Part 8 (1/2)
”Doggett and Cubs each win shut out.”
”Brockett is easy for Detroit Nine.”
Glancing at the small type I read:--
”Englewood was the first to tally. This was in the fourth inning. W.
Merritt, the first man up, was safe on Williams' error, and he got round to third on another miscue by Williams. Charley Clough was on deck with a timely single, which scored Merritt. Curran's out at first put Clough on third, from whence he tallied on c.u.ming's single. c.u.ming got to second, when Wiley grounded out along the first base line and scored on Reinmund's single. Every other time Reinmund came to the bat he struck out.”
I pa.s.s to the _Magazine Section_.
On the first page is the mysterious heading ”E. of K. and E.” Several huge portraits of a bald clean-shaven man in s.h.i.+rt sleeves partially explain. E. is Mr. Erlanger, a theatrical impresario, and K. and E.
presumably is his firm. The article describes ”the accomplishment of a busy man on one of his ordinary days,” and makes one hope no day is ever extraordinary. The interviewer who tells about him is almost speechless with emotion. He searches for a phrase to express his feelings, finds it at last, and comes triumphantly to his close--Mr. Erlanger is a man ”with trained arms, trained legs, a trained body and a trained mind.”
There follows: ”The Story of a Society Girl,” in which we are told ”there is a confession of love and the startling discovery that Dolly was a professional model”; ”The Doctor's Story,” with a picture of a corpse, ”whose white shapely hands were clasped one over the other”; and ”Would you Convict on Circ.u.mstantial Evidence?--A Scaffold Confession. A True Story.” I glance at this, and read, ”While the crowd watched in strained, breathless silence there came a sharp agonised voice and a commotion near the steps of the scaffold. 'Stop! Stop! The man is not guilty. I mean it. It is I who should stand there. Let me speak.'” You can now reconstruct the story for yourself. Next comes ”Get the Man! Craft and courage of old-time and modern express robbers matched by organised secret service and the mandate that makes capture alone the end of an unflagging man-hunt.” This is accompanied by portraits of famous detectives and train-robbers.
There follows ”_Thrilling Lines_,” with a picture of a man who seems to be looping the loop on a bicycle.
And the conclusion of the section is a poem, ent.i.tled ”Cynthianna Blythe,” with coloured ill.u.s.trations apparently intended for children, and certainly successful in not appealing to adults.
Comment, I suppose, is superfluous. But it is only fair to say that the whole of the press of America is not of this character. Among the thousands of papers daily produced on that continent, it would be possible, I believe, to name ten--I myself could mention five--which contain in almost every issue some piece of information or comment which an intelligent man might care to peruse. There are to be found, now and again, pa.s.sing references to European and even to Asiatic politics; for it cannot be said that the press of America wholly ignored the recent revolutions in Persia and in Turkey. I myself saw a reference to the new Sultan as a man ”fat, but not fleshy.” England looms big enough on the American horizon to be treated to an occasional gibe; and the doings of fas.h.i.+onable Americans in London are reported somewhat fully. Still, on the whole, the American daily press is typified by the specimen I have a.n.a.lysed. Sensations, personalities and fiction are its stock-in-trade.
Why? The causes are well known, but are worth recapitulating, for they are part of the system of modern civilisation.
The newspaper press is a business intended to make money. This is its primary aim, which may, or may not, include the subordinate purpose of advocating some line of public policy. Now, to make money, it is essential to secure advertis.e.m.e.nts; and to secure advertis.e.m.e.nts it is essential to have a large circulation. But a large circulation can only be obtained by lowering the price of the paper, and adapting it to the leisure mood of the ma.s.s of people. But this leisure mood is usually one of sheer vacuity, incapable of intellectual effort or imaginative response. The man is there, waiting to be filled, and to be filled with the stuff easiest to digest. The rest follows. The newspapers supply the demand and by supplying extend and perpetuate it. Among the possible appeals open to them they deliberately choose the lowest. For people are capable of Good as well as of Bad; and if they cannot get the Bad they will sometimes take the Good. Newspapers, probably, could exist, even under democratic conditions, by maintaining a certain standard of intelligence and morals. But it is easier to exist on melodrama, fatuity and sport. And one or two papers adopting that course force the others into line; for here, as in so many departments of modern life, ”The Bad drives out the Good.” This process of deterioration of the press is proceeding rapidly in England, with the advent of the halfpenny newspaper. It has not gone so far as in America; but there is no reason why it should not, and every reason why it should; for the same causes are at work.
I have called the process ”deterioration,” but that, of course, is matter of opinion. A Cabinet Minister, at a recent Conference in London, is reported to have congratulated the press on its progressive improvement during recent years. And Lord Northcliffe is a peer. The more the English press approximates to the American, the more, it would seem, it may hope for public esteem and honour. And that is natural, for the American method pays.
Well, the sun still s.h.i.+nes and the sky is still blue. But between it and the American people stretches a veil of printed paper. Curious! the fathers of this nation read nothing but the Bible. That too, it may be said, was a veil; but a veil woven of apocalyptic visions, of lightning and storm, of Leviathan, and the wrath of Jehovah. What is the stuff of the modern veil, we have seen. And surely the contrast is calculated to evoke curious reflections.
V
IN THE ROCKIES
Walking alone in the mountains to-day I came suddenly upon the railway.
There was a little shanty of a station 8000 feet above the sea; and, beyond, the great expanse of the plains. It was beginning to sleet, and I determined to take shelter. The click of a telegraph operator told me there was some one inside the shed. I knocked and knocked again, in vain; and it was a quarter of an hour before the door was opened by a thin, yellow-faced youth chewing gum, who looked at me without a sign of recognition or a word of greeting. I have learnt by this time that absence of manners in an American is intended to signify not surliness but independence, so I asked to be allowed to enter. He admitted me, and resumed his operations. I listened to the clicking, while the sleet fell faster and the evening began to close in. What messages were they, I wondered, that were pa.s.sing across the mountains? I connected them, idly enough, with the corner in wheat a famous speculator was endeavouring to establish in Chicago; and reflected upon the disproportion between the achievements of Man and the use he puts them to. He invents wireless telegraphy, and the s.h.i.+ps call to one another day and night, to tell the name of the latest winner. He is inventing the flying-machine, and he will use it to advertise pills and drop bombs. And here, he has exterminated the Indians, and carried his lines and his poles across the mountains, that a gambler may fill his pockets by starving a continent.
”Click--click--click--Pick--pick--pick--Pock--pock--pockets.” So the west called to the east, and the east to the west, while the winds roared, and the sleet fell, over the solitary mountains and the desolate iron road.
It was too late now for me to reach my hotel that evening, and I was obliged to beg a night's rest. The yellow youth a.s.sented, with his air of elaborate indifference, and proceeded to make me as comfortable as he could. About sunset, the storm pa.s.sed away over the plains. Behind its flying fringes shot the last rays of the sun; and for a moment the prairie sea was all bared to view, as wide as the sky, as calm and as profound, a thousand miles of gra.s.s where men and cattle crept like flies, and towns and houses were swallowed and lost in the infinite monotony. We had supper and then my host began to talk. He was a democrat, and we discussed the coming presidential election. From one newspaper topic to another we pa.s.sed to the talk about signalling to Mars. Signalling interested the youth; he knew all about that; but he knew nothing about Mars, or the stars. These were now s.h.i.+ning bright above us; and I told him what I knew of suns and planets, of double stars, of the moons, of Jupiter, of nebulae and the galaxy, and the infinity of s.p.a.ce, and of worlds. He chewed and meditated, and presently remarked: ”Gee! I guess then it doesn't matter two cents after all who gets elected president!” Whereupon we turned in, he to sleep and I to lie awake, for I was disturbed by the mystery of the stars. It is long since the notion of infinite s.p.a.ce and infinite worlds has impressed my imagination with anything but discomfort and terror. The Ptolemaic scheme was better suited to human needs. Our religious sense demands not only order but significance; a world not merely great, but relevant to our destinies. Copernicus, it is true, gave us liberty and s.p.a.ce; but he bereft us of security and intimacy. And I thought of the great vision of Dante, so terrible and yet so beautiful, so human through and through,--that vision which, if it contracts s.p.a.ce, expands the fate of man, and relates him to the sun and the moon and the stars. I thought of him as he crossed the Apennines by night, or heard from the sea at sunset the tinkling of the curfew bell, or paced in storm the forest of Ravenna, always, beyond and behind the urgency of business, the chances of war, the bitterness of exile, aware of the march of the sun about the earth, of its station in the Zodiac, of the solemn and intricate wheeling of the spheres. Aware, too, of the inner life of those bright luminaries, the dance and song of spirits purged by fire, the glow of Mars, the milky crystal of the moon, and Jupiter's intolerable blaze; and beyond these, kindling these, setting them their orbits and their order, by attraction not of gravitation, but of love, the ultimate Essence, imaged by purest light and hottest fire, whereby all things and all creatures move in their courses and their fates, to whom they tend and in whom they rest.
And I recalled the pa.s.sage:
”Frate, la nostra volonta quieta Virtu di carita, che fa volerne Sol quel ch'avemo, e d'altro non ci a.s.seta.
Se disia.s.simo esser piu superne, Foran discordi gli nostri disiri Dal voler di Colui che qui ne cerne;