A few days later, filled with pensive, affectionate, and somewhat irreverent thoughts about the newspaper business, I went uptown to the offices of a very great New York paper—a paper which, as a gatherer of news, though it does not claim the “Greatest” phrase, comes a lot nearer to it than that one in Chicago. A beautiful bronze elevator lifted me gently to the tenth floor, a beautiful bronze attendant took my name politely and asked me to wait until my host emerged from conference. I gazed amazedly into the editorial penetralia, churchly in aspect, with groined ceiling, panelled alcoves, like pews, and lead-veined glass. Very handsome young women came strolling from those shadowy cloisters of opinion. A scholarly-looking young man, with tortoise spectacles, sat under a reredos of books. If not a curate, at least a curator. It all came down upon me with crushing force. How could one chaff this magnificent thing? How could one speak jocularly of The Press? This was all so terribly real, so unmistakably there. I remembered my amazement when I first entered the Curtis Building in Philadelphia. Beside the humble little state house where a nation was founded rises that gigantic cube of Americanization; in more senses than one it is the exact spiritual centre of America. Does it not contain a mosaic glass picture with “over a million pieces”? It has been told, with the jolliest humour, how several of the world’s greatest artists were commissioned, one after another, to create a painting of Plato’s Grove of Academe for that lobby; but they kept on “passing away” before it was done. There is something most quaintly American, I believe, in adoring Plato with a vast painting rather than by listening to what he had to say. At a window on the seventh floor (I think it was the seventh) might have been seen the strong masculine face of the fashion editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal gazing out with a sudden unaccountable nostalgia. The trademarked patroness of the “L. H. J.,” I remembered, was Pallas Athene. Pallas is right, I said to myself, studying that building. This must be a home of literature, the walnut panelling is so fine. This huge bulk, edified from the ribs of a simple, shrewd, courageous, and strangely wistful little man from Maine—surely if the Muse were looking for a comfortable lodging, this is where she would habit?
Sometimes it is with an effort that one must remind oneself, a thing is not necessarily wrong because it is so large.
Well, all that came back to me as I sat waiting in the New York newspaper office. Painful doubts, too, as to whether what I am anxious to say is worth attempt. For it is sure to be misconceived. I am not satirizing anything. These matters are far too serious for mere satire, which is so agreeably easy. No, I am merely attempting to think.
I remembered also how, not long before, it strangely befell me to speak in a large church on a Sunday afternoon. I had not rightly apprehended the situation beforehand: I found that I should have to mount into what the cheerful minister called “the high pulpit.” Sitting behind a thin frondage of palms, and scanning the scene in some frightfulness, I waited my exposure. It was a beautiful church, and there was a large and friendly congregation. In one of the front pews there was even a gentleman with a silk hat. There was music, the thrilling tumult of the organ, a choir, a soprano soloist with a clear and lovely voice. There were prayers, and great words were said. And in the same way that the editorial magnificence of that newspaper office came down upon me from above, so I felt the whole weight and beauty and tradition of Holy Church moulding me and subduing my poor little premeditated ardours. I felt the awful hopelessness of attempting to convey, in those circumstances, my feeble and futile sense of the love and liberty of life. I knew then why Christ preached in the open air. And I knew that the people in those pews, dear friendly people the latchets of whose minds I was not worthy to unloose, desired me to say what was in my heart just as keenly as I desired to say it. Yet it could not, fully, be done. Holy Church was too strong for them as it was for me. I knew then, even in the small, imperfect way I know things, something of the whole history of religions. I knew how the majesty and glamour and noble gravity of institutions and authorities must have lain heavy on the hearts of schismatics and reformers. It is not that those poor brave souls did not love the rote they questioned. But the rote must be kept in its place. I knew then, for the first time, the real dangers of the pulpit. And yet even that polished wood was once alive, growing from earth toward sky.
§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.