第29章 THE REAL JOURNALIST(1)

Our age which has boasted of realism will fail chiefly through lack of reality.Never,I fancy,has there been so grave and startling a divorce between the real way a thing is done and the look of it when it is done.

I take the nearest and most topical instance to hand a newspaper.

Nothing looks more neat and regular than a newspaper,with its parallel columns,its mechanical printing,its detailed facts and figures,its responsible,polysyllabic leading articles.Nothing,as a matter of fact,goes every night through more agonies of adventure,more hairbreadth escapes,desperate expedients,crucial councils,random compromises,or barely averted catastrophes.Seen from the outside,it seems to come round as automatically as the clock and as silently as the dawn.Seen from the inside,it gives all its organisers a gasp of relief every morning to see that it has come out at all;that it has come out without the leading article upside down or the Pope congratulated on discovering the North Pole.

I will give an instance (merely to illustrate my thesis of unreality)from the paper that I know best.Here is a simple story,a little episode in the life of a journalist,which may be amusing and instructive:

the tale of how I made a great mistake in quotation.There are really two stories:the story as seen from the outside,by a man reading the paper;and the story seen from the inside,by the journalists shouting and telephoning and taking notes in shorthand through the night.

This is the outside story;and it reads like a dreadful quarrel.The notorious G.K.Chesterton,a reactionary Torquemada whose one gloomy pleasure was in the defence of orthodoxy and the pursuit of heretics,long calculated and at last launched a denunciation of a brilliant leader of the New Theology which he hated with all the furnace of his fanatic soul.In this document Chesterton darkly,deliberately,and not having the fear of God before his eyes,asserted that Shakespeare wrote the line "that wreathes its old fantastic roots so high."This he said because he had been kept in ignorance by Priests;or,perhaps,because he thought craftily that none of his dupes could discover a curious and forgotten rhyme called 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard'.Anyhow,that orthodox gentleman made a howling error;and received some twentyfive letters and post-cards from kind correspondents who pointed out the mistake.

But the odd thing is that scarcely any of them could conceive that it was a mistake.The first wrote in the tone of one wearied of epigrams,and cried,"What is the joke NOW?"Another professed (and practised,for all I know,God help him)that he had read through all Shakespeare and failed to find the line.A third wrote in a sort of moral distress,asking,as in confidence,if Gray was really a plagiarist.They were a noble collection;but they all subtly assumed an element of leisure and exactitude in the recipient's profession and character which is far from the truth.Let us pass on to the next act of the external tragedy.

In Monday's issue of the same paper appeared a letter from the same culprit.He ingenuously confessed that the line did not belong to Shakespeare,but to a poet whom he called Grey.Which was another cropper--or whopper.This strange and illiterate outbreak was printed by the editor with the justly scornful title,"Mr.Chesterton 'Explains'?"Any man reading the paper at breakfast saw at once the meaning of the sarcastic quotation marks.They meant,of course,"Here is a man who doesn't know Gray from Shakespeare;he tries to patch it up and he can't even spell Gray.And that is what he calls an Explanation."That is the perfectly natural inference of the reader from the letter,the mistake,and the headline--as seen from the outside.The falsehood was serious;the editorial rebuke was serious.The stern editor and the sombre,baffled contributor confront each other as the curtain falls.

And now I will tell you exactly what really happened.It is honestly rather amusing;it is a story of what journals and journalists really are.