XIX. On the Crank and the Cad

WE should naturally think that vulgarity and eccentricity were at opposite extremes; that whatever the vulgarian might do, he would scorn doing anything eccentric; and that whatever the eccentric might do, he would scorn doing anything vulgar. When of the energetic Mr. Bundleton-Brown, who has just bought the shooting from the impecunious Duke, it is first faintly whispered that he is ‘rather common’, it is certainly meant that there are rather too many of him; even by those who know only a few, and wish there were fewer still. But when of Mr. Gurley Wow, the enthusiast who, so far from shooting birds, stands still for days that they may comfortably nest in his hair, when of him it is said that he is ‘rather eccentric’, it serves at least to clear his reputation of the charge of commonness, of dull conventionality, of snobbish acceptation of a uniform suburban etiquette, and all such things. By being a lunatic, he has at least purged himself of the foul stain of being a regular guy. And we should naturally suppose that the regular guy would be equally satisfied with the thought that he was not a lunatic. And yet these two extremes do in fact meet.

They meet in the modern thing called journalism, or the Press, and the cause of the conjunction of contrariness is curious and amusing. It arises out of the combination of two different things: the newspaper looking for customers and the newspaper looking for copy. For the purpose of circulation, it is all to the interest of the newspaper that Mr. Bundleton-Brown should be very common indeed. That is, that there should be a great many of him, and that they should be all approximately alike; that they should all have the same social habits, including the habit of reading the newspaper. It is desirable that they should be regular in their habits, and even in their virtues; as, for example, that Mr. Bundleton-Brown should pay for the newspaper, and not think it funny to snatch it off the newspaper stall and rush in triumph down the street, leaping like a young goat and emitting shrill cries of joy. Mr. Bundleton-Brown is expected to show business enterprise, but not to be enterprising in any direct romantic fashion like that. If he shows enough business enterprise, of the sort that is entirely unromantic, he may at last be rewarded by buying wholesale instead of retail. He who once stopped humbly to ‘buy a newspaper’, with no intention save that of being a newspaper-reader, may some day ‘buy a newspaper’, just as he buys the shooting, in the sense of becoming a newspaper proprietor. In that position he may discover that there is, after all, witness to the fact that mankind wants to be amused and that mankind is still amused, as much as ever it was, with dwarfs and giants, bearded women, and twelve-toed men.

To a certain extent this was equally true of the records of the remote past; and a well-equipped modern newspaper is not much behind a barbaric chronicle or saga of the Dark Ages. They also delighted to record that a child had been born with the head of an elephant, as we to record that a prize Eugenic child is destined to grow up as a Superman. They rejoiced to tell tales of some remote Turkish Sultan who had cut off the noses of all his subjects, just as our newspapers seriously record proposals for general mutilation in the name of morality and science. But there is one little difficulty about it: that, in the ages of faith, the story-tellers were not moralists. They recorded the acts of mad kings or dubious magicians, but they never said they approved of them any more than the manager of a travelling show expresses a moral conviction that all women ought to have beards. The curiosities were exhibited because they were curious. There was never a panic spread in the fair to the effect that the curiosity was contagious. It was never the fashion for women to grow hair on their faces, as it can be the fashion for them to shave it off their heads. The gentleman with twelve toes was not treated as a Superman, whose feet were more beautiful upon the mountains than those of other bearers of good news; he was not regarded as a new and promising evolutionary growth or expanding organism. The curse of the present conjunction between the commonplace spirit in the public and the eccentric nature of the news and notions offered them in the newspaper is that the wildest things are suggested with a savour of serious prophecy; and, above all, that the wildest things are preached to the tamest people. And they are so accustomed to taking what is given them, and so unaccustomed to tasting what is good, that there is a real danger of such nonsense acting like a stimulant on an empty stomach. There is so much that is nonsensical in the daily news-sheet, and so little that is new in the daily life, that there may be a dangerous breach between the unreal and the real. It is not the most commonly discussed of the problems of the Press; but it is one of the most vital, or deadly.