AMERICAN JOURNALISM.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 43, 24 October 1891, Page 511

AMERICAN JOURNALISM.

America has always been the home of large gooseberries and mares’ nests. Never since Columbus has it ceased to make discoveries ten fold more wonderful than itself. One of its most pleasing inventions is American journalese. So admirably fitted is this form of literary vice to corrupt the taste and secure the pence of the democracy, that under the auspices of certain earnest Radicals, who despise gain and revere the People, it has flourished triumphantly in the British Isles. Englishmen have smiled at its vulgarity, have welcomed its Hash headlines and brief paragraphs, as so many labour saving machines; but they have not yet exalted it as a model for all time. It has been reserved for a certain Professor of English literature who hails from Columbia, U.S.A., to declare that the perfection of real style is to be sought in the American newspapers. Hobbes and Milton, Addison and Steele, Swift, Gibbon, and Matthew Arnold, even the peerless Mr Howells himself, whois a ‘stylist'or nothing, have lived in vain. Their bucket has never been dipped in the well of English undefiled. The American editor alone possesses the secret of ‘real style.’ You may not look for nervous and expressive English beyond the limit of ‘ These States.’ The * Active art ’ of America has its champions, and it has long been an established fact that the only straight road to immortality lies through the American magazine. But neither the novel nor the ‘ profusely illustrated ’ article absorbs Columbia’s choicest spirits. Even the sermon handled by such pulpiteering mountebanks as Ward Beecher himself, must yield in ‘sharpness and rapidity ’ to the ‘ editorial.’ There is in fact ‘no body of written English so strong and effective, or even so correct and, in the true sense, classical in point of style, as we find day after day in the best editorial writing of our American newspapers.’ This is a marvellous pronouncement, and it is the best possible proof that the only prospect for a democracy is blank, irremediable degradation. The mob called Ameri can journalese into being ; the mob applauded its vulgar acuity, and mistook its virulent insolence for wit. And so completely does the mob dominate even the seats of learning that you find a professor truckling so meanly to the free and ignorant citizen that he can describe as classical the very worst English that ever was penned.— National Observer.