The esteemed newspaper to which I was now attached served several fairly large municipalities which lay so close together as to form in reality one very large town divided against itself. Each wilful cell in this organism was represented by its own special correspondent on the newspaper, and I was to be the correspondent for my native town. I had nothing to do with the news department; menial reporters attended to that. My task was to comment weekly upon the town's affairs to the extent of half a column of paragraphic notes.
"Whatever you do, you must make your pars bright," said the editor, and he repeated the word—"Bright!"
Now I was entirely ignorant of my town's affairs. I had no suspicion of the incessant comedy of municipal life. For two days I traversed our stately thoroughfares in search of material, wondering what, in the names of Horace Greeley, James Gordon Bennett, and Mr. Delane, my first contribution was going to consist of. Law went to the devil, its natural home. Then I happened to think of tram-lines. The tram-lines, under the blessing of Heaven, were badly laid, and constituted a menace to all wheeled traffic save trams; also the steam-engines of the trams were offensive. I wrote sundry paragraphs on that topic, and having thus acquired momentum, I arrived safely at the end of my half column by the aid of one or two minor trifles.
In due course I called at the office to correct proof, and I was put into the hands of the sub-editor. It was one of those quarters-of-an-hour that make life worth living; for the sub-editor appreciated me; nay, he regarded me as something of a journalistic prodigy, and his adjectives as he ran through the proof were extremely agreeable. Presently he came to a sentence in which I had said that such-and-such a proceeding "smacked of red tape."
"'Smacked of red tape'?" He looked up at me doubtfully. "Rather a mixed metaphor, isn't it?"
I didn't in the least know what he meant, but I knew that sentence was my particular pet. "Not at all!" I answered with feeling. "Nothing of the sort! It does smack of red tape—you must admit that."
And the sentence stood. I had awed the sub-editor.
My notes enjoyed a striking success. Their brightness scintillated beyond the brightness of the comments from any other town. People wondered who this caustic, cynical, and witty anonymous wag was. I myself was vastly well satisfied; I read the stuff over and over again; but at the same time I perceived that I could make my next contribution infinitely more brilliant. And I did. I mention this matter, less because it was my first appearance in print, than because it first disclosed to me the relation between literature and life. In writing my stories I had never thought for a moment of life. I had made something, according to a model, not dreaming that fiction was supposed to reflect real life. I had regarded fiction as—fiction, a concoction on the plane of the Grand Canal, or the Zocodover at Toledo. But in this other literature I was obliged to begin with life itself. The wheel of a dog-cart spinning off as it jammed against a projecting bit of tram-line; a cyclist overset: what was there in that? Nothing. Yet I had taken that nothing and transformed it into something—something that seemed important, permanent, literary. I did not comprehend the process, but I saw its result. I do not comprehend it now. The man who could explain it could answer the oft-repeated cry: What is Art?
Soon afterwards I had a delightful illustration of the power of the press. That was the era of coffee-houses, when many excellent persons without too much humour tried all over the country to wean the populace from beer by the superior attractions of coffee and cocoa; possibly they had never tasted beer. Every town had its coffee-house company, limited. Our coffee-house happened to be a pretty bad one, while the coffee-house of the next town was conspicuously good. I said so in print, with my usual display of verbal pyrotechny. The paper had not been published an hour before the aggrieved manager of our coffee-house had seen his directors on the subject. He said I lied, that I was unpatriotic, and that he wanted my head on a charger; or words to that effect. He asked my father, who was a director of both newspaper and coffee-house, whether he could throw any light on the identity of the scurrilous and cowardly scribe, and my father, to his eternal credit, said that he could not. Again I lived vividly and fully. As for our coffee-house, it mended its ways.
The County Council Bill had just become law, and our town enjoyed the diversions of electing its first County Councillor. The rival candidates were a brewer and a prominent lay religionist. My paper supported the latter, and referred to the conflict between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism. It had a magnificent heading across two columns: "Brains versus Beer," and expressed the most serene confidence as to the result. Of course, my weekly notes during the campaign were a shield and a buckler to the religionist, who moreover lived next door.