it attacks on the ground that it is very
sensational, very violent and vulgar and startling. I am speaking in no
affected contrariety, but in the simplicity of a genuine personal
impression, when I say that this journalism offends as being not
sensational or violent enough. The real vice is not that it is
startling, but that it is quite insupportably tame. The whole object is
to keep carefully along a certain level of the expected and the
commonplace; it may be low, but it must take care also to be flat.
Never by any chance in it is there any of that real plebeian pungency
which can be heard from the ordinary cabman in the ordinary street. We
have heard of a certain standard of decorum which demands that things
should be funny without being vulgar, but the standard of this decorum
demands that if things are vulgar they shall be vulgar without being
funny. This journalism does not merely fail to exaggerate life--it
positively underrates it; and it has to do so because it is intended
for the faint and languid recreation of men whom the fierceness of
modern life has fatigued. This press is not the yellow press at all; it
is the drab press. Sir Alfred Harmsworth must not address to the tired
clerk any observation more witty than the tired clerk might be able to
address to Sir Alfred Harmsworth. It must not expose anybody (anybody
who is powerful, that is), it must not offend anybody, it must not even
please anybody, too much. A general vague idea that in spite of all
this, our yellow press is sensational, arises from such external
accidents as large type or lurid headlines. It is quite true that these
editors print everything they possibly can in large capital letters.
But they do this, not because it is startling, but because it is
soothing. To people wholly weary or partly drunk in a dimly lighted
train, it is a simplification and a comfort to have things presented in
this vast and obvious manner. The editors use this gigantic alphabet in
dealing with their readers, for exactly the same reason that parents
and governesses use a similar gigantic alphabet in teaching children to
spell. The nursery authorities do not use an A as big as a horseshoe in
order to make the child jump; on the contrary, they use it to put the
child at his ease, to make things smoother and more evident. Of the
same character is the dim and quiet dame school which Sir Alfred
Harmsworth and Mr. Pearson keep. All their sentiments are
spelling-bo