FullReads

Then we have the leader-writer. The British public have decided that their newspaper shall furnish them daily with three or four little addresses on various topics of current interest; and these grave or gay sermons are composed by practised hands who must be ready to write on almost any subject under the sun at a minute’s notice. In a certain class of old-fashioned literature the newspaper-writer is represented as a careless, dissipated Bohemian, who lived with rackety inconsequence. That tribe of writers has long vanished from the face of the earth. The last of the sort that I remember was a miserable old man who haunted the British Museum. No one knew where he lived; but his work, such as it was, usually went in with punctuality, and he drank the proceeds. He died in a stall of a low public-house, and was buried by the parish. No one but his editor and one or two cronies knew his real name, and he appeared to be utterly friendless. But the modern leader-writer must beware of strong liquors. Usually he is a keen, reposeful man who has his brain cool at all hours. The immense drinking-bouts of old times could never be indulged in now; and indeed, if a journalist once begins to take stimulants as stimulants, his end is not far off. Let us mention the kind of feats which must be performed. A powerful minister makes a speech after eleven o’clock at night; the leader-writer receives proof-sheets; he must grasp the whole scope of the speech in a flash, and then proceed with the mere mechanical work of writing. Twelve hundred words will take about an hour and twenty minutes to set down, and then the MS. must be rushed piece by piece to the composing-room. Again, supposing that news of some great disaster arrives late. An article must be swiftly done, and the writer must have a theory ready that will hold water. Work like this needs a quick wit, a copious vocabulary, and an absolutely steady hand. Moreover, the leader-writer must unhappily be invariably ready to write “nothings” so that they may look like “somethings.” News is scarce, foreign nations show a culpable lack of desire to kill each other, no moving accident has occurred–and the paper must be filled. Then the leader-writer must take some trivial subject and weave round it a web of graceful and amusing phrases. One brilliant scholar once wrote a most charming and learned article about pigs; and I have seen a column of grave nonsense spun out on the subject of an unhappy cat which fixed its head in a salmon-tin!

This hurried writing on trifling matters brings on a certain looseness of style and thought; but the public will have it, and the demand creates the supply of a flimsy, pleasant, literary article. The best leaders are now written by fine scholars. In travelling over the country I have been amused by simple people who imagined that the articles in a journal were produced by one secret and utterly mysterious being. These good folk are mightily surprised on finding that the admired leaders are done by a troop of men who are not exactly commonplace, but who are not much wiser or better than their fellows.