The childishness and brutality of the time: some plain truths in plain language. Supplemented by sundry discursive essays and narratives

Front matter

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FROM THE

Contents

CUA1>. , PAOE

PBEFACK vii

I. THE NEWSPAPERS — THE WHOLESALE NEWSPAPER LIFE

Chapter I. The Newspapers. — The Wholesale Newspaper Life Of The

PUBLIC.

IS the Englishman's modern day life a life'? Is it not rather a negation ? At the close of the day he thinks that he has had a day. But has he had one ? Has he thought ? — has he lived ? — is he satisfied ? If he has thought at all, it has been a thought of disappointment. If he has lived at all, it has been to dislike and despise that sort of life, and to feel a sort of indignation at the circumstances which have compelled him to advance — for he must advance — in that groove. Take an ordinary inhabitant of this great town of ours — this London. Is the day-after-day life of this man life at all — in the realising, in any sense of the term, true life ? ' Or may it not be designated (and abandoned) as the acquiescence in a wearying round of merely presented things ? Our usual occupations — in monotonous repetition — are only a means of somehow reaching to the end of the day. We live outside of ourselves — every man of us. We may more particularly refer to the metropolitan Englishman, the regular London

' "Every man truly lives so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties of himself." — Sir Thomas 'Browne.

2 THE CHILDISHKESS AND

man, to whom the traffic in the streets, the continual roar of the wheels, and the dizzy succession of vehicles of all sorts and sizes, of all characters, and contrived for all purposes, are an ever-soliciting, never-withdrawing, constantlyreinforced worry. The crowds of people overwhelm us. The idea of the multitude overawes us. "We are oppressed with the sense of the fact of the generations. Whence did they come? How dwell (and where dwell) these multitudes ? And whither are they all tending ? — and for what ? Unanswerable thought ! For " every man hath business and desire, such as it is." Ah, indeed ! Business and desire — such as it is!

The conflict of purpose — the never-ending succession of faces, with some design, and some immediate object plainly visible in each, bewildering us in their inextricable multiplicity — all reacts upon oneself. Every man, when he begins to think, seems very lonely, hopelessly solitary, in this crowd. The continual reminder that we feel of how valueless, how insignificant an item our own poor personality is in all this turmoil, brings us down to a very low level of sense of self. We will defy any man to believe — that is, if the individual be capable of giving a glance now and then inwards — that he lives in all this noise. What can he know of himself — what can he become aware of as genuine of his own true nature, in all this battle of interests ; where each man is bound to get the better of the other to maintain his own foothold; and each object appears with the necessity of becoming dominant, not to be displaced and superseded by some other object. Thus the whole world is fight and contention ; it is either little murder or large murder."'^

■■ See Appendix : Note (a).

"What have we done, too, that we should be compelled to live alone in the newspapers ? These newspapers are the only means of intercommunication in these so continual hurrying days ; for men cannot meet to compare opinions personally. Therefore all our ideas and impressions are created by the impersonal newspapers, unseen nobodies, who give us what they please, and who dilute a little truth in a vast ocean of interested, plausible talk; administered to us by we never know whom, served up to us, as opinions which we must accept on our peril, by Mr.. Anonymous.

Now we do not want to be misconstrued in what weare going to advance. "We are preparing to speak a little truth. To speak truth is very difficult. The reception and the acknowledgement of truth requires some time for preparation. To those who know what prejudices are, it will not appear strange to add that, however well received at . last, and admitted with approval in the long run, the full speaking of truth requires very considerable caution. "We very much doubt whether man was ever intended for truth,, for his " best pleasantness " lies in the being deceived ; deceived either by himself or others. People are not prepared' for truth. It is a special gift to see truth, and truth is; very often not an inviting object when you do see it.. Every person professes to love truth; yet if we apply thescrew in the most moderate degree, and press people as to a little proof of self, or examine them as to their reliance on this or that little matter which they put forward as truth, or as a fact beyond disputation, you will find that they waver. And if you persevere, and press them just a little more you will discover that they oscillate; that is, vibrate from side to side as if they were coming down like a house of cards, really not

B 2 knowing what they do believe, or how they stand in relation to anything on this side, or on the other. We shall encounter much astonishment on the part of confident people that we doubt anything at all! They say this or that is " so very clear." Everybody says that it must be so. The newspapers say it is so, or they pity the untrained inexperience which ventures to doubt. And yet these very people will find in themselves sometimes a small vacuity into which intrudes a doubt of what they themselves maintained the minute before ; and at last they discover to their own surprise, that they doubt themselves.

Newspapers, in these modern days, have grown to be esteemed as the public health ; for we should think everything wrong if we did not see them every day. Newspapers are the visible presences and reminder of the public wealth, for they are lords, great controlling powers, great " assemblies of the notables," great banks and banking interests, as it were, and plutocrats in their very nature."^ Banking among the wonders of this strangely polyglot time, is the prodigious influence which the principal daily newspapers exercise. They are certainly tremendously overgrown — like prodigious plants, ever-growing, and growing gigantically. You can scarcely tell by what singular means they have secured themselves in their present place ; but there they are, and their colossal leaves, or sheets, or glaring efflorescence cover the earth. Their fibres interpenetrate through all the streets, and the important morning and evening journals — all save the king, and master, and lord of these plains of pulp, the majestic anarch of these fields, or provinces, of thin paper — blossom and bud in inscribed white, waylaying and waylaid all over the town,

'See Appendix: Note (h).

SEUTALITY OF THE TIME 5

though mainly over the western — the talkative, stupid parts of it.

Somehow or other, owing to an overmastering necessity, we suppose, these great daily newspapers have worked themselves up into the position of our lords and dominators, the magistri of the great reading school, armed with the ferula which raps our knuckles when we do not believe them. And oh ! those wise spectacles through which the editorial eyes gleam upon us ! Who has a glance so undaunted as to bear up against them? It requires a largeamount of courage to protest against the dicta of these-, self-assuming, absolute truth-tellers. Infallibility I What, is infallibility compared with the calmly reliant, self-- conscious certitude of the assertions of a lordly " leader "■ appearing in one of these great papers ? They must be right ; it is treason to suppose that they are not right. '

' " It has been said that the test of fame or popularity is to consider the number of times your name is repeated by others, or is brought to their recollection in the course of a year. At this rate, a man has his reputation 1 in uis own hands, and by the help of puffing and the press, may forestall the ■ voice of posterity, and stun the ' groundling ' among his contemporaries. Itr you see the same name staring you in the face in great letters at the cornerof every street, you involuntarily think the owner of it must be a great man,, to occupy so large a space in the eye of the town. The appeal is made, inthe first instance, to the senses, but it sinks below the surface into the mind^ A quack gets himtelf dubbed doctor or knight, and though you may laugh in his face, it pays expenses.

" There are innumerable ways of playing one's self off before the public, and keeping one's name perpetually alive. The newspapers, the lamp-posts, the walls of empty houses, the shutters of windows, the blank covers of magazines and reviews, are open to every one. I have heard of a man of literary celebrity sitting in his study, writing letters of remonstrance to himself, on the gross defects of a plan of education he had just published, and which. remained unsold on the bookseller's counter. A flashy pamphlet has been run to a five-and-thirtieth edition, and thus ensured the writer a ' deathless date ' among political charlatans, by regularly striking off a new titlepage to every fifty or a hundred copies that were sold. This is a vil& practice. Formerly when I had to deal with this sort of critical verdict, I was generally sent out of the way when any debutant had a friend at courtj and was to be tenderly handled." — William Hailitt.

In the flourish of their pen, there is wisdom. In their nod there is calm approbation, possibly warning, the perhaps letting go of the " thunder," at which the small birds, careering in the sky, shall betake themselves to cover with blinking eyes and drooping wing. What fields and pastures of print in which to disport, if the sky favours, and you have time to pass thus quietly, do these columns of a great "Daily" afford! Columns upon columns of type; a microscopical map or muddle, buUt up of a multitude of letters, wherein you may find all the politics (and all the commentary upon them) of the world. A sackful of journalistic chaff, in which we have to hunt for — and when found delightedly to hail —the few grains of golden corn, or the few wise and really profitable notions, or new ideas, or good ideas.

Human cattle — ^to wit, the studious, credulous, and anxious (though asinine, for the greater part) British public — are turned in, or purposely turn themselves into, these fields of lead, for some ponderous spiculce, some grains or ounces of ballast, to steady them in their windy, foolish, and fool-like walk through this politically or domestically tempestuous and blowing world. The great daily newspapers boast of the mass of information which it is their duty and their pleasure to lay before the world every day. In fact it is astonishing, overwhelming, bewildering. Why, of any one single daily newspaper, it may truly, and with grief, be said that it were the work of a week to read it through ! Why should we have the whole world thus administered to us all at once ? And why should we thus, with mental compasses opened out with infinite labour and groaning, span latitudes and leap distances? What is India to us, or we to India, at this particular moment? We are in London. Our watch warns us to

BSUTALITY OF TEE TIME. 7

the City. Our daily burthen of business has to be at once taken up. We must not dally with the margin of a tempting article, or with the title of some attractive stretches down the page of sensation news. Therefore the daily paper, with all its luring mass of news, is laid aside ; and by two o'clock, when the " first editions " of the evening papers come out, the whole " morning paper" will have rolled up as into oblivion, and become of just as much import and consequence to the onrush of humanity — particularly metropolitan humanity — as last year's clouds.

Few of us, except the prosers, who are just the individuals to yield easily their judgment, have time to inspect more of the daily broadsheet than the most intimately and immediately interesting leading article, and 'the particulars of the last startling atrocity which has excited the greatest amount of curiosity, or the extraordinary " disclosure," or " libel," or what not, which is supplying people with the material to talk about. The town-talk is the circulating medium of society; it is the paper (newspaper) money of the mass. You receive it ; you have it to give. There are sovereigns, florins, and sispenny-pieces of it. In the newspapers we always seize upon the principal subject which is exciting the public curiosity. We must be up in conversation. The newspaper, in other respects, is a sea of information, in which, swimming about, as it were, naked and defenceless, we continually stand in need of a buoy, upon whose apex or head we could mount as upon a spire of Vantage to become aware of our neighbour, or of what is about us. We require some such spying direction-point from which to gather up knowledge and familiarity with the view around. The embarrassment of rich things — jewels of the journalistic order (paste and scissors) — to the curious, and to the intelligent, is vexatious in its very abundance, especially to those whom time presses. We are overborne by talk, and good talk too! We have a schoolmaster — each of us — in the particular daily newspaper which we take in; and which, in a very large majority of instances, really "takes in" its own readers. It lays down the law. It is not to be contradicted. It cannot be contradicted. Who can contradict a daily newspaper — indeed any newspaper? Whom is there to contradict? You must have an individuality to deal with before you can assert or prove — if proof be possible of anything, which we really doubt — that that individuality is wrong. You can no more contradict a newspaper than you can contradict a milestone to its face — of stone. The latter must always have the best of you in the argument, since, whatever you may aver in point of protest as a fact, you cannot do away with the steadfastness of the figures, I. II. or III., on the face of this obdurate, perfectly unconscious and immovable, milestone. A milestone always tells the truth ; and so does a newspaper, of course.

Our modem daily newspapers are like the lawyers; they always have the best of you, for if you be inclined to dispute, whom are you to protest to ?— whom are' you to insult ? — since in all disputes, you must insult somebody ? Whom are you to be so severely savage upon, if you feel the impulse upon you to be rude to anybody? You really cannot insult an Editor. He is a myth, an impersonaUty, something "robed in clouds." We do not believe that anyone — in real absolute body or corporiety, so that you had your man fairly face to face and there could be no mistake about it — ever saw an Editor, that is, the real undoubted Editor. Like the

BBVTALITY OF THE TIME. 9

mighty " Thunderer," great Jove himself, the Editor of the Times has his virgin peak in his Olympus. And his newly-bound and reticulated fasces (flashes or bundle of lightning-electric) are the new scientist's lights as lately introduced into the Printing-House Square mythology of practical printing. Thus Mercury, as he compels, commands, and forces everything into his service in the shape of a Great Daily; which has its eyes and its ears everywhere, above, around and underground ; has bound the lightning about his feet, and spurring the rest^ less machine-wheels ever clicking and whirring in the great Times offices, evokes a public wearying whirr, clack and hum, to which the far too highly civilized and far too highly educated world (for anything like happiness) replies with a groan.

The Human Sentience, Man, was certainly never born for this untiring demonstrative rasping out of his vitaUty in an activity which is grinding up life itself into so many items or points of pain ; rousing itself for relief even into fits of delirium : for Human Life knoweth not its own meaning, nor whither it is urging in its ignorant, blind, pursued impetus to som-ething. Life, in these latter days, becomes headlong in its confused aimlessness. Why is Dives obliged to have all his cushions white-spread with these continuous annoying sheets of information called newspapers, which — so totally do they prevail — are as the white clouds filling the sky of this Land of Shopkeepers ? Why has poor Lazarus nothing but this never-ceasing plausible presentment of cruel useless newspapers as white plasters for his woes? The poor man's bones cry out for something better than paper for plasters, or for new restoration of bone. Papier macM bones will not prove permanent.

The public, in the hands of the great newspapers, is but lo THE CHILDISHNESS AND

in leading-strings. It listens like a three years' child. It bows like a pupil to his lecturer. At least, so all the great newspapers think of their crowds of readers. They disdain their customers in their secret heart. " They must read us — what is better, they must buy us," is the cry of the journals. This is the universal press-policy. Its necessity is the being believed in. Like sheep over a gate, once an affirmation is made, once condemnation is uttered by a great daily paper — one of sufficient superlative greatness to be believed in — like the imitative sheep, like following like, over go the papers in unanimity ; shutting their eyes, resolutely holding on in obedient continuity after the first who says, " Yes, thus it is ; at least, thus it is our interest to declare." This is the general policy of the newspapers. They must hold together. They speak to the hour. They look not forward, by their own confession. Their principles of living must be that of going on de die i/n diem, following clocks. Thus, there never was, perhaps, such a mass of contradiction not to be detected in the highly- wrought periods, the verbiage or skilful playing off of happily-jointed epithets, than the opinions and judgments presented in any two days' papers separated by anything like an interval.

These journals alternate in their favours. They smile to two sides. They are puzzled to prefer. They hover between Paul and Barabbas, with a fidgety hand reaching out feeling fingers to each, when the people are looking, or not looking, just according to circumstances. What does that uncomfortable thing, absolute truth, or any truth, matter ? What an unreasonable question. What madness to suppose that it does matter ! Newspapers cannot afford to direct public opinion. They leave books (by dead men, who are irresponsible) to do this. " Will it pay, sir ? Will the

BRUTALITY OF THE TIME. ii

newspaper pay ?" That is the intelligible point. Let those enthusiasts who wish to offer themselves as martyrs for the good of +he world, betake themselves to the arena. There they shall stand face to face with their martyrdom, and be torn to pieces. There they shall achieve as much posthumous glory as they please. There they shall find their lions. As for us, say the journalists, we want to be " lions " in another sense, ourselves. These obvious truths are put forward as the grand queries which now dominate east and west, and north and south. The sly directors of public opinion who sit in the editorial chairs, peer like black spying birds out of their respective eyries, to descry the steeples, and particularly to watch the political clocks, to see which way the hands are tending. " Two " or " Ten " is as the bell is made to strike ; not as by the natural day. As for the rest of the .national dial — so far as the great newspapers are constituted the registers of events — it is all an inside of wire and of wooden hammers.

Newspapers, with such enormous influence (from some of the above stated reasons), could not exist in a community that was less of a nation in itself than this aggregate of between three or four millions of us good, silly, self-absorbed people in London. From the crowds and masses of people who fill this gigantic metropolis, and which multitude of inhabitants may be said, literally, to bury in its depths all judgment, and sometimes all common sense, as equally as common feeling, it is impossible that there can be a general opinion, or any means of arriving at it. The people, themselves, obey the direction-points of the day. They rise in the morning and go to bed at night, and, we trust, also partake of a dinner, or an equivalent. But these people never care how others rise, or when, or where they lie, or whether they have sufficient for the supply of nature's wants, or nothing at all, a dinner or no dinner, a bed or no bed. It results from this broad fact, of there being such a multitude in London, all necessarily selfish,, that there never can be general correspondence, because we never have opportunities of seeing or speaking extensively with one another. Therefore, we run to seek in the columns of the great newspapers for those opinions which each man would express for himself if he could. And we should really know nothing of what is publicly occurring about us, if we did not look into the newspapers for it.

Another, and perhaps the principal reason of all, why men,, to so deplorable an extent, surrender their judgment and unconsciously trot along, with their heads to the ground, ia the harness of the great charioteers of the press, arises, from the fact that folks are too busy to think. There is. so grand, so unremitting, and so uncomfortable a race, in our scramble for the money that alone enables us to be in the world at all, that people cannot stop to look at objects, by the roadside. They take other folks' word for them. In spite of Montaigne's saying, " Toute notre dignity consiste dans la pens6e," that must surely be a contemptible art which will rarely deposit a shilling in the pocket — and that is thinking ; especially thinking about abstract things, or sentimental things, or about other people. Will much virtue or charity, or continual pondering about anything on God's earth put money in the pocket ? Nay, thinking will rather prevent good shillings from dropping into the pocket, thought in all ages having been, the most unproductive and therefore ridiculous faculty.

Thought — that is, abstract thought about this, that, or the other — is a paralysing determent, so far as the main_ object of living in the world is concerned, and this we take to be the getting-on in the world. In a civilized coTintry like England, and in a model metropolis like London — so restlessly engaged, and so wholly engrossed in the universal aim, that of bartering life, of consuming life, in procuring the tneans to live—^ thought should be abandoned by all thoughtful men (to prefer a paradox) and be handed over to the professional thinkers. Or, if not left as the task of men who can afford to think, the faculty of ^lought, in these days, should be exercised by those wiseheads who are not wholly personified necessity — by those who have not, to the shutting out of all reflection else, to occupy their minds with their shop or counting-house, or business alone, nor to puzzle their ingenuity in the discovery of means whereby they may undersell Mr. So-and-So, or sell at all; indeed, live at all ! The most exact conclusions as to public measures will not buy us anything. No knowledge of political affairs can we offer for our rent. Nor will the finest social principles, or the greatest philosophic acumen be taken in satisfaction of our taxes. Men think, and very sensibly think, that the operations of life are coniined to the earning bread for their wives and families. These cannot live on politics ; and in regard to these there is no truth so triumphant as that the public weal

' A man is apt to flatter himself that in this over-grown metropolis, ■with its iour minions of inhabitants, he will be certain to fall in with employment. Experience convinces me that he cm hardly make a greater mistake. Ho cannot search long for work before he discovers his error, and learns that even London, this immense Babel of cities, is a town of constantly-guarded vested interests, close corporations whose members regard strangers with little favour, but, on the contrary, with much suspicion and distrust. Judging from the evidence given the other week at an inquest at the East-end of London, this unchristian, exclusive sentiment extended even to the gates of the workhouse, where the porter, himself a pauper, refused to admit an unfortunate starving, dying female, who was found, a few minutes after being driven off, dead on the pavement.

must yield to the private necessity — patriotism and public justice to pabulum. Accordingly we have no moderation now in our boastful recommendations of ourselves in the advertising columns of the newspapers ; all is " puff," bargain, and sale.

It is, then, this universal selfishness, this sad, this dispiriting, this dreary necessity, that we should each tell lies and browbeat one another, to take care of ourselves ; it is this compelled holding on to, or clutching at, the main chance, which hardens our hearts, and dulls our understandings, and chills anything like a public effort — even a public feeling. We have no real political blood in us. Our public aspirations are haze and moonshine. We are made up of mechanical muscles, and have a heartsease stuffed with paper. Our eyes are of glass, and our vital pulses are clockwork. We are mere machines, in fact ; darting in and out of our places of business, and walking about the streets. The show is ghastly, and the culture of the present day, astonishing as a fact, and profoundly interesting as a study, is the culture of an age which is harassed by perplexity, and haunted with a sense of its own ignorance ; an age which knows that it ought to have higher interests, but cannot decide where those higher interests are to be found. We are as the automata of some commercial Magus — a Somebody or other who cries " Peace ! when there is no peace ;" some apostle of expediency, with a name or without a name; some aristocratic or successful spouter, with a mouth of wood, and perhaps a dry nut full of dust for a political heart. We are scarcely freemen.^

1 Among other things said by William Walter Phelps, at a meeting of American physicians and surgeons, the following will bear reading, as strongly applicable to the England of to-day : — " We are a nation without contentment, without rest, without happiness. In a feverish race we pass from the

BETITALITY OF THE TIME. ,5

We are prepared to yield up our opinions to the first newspaper that asks them of us — as Sancho was to surrender himself to the first champion. And these great newspapers — or that which we elect as our chosen one — having grown as the rug to every man's hearth, we believe in it, and yearn towards it, count it as one of our household gods, decline into its arms as our political Dalilah, and permit our mind to take its tone from its felicitations ; nay, from the reveries that linger about it, and are as a sort of atmosphere that we carry about us, giving us, in the newspaper breath, a sort of second life.

Nor is this all. Every man so feels the money pressure upon him, that he cannot convert himself into a politician.

cradle to the grave — successful men to -whom life is a failure. Our boys leave the university when English boys .leave their school. Our merchants leave their trade, retiring to some more dignified or honourable work, as they believe it, at an age when the German merchant first feels the master of his craft. We are always anticipating the future, forcing the task of a whole life into part. Worse, we are not content with doing a year's work in n, month in our calling, but we must do enough in all other callings to win distinction there. In other lands it is enough to be a lawyer, physician, clergyman, merchant. Here we are nobodies imless we fill the sphere of all human occupations. One must be a statesman and know political science as if already in ofifice. He must be an orator, and ready to persuade and instruct ; a wit to shine at a dinner-table, a litUratetir, a critic ! There is too much human nature in man for this to mean anything except a discontented life and a premature death. And the remedy? Correct public opinion. We must honour the man who faithfully does his task, whatever it is. Not the task, but the faithfulness with which it is done, must be the measure of the honour. The men will be content with their father's trade. This will give us that family association which is a sure pledge of good conduct and patriotic love. This will give us too that traditional aptitude which alone gives great mechanical excellence. It will not be a bad time for American manufacturers when we find stamped on their goods what Mr. Griffs finds on Japanese bronzes : ' Done by the ninth bronzer in this family.' Then men will keep the occupation of their youth for life, and, having leisure, will build the foundations broad enough to withstand bankruptcy. Then men will seek excellence in their callings. Then men will alternate labour with rest, and obey the demand of nature.''