Space fails me here to do justice to the literary, dramatic, and artistic journals. Among the first, however, mention must be made of the Critic. Its analyses are amiable and discreetly erudite. Its criticisms are always fair, and never crabbed.
I cannot close this chapter without speaking of the American Reviews; they have attained a perfection which is the highest utterance of journalism, as understood by the educated world. But they are for the most part so well known in England that I need not enlarge upon the merit and charms of such publications as the North American Review, the Atlantic Monthly, the Forum, the Century, the Harper, Scribner, Lippincott, and that treasure of English-reading children all over the world, the incomparable St. Nicholas. Besides all these, there are the Cosmopolitan, the America, the American Magazine, and numbers of others.
Alas, it would need a score of volumes to do anything like justice to that which one can see in America. Unhappily, it would take a score of years to see it in. And so I alight but a moment at each turning, happy if, by trying to show the reader a little of everything, I succeed in showing him something.
CHAPTER XX.
Reporting.—For the American Reporter Nothing is Sacred.—Demolition of the Wall of Private Life.—Does your Husband Snore?—St. Anthony and the Reporters.—I am Interviewed.—My Manager drops Asleep over it.—The Interview in Print.—The President of the United States and the Reporters.—"I am the Interviewer."
ournalism has killed literature, and reporting is killing journalism. It is the last gasp of the dying of literature of an epoch; it is the man letters replaced by the concierge." So exclaims M. Albert Millaud in one of his clever articles in the Figaro.
In America, reporting has simply overrun, swallowed up, journalism. It is a demolition of the wall of private life; the substitution of gossip for chronicle, of chatter for criticism.