VIII

JOURNALISM OLD AND NEW (1)

MY DEAR X,

I suppose that the degeneration of the daily newspaper must be expected in an era when commercial values are paramount. It is certainly not the newspaper as a form of reading that is wrong. Journalism proper is, after all, as old as the Renaissance. Many of the Elizabethans were obvious journalists. They were strictly the pen-masters of the London apprentices, the "groundlings " who bellowed applause at the Globe and Paris Gardens on Bankside and were alternately petted and exacerbated by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Middleton and others, when the old, old duel between the Boiling Pot and the Sacred Fire was acute. Nashe, who so often gave the passado to strutting Gabriel Harvey, you may call our first leader-writer; Greene, the first picturesque reporter of crime; Dekker of "The Guls Horne-Booke and "The Bellman of London " the first "fourth-page impressionist chronicler of London manners, and Thomas Deloney" the balletting silk-weaver of Norwich" (in the genealogical lineage of the medieval minstrel) the founder of the newspaper lyric and (in such romances as 'Jack of Newbury” and “Thomas of Reading") of the newspaper serial. Seventeenth-century journalism was

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principally theological, a development on a grand scale of the unspeakably tedious Martin Marprelate controversy a tornado of pamphlets of such virulence that they threatened to brown the verdure of a more natural literature. Charles I was a religious symbol as well as a political doctrinaire, and even the politicians Marvel, Milton, Lestrange and Cleveland discharged political convictions from a theological mortar.

But I can draw very little moral from inspecting the protoplasm of journalism. To suggest a contrast and to enforce what I mean by the decay of modern journalism you will require an example of it as a modern and organized force, in an old setting. Well, why not Addison, the sententious Addison, Autocrat of the Breakfast Table? Is he not worth examining closely, not only as an illustration of journalism before it became a business, but as showing to what extent it was a compartment of literature, what kind of public opinion it created, and what were its relations with the public.

It is not legitimate to separate the literary from the historical Addison, but it is fatally easy. The reason, I imagine, is that Addison, released from his historical moorings, is susceptible to certain obvious critical remarks, which do not apply to his position in society. The one is a literary problem which has been solved without much chance of being reconstructed or modified; the other involves the discrepancies and deceptive analogies between modern and eighteenth-century journalism. Let me take these points one by one and see how actually indivisible they are. Everybody knows what the textbooks say about Addison's prose. It is the model of English urbanity and reasonableness. It is the reflection

of a mind adjusted to a polite serenity and a judicious optimism. It is decorous, complacent and discreet, thereby not only exhibiting the limitations of Addison's personality, but finishing and balancing the graces of his style. If his philosophy had been more profound, his humanity more catholic, his vision less narrow, and his feeling more acute his style, would have been a less disciplined instrument of his artistic purpose. As a critic he was the only Augustan to appreciate Milton and to read Shakespeare, regardless of Aristotle. As a satirist, he sufficiently explains himself :

"I did not design so much to expose vice as idleness, and aim at those persons who pass away their time rather in trifles and impertinence than in crimes and immorality. Offences of this latter kind are not to be dallied with and treated in so ludicrous a manner. In short, my journal only holds up folly to the light, and shows the disagreeableness of such actions as are indifferent in themselves and blameworthy only as they proceed from creatures endowed with reason."

His conception of art, as a whole, was both shallow and lucid. "I shall endeavour," he said, " to enliven morality with wit and to temper wit with morality." But Addison, though he seldom wrote ex cathedra or regarded art as anything but the handmaid of morality, had not the strength of conviction to be a moralist. His paternal and conciliatory temper could only approach art as the useful appanage of a comfortable virtue. So, though didactic for his orthodoxies, he made them palatable to his readers' taste by means of the persuasions of a bedside physician. He looked upon the creative imagination as a curiosity, a kind of treachery to the genteel tradition

of writing, and as interfering with the faculty of design, which informed the whole of his prose to the last comma and meant simply "a prospect that is well laid out." A prospect in the "ha-ha " style, with perhaps a neo-Gothic temple, where the garden merged with the lansdcape. At which temple, my dear X, repose with me until my next letter.

IX

JOURNALISM OLD AND NEW (II)

MY DEAR X,

Only, as you will agree, so formal and external an attitude of life could have written of human suffering with the priggish egoism of this passage: "When we read of torments, wounds, deaths and the like dismal accidents our pleasure does not flow so properly from the grief which such melancholy descriptions give us, as from the secret comparison which we make between ourselves and the person who suffers. Such representations teach us to set a just value upon our own condition and make us prize our good fortune, which exempts us from the like calamities." Steele, with his surer humanity and sympathy, could never have been so baldly pompous. Addison was, in fact, purely and simply a stylist. Literature was not a criticism or interpretation or the flower of life, but the accomplishment of a man-about-town, incurious of all that lay outside his immediate horizon, indulgent to the accepted frailties of his circle, self-conscious in his mission of instruction and diversion to it, and dispassionate in his observation of it. The only extraordinary thing to be got out of the survey of this prosaic and methodical artist is that a mind so mediocre, so devoid