Practical Agitation

by John Jay Chapman

It must be that thousands of good intellects perish annually. The men do not die, but their powers wither, or rather never mature. Art, like everything else, represents an escape, a survival. In any age that lacks it, or is weak in it, we may look about for the enginery by which it is crushed. In looking into a past age we are put to inference and conjecture. We see the mark of fetters upon the Byzantine soul, and we begin dredging the dark waters of history for a metaphysical cause. We cannot walk into a Byzantine shop and watch the apprentice at work. But in our own time we can see the whole process in action. We can study our modern Inquisitions at leisure, and note every mark that is made upon a soul that is passing through them.

It does not involve any indignity to the pretensions of literature if we walk into that great bazaar, modern journalism, and see what is going on there behind the counters. Here is a factory of popular art. It is not the whole of letters; but it has an influence on the whole of letters. The press fills the consciousness of the people. A modern community breathes through its press. Journalism, to be sure, is a region of letters, where all the factors for truth are at a special and peculiar discount. Its attention is given to near and ugly things, to mean quarrels, business interests, and special ends. Every country shows up badly here. The hypocrisy of the press is the worst thing in England. It is the worst exhibition of England’s worst fault. The press of France gives you France at her weakest. The press of America gives you America at her cheapest. Perhaps the study of journalism in any country would illustrate the peculiar vices of that country; and it is fair to remember this in examining our own press. But examine it we must, for it is important.

The subject includes more than the daily newspapers. Those ephemeral sheets that flutter from the table into the waste-paper basket, which are something more than mere newspapers and less than magazines, and the magazines themselves, which are more than budgets of gossip and less than books, make up a perpetual rain of paper and ink. Thousands of people are engaged in writing them, and millions in reading them. This whole species of literature is typical of the age; let us see how it is conducted.

A journal is a meeting-place between the forces of intellect and of commerce. The men who become editors always bear some relation to the intellectual interests of the country. They make money, but they make it by understanding the minds of people who are not taking money, but thought, from the exchanges that the editors set up. A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus, a new ratio between commerce and intellect. Even trade journals have columns devoted to general information and jokes. The one thing a journal must have in order to be a journal is circulation. It must be carried into people’s houses, and this is brought about by an impulse in the buyer. The buyer has many opinions and modes of thought that he does not draw from the journal, and he is always ready to drop a journal that offends him. An editor is thus constantly forced to choose between affronting his public and placating his public. Now, whatever arguments may be given for his taking one course or the other, it remains clear that in so far as an editor is not publishing what he himself thinks of interest for its own sake, he is encouraging in the public something else besides intellect. He is subserving financial, political, or religious bias, or, it may be, popular whim. He is, to this extent at least, the custodian and protector of prejudice.

The thrift of an editor-owner, who is building up the circulation of a paper, tends to keep him conservative. Repetition is safer than innovation. An especially strong temptation is spread before the American editor in the shape of an enormous reading public, made up of people who have a common-school education, and who resemble each other very closely in their traits of mind. There is money to be made by any one who discerns a new way of reinforcing any prejudice of the American people.

It has come about very naturally during the last thirty years, that journalism has been developed in America as one of the branches in the science of catering to the masses on a gigantic scale. The different kinds of conservatism have been banked, consolidated, and, as it were, marshalled under the banners of as many journals. Money and energy have been expended in collecting these vast audiences, and sleepless vigilance is needed to keep them together.

The great investments in the good will of millions are nursed by editors who live by their talents, and who in another age would have been intellectual men. The highest type of editor now extant in America will as frankly regret his own obligation to cater to mediocrity, as the business man will regret his obligation to pay blackmail, or as the citizen will regret his obligation to vote for one of the parties. “There is nothing else to do. I am dealing with the money of others. There are not enough intelligent people to count.” He serves the times. The influence thus exerted by the public (through the editor) upon the writer tends to modify the writer and make him resemble the public. It is a spiritual pressure exerted by the majority in favor of conformity. This exists in all countries, but is peculiarly severe in countries and ages where the majority is made up of individuals very similar to each other. The tyranny of a uniform population always makes itself felt.

If any man doubt the hide-bound character of our journals to-day, let him try this experiment. Let him write down what he thinks upon any matter, write a story of any length, a poem, a prayer, a speech. Let him assume, as he writes it, that it cannot be published, and let him satisfy his individual taste in the subject, size, mood, and tenor of the whole composition. Then let him begin his peregrinations to find in which one of the ten thousand journals of America there is a place for his ideas as they stand. We have more journals than any other country. The whole field of ideas has been covered; every vehicle of opinion has its policy, its methods, its precedents. A hundred will receive him if he shaves this, pads that, cuts it in half; but not one of them will trust him as he stands, “Good, but eccentric,” “Good, but too long,” “Good, but new.”

Let us follow the steps of this withering influence. A young illustrator does an etching that he likes. He is told to reduce it to the conventional standard. This is easy, but what is happening in the process? He blurs the fine edges of vision, not only on the plate, but in his own mind. The real injury to intellect is not done in the editorial sanctum. It is done in the mind of the writer who himself attempts to cater to the prejudice of others. A man rewrites a scene in a story to please a public. In order to do this he is obliged to forget what his story was about. He is talking by rote; he is making an imitation. Does this seem a small thing? Let any one do it once and see where it leads him. The attitude of the whole human being towards his whole life is changed by the experience. Do it twice, and you can hardly shake off the practice. Write and publish six editorials for the “Universalist,” and then sit down to write one not in the style of the “Universalist.” You will find it, practically, an impossibility.

The notable lack in our literature is this: the prickles and irregularities of personal feeling have been pumice-stoned away. It is too smooth. There is an absence of individuality, of private opinion. This is the same lack that curses our politics,—the absence of private opinion.