THE MYSTERY OF THE PRESS.
R. CHAMBERLAIN'S amusing speech at 13irmingham on; Saturday, on"the modern Press and modern Journal- ism, brings out very effectively the ill-defined homage to which the Press has succeeded in most civilised countries in place of the angry suspicion and irritability which it used to excite so long as its power was more of a novelty and less universally con- ceded. The maxim Omne ignotum pro magnifico is hardly true. At all events, new unknown agencies are quite as likely to excite surprise and vexation as to inspire homage. It is not till their power, though still a mystery, is pretty generally acknowledged, that the shadows which they oast appear to lengthen and to play with impressive and exaggerated effect upon the imagination of the public. The odd thing is that the stories we are always hearing, and of which Mr. Cham- berlain himself told two with very great humour, as to the sham grandiosities of the Press, never seem to undeceive the public or even to cheapen or neutralise its influence. The American editor who had spoken of a local celebrity as hanged for horse-stealing, and who, when assured by the gentleman in person who ought to have been a corpse, that nothing of the sort had befallen him, replied, " Well, we cannot retract, we never do ; but we don't mind saying that the rope broke, and that you escaped with a slight contusion,"—is only a happy caricature of that inflated affectation of omniscience which besets a great part of the European Press. Yet people who have seen that affectation of omniscience confronted a hundred times with its blunders, still go on doing a sort of obeisance to the mystery in which the Press is wrapped, and sometimes almost seem to think that there is a sort of histrionic decency in ignoring the plain evidence of facts, and meeting defeat with the mere oracular retort that that is so much the worse for the facts.' If the Press likes to impersonate Tennyson's mighty Shadow who "keeps the key of all the creeds," the public like the solemn fiction almost better than the Press, and more or less encourage the make-believe of the journalist. There is something profoundly histrionic about popular taste. And whenever there is some shadowy veil in- terposed, like " the Minister's black veil " in Hawthorne's remarkable story, between the language they read and the oracle that utters it, they do not like to have that veil removed. They would rather live on in a sort of con- sciously chosen twilight than be coarsely forced to believe that there is no mystery in the matter. " Populus vult decipi " applies to a large number of even fairly-educated men. They take no pleasure in having veils stripped from the counten- ances of those to whom they attach a sort of dubious but mysterious authority. The mystery of the Press is one of the modern world's spurious substitutes for a religion. One of the principal of our popular organs is said to enforce upon its writers the duty of writing "plain common- sense in an inflated style." The plain common-sense produces willingness to believe, while the inflated style gives it an air of authority and mystery which it would not otherwise command. That elevates the plain common-sense into a sort of religion made easy. Any one can accept plain common-sense without a qualm, and yet, in order to be able to attach to it a factitious im- portance, it must be enveloped in some non-conducting intel- lectual medium which, by obstructing its easy access to the mind, lends it an air of paradox and dignity. To mingle an im- pressive illusion with what it is easy to believe, is one of the great arts of those who write for any but the most sincere, keen, and practised intellects. The ordinary reader loves to be a little hypnotised at the same time that his own convictions are em- bodied in what is said, in order that he may not only find it easy to accept what he reads, but to attach to it a higher authority and associate it with a more impressive manner than any with which he could himself have managed to invest it. To find your own thoughts dropping on you from the clouds, with all that air of benignity which belongs to Heaven-born agencies such as these, gives them a new character and value suoh as they never had before. The true reason why the Press loves to pretend to a sort of imaginary infallibility, is that the people themselves admire the sort of spurious dignity which the manner of the Jupiter confers. Anthony Trollope, who understood the English middle-class perfectly well, never drew a more perfect sketch than that of Tom Towers, the editor of the Jupiter, with his grandiose airs and that half-unreal manner of inflated self-confidence of which Mr. Chamberlain's American editor, who proposes to engraft a new lie upon the old rather than withdraw anything, is but a very humorous and impudent caricature. In England, our people are not so fond of bare- faced assumption as the Yankees,—whose sense of humour is considerably larger ; but most of us like to be bewildered and impressed by an air of dictatorial finality. The cloudy imperiousness which lays down the law in our own sense, but with ten times our own confidence of assertion, reassures our self-distrust as well as echoes our common- place judgments. We are confirmed in our own judgment when we hear it rolled out in Tom Towers's big and bom- bastic style.
Of course, all that is due, not to education, but to the want of education, to the imperfect self-knowledge which is ren- dered more confident instead of more diffident by the use of large, vague, ill-defined phraseology. It is the confused element in democratic conviction which craves the stimulus of this big bow-wow manner. When it becomes as brazen and self-conscious, as in the Yankee : " We air a great people, Sir, and we like to be cracked up," it is already getting beyond the democratic point and reaching the blatant point at which it cannot long survive its own secret contempt. But, as Mr. Chamberlain noted, there is a certain popular satis- faction felt in seeing honours heaped on organs of public opinion, which the democracy do not feel in the reward of mere political services. A Minister must offend many people as well as please many people before he becomes a popular character. He exercises authority. He not only gratifies some, but he irritates others. But the great organs of the Press have not excited nearly so much of this acrid feeling. They represent a certain magisterial power which has soothed the diffidence and doubt of many a reader, without, perhaps, seriously annoying any one,—for public opinion naturally seeks the organ with which it agrees, and respectfully ignores that with which it is apt to disagree. Many a politician murmurs when he sees a well-known partisan on the opposite side raised to great honour, placed in the Cabinet, or rewarded with a baronetcy. But when he only sees a clever writer on the opposite side so distinguished, he has no such sense of being worsted. He only sees in it the natural and harmless come- quence of the cleverness which reassures his opponents, as he is conscious of having been himself reassured by the bold Roman hand of his own scribes. It does not excite his jealousy to see the esteem in which the popular advocates of his opponents' politics are held, as it does to see the esteem in which they themselves are held. On the contrary, it gratifies him to impute their party success rather to the sleight-of- hand of their chief writers than to the intrinsic strength of their cause. After all, there is an impersonal mystery about the Press, which enables a man to think that it impresses him when he agrees with it only because his own view is so adequately stated, but which enables him, also, to ascribe its power, when he disagrees with it, to the skill with which the weak points have been concealed, and the strong points brought out into relief. Whether the Press is with him or against him, he feels no jealousy of its influence. You cannot be jealous of a moral atmosphere, whether it presses as you wish it to press, or whether it gives an imaginary plausibility to mistaken views. The "very clever fellow" who "found their reasons" for the opposite party, does almost as much to soothe the pride of the party who were not converted by him, as to persuade his own party that they were as clever as he. To the foe he seems to excuse and explain the obstinacy of their antagonists. To his friends he appears to deserve patronage for having expressed with some lucidity their own thoughts.
But after all, the mystery of the Press is not all of the less honourable kind,—the kind which magnifies the dimensions of our knowledge and conceals our consciousness of ignorance. There is also a real mystery in that sensitiveness to the various crossing currents of popular opinion, and in that power to comprehend and take account of all of them in the general expression and compression of wide-spread convictions, which the greater publicists display. And, indeed, it is a mysterious kind of power, for which we do not believe that even the few who possess it could themselves, in any adequate way, account. It is not the highest form of intellectual power; for those who possess it even in a very remarkable degree, do not always show any remarkable power of guiding and correcting the public opinion which they have so singular a genius for gauging and expressing. But it is a power just of that same intuitive and unconscious kind which gives his power to the great actor, the great orator, and the great cross- examiner,—a power of the origin and actual secrets of which even those who exert it are quite unable to give any coherent explanation. This is the honourable side of the mystery of the Press. But there is nothing honourable,—on the con- trary, there is much which is the reverse of honourable,—in magnifying the mystery into mystification July in order to administer a sedative to the self-distrust of ordinary people, and so to hypnotise them into a false satisfaction with their own opinions.
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