baptists Gasp by Strong Defense of Virgin Birth.” (New York World.) Dr. Guthrie Finds Yule All Pagan: St. Mark’s Rector Says Gift Custom Was Roman, Mistletoe Celtic and Tree Teutonic. (New York Times.) Modernism Found Here Mid Rituals, Dogma Mid Glare. (New York Evening Post.) Dr. Guthrie Scents Clashes to Come. (New York Times.) And so on. I threw the mass of clippings into the fire.
And yet throughout those naïve burblings the reader felt a strange mixture of exhilaration and disgust. For the newspapers, with their unerring instinct, realize that men are keenly and desperately interested in these matters. Hidden inside that mysterious carcass, your neighbour, is the universal cry, “I want to be happy!” And with all their agile and cautious skill at hiding what they really think, men wildly crave those liberating sorceries (liquor and love and laughter, perhaps even literature, too) that roll away the stone from the door of the heart.
Yet perhaps no man in his senses talks about religion except for the pleasure of the talk, which is a sufficient human excuse. For the less we talk about religion, probably, the nearer we come to the heart of it. By religion we mean, I suppose, our ligatures with an unseen world—a world not realized, as Wordsworth says in those “Intimations” that are a whole prayer-book in themselves. There are “high instincts,” he tells us, before which we tremble “like a guilty thing surprised.” Our guilt, surely, is that we know ourselves to have been so wearily and perversely disloyal to that unseen world of beauty and ecstasy; and our surprise, that when we escape into the honest solitudes of the mind we find it waiting for us. There is a great saying to the effect that wherever two or three are gathered together, I shall be among you. But, alas! it is even more true perhaps (one must not forget a plenty of perhapses) that wherever two or three are gathered together, there I am not. Human meeting introduces awkwardly human difficulties and embarrassments. It introduces, for instance, vanity and humility, both awkward encumbrances to truth. Is there a man who does not know, sorrowfully, that he is much “better company” when he is alone? As old Doctor Donne found in the absence of his mistress, there is a “close corner of the brain” where the purest and loveliest embraces are possible. Of all mistresses, the fairest and the farthest away is Truth. God is known, if at all, in solitude.