s
ashamed to recognise. It may be that when a preacher makes hell real to
him by physical images of fire and torment his conviction will acquire
coercive force. But that force may soon die away as his memory fades,
and even the most vivid description has little effect as compared with a
touch of actual pain. At the theatre, because pure emotion is facile,
three-quarters of the audience may cry, but because second-hand emotion
is shallow, very few of them will be unable to sleep when they get home,
or will even lose their appetite for a late supper. My South African
trooper probably recovered from his tears over 'Our Boys' as soon as
they were shed. The transient and pleasurable quality of the tragic
emotions produced by novel reading is well known. A man may weep over a
novel which he will forget in two or three hours, although the same man
may be made insane, or may have his character changed for life, by
actual experiences which are far less terrible than those of which he
reads, experiences which at the moment may produce neither tears nor any
other obvious nervous effect.

Both those facts are of first-rate political importance in those great
modern communities in which all the events which stimulate political
action reach the voters through newspapers. The emotional appeal of
journalism, even more than that of the stage, is facile because it is
pure, and transitory because it is second-hand. Battles and famines,
murders and the evidence of inquiries into destitution, all are
presented by the journalist in literary form, with a careful selection
of 'telling' detail. Their effect is therefore produced at once, in the
half-hour that follows the middle-class breakfast, or in the longer
interval on the Sunday morning when the workman reads his weekly paper.
But when the paper has been read the emotional effect fades rapidly
away.

Any candidate at an election feels for this reason the strangeness of
the conditions under which what Professor James calls the 'pungent sense
of effective reality,'[9] reaches or fails to reach, mankind, in a
civilisation based upon newspapers. I was walking along the street
during my last election, thinking of the actual issues involved, and
comparing them with the vague fog of journalistic phrases, the
half-conscious impulses of old habit and new suspicion which make up
the atmosphere of electioneering. I came round a street corner upon a
boy of about fifteen returning from work, whose wh