Talcott Williams

“ What is needed for adequate comment on Shakspere, the most English of all figures in the world of letters, is that numberless capacity to see the broad laugh in all things which lies so near to tears that when the coin of fate is flipped no man knows which is to be uppermost. This gives sanity. It enables the editor of a Variorum to know from time to time what a fool a German scholar can make of himself and his author. ”

“ Those who read are directly affected by what is printed as with any printed utterance, but the periodic issue and the consequent array of subscribers or regular readers give newspapers in politics and in other fields a representative character, their influence depending on the fact that what is said expresses the opinion of a great multitude of readers. The skillful editor succeeds in combining leadership in new exigencies and problems with the capacity of expressing the opinion or sentiment that great masses of his readers will feel as new events call for the application of old principles. ”

“ There is in Philadelphia a little group which has dined together just short of four decades every three weeks for eight months of each year. He was of the first that met, and the last of the first to go. To one who began thirty years ago as the youngest of those who sat at this board, and now, alas! finds himself among the elder at a table peopled with the past, nothing so bulks in all the round of a manifold social contact as this dominant figure, alert, awake, clear-visioned, felt through all this gathered group of men. ”

“ Still preserved from custom, an arrangement is now growing up in the United States in which important news, likely to attract buyers, gravitates to the front, and other fields to the rear pages, an arrangement long prevalent in the French boulevard press. As politics is the one subject of universal interest for men, newspapers in all countries tend to ally themselves with one of two political parties, where a bi-partisan organization for the control of an elective government exists. Where, as in European countries, parties are replaced by groups, each has its newspaper. ”

“ A ‘city editor’ directs the reporters in gathering news. A ‘news editor’ keeps in touch with outside correspondents through the telegraph and the telephone. What pours in from the press associations and a paper's own avenues must be thoroughly sifted by ‘copy editors,’ who now throw out far more than they put in. For important news articles there are usually special writers. ‘Exchange editors’ read other periodicals with scissors in hand, clipping what they think will interest the public. Comment on the news of the day is in the hands of a trained corps of editorial writers. ”

“ Electricity is displacing steam. The automobile has been pressed into service for getting newspapers on the street; and for wider circulation special trains are employed.
No observer can fail to notice that under the new régime, where the editor-in-chief counts for less, the press of the United States is becoming less personal and more and more independent. True, nearly all American papers are the voice of some party, but they are not its slaves. ”

“ For forty years he sat at a desk and worked to make books from books on a book. In all our American life there is no other, few in any land, who so encysted himself in a task wholly of letters. There goes with this for most, as all know, the bent figure, the absent-minded or the self-conscious gaze, aloofness from the actual. ”

“ How wise to know your friends in your forties, and to gather them and to be with them to the very threshold of the eighties! How far wiser than the wandering way in which, like children, we fill our hands so full that we can neither use, nor give, nor leave, nor enjoy! ”

“ American universities of over 1000 students usually support a daily. The city daily necessarily covers four fields: (a) the events of the place in which it is published; (b) events without; (c) opinion, usually given on a separate page, known as the editorial page; (d) the quotation of stock, cereal, and other exchanges, and advertisements. To these are added combined criticism and record, in special articles and correspondence on special fields, as politics, sports, theatre, letters, education, etc. Usually the earlier pages of a newspaper open with news from without and pass to local news. ”

“ Nothing saves a man from this but personality. The first great tonic is humor. Dr. Furness, man and work together, brim with it. Who else would have made a merry mark of the one word in Shakspere—in The Tempest, 'young scamels from the rock'—for which no one has ever suggested a convincing or even plausible meaning? The humor needed to salt these barrels and barrels of Shaksperian pemmican is much more than the capacity to see a joke. ”

“ Special postal privileges in the United States—a rate of one cent a pound, paid in bulk, or one-eighth that for books, one-sixteenth that for merchandise, and one-thirty-second that for letters—and in other countries press laws have led to many judicial and administrative decisions which unite in defining a periodical as earmarked by recurrent publication and a subscription list made in good faith, and the newspaper as published at least once a week. ”

“ Public Opinion presents a résumé of current thought. New York still leads the American press. But what has been said of her journals is largely true of Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Chicago, Saint Louis, and San Francisco. And from certain other cities, sometimes small, are issued newspapers which have gained a national reputation. Such are the Springfield Republican, the Detroit Free Press, the Louisville Courier-Journal, and the New Orleans Picayune. The last years of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of the Sunday issue of the great dailies. ”

“ It is the odd blunder of a dull world that social buoyancy and the notable mind seldom march together; but, as an acute thinker has said, a man with a strong pair of legs can walk east as easily as he walks west, and our great Shaksperian had all the mirth that rang under the rafters of the Mermaid. He made the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard. He was the dancer of his year and led in the play of more than sixty years ago. ”

“ The Associated Press of the United States dates from 1849. Though these serve for the smaller papers, they are to the larger papers only hints to be followed up by their own agents. The telegraph, indispensable for gathering news, has been reënforced by the telephone, which is now finding its way into every village. These new sources for obtaining news have revolutionized the office. The editor who personally superintended the issue of his paper is of the past. There can never be another Greeley or Dana. The editor-in-chief of certain papers finds no time even to write a leader. ”

“ Mere industry can do much, but mere industry could never build the monument of these volumes. I confess I never look at the impressive row without amazement at the labor for which they stand. It would be much, if this were all. Long labor of this order grinds like a glacier over a writer's style and individuality. Textual criticism saps men. ”

“ When the changes in paper manufacture at the close of the eighteenth century and in the bed-plate of a press at the beginning of the nineteenth century through the application of power to printing enlarged the sheets and altered their limit, the newspaper began to be folded for the weekly to a square octavo, and enlarged for the daily to a large ‘blanket’ sheet. ”

“ Though there were earlier sheets published at irregular intervals, the first Spanish newspaper seems to date only from the eighteenth century. Even for some time after 1800 Madrid had only its Diario. Indeed, the press in Spain had a hard career till the Revolution of 1854. Dailies in all the chief cities are now numerous. Madrid has about twenty, among which are the Imparcial and the Correspondencia de España. Among the Madrid illustrated weeklies are the Correspondencia Illustrada and the Illustracion Española y Americana. From the American standpoint, the news in Spanish papers is meagre. ”

“ His beam will stand sure and he will 'poise the cause in justice' equal scales.' There are scholars whose lives are given to the great in letters who become surfeited with honey and 'in the taste confound the appetite.' Nothing saves from this but the incommunicable capacity for the perception of the best. ”

“ The journalism of the Revolution, when for newspaper purposes no common communication existed between colonial centres, was limited in influence and circulation to the place and region in which each paper was published, and even the New York Journal, in which the Federalist appeared, had small influence outside of New York City. ”

“ NLY a great man can accomplish a great task. For fifteen of Shakspere's most familiar plays, Horace Howard Furness condensed the criticism of three centuries for each play in a single volume, save Hamlet, which has two. [1] From 6000 to 8000 works have been published on Shakspere. All on each play is brought within the compass of its volume. Who holds this volume holds the fruits of all past criticism and comment on the play. ”

“ After arrangements were made whereby it could be furnished throughout France at the same price, its daily issue rapidly increased till it reached a million. French newspapers contain less news than the English or the American. Space is thus found for the feuilleton, a literary essay, sketch, or short story, an indispensable feature of the French journal. Paris is famous for her weeklies devoted to art, fashion, literature, and the professions. Outside of Paris, the larger towns support several dailies. ”

“ Newspapers, by periodic appearance, divide sharply into weekly (usually devoted to a special field, social, political, literary, the general weekly being the exception) and daily. The special daily is the exception, the world's four largest capitals and some American lesser cities having dailies devoted exclusively to the stock market or sports. ”

“ This capacity grows by what it feeds upon. Through these volumes there has grown certainty of touch and serenity of judgment, but from the first issue there was apparent, as in the man, the norm which is not to be corrupted even by the Elizabethan extravagance of the greatest of Elizabethans.
Dr. Furness came to his life task through the Kemble tradition. ”

“ Now a daily without illustration is rare. American humor finds expression in Puck, Judge, and Life; criticism in the Nation, in many other weeklies, and in the Saturday or Sunday editions of the dailies. The Times publishes a Saturday supplement composed wholly of book reviews and literary comment. Among religious journals, which often include literary criticism, are the Observer (Presbyterian) ”

“ New York has found indispensable a few dailies and numerous weeklies devoted to finance and each important branch of trade. Such are: the Financial News (daily) ; the Journal of Commerce (daily) ; Bradstreet's; the Iron Age, etc. Each department of knowledge and each profession also has its weekly. Of the many illustrated journals Harper's Weekly is the oldest. ”

“ The nineteenth century type of the weekly review was set by Leigh Hunt in the Examiner (1808) , which combined literature and politics. Under its first editor and Albany Fonblanque (q.v.) , it had a brilliant career, as an exponent of current radicalism. The Athenæum (1828) confines itself to literature, art, and music. Though it has had many rivals, it is to-day one of the most trustworthy reviews in the world. The Academy (1869) is similar in design, but runs more to literary gossip. The Saturday Review (1855) , once the most solid, is now the ‘smartest’ of English weeklies. ”

“ It was in Philadelphia that Wordsworth was first appreciated at his full value by an American. It was there that Coleridge was first printed. There, in a commonwealth for two centuries nearer Germany than any other American state, German translation began. William Henry Furness early addressed himself to this field. His daughter, Mrs. Annis Lee Wister, continued the task through thirty years, her last work appearing in a volume of her brother's Variorum series. Where other commentators in our tongue, in either home of our race, have looked to English comment, Dr. ”

“ The history of journalism in Australia is scattered with failures from 1810 to 1860. But to-day the dailies and weeklies of large circulation are numerous. Though the press has been established in the small towns, the great journalistic centres are Melbourne and Sydney; and next to them, Adelaide and Brisbane. We may cite for Melbourne, the Argus, the Age, and the numerous journals devoted to building, mining, stock-raising, and shipping ”