Tom Brown, the Supreme Thinker.
These six gentlemen being all blessed with youth, health and incompetence, resolved to capture the town. Their tactics were very simple, though their first operations were hampered by their ignorance of one another's. Thus, it was some time before it was discovered that Andrew Mackay, who had been deployed to seize the Saturday Slasher, had no real acquaintance with the editor's fencing-master, while Dick Jones, who had undertaken to bombard the Acadæum, had started under the impression that the eminent critic to whom he had dedicated his poems (by permission) was still connected with the staff. But these difficulties were eliminated as soon as the Society got into working order. Everything comes to him who will not wait, and almost before they had time to wink our six gentlemen had secured the makings of an Influence. Each had loyally done his best for himself and the rest, and the first spoils of the campaign, as announced amid applause by the Secretary at the monthly dinner, were
Two Morning Papers,
Two Evening Papers,
Two Weekly Papers.
They were not the most influential, nor even the best circulated, still it was not a bad beginning, though of course only a nucleus. By putting out tentacles in every direction, by undertaking to write even on subjects with which they were acquainted, they gradually secured a more or less tenacious connection with the majority of the better journals and magazines. On taking stock they found that the account stood thus:
Three Morning Papers,
Four Evening Papers,
Eleven Weekly Papers,
Thirteen London Letters,
Seven Dramatic Columns,
Six Monthly Magazines,
Thirteen Influences on Advertisements,
Nine Friendships with Eminent Editors,
Seventeen ditto with Eminent Sub-editors,
Six ditto with Lady Journalists,
Fifty-three Loans (at two-and-six each) to Pressmen,
One hundred and nine Mentions of Editor's Womenkind at Fashionable Receptions.
It showed what could be achieved by six men, working together shoulder to shoulder for the highest aims in a spirit of mutual good-will and brotherhood. They were undoubtedly greatly helped by having all been to Oxford or Cambridge, but still much was the legitimate result of their own manœuvres.
By the time the secret campaign had reached this stage, many well-meaning, unsuspecting men, not included in the above inventory, had been pressed into the service of the Society, with the members of which they were connected by the thousand and one ties which spring up naturally in the intercourse of the world, so that there was hardly any journal in the three kingdoms on which the Society could not, by some hook or the other, fasten a paragraph, if we except such publications as the Newgate Calendar and Lloyds' Shipping List, which record history rather than make it.
Indeed, the success of the Society in this department was such as to suggest the advisability of having themselves formally incorporated under the Companies' Acts for the manufacture and distribution of paragraphs, for which they had unequalled facilities, and had obtained valuable concessions, and it was only the publicity required by law which debarred them from enlarging their home trade to a profitable industry for the benefit of non-members. For, by the peculiar nature of the machinery, it could only be worked if people were unaware of its existence. They resolved, however, that when they had made their pile, they would start the newspaper of the future, which any philosopher with an eye to the trend of things can see will be a journal written by advertisers for gentlemen, and will contain nothing calculated to bring a blush to the cheek of the young person except cosmetics.
Contemporaneously with the execution of one side of the Plan of Campaign, the Society was working the supplementary side. Day and night, week-days and Sundays, in season and out, these six gentlemen praised themselves and one another, or got themselves and one another praised by non-members. There are many ways in which you can praise an author, from blame downwards. There is the puff categorical and the puff allusive, the lie direct and the eulogy insinuative, the downright abuse and the subtle innuendo, the exaltation of your man or the depression of his rival. The attacking method of log-rolling must not be confounded with depreciation. In their outside campaign, the members used every variety of puff, but depreciation was strictly reserved for their private gatherings. For this was the wisdom of the Club, and herein lay its immense superiority over every other log-rolling club, that whereas in those childish cliques every man is expected to admire every other, or to say so, in the Mutual Depreciation Society the obligation was all the other way. Every man was bound by the rules to sneer at the work of his fellow-members and, if he should happen to admire any of it, at least to have the grace to keep his feelings to himself. In practice, however, the latter contingency never arose, and each was able honestly to express all he thought, for it is impossible for men to work together for a common object without discovering that they do not deserve to get it. Needless to point out how this sagacious provision strengthened them in their campaign, for not having to keep up the tension of mutual admiration, and being able to relax and breathe (and express themselves) freely at their monthly symposia, as well as to slang one another in the street, they were able to write one another up with a clear conscience. It is well to found on human nature. Every other basis proves shifting sand. The success of the Mutual Depreciation Society justified their belief in human nature.
Not only did they depreciate one another, but they made reparation to the non-members they were always trying to write down during business hours, by eulogizing them in the most generous manner in those blessed hours of leisure when knife answers fork and soul speaks to soul. At such times even popular authors were allowed to have a little merit.