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The men of Fleet Street are the best fellows in the world. Roughly, they may be divided into two classes: those who “go steady,” with their eye always on the main chance, with every faculty strained to enable them to “get on” in the world; and those happy-go-lucky people who make money easily and spend it recklessly, so excited by life that they cannot pause to contemplate life, so happy in their labour and in their play that they cannot conceive a day may come when work will be irksome and playing a half-forgotten dream. There are, of course, other divisions into which journalists may be separated. There is, for example, the devoted band of brilliant young men who work for Orage in The New Age—a paper that cannot, I am sure, pay high rates. (What those rates are I do not know, for I could never induce Orage to print a single thing I wrote for him.) Then there are the hangers-on of journalism: people who review books in the time spared from their labours as university professors, struggling barristers, parish priests and so on. Many of these people, led by vanity or some other concealed motive, offer to work without payment.
The men who “go steady” are the editors, the leader-writers, the news editors, the literary editors, etc. For [105] ]the most part they are men who have to keep late hours and clear heads, for important news may reach the office at midnight and instant decisions regarding the policy that the paper has to assume in regard to that news have to be made. A great political speech may be made in Edinburgh; a startling murder trial may close in Liverpool; a famous man may die in Paris; a strike may break out in the Potteries: in short, anything may happen. What attitude is the paper going to take up? What precise shade of opinion is going to be expressed about that political speech? What is to be said about the degree of justice that the workers in the Potteries can claim for their action? These matters have to be decided instantly, for they have to be written about instantly, and perhaps you who read the leading article next morning rarely stop to consider the conditions—the incredibly difficult conditions—under which it has been written. For this kind of work real, genuine ability is required: a very wide and accurate knowledge of affairs, rapidity of thought, a fluent and eloquent pen and a mind so sensitive that it can, without effort, reflect to a nicety the precise policy of the paper upon whose work it is engaged.
There is a story, and I think the story is true, of a new and inexperienced reporter who was given a trial on the staff of a very famous “halfpenny” paper. He was not a success, for he bungled everything that was given him to do, and he had not an idea in his head concerning the invention and manufacture of stunts. So he was tried as a book-reviewer, and again failed miserably. They made a sub-editor of him, and once more he was slow and inaccurate. Said the news editor to the editor-in-chief: “I’m afraid I shall have to get rid of Jones; he’s tried almost everything and failed.” “Oh! has he?” returned the editor-in-chief. “Well, put him on to writing leaders.”
But even the halfpenny Press has, in recent years, come to regard its leader columns as one of the most important [106] ]parts of its papers. Of this kind of work I have had little experience. A position as writer of “leaderettes” was offered me on The Globe, but I was not a success, for I was at the same time writing a great deal of stuff for The Daily Citizen, and, as both papers were equally violent in antagonistic political and social fields, I soon found myself writing solidly and regularly against my own convictions. It is true that a journalist, like a barrister, is generally but a hireling paid to express certain views, but there are few men so intellectually backboneless and ethically flabby that they can, day after day, say both yes and no to the various problems that face them.
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I suppose there are few professions in which one learns more about the seamy side of human nature than one does in journalism. The one appalling vice of eminent men is vanity. Musicians, actors, authors, politicians—even judges and preachers—appear to be so constituted that they cannot live and be happy without publicity. From what source, do you think, originate those chatty little paragraphs concerning famous men and women that you find in every evening newspaper and in many weeklies? They originate from the fountain-head. If the novelist does not himself send the paragraph to the paper, his publisher does; if the actor has not written that “snappy” par., he has given his manager the material for it. At one time I wrote a weekly column of theatrical gossip for a well-known daily, and I can, without exaggeration, say that most of our famous actors and actresses did my work for me. I used scissors and paste, corrected their grammatical errors (and mistakes in spelling!), coloured the whole with my personality—and there the column was ready for the printer! Sometimes I would receive letters from notorious mimes expostulating with me because I had not mentioned their names for a month or two. Others wrote and thanked me for praising them. One [107] ]lady whom I have never seen, either on the stage or off, sent me a silver pencil-case, with a letter containing the material for a very personal sketch. I put the pencil in my pocket and the sketch in the newspaper. Quite recently I was shown an article signed by a famous lady, containing a bogus account of how she had received a strange proposal of marriage. The article had been invented and written by an acquaintance of mine, but the signature was the lady’s.
But more egregious than the vanity of actors is the vanity of fashionable preachers. To them notoriety is the very breath of their nostrils. They have no “agents,” so they are compelled to advertise themselves without camouflage. And they do it shamelessly. I will not mention names, but at least half the fashionable preachers in London, no matter what their denomination, are guilty of constant and most resourceful self-advertisement. A little, a very little, jesuitical reasoning is sufficient to satisfy their consciences that this is done, not out of vanity, but from a desire to bring a still larger congregation to the fount of wisdom itself.... They are the fount of wisdom.
On only two occasions have I approached an author with a request for an interview and been refused. But I have taken care never to approach such men as Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy and a few others who regard their profession with too much respect to lend themselves to a practice which, at its best, is undignified, and which, at its worst, is a method of mean self-glorification.
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