And something of this intellectual vengeance pursues also those who adopt the modern method of reporting speeches.  They also become mystical, simply by trying to be vulgar.  They also are condemned to be always trying to write like George R. Sims, and succeeding, in spite of themselves, in writing like Maeterlinck.  That combination of words which I have quoted from an alleged speech of Mr. Bernard Shaw’s was written down by the reporter with the idea that he was being particularly plain and democratic.  But, as a matter of fact, if there is any connection between the two sentences, it must be something as dark as the deepest roots of Browning, or something as invisible as the most airy filaments of Meredith.  To be simple and to be democratic are two very honourable and austere achievements; and it is not given to all the snobs and self-seekers to achieve them.  High above even Maeterlinck or Meredith stand those, like Homer and Milton, whom no one can misunderstand.  And Homer and Milton are not only better poets than Browning (great as he was), but they would also have been very much better journalists than the young men on the Daily Mail.

As it is, however, this misrepresentation of speeches is only a part of a vast journalistic misrepresentation of all life as it is.  Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction.  Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another; the public enjoys both, but it is more or less conscious of the difference.  People do not believe, for instance, that the debates in the House of Commons are as dramatic as they appear in the daily papers.  If they did they would go, not to the daily paper, but to the House of Commons.  The galleries would be crowded every night as they were in the French Revolution; for instead of seeing a printed story for a penny they would be seeing an acted drama for nothing.  But the, people know in their hearts that journalism is a conventional art like any other, that it selects, heightens, and falsifies.  Only its Nemesis is the same as that of other arts:  if it loses all care for truth it loses all form likewise.  The modern who paints too cleverly produces a picture of a cow which might be the earthquake at San Francisco.  And the journalist who reports a speech too cleverly makes it mean nothing at all.

THE WORSHIP OF THE WEALTHY

There has crept, I notice, into our literature and journalism a new way of flattering the wealthy and the great.  In more straightforward times flattery itself was more straight-forward; falsehood itself was more true.  A poor man wishing to please a rich man simply said that he was the wisest, bravest, tallest, strongest, most benevolent and most beautiful of mankind; and as even the rich man probably knew that he wasn’t that, the thing did the less harm.  When courtiers sang the praises of a King they attributed to him things that were entirely improbable,