Portraits of the Nineties

by E. T. Raymond

The first who made a burst into that silent sea was Mr. T. P. O’Connor with The Star; Mr. W. T. Stead’s experiments with the Pall Mall Gazette were not of long duration, and the enterprise of The Echo, one of the earliest pioneers of popular journalism, was not specially distinctive. The Star may be taken as typical of the newer journalistic school of the early Nineties. In those days it was a strange blend of seriousness and flippancy. To the rather stodgy decorum of the old-established papers it opposed a curiously insincere rowdyism. I say “insincere,” but perhaps the better adjective would be “forced.” The Star was really not at all vulgar. On its literary side it stood for the very opposite of vulgarity; the true vulgarity was on the side of the staid and respectable critics. And in politics it was mainly for all that was honest and of good report; one might smile at the enthusiasms of a purely Cockney print for “Home to the village and back to the land,” but one could not accuse it of an unworthy or trivial outlook. But it tried with extraordinary strenuousness to give the impression of vulgarity. In dealing with the gravest matters it affected a riot of titular fantasy tending to scandalise the steady-going. On the whole, it clung to the narrow range of subjects affected by the older papers, but it dished up the meetings and despatches piping hot and with a sauce piquante of “bright” headline. The news of the “Wife Murder at Stepney” might be substantially the same as in the ordinary paper, but The Star sought to induce cheerfulness by heading the paragraph “Bullets for Mother.” A criminal who cut his throat while trying to escape from the police was described as “A Scarlet Runner.” But this jocularity was often too abstruse to be really popular. The Star was staffed chiefly by clever and rebellious young men, most of whom have since done well for themselves and perhaps for others, and they were incorrigible in inferring, not only much mental alertness in their readers, but a considerable acquaintance with the dead languages and the French and English classics. Thus, if there happened to be a strike of bakers settled by compromise, the glad news was pretty sure to be announced under the headline “Dough ut des,” which might have delighted a frivolous man of education, but could hardly have failed to leave the ordinary proletarian (supposed to be the main support of the paper) in a state of angry mystification. Suppose, also, that some gorgeous Maharajah happened to come over to one of the recurrent royal pageants, dropping diamonds wherever he went—“Lo! The Rich Indian,” the predestined headline, might tickle an idle man who remembered the original quotation and recalled the rest of the couplet. But to the brewer’s drayman it would seem a mere gratuitous silliness. It was this disastrous cleverness, perhaps more than anything else, which prevented the ultimate victory resting with the newer journalism, and left the way open to the newest school.

The newer journalism, however, set many of the fashions that still prevail to-day. It broke up the old anonymity of the Press. Few people would have been able at that time to say who edited The Times, The Standard, or The Morning Post, who wrote those charming things on golf and Shakespeare and the musical glasses, or who was responsible for exalting “The Bells” or decrying “Ghosts.” But everybody knew that Mr. T. P. O’Connor started The Star, that Mr. Bernard Shaw “did” the music for it, that Mr. A. B. Walkley “did” the drama, and that Mr. Ernest Parke, after a very short time, inherited Mr. O’Connor’s mantle. The name of Mr. Parke at once suggests what was perhaps the feature which most strongly differentiated the journalism of the early Nineties, new or old, from that which was seen clearly to be most successful at the end of the decade. I mean its unashamed preaching, its conviction that it had a mission, and its content to risk being a bore if only the mission could succeed. Ernest Parke was—I speak of him in the past tense, though he happily remains in the present, because, while he is still hale and vigorous, his massive and once golden head is no longer a common object of the Fleet Street landscape—a journalist of a type now hardly existent. To begin with, he was an extraordinary judge of ability of any kind, and managed to surround himself, at singularly low cost for the most part to his principals, with young men who have since either earned distinction in letters or have gone to form the cadres of all the chief newspaper staffs of London. In the second place he contrived to maintain all the realities of the sternest discipline with all the forms of anarchy. The shyest new arrival soon fell into the habit of calling him by his surname, and making jokes (not excluding practical jokes) at his expense. Yet the terror of being found out by him in any slackness or stupidity lay on the oldest inhabitant as much as on the rawest recruit. He contrived to give the journalistic calling all the zest of a joke with all the earnestness of a religious vocation. His interests were singularly wide. Himself very far removed from the scholarly, he had the keenest appreciation of all the newest things in literature and the arts, and there was no better rough judge of good, sound writing. On the other hand, he had the capacity of feeling deeply on all sorts of odd things to which the bookish man is commonly indifferent. He could work himself up—or perhaps he did not need working up—into a state of frenzy over the “guzzling” and junketing propensities of various public or semi-public bodies in the City of London. He waged deadly war against all ill-treatment of animals. A workhouse “scandal” would move him to extraordinary indignation. A police court sentence which appealed to him as unjust or cruel would rouse all the generous Quixote as well as all the original savage in him. But he did not, by any means, think parochially—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, if he thought parochially, he made the whole world his parish. Something happening in Russia would excite him no less, in given circumstances, than something happening in Mile End. He kept his eye as vigilantly on the iniquity of the Turk as on the shiftiness of a minor Minister or the advertisements of a bucket-shop fraud. The memory of his long duel with the Rockefellers over “low-flash oil” still lingers with the older inhabitants of Fleet Street. I happened to be out of England for some years while this crusade was proceeding. My last uncloudy impression of the Old Country was a placard at Southampton with some such words as “Nearing Victory over Low-Flash,” and my first clear impression on my return was another placard at Tilbury (a rather depressed-looking and washed-out placard) bearing the legend “Another Low-Flash Horror—How long, Oh Lord, how long?”—or words to that effect.

A vague and even rather bewildered kindness of heart, a noble indignation against any sort of oppression, corruption, or insolence, a general sympathy with the under-dog anywhere and everywhere—these Ernest Parke had in common with a number of men who, lacking the essential sanity which was at the bottom of his very English temperament, drifted into mere faddism, humanitarian eccentricity, and anti-nationalism: the sort of men who, to quote Mr. Chesterton, would first ask us to eat nothing but vegetables, then tell us that it was wicked to consume even grass, and finally ask, in a flush of noble sentiment, “Why should salt suffer?” But Mr. Parke may well serve as the representative of a whole class of editors, flourishing in the Nineties, who were not afraid to be bores, and (by some miracle) succeeded in escaping the usual fate of the bore. In ordinary life the man who insists on expounding his view of a certain set of questions is shunned like the plague: business interest, blood relationship, deep-seated esteem suffice not to win him toleration. A boring newspaper is easier to avoid than a boring individual; the remedy is simply not to buy it. The only conclusion, therefore, is either that the public of that day enjoyed “damned iteration,” or that the “damned iteration” was done with great art. The contrast between the preaching journalism of the Nineties and the preaching journalism of to-day cannot be better exemplified than by the history of two agitations. In the Nineties there was an agitation against the Turk. The British public was called on to express its feeling concerning a great massacre of Armenians. It was invited to condemn “the dripping sword of Abdul the Damned.” Now the Armenians, though an ill-used, were a very far-away people; not one out of a thousand Englishmen had ever seen an Armenian, or even framed any clear picture of the nature or geographical disposition of an Armenian. Yet, after some weeks of newspaper agitation, the whole country was ringing with indignation against the Sultan, and Lord Rosebery’s retirement was hastened by the incompatibility between his views on these massacres and those of the great majority of the Liberal Party.

Contrast this agitation with that concerning recent Irish administration. Ireland lies a few hours from England, and vast numbers of Englishmen have friends among the Irish. The Irish question is not a remote affair of foreign politics, but is most intimately connected with all our great interests, as well as all our party feuds and intrigues. Whatever be the exact truth about the situation, it is certain that the state of Ireland has long been worse than it has ever been within living memory, and it is equally certain that for a hundred years no such allegations have been made against a British Government in regard to Ireland as the allegations that are made to-day. But the newspapers which have the clearest political interest in agitation do not agitate. Apparently they are not without the wish to agitate, for they occasionally publish strongly-worded articles. What they have lost is less the spirit than the knack of agitation. That knack consists in merciless and unremitting repetition, in what the ordinary man calls “rubbing it in.” The facts have to be made clear, not once or twice, but seventy times seven. The public has to be given no chance of forgetting and no excuse for misunderstanding. The paper that would succeed in agitation must, in short, be prepared to make itself a very serious bore. It must be prepared to lose something in order to gain something. It must be ready to sacrifice any reputation it may have with office boys and millinery hands, who are not and cannot be made interested in politics. It must even reconcile itself to the loss of a nice balance of headlines on its main news page. Now the modern editor is far too much of an artist to make these sacrifices. He is prepared to give Ireland some sort of show if Ireland happens to be much in the picture. But even then the eternal test match and the never-remitting golf championship cannot be banished to the sporting page, and prominence simply must be found for the pathetic little story about the “Thousand Million Dollar Baby,” while the demands of local interest compel due attention to “Spooks in a Norfolk Rectory,” and “Cat at an Eastbourne Whist Drive.” So Ireland’s tale of woe flows through the paper like an Australian river. It is easily traceable to the extent of a column; with some little difficulty one finds an inch and a half of it under “Rembrandt for Ninepence” two columns away; the mystery thickens when, referred to “continuation on page seven,” one finds nothing there but a company meeting and “Are we Immodest?” (continued from page eight); but finally the residue of the Irish revelations is, by a lucky chance, run to ground on the City page between “Butter Quiet” and “Copper Uneasy.” This is what happens when Ireland is uppermost. At other times just nothing happens. When Ireland does not deserve an important headline Ireland does not get one, and the perfunctory paragraph is relegated to some back page, where a provincial tennis match crowds it out.

Now the editor of the Nineties had none of this excessive respect for the momentary and this strange disregard for continuity. Nor was he in the smallest degree concerned about the symmetry of his news page. His main idea was to make an impression, and an impression he certainly made. The truth is that he felt himself less an artist in newspaper technique than a prophet; often a Nonconformist by extraction, sometimes a secularist of that Victorian type which was really more religious than the orthodox, he was consumed with the idea that it was his business to put the world right, and if he thought the world could be put a little more right by letting an article run to five good columns, he could not bring himself to hack it into two poor columns. He would rather leave out something about a dog swallowing a will.

Curiously enough, the only newspapers which have not lost the knack of propaganda are those which, in their origin, represented the revulsion against propagandist journalism, and set out to supply simply “what the public wants.” What I have called the newest journalism of the Nineties (that is, the most solidly established journalism of to-day) has none of the moral fervour of the Parkes and Steads. But it understands as well as they did the importance of “rubbing it in”; and modern history might well have run a far different course had such mastery of method been associated with a more stable political philosophy.

This newest journalism is the child of two men—Alfred, Viscount Northcliffe, and Mr. Kennedy Jones, M.P. The soul of it belongs to the one, the body of it was moulded by the other. There were immediate imitators, careful but uninspired, like Sir Arthur Pearson, and in the long run all sorts of old papers abjectly copied the methods which had brought them discomfiture. Other magnates, endowed with more character, adopted the spirit while imparting to their productions a rather more masculine note. But on the whole the great revolution in the Press since the Nineties took its form from the personality of these two men. The journalism represented by The Star was half a joke and half a crusade, with a commercial side to it. It was meant to pay, and no doubt did pay up to a point; but its main motive was hardly a purely commercial motive. The newest journalism, on the other hand, was frankly businesslike: it set out to industrialise Bohemia, and succeeded. It was as businesslike as a tea-shop: indeed, its progress was very like that of the great tea-shop concerns. The tea-shops started with the lightest of refreshments; the newest journalism started with the lightest of reading. The tea-shop concerns went on extending and experimentalising until they embraced every branch of the trade; they bought up old concerns and started new ones; but to every acquisition and departure they imparted something of their own original character. It was the same with the newest journalism. Starting on crackers and sherbert, it worked its way to fifteen-course dinners and vintage wines. But it has retained throughout a certain singularity; and that singularity is the complete standardisation of things of the spirit. The newer journalism carelessly made a joke, sniggered over it, and then forgot all about it. The very new journalism, on the contrary, treated a joke as a very serious thing, in which it was right—a joke is a very serious thing. It decided against certain classes of jokes. There must not be jokes about Nonconformists: many advertising agents are Nonconformists. There must not be jokes about Jews: many Jews are wealthy and prone to advertising; was not the first advertisement on record that of a Frankfort Jew? Jokes against “aliens” are, of course, permissible. On the whole, there must not be jokes about the Church of England, though that is a less serious matter. There must not be “unpleasant” jokes; otherwise the babies’ foods and the condensed milks will not come into the advertising columns. Finally, by a process of exhaustion, the right kinds of jokes are reached, and by due experiment (prize competitions and the like) conducted with all the seriousness of a Home Office analysis, it is found which particular kind of joke brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number. This discovery made, the joke is made the subject of mass production, and vast stocks are poured out until the bookstall agents recommend a change. It is much the same with news; the experts can tell within five hundred the circulation effect of an ordinary murder, a “mystery,” a “poison mystery,” a “poison mystery” with a “money motive,” a “poison mystery” with a “love motive,” a divorce case with two eminent co-respondents and no particular point, and a divorce case with one quite undistinguished co-respondent and a strong “heart interest.” The business mind only begins to haver when it reaches the rarefied atmosphere of high politics. It inclines to the view that, war apart, foreign news is only useful to give a certain distinction to a paper, but that home politics may occasionally furnish the raw material for a really effective “stunt.”

The victory of the newest journalism over the old and the rather new is only part of the general victory of standardisation and mass production over the older and more individual enterprise. Everybody knows all about what it has given the public—how it has placed every village much on a news equality with the great towns, how it has given vastly increased and diversified news services, how it has spread the habit of reading (if not of thinking) over great classes which never glanced at a book or a newspaper. It is not my business to discuss all this, which belongs to the new century. More to the present purpose is to indicate what it has destroyed, but what was still living and vigorous in the Nineties.

In the first place, it has destroyed that singular thing called editorial responsibility, to which I alluded above. In the second, it has given the newspaper the flickering unsteadiness of a cinema film, instead of the fixity appropriate to the printed page; the paper amuses and interests more, but instructs and leads far less. In the third, it has undoubtedly debased the taste for really good and especially for really thoughtful writing. But, above all, it has tended to render obsolete the prophet in print, the man who feels a vocation to right wrongs, to preach crusades, or to insist, in season and out, on the importance of principle. Such men are now scarcely found in modern daily journalism, and if they were never so numerous they would find difficulty in getting a hearing. They linger, with increasing difficulty, on the weekly papers; they seem doomed to eventual extinction; but when they go the world will be the poorer for their loss. In the Nineties a notable specimen of this kind of man, notable but perhaps scarcely brilliant, was Sir Thomas Wemyss Reid, the first conductor of The Speaker, which attempted to be to Gladstonian Liberalism what The Spectator was to Unionism. His warm friend, Lord Rosebery, has paid him as noble a tribute as journalist ever earned from man of affairs. “His ideal of friendship,” says Lord Rosebery, “was singularly lofty and generous. He was the devoted and chivalrous champion of those he loved; he took up their cause as his own, and much more than his own; he was the friend of their friends, and the enemy of their enemies. No man ever set a higher value on this high connection, which, after all, whether brought about by kinship, or sympathy, or association, or gratitude, or stress, is, under Heaven, the sweetest solace of our poor humanity; and so it coloured and guided the life of Wemyss Reid. His chief works were all monuments to that faith; it inspired him in tasks which he knew would be irksome, and which could scarcely be successful, or which at least could ill satisfy his own standard. This is a severe test for a man of letters, but he met it without fail.” It was perhaps this sympathy, as well as his discrimination, which enabled Reid to gather round him so brilliant a group of contributors; among them were Mr. John (now Lord) Morley, Mr. J. A. Spender (the present editor of the Westminster Gazette), Mr. Herbert Paul, Mr. James (now Lord) Bryce, Sir Alfred Lyall, Mr. Augustine Birrell, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Mr. James Payn, Mr. Henry James, Mr. (now Sir) J. M. Barrie, and Mr. A. B. Walkley.

Wemyss Reid detested above all things what was then called the new but what I have called the newer journalism; he would have hated still more the newest journalism; and he gave John Morley advice (which was at the time rather resented) to keep strict control over the activities of W. T. Stead. He did not believe in government by newspaper, and Stead’s essay in connection with the mission of General Gordon more than ever convinced him that the proper function of the Press was rather to check Ministers than to dictate their policy. His Speaker was ultimately not a success, and if he is noted here it is chiefly because the journalistic ideas for which he stood, as well as his politics, are still represented by one of the most brilliant of his younger colleagues, Mr. J. A. Spender, who now directs the Westminster Gazette, and there exemplifies his old chief’s horror of sensationalism and love of balance.