The capacity to weigh exactly the practical effect of words in despatches, which is strictly akin to journalistic talent, has been an invaluable one to many a general who had to rely on popular support. Napoleon was a master of it, Frederick the Great, being an autocratic sovereign, could afford to despise it. But the best instance of this quality exhibited on a striking occasion in history was the way, in which Bismarck sub-edited the famous Ems telegram, which brought on the Franco-Prussian war. He cynically tells the story in his “Table Talk.” Bismarck had gone to Berlin to discuss the coming war with Moltke and Roon. The conversation was gloomy, because at that moment it appeared that the difficulties with France would be adjusted, which did not suit the views of the war party. While they were sitting at dinner, Bismarck received from the Emperor a telegram describing a firm but not unfriendly reception of Benedetti, the French ambassador, leaving it to his Chancellor to publish the whole or part of his despatch, as he pleased. Bismarck turned to Moltke and asked, if he was assured of success. He was told yes. “‘Well then,’ said I to both, ‘you can now calmly go on with your dinner!’ Thereupon I sat down at the round marble table, standing near the dining one, perused the King’s despatch once more with great attention, took a pencil and erased the sentence referring to Benedetti’s request for another audience, leaving only the head and tail. And now the telegram read somewhat differently. My two guests exclaimed, ‘Splendid! That will do!’ and now we continued our meal with the best of appetites. I gave directions for the telegram in its altered form to be communicated as quickly as possible to the semi-official newsagency (Wolff’s bureau), to all the newspapers and all our embassies abroad.... I never had cause to regret the way in which it was edited.” That night Paris was led to believe that the French ambassador had been insulted and war broke out next day. Could we have a better instance of the thorough comprehension of the weakness of the public addressed and of the way newspapers can be used to manipulate opinion and sway the course of events in great issues?
Such supreme opportunities do not come to ordinary journalists. Under the same circumstances they might possibly behave better. But at all times of public excitement something of this power is in the hands of every editor. It is, as a rule, for him to say the last word in the method of presenting news of a sensational description, either to modify the bitterness of an unpleasant announcement or to add to its provocative character. But the presentation of obvious news is but part of the functions of journalism, its selection is another and the selection also of accompanying details and corroborative and explanatory information. It is this side of journalism, which is entirely modern, which may in fact be said to have been, if not invented, yet for the first time consistently done and supremely well done by the father of English journalism.
Defoe is the master of circumstantial detail. The reader can find no modern instance, which will excel or equal in this respect his True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal. He first employed this art of inducing credibility for his central tale, whether fact or fiction, by so surrounding it with petty and commonplace exactitude, that criticism is diverted and put to sleep and conviction is insensibly compelled. He was also master of an equally modern art, intimately allied to the other, of selecting subjects of topical interest and treating them in a realistic way. In this respect I venture to quote from Professor Minto who shows how some of Defoe’s most celebrated works had an entirely opportunistic origin.
“Defoe was essentially a journalist. He wrote for the day and for the greatest interest of the greatest number of the day. He always had some ship sailing with the passing breeze and laden with a useful cargo for the coast upon which the wind chanced to be blowing. If the Tichborne trial had happened in his time, we should certainly have had from him an exact history of the boyhood and surprising adventures of Thomas Castro, commonly known as Sir Roger, which would have come down to us as a true record, taken, perhaps by the chaplain of Portland prison from the convict’s own lips. It would have had such an air of authenticity and would have been corroborated by such an array of trustworthy witnesses, that nobody in later times could have doubted its truth. Defoe always wrote what a large number of people were in a mood to read. All his writings, with so few exceptions that they may reasonably be supposed to fall within the category, were pieces de circonstance. Whenever any distinguished person died or otherwise engaged popular attention, no matter how distinguished, whether as a politician, a criminal, or a divine, Defoe lost no time in bringing out a biography. It was in such emergencies that he produced his memoirs of Charles XII., Peter the Great, Count Patkul, the Duke of Shrewsbury, Baron de Goertz, the Rev. Daniel Williams, Captain Avery the king of the Pirates, Dominique Cartouche, Rob Roy, Jonathan Wild, Jack Sheppard, Duncan Campbell. When the day had been fixed for the Earl of Oxford’s trial for high treason, Defoe issued the fictitious Minutes of the Secret Negotiations of Mons. Mesnagerat the English Court during his ministry. We owe the Journal of the Plague in 1665 to a visitation, which fell upon France in 1721 and caused much apprehension in England. The germ which in his fertile mind grew into Robinson Crusoe fell from the real adventures of Alexander Selkirk, whose solitary residence of four years on the island of Juan Fernandez was a nine days’ wonder in the reign of Queen Anne. Defoe was too busy with his politics at the moment to turn it to account; it was recalled to him later on, in the year 1719, when the exploits of famous pirates had given a vivid interest to the chances of adventurers in far away islands on the American and African coasts. The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, who was set on shore in Madagascar, traversed the continent of Africa from east to west past the sources of the Nile, and went roving again in the company of the famous Captain Avery, was produced to satisfy the same demand.”
A more questionable venture in semi-journalism was made by Defoe in The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which is still a matter of controversy. It was an outrageous pamphlet, so skilfully couched in language current at the time in the mouths of extreme Highchurchmen that the whole country was deceived, in which it was proposed to put a short term to Nonconformity by hanging every preacher in a conventicle and banishing the congregations. It met with all the paradoxical success that its author could have wished because it was accepted by the dominant Tory party with acclamation that was turned into fury, when the author was discovered to be a Dissenter, who had published it in mockery of the excesses of his opponents. Defoe had to stand in the pillory for three days and was fined and imprisoned.
It may be questioned whether such a prank can be considered to be irony, when the key to the inverted point is not contained in the work itself but in some outside circumstance. True irony is an appeal in one form of words to two grades of intelligence, one of which accepts the literal and the other the concealed meaning. A much more indisputable instance of journalistic irony in our times was Henri Rochefort’s eulogy of Napoleon II., equally effective with Defoe’s as a practical weapon and as a literary masterpiece of concealed invective for ever to be unexcelled. The validity of this irony consisted in facts that were known to all his readers, while the statement of them was inverted for reasons not of caprice nor cleverness but for a practical purpose for which there was every excuse. It is so short that the gist of it is worth quoting. It was in the second number of the notorious Lanterne, the first issue of which had been sold to the extent of 125,000 copies, that Rochefort complained that his political attitude had never been understood and that he was in fact an out and out Bonapartist. “Nevertheless,” he added, “I may be allowed to choose my own hero in the dynasty. Amongst the legitimists some prefer Louis XVIII., others Louis XVI., others on the contrary place all their sympathy on the head of Charles X. As a Bonapartist, I prefer Napoleon II.; I have a right to do so. In my mind he represents the ideal of a sovereign. No one will deny that he has occupied the throne, because his successor calls himself Napoleon III. What a reign, my friends, what a reign! Not a tax; no useless wars, with the ravages they involve; none of those distant expeditions in which six hundred millions are spent to recover fifteen francs; no devouring civil lists; no ministers accumulating five or six posts at a hundred thousand francs each; that is the monarchy, as I understand it. Oh yes! Napoleon II., I love and admire you without reserve.... Who then will dare maintain that I am not a sincere Bonapartist?” Within a few weeks the Lanterne was suppressed and Rochefort was flying over the Belgian frontier. But his articles had prepared the Commune and eventually made France a Republic.
Returning to England it is impossible, in mentioning Defoe, to refrain from opposing to him, not only politically but in a journalistic sense, his far more brilliant Tory opponents, Swift and Bolingbroke. It is true that their weapons were more effective at the time, because they were more aristocratic, but for that reason they are outside the stream of progress. Journalism is necessarily democratic. Bolingbroke with his Dissertation on Parties and the Patriot King anticipated Disraeli’s novels and the Saturday Review. Swift in his Drapier’s Letters made one counter-move to the Whig government of his time, which showed that, if he had sufficiently valued the weapon of an ephemeral pen, there is no one living or dead, who could have beaten him either in literary style or in practical effectiveness. After Swift comes Junius, with his newly-discovered advertisement of anonymity, a long way behind, a kind of ostentatious but safely sheltered temerity colouring his natural tendency to seclusion and his disinclination to take the responsibility of parrying counter-attacks.
Since the time of Junius there has been little literary matter in the press equally brilliant as well as ferocious. The battles of journalistic independence were fought more with the special message and the telegram than with the pen. Cobbett, Joseph Cowen and W. T. Stead may be held to be the best known names among what may be termed the aggressive school. Southey, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, R. H. Hutton, Meredith Townsend, W. T. Arnold and Andrew Lang may be quoted as the best representatives of the academic school. George Borrow, Lawrence Oliphant, W. E. Henley and G. W. Steevens may better be described as free lances owing obedience to no tradition. If we may single out one typical journalist, little known in London, who may stand forward as the representative writer of the century in England, just as Alexander Russel was beyond the Tweed, I should name Dr. Dunckley, at one time editor of the Manchester Examiner, who wrote for the daily press articles which came to take their place as some of the constitutional documents of this country. Writing under the name of “Verax” in a series of articles for his own paper, afterwards republished, he attracted widespread attention and was attacked with some bitterness in the Quarterly Review. Dunckley was at pains to warn the country against a threatened constitutional experiment similar to the unfortunate mistake of George III., whereby the direct influence of the Crown was to be reasserted for the benefit of one party in the State. He defended himself against the Quarterly with dignity and effect. “When I began writing I never thought of challenging the verdict of so wide an audience. In the discharge of a semi-imposed and pleasant duty I merely wrote for my accustomed readers in these northern districts. I never dreamed that the country mouse would visit town. The reviewer says, I appear to pose as a tame Junius! If I had thought of posing at all, it would have been as Junius rampant. As a matter of posing one would have been just as easy as the other and of the two I should have preferred the renowned original. But the reviewer does me too much honour. I thought no more of Junius than of Tancred or Mungo Park.”
It is impossible to close this brief review of journalism without some reflections on that branch of it, which consists not in writing but in controlling and directing the writing of others. There is more than a distinction between the two functions, there is to some extent an opposition. Sheer brilliancy with the pen is not the best quality for an editor. If he has it, he must be sparing in its use; otherwise he will write every one else of considerable ability off his own paper and find himself, like Defoe, having to do alone and unaided everything of any special importance. That is not a possible position for any one to take up in a daily newspaper in modern times. A race of editors has thus grown up, who write hardly at all themselves and pass their lives as the perpetual directors and critics of others. In this respect our typical example is undoubtedly Delane, of whom we have fortunately much published information.
By way of understanding the great step taken by the new tradition of an editor’s calling established by Delane we may recall Leigh Hunt’s confessions or views of his editorial work. The Hunts, father and son, when running the (London) Examiner, long since dead, made it a rule to isolate themselves from the world, to refuse dinner invitations and all personal intercourse with party leaders. They remained at home or at the office polishing paragraphs and evolving verses. “I galloped,” said Leigh Hunt “through my editorial duties, took a world of superfluous pains in the writing, sat up very late at night and was a very trying person to compositors and newsmen.” Delane on the other hand hardly ever took pen in hand, dined out every night in the season and went back to his house in Serjeant’s Inn, about 5 a.m. only after he had seen the final proofs of everything which he considered important. It is said that in his thirty-seven years of editing Delane saw more sun-rises than any man in London.