VI. Thou shalt ever bear in mind that there is no joy but calm, and that the supreme moral excellence is good taste, which may be quite compatible with meanness, servility, and cowardice, but cannot be compatible with the foolish fervor of zeal.
VII. Thou shalt always mention and allude to as many persons, places, and luxuries of high life as possible.
VIII. Thou shalt drag into every article three or four literary citations or allusions, whether relevant or irrelevant, in order to show to the world thy culture.
IX. Thou shalt carefully avoid mention of all ardent reformers and unpopular thinkers, and their doings, save to lightly banter or coldly rebuke them.
X. Thou shalt treat with profound respect and tenderness all the powers that be, and all popular opinions, social, political and religious, however thou mayest contemn them in thy heart; for great Bumble is the sole lord of large circulations, and only through his continued grace can our circulation continue to increase.
It is by assiduously conforming themselves to this most wise and holy decalogue, that the members of the staff of the Daily News have become such rare flowers of sweetness and light; worthy of that serene Professor of Haughty-culture, Matthew Arnold himself, ere he had perpetrated “Literature and Dogma.”
But while, in common with all the other worshippers of the Daily News, I exult in its world-wide and ever-increasing circulation, I am haunted by a horrible fear, which I cannot conceal, but will hint and whisper as gently as possible. When a stone falls into a pond—but no, pond is vulgar—when a stone falls into a still lake, the first small rings are clearly defined, but the circlings as they enlarge grow fainter and fainter, until at length they can no more be perceived. Now, as all the world knows, our beloved and revered Daily News, in its ever-increasing circulation, has hitherto followed precisely the same law; and my dread is that it will continue to do so unto the utmost extremity, becoming ever more and more faint and undefined as the circulation increases, until it shall altogether vanish away. It is getting so refined that I fear it will soon be fined away to nothing; so delicate and dainty, that it is already unfit for this rough world, whose slightest shock may kill it; so ethereal that its complete evaporation seems imminent; so supernal that it must surely soon disappear, absorbed into the Empyrean. May that good God, who we have been told “will think twice before damning a person of quality,” think many, many times before condemning our fashionable world to such an irreparable loss!
[JESUS: AS GOD; AS A MAN]
(1866.)
“These hereditary enemies of the Truth... have even had the heart to degrade this first preacher of the Mountain, the purest hero of Liberty; for, unable to deny that he was earth’s greatest man, they have made of him heaven’s smallest god.”—Heine: Reisébilder.