The Adventure of Living : a Subjective Autobiography

by John St. Loe Strachey

Twenty years ago, I had a conversation in regard to this point with the reporters of two very Yellow newspapers, on an Atlantic liner outside the port of New York. The Lucania had run upon a sand-bank, and we had to wait all day in sight of that towered city, exposed to the full fury of the interviewer. When I ventured to ask the two reporters in question whether they did not think it was perfectly absurd and ridiculous to print the chronicles of small beer, or, rather, of small slops, such as appeared in their columns, they readily, and I believe perfectly honestly, agreed, but said in defence that they had to obey their editor's orders. To me, at any rate, they acted most honourably and gave no report of our conversation, for I had reminded them that dog did not eat dog. A third reporter, however, to whom I had not thought it necessary to indicate as "private and confidential" an enthusiastic remark drawn by the beauty of New York harbour in an autumn sunset, was not so sensitive. "This is more splendid," I said, "than even the approach to Venice. There is nothing in the whole world like the sea- front of New York seen from the sea." This reporter honoured me next day with a headline of such magnificent triviality that I cannot refrain from quoting it: "Editor Strachey says New York skins Venice!"—a contribution to the illimitable inane worthy to stand by a headline in an English provincial paper: "Vestryman choked by a whelk!"

Publicity, when it is honest publicity, is as important a thing as the collection and presentation of evidence at a trial. Without the evidence, of what avail would be advocacy or judgment? I have dealt with the problem of publicity, but publicity of course is not the whole of journalism. Besides news there is comment, and comment, at any rate among serious-minded people like the British, is quite as well thought of as news. It is with that part of journalism, indeed, that the editor of a weekly newspaper has most to do. The journalism of comment may be divided into parts, both perfectly legitimate. There is what I may term judicial journalism, and the journalism of advocacy. In judicial journalism the writer attempts to approach the jury of the public rather as a judge than as a barrister, to sum up rather than make a speech for the prosecution or the defence. This does not, of course, mean that he does not in the end take a side or give a decision. He forms a view and states it, but in stating it he admits the existence of the other side and does not try to carry the jury away with him by the arts of rhetoric. Such journalism is not necessarily cold-blooded. Just as a judge may denounce baseness or misconduct in burning words, so the journalist who endeavours to maintain the judicial attitude may, when the necessity arises, be strong in his denunciation of what he holds to be weak, dangerous, or evil. He, however, who is bold enough to essay this form of journalism must never forget that a judge who professes to be judicial in tone, but who ends in being partial, is a worse man than an honest advocate, because he is, in fact, cloaking partisanship by hypocrisy.

Little need be said in defence of the advocate journalist. He makes no pretence to be doing anything but pleading the cause of his party, and placing it in the best possible light. It is not his business, but that of the opposition writer, to put the case for the other side, and if he occasionally pretends to an enthusiasm which does not really belong to him, he is only practising the innocent artifice of the counsel who tells the jury that he will be an unhappy man should he have failed in the task of persuading them to restore his long-suffering, if burglarious, bibulous, or bigamous, client to his best wife and family.

It must not be supposed, however, that the advocate journalist is a cynic who realises that his own cause is a poor one, but calls it the best of causes because he is paid so to do. That, as all men of experience know, is a fallacy as regards the barrister, and it is still more a fallacy as regards the journalist. We should remember the story of the barrister who, at the end of a long career, declared that he had been singularly fortunate. He had never been called upon to defend a guilty person or to argue a case where the merits and the law were not strongly on his side. If this feeling grows up in the case of a man who, changing from prosecution to defence and from plaintiff to defendant, may often have to alter his point of view completely, how much more is it likely to grow up in that of the advocate journalist who is always on the same side? Believe me, the notion of the political journalist perpetually writing leaders against his own convictions is a pure figment of the popular imagination. No doubt an editor will sometimes ask a leader-writer not to put a particular view so strongly as he, the leader-writer, is known to feel it, but such reticence cannot surely be regarded as insincerity on the ethics of anonymity in journalism. The public are apt to suppose that anonymity is the cloak of all sorts of misdoings, and I have often heard people declare that in their opinion every leader-writer should be forced to sign his name. As I once heard it picturesquely expressed, "The mask should be torn from the villain's face. Why should a man be allowed to stab his neighbour in the dark!" As a matter of fact, I am convinced that anonymity makes, not for irresponsibility but for responsibility, and that there are many men who, though truculent, offensive, and personal when they write with the "I," will show a true sense of moderation and responsibility when they use the editorial "we." The man who writes for a newspaper very soon gets a strong sense of what is right and proper to be said in that particular organ, and he instinctively refuses to give way to personal feeling and personal animosity when he is writing, not in his own name, but in that of his newspaper.

I have hated and distrusted So-and-So ever since I was at Cambridge with him. I know what a false-hearted creature he was then, and how vain and supercilious, and I should like to get my knife into him some day. I feel, however, that the Daily Comet could not possibly attack him in this way. Even though my editor has told me that I may say what I like about him it would not be fair to go for him unless I signed my name.

That is an imaginary soliloquy which, I am sure, represents the feelings of plenty of leader-writers when confronted with a personal issue.

Again, men who write anonymously, and in the name of their paper and not of themselves, are much less likely to yield to the foolish vanity of self-assertion. When Zola visited England, I remember a very striking passage in which he expressed to an interviewer his astonishment at the anonymity of the British Press. He wondered how it was that our writers refused themselves the "delicious notoriety" which they might obtain through signed articles. Thank heaven, our writers prefer the dignity which can be maintained through the honourable tradition of a great journal to such "delicious notoriety" The delicious notoriety of the individual is the ruin of the better journalism.

Again, we must never forget that the signed article, however true and sound it may be, is always to some extent discounted through the personality of the writer. "A" may have written in perfect sincerity of a particular statesman, but if he signs his name the gossip-mongers are sure to say that the article in question is to be accounted for by the fact that a fortnight before the writer was stopping with the Cabinet Minister who has been well spoken of, or because the writer's wife is well known to be a friend of the statesman, or for some equally trivial reason. Just as a good chairman of a committee should sink his individuality and speak for the committee as a whole, so a good leader- writer can with perfect honesty and sincerity sink his individuality and speak for his newspaper rather than himself.

But, though I incline to anonymity as the rule of political journalism, I quite admit that in pure literature and in the arts the signed article is often to be preferred. For the object with which the reader approaches a literary article is the desire for pleasure, and that pleasure is naturally heightened by knowing the name of the actor who is on the stage. Though it might be an amusing trick it would be on the whole very disappointing to the public if the play-bill on which the names of the characters appear had instead of the actors' names arbitrary letters, like X, Y, and Z. They would probably not appreciate the task of guessing who was concealed under the wig or the shadows painted on the face which converted Miss Jones' somewhat aquiline features into a nez retroussé. No one can doubt that the Parisian public liked to know that the Causeries de Lundi were by Sainte- Beuve, just as they now like to see the signature of Mr. J. C. Squire at the end of an article. To push the point to extremes, who would care to grope through a nameless Georgian Anthology in which each poem had to be taken on its intrinsic merits? Even if the public could stand the test, I feel certain that the critics could not. I have always had a good deal of sympathy for the dramatic critic in Mr. Shaw's play when he declares that he can place a play with perfect certainty if he knows whom it was written by, but not unless. Fancy the poor critic going through a volume and saying to himself: "Now is this Shanks or is it Graves trying to score off him by a parody? Again, is this one of the Sitwells writing like Sassoon in order to drive the grocers to delirium?" But, harrowing thought, perhaps it is neither, but only some admirer of the Georgian Mind at Capetown or Melbourne, who has produced for his own use an amalgam of several styles. The mere writing about it is making me so uncomfortable that I must hastily desist!

There is another point upon which I must touch, though very shortly. That is the ethics of newspaper proprietorship. People sometimes talk as if it were a great misfortune that the newspapers of England are, as a rule, owned by rich men. I cannot agree, though I do think it is a great misfortune that a newspaper cannot be started by a poor man. My reason for desiring that as a rule a newspaper proprietor should be rich is the danger of newspapers being bought, or, at any rate, of their articles being bought, as too often happens in countries where newspapers are not great properties. It is often said, for example, that a hundred pounds or so will procure the insertion of an article in most continental newspapers. This is no doubt a gross libel on the best foreign newspapers, but it indicates a danger when newspapers are owned by men of small means and make small profits. When a newspaper is bringing in £50,000 or £60,000 a year it is obvious that even if we assume the newspaper proprietor to have no sense of public duty, it will not be worth his while to sell the influence of his paper. He is not going to risk the destruction of a great property—destruction would surely ensue from his corrupt act becoming known—for a few hundred pounds. To put it brutally, "his figure" would be too high for any to pay—a quarter of a million at least.