First Lessons In Journalism

( Originally Published 1912 )

WHEN that little story of mine appeared in all the glory of print, Fame stood at my door, a daughter of the stars in such array that it blinded one to look at her. She has never come near me since, and I have changed my opinion of her: a beguiling minx, with little taste or judgment, and more than her share of feminine lightness and caprice; an unconscionable flirt, that is all she is.

I came to New York, and peeped into the doors of the Tribune, the World, the Times, and the Sun with all the reverence that a Moslem may feel when he beholds Mecca. To me, in my ardour and innocence, journalism was not as I regarded other professions, self-seeking and commercial. I idealized it (I was only seventeen) and attributed to it, the Church's aspiration and endeavour for the betterment of the world. And its power was on a parity with its beneficence. Thackeray's apostrophe to it in "Pendennis" ran in my memory. Notwithstanding my simplicity the power was not lost sight of, nor the humble rank of some of those, like Mr. Doolan, who exercised it :

They were passing through the Strand as they talked, and by a news-paper office, which was all lighted up and bright. Reporters were coming out of the place, or rushing up to it in cabs; there were lamps burning in the editors' rooms, and above, where the compositors were at work, the windows of the building were in a blaze of gas. "Look at that, Pen," Warrington said. "There she is — the great engine — she never sleeps. She has her ambassadors in every quarter of the world, her couriers upon every road. Her officers march along with armies, and her envoys walk into statesmen's cabinets. They are ubiquitous. Yonder journal has an agent at this minute giving bribes at Madrid, and another inspecting the price of potatoes in Covent Garden. Look! here comes the Foreign Express galloping in. They will be able to give the news to Downing Street to-morrow; funds will rise or fall, fortunes be made or lost. Lord B will get up, and holding the paper in his hand, and seeing the noble marquis in his place, will make a great speech; and and Mr. Doolan will be called away from his supper at the Back Kitchen, for he is foreign subeditor, and sees the mail on the newspaper sheet before he goes to his own." And so talking the friends turned into their chambers, as the dawn was beginning to peep.

The "bribery at Madrid" did not blot the picture, as it ought to have done, and enthusiasm deflected the moral sense, as I fear it often can.

I remembered also Trollope's Tom Tower and the Jupiter (a transparent pseudonym for the Times) of which Tom was an editor.

"Is this Mount Olympus?" asks the unbelieving stranger. "Is it from these small, dark, dingy buildings that those infallible laws proceed which cabinets are called upon to obey; by which bishops are to be guided, lords and commons controlled, judges instructed in law, generals in strategy, admirals in naval tactics, and orange-women in the management of their barrows?" "Yes, my friend — from these walls. From here issue the only known infallible bulls for the guidance of British souls and bodies. This little court is the Vatican of England. Here reigns a pope, self-nominated, self-consecrated — aye, and much stranger, too — self-believing! a pope whom, if you cannot obey him I would advise you to disobey as silently as possible; a pope hitherto afraid of no Luther; a pope who manages his own inquisition, who punishes unbelievers as no most skilful inquisitor of Spain ever dreamt of doing — one who can excommunicate thoroughly, fearfully, radically; put you beyond the pale of men's charity; make you odious to your dearest friends, and turn you into a monster to be pointed at by the finger!"

All the papers were then engaged in eager warfare with the Tweed Ring, and their columns were filled with exposures of its plunderings. The Tammany Tiger, glossy and content, sprawled over the city, fatter than it has ever been since, and bolder. Crime and vice flaunted themselves unashamed. No Comstock or Parkhurst had yet tackled them. Unmentionable photographs and books filled windows, and were peddled without secrecy on the street corners to any one who wanted them, either boys or men. Among the shops and banks on Broadway between Broome Street and Astor Place, rows of dives, bearing such names as The Do Drop Inn, were open day and night, and the customers, some of them minors, were waited on by tinselled and painted harridans in stiff ballet skirts. Along the wharves sailors were "Shangaied" under the eyes of public and police, sand-bagged and bundled aboard ships in which they did 'not want to go, and the poor immigrants landing at Castle Garden were fleeced and beaten by those "heelers" of Tammany appointed to protect them. The "lid" was off : in fact, there was no "lid" to the garbage barrel of those days; the average citizen seemed to regard it as a superfluity.

While the public was apathetic the Press flamed with moral and political indignation. Only one paper, I think, stood for Tammany, the Star, edited by Joseph Howard, Jr. The others were independent, and closely allied in their hostility to the common enemy, the Times and the Tribune taking the lead. They Were all dignified, and, dare I say it, less frantic than they are now? The interview had not become the scandalous intrusion, the prying, house-breaking implement which abuse has made it. The word "yellow" had not come into use: it was inapplicable. As its advertisements declared, the Sun "shone for all " except those whom Charles A. Dana did not like. The Times and the Tribune in appearance and in substance could not have been improved. The World, under Manton Marble, was "the gentleman's newspaper, " notable for its wit, its learning, the polish of its style and its badinage. The Evening Post — how could it have been otherwise than good under the editorship of William Cullen Bryant? No other profession seemed to me to be so glorious or as satisfying as that exemplified in the high purposes and clean methods of those journals in the early seventies.

It was in the August of a bounteous year of fruit. The smell of peaches and grapes piled in barrows and barrels, scented the air, as it scents the memory still. The odour of a peach brings back to me all the magic-lantern impressions of a stranger memories of dazzling, dancing, tropical light, bustle, babble, and gayety; they made me feel that I had never been alive before, and the people of the old seaport, active as I had thought them, became in a bewildered retrospect as slow and quiet as snails. But far sweeter to me than the fragrance of peaches were the humid whiffs I breathed from the noisy press rooms in the Park Row basements, the smell of the printers' ink as it was received by the warm, moist rolls of paper in the whirring, clattering presses. There was history in the making, destiny at her loom. Nothing ever expels it: if once a taste for it is acquired, it ties itself up with ineffaceable memories and longings, and even in retirement and changed scenes restores the eagerness and aspirations of the long-passed hour when it first came over us with a sort of intoxication.

I had no introduction and no experience and was prudent enough to foresee the rebuff that would surely follow a climb up the dusky but alluring editorial stairs and an application for employment in so exalted a profession by a boy of seventeen. I decided that I could use more persuasion and gain a point in hiding my youth, which was a menace to me, by writing letters, and. so I plunged through the post on Horace Greeley, on L. J. Jennings, the brilliant, forgotten Englishman who then edited the Times, on Mr. Dana, and on the rest. The astonishing thing of that time, as I look back on it, was my invulnerability to disappointments; I expected them and was prepared for them, and when they came they were as spurs and not as arrows nor as any deadly weapon. They hardly caused a sigh except a sigh of relief from the chafing uncertainties of waiting, and instead of depressing they compelled advances in fresh directions which soon became exhilarating, advances upon which one started with stronger determination and fuller, not lessened, confidence. O heart of Youth ! How unfluttered thy beat ! How invincible thou art in thine own conceit! What gift of heaven or earth can compare with thy supernal faith! "No matter how small the cage the bird will sing, if it has a voice."

Had my letters been thrown into the waste paper basket, after an impatient glance by the recipients, I should not have been surprised or more than a little nettled; but I received answers, not encouraging, from both Horace Greeley and Mr. Dana.

Mr. Jennings was a top-loftical gentleman, like the heavy swell of a Robertsonian comedy, say Captain Hawtree, who wore a monocle, and was very deliberate and cutting in speech and manner. When he appeared, an apparently languid witness, in the prosecution of one of the abounding grafters, the counsel for the defendant asked him what the bundle was which he carried under his arm.

"Guess," drawled Jennings, yawning out of his frame of elegance and disdain.

"Answer my question, sir."

"Well, it might be clean collars and cuffs, and if you press me I may lend some to you, for you need them very badly." He would not be badgered or bullied. The virulence of the counsel did not discompose him in the least; it could not penetrate his immovable mask of hauteur and scorn.

An Olympian like that had, of course, no interest in letters from such an unaccredited and insignificant mortal as I was. Adversity may have softened him later in life, though adversity is seldom emollient: it rubs the wounds with vinegar, not with oil, and embitters instead of sweetening. Let us give him credit for all his splendid service in overthrowing the Tweed Ring. He led in that victory. Soon afterward he returned to his native land and ended his days there in dignified and inconspicuous quiet. I have on my shelves now a book of his, "Field Paths and Green Lanes," one of the best of its kind, a classic in its way, describing country rambles in the neighbourhood of London. A man who can content himself with the simple pleasures of the wayfarer, the beauty of nature, and humours of peasants may stand scathless under reverses and not disquiet himself because he is no longer seen or talked about.

Mr. Greeley was brief and final, but Mr. Dana, writing in his own hand (how friendly it was of him!) qualified an impulse to encourage with a tag for self-protection. "Your letter does you credit," he wrote. Those five words put me on the threshold of my goal.

"Your letter does you credit, and I shall be glad to hear from you again " A door opened, and a flood of light and warmth from behind it enveloped me as in a gown of eiderdown. " I shall be glad to hear from you again three or four years from now!" The door slammed in my face, the gown slipped off and left me with a chill. But I did not accuse Mr. Dana of deliberately hurting me or think that he surmised how a polite evasion of that sort may without forethought be more cruel than the coldest and most abrupt negative.

I went farther afield, despatching my letters to Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Springfield. In Philadelphia there was a little paper called the Day, and this is what its editor wrote to me:

There are several vacancies in the editorial department, but there is one vacancy still worse on the ground floor, and the cashier is its much-harried victim. You might come here, but you would starve to death, and saddle your friends with the expenses of a funeral.

A man with humour enough for that ought to have prospered, and I rejoiced to learn soon afterward that he (I think his name was Cobb) had been saved from his straits by an appointment to the United States Mint!

His jocularity did not shake my faith in the seriousness of journalism. I had not done laughing when I opened another letter written in a fine, crabbed hand like the scratching of a diamond on a window pane, and as I slowly deciphered its contents I could hardly believe what I read. It was from Samuel Bowles the elder, editor of the Springfield Republican, then as now one of the sanest, most respected, and influential papers in the country. He wanted a young man to relieve him of some of his drudgery, and I might come on at once to serve as his private secretary. He did not doubt that I could be useful to him, and he was no less sure that he could be useful to me. Moreover my idea of salary, he said — it was modest, but forty dollars a month — "just fitted his." He was one of the great men of his time when papers were strong or weak, potent in authority or negligible, in proportion to the personality of the individual controlling them. He himself was the Republican, as Mr. Greeley was the Tribune, Mr. Bennett the Herald, Mr. Dana the Sun, Mr. Watterson the Courier-Journal, and Mr. Murat Halstead the Cincinnati Commercial, though, of course, like them, he tacitly hid himself behind the sacred and inviolable screen of anonymity, and none of them exercised greater power over the affairs of the nation than he, out of the centre, did from that charming New England town to which he invited me. The opportunity was worth a premium, such as is paid by apprentices in England for training in ships and in merchants' and lawyers' offices; the salary seemed like the gratuity of a too liberal and chivalric employer, for no fees could procure from any vocational institution so many advantages as were to be freely had in association with him. He instructed and inspired, and if he perceived ability and readiness in his pupil (this was my experience of him), he was as eager to encourage and improve him as any father could be with a son, looking not for the most he could take out of him in return for pay, but for the most he could put into him for his own benefit.

Journalism to him was not the medium of haste, passion, prejudice, and faction. He fully recognized all its responsibilities, and the need of meeting them and respecting them by other than casual, hap-hazard, and slipshod methods. He was an economist of words, with an abhorrence of redundance and irrelevance; not only an economist of words, but also an economist of syllables, choosing always the fewer, and losing nothing of force or precision by that choice. He had what was not less than a passion for brevity. "What," he was asked, "makes a journalist?" and he replied: "A nose for news." But with him the news had to be sifted, verified, and reduced to an essence, not inflated, distorted, and garnished with all the verbal spoils of the reporter's last scamper through the dictionary.

How sedate and prosperous Springfield looked to me when I arrived there on an early spring day ! How clean, orderly, leisurely, and respectable after the untidiness and explosive anarchy of New York! I made for the river, as I always do wherever a river is, and watched it flowing down in the silver-gray light and catching bits of the rain-washed blue sky. The trees had lost the brittleness and sharpness of winter's drawing and their outlines were softening into greenish velvet. In the coverts, arbutus crept out with a hawthorn-like fragrance from patches of lingering snow. The main street leading into the town from the Massasoit House and the station also had an air of repose and dignity as if those who had business in it were not preoccupied by the frenzy for bargains, but had time and the inclination for loitering, politeness, and sociability. That was in 1870, and I fear that Springfield must have lost some of its old-world simplicity and leisureliness since then. I regret that I have never been in it since, though I have passed through it hundreds of times.

The office of the Republican was in keeping with its environment, an edifice of stone or brick not more than three or four stories high, neat, uncrowded, and quiet; very different from the newspaper offices of Park Row, with their hustle, litter, dust, and noise. I met no one on my way upstairs to the editorial rooms, and quaked at the oppressive solemnity and detachment of it. I wondered if people were observing me from the street and thought how much impressed they would be if they divined the importance of the person they were looking at, possibly another Tom Tower. The vanity of youth is in the same measure as its valour; withdraw one, and the other droops.

"Now," said Mr. Bowles sharply, after a brusque greeting, "we'll see what you can do."

I was dubious of him in that first encounter. He was crisp and quick in manner, clear-skinned, very spruce, and clear-eyed; his eyes appraised you in a glance.

"Take that and see how short you can make it."

He handed me a column from one of the "exchanges," as the copies of other papers are called. I spent half an hour at it, striking out repetitions and superfluous adjectives and knitting long sentences into brief ones. Condensation is a fine thing, as Charles Reade once said, and to know how to condense judiciously, to get all the juice, without any of the rind or pulp, is as important to the journalist as a knowledge of anatomy to the figure painter.

I went over it a second time before I handed it back to him as the best I could do. I had plucked the fatted column to a lean quarter of that length, yet I trembled and sweated.

"Bah!" he cried, scoring it with a pencil, which sped as dexterously as a surgeon's knife. "Read it now. Have I omitted anything essential?"

He had not; only the verbiage had gone. All that was worthy of preservation remained in what the printer calls a "stickful. " That was my first lesson in journalism.

Attempts are often made to define the difference between journalism and literature without more than an approach to a generally satisfactory conclusion. "Literature in a hurry" has the impact of an epigram, but it is based on a false premise. Literature in the true sense is never in a hurry : it is leisurely and discursive; an art of the temperament, of the spirit, and of the finer senses; the evidence of things not seen, interpreting itself now playfully by indirection, like a sprite, now in the full value of picked words of unexpected and individual illumination. Journalism, on the contrary, must always be, or should be, in a white heat of energy and precipitancy, catching things as they fly, not decorating them or fondling them in rhetoric or musing on them as literature may, but seizing them with breathless expedition. It should be limited to matters of fact and should not be expansive and imaginative, but concrete and concise, a process of elision and enucleation, and that is how, I am pretty sure, Mr. Bowles took it. What a relief it would be if his view of it prevailed in all news-paper offices !

That word "enucleation" may be unfamiliar to some readers. I discovered it by chance after I had become an editor myself. Usually you say to your contributor that his article may be used if he will "boil it down," a kitchen phrase lacking both elegance and delicacy. Now I say "enucleate it"; that is, separate the wheat from the chaff, or bring out something, as a kernel, from its enveloping husk or shell. It may drive him to the dictionary, but then he cannot fail to acknowledge its aptness. I was so elated by my discovery that I crowed over it to a medical friend.

"One of the commonest words in the profession; we are constantly using it," he said loftily, with an air of condescension. "You literary fellows, editors included, know less than any other people in the world. I always say so. Think of the ignorance of anybody who reaches middle life before he finds out the meaning of a simple and obvious word like that!"

He was jealous. I rejected the next article he sent me. He was always bothering me with articles, and was more vain of one accepted at fifty dollars than of a successful operation for appendicitis, which too easily brought him five hundred.

The ice of Mr. Bowles was only on the surface. He reminded me of old Adam in "As You Like It" — frosty but kindly. If one flinched at his angles, he melted and grew warm. The months I spent under him were as pleasant as they were profitable. The staff included Frank B. Sanborn (who is still active at eighty), and Charles G. Whiting, the poet. The ship of stars was in full sail. Think how splendid the period was when new novels were issuing from Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Bulwer Lytton! Sanborn, who from 1868 to 1872 was a resident of Spring-field, received advance sheets of "Little Women" from his friend, Miss Alcott, and I read them, behind his back as it were, before he could cut out the extracts he needed to justify the praise he lavished in a many-columned review. "The Story of a Bad Boy," with ali its humour, had just finished its course in Our Young Folks, and it at once put Aldrich on one of the highest pedestals in my pantheon. Week after week instalments of "Edwin Drood" were appearing in Every Saturday, and then, one afternoon, I read with moistened eyes on the bulletin board on the street front, that Charles Dickens was dead. A hush fell over the office and the town. Men and women wept. It was as though each of us had lost the dearest of friends. Never, I suppose, has any other author evoked such grief by his passing.

I was drawn back into the whirlpool; I liked excitement, and returned to New York, a much more eligible person, thanks to Mr. Bowles, than I was when I left it. Whitelaw Reid had become managing editor of the Tribune. I had seen him in Broadway (one saw every-body in Broadway in those days) dark, tall, straight, and handsome, but haughty in bearing; a man not likely to be mistaken for a trifler, irresolute and vague of purpose, or for a renegade to ambition. There was an air of puissance and of assured authority about him, and a glance revealed a martinet. However, he was very kind to me.

"Your letter persuades me," he wrote, "that you are the sort of man I wish to attach to my staff, but there is no vacancy. Still, if you come to New York, I think I can promise you at least enough work to pay your board bill."

I reminded him of that letter when I was lunching with him last summer, at Dorchester House, the palace he has occupied since he became with distinguished success ambassador to the Court of St. James. Time and affluence have mellowed him; velvet-gloved diplomacy has increased his charm: "Think of it, my dear," he said, taking me over to Mrs. Reid, "Mr. Rideing did me the honour to serve with me on the Tribune ten years before we were married!" How could he have been nicer! I am willing to expose my vanity in quoting him.

I was put among a crowd of "space men" employed to help out the regular salaried reporters. At half past ten every morning, all the members of the city department were expected to be present at the office, and at that hour the city editor had made up the "assignment book," in which the reporters found opposite to their names specifications of the duties assigned to them for the day. It was an index to the extraordinary variety that enters into a reporter's life. Not a spot in the city was left uncovered in the search for news.

Those were busy times in New York. The progress of the raid on Tammany filled the papers to the exclusion of other things. There was usually more work than the regular staff could attend to, though it included about thirty salaried reporters, and after they had been sent in every direction there still remained a number of "assignments" for the "outsiders" who were waiting for a chance job.

I waited at the office to see a proof of an article I had written and went home happy on finding that it filled nearly three quarters of a column. Three quarters of a column at ten dollars per column — the price then paid to "outsiders" — would make seven dollars and a half, a good day's work, thought I. But on the next morning I found that, as the pressure on his space had increased, the night editor had been obliged to cut my article down to about ten lines.

I haunted the office early and late, but everything I did was compressed into a meagre paragraph, and at the end of a week my total earnings amounted to less than five dollars. The results of the second week were a little better, and of the third week better still, though not yet enough to pay my expenses, moderate as they were. Before the end of the month, however, I was sent to Norwalk to look up one of the "ring," and through real-estate records and the town officials I discovered proofs of his frauds.

I had just time to catch the Boston express for New York, and, sitting on one trunk in the baggage car, I made a desk of another, and dashed off my article as the train whirled along through the night. I appreciated the value of the facts I had obtained, and knew that I could elaborate them to any extent I pleased. My pencil flew over the paper with a facility of which I had not thought it capable. When we reached Forty-Second Street it was close upon midnight, and no horse-car was visible. I could not afford a hack, so I set off at a run for the office, and never stopped until I dropped my article on the city editor's desk. The next morning the article appeared "double leaded" on the front page; it made a stir, and in the afternoon he came to me and told me that there was a place for me on the regular staff with a salary of twenty-five dollars a week.