Compared with the French and English papers, the American dailies have neither the literary value of the former nor the authority of the latter in the matter of political foreign news.
The French newspapers are most of them literary productions of incontestable worth; but, with the exception of one or two leading articles, and the literary, musical, and dramatic criticisms, nothing very serious in the way of information is to be found in them. The foreign intelligence is of the most meagre, and usually consists of a few lines furnished by L'agence Havas: "The Emperor of Germany is a little better," or "Queen Victoria has returned to Windsor from Scotland," etc.
Mr. George Augustus Sala once said very wittily that the French papers bear the date of to-morrow and the news of yesterday. The satire is a little severe, but it is not unmerited. He might, however, have taken that opportunity for reminding his numerous readers that, if the Parisian papers are inferior to the London ones in the matter of news, they are greatly their superiors in the matter of articles. It is true we have no longer among our journalists Roqueplan, Karr, Méry, Janin, Prévost-Paradol, Girardin, Taine, About; but we have still John Lemoinne, Weiss, Sarcey, Rochefort, Wolff, Lockroy, Vacquerie, Scholl, Fouquier, Bergerat, and many others, who offer to the public every morning articles stamped with genius, or, at the least, sparkling with wit; yes, we have still a goodly group of such.
For the intelligent, serious man, the English daily papers have only the attraction of the correctness of their correspondence, home and foreign. It consists of facts in all their aridity, but still facts. As for the articles, few persons, I fancy, read those productions written, with few exceptions, in the dry, thready, pedagogic style much affected by lower-form schoolboys, and often deserving the favourite comment of the late M. Lemaire, professor at the Lycée Charlemagne: "Lourd, pâteux, délayé dans le vide."
An American newspaper is a conglomeration of news, political, literary, artistic, scientific, and fashionable, of reports of trials, of amusing anecdotes, gossip of all kinds, interviews, jokes, scandal; the whole written in a style which sometimes shocks the man of taste, but which often interests, and always amuses.
A literary celebrity of Boston said to me one day: "I am ashamed of our American press; we have only two papers in the country that I do not blush for, and those are the Boston Post, and the Evening Post of New York.
I must say that, if you want to hear America and everything American severely criticised, you have only to go to Boston. There you will hear Boston and England praised, and America picked to pieces.
"Are you an American?" I once asked of a gentleman I met in New York.
"Well," he said after some hesitation, "I'm from Boston."
Fancy! being born in Boston, and obliged to be an American! That's hard.