Arnold Bennett
The Selected Works of Arnold Bennett: Essays, Personal Development Books & Articles
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, Mental Efficiency, Self and Self-Management, The Human Machine…
Published by
Books
- Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -
2019 OK Publishing
EAN 4057664559524
Table of Contents
Literary Taste: How to Form It
The Feast of St. Friend: A Christmas Book
Paris Nights and Other Impressions of Places and People
Over There: War Scenes on the Western Front
Books and Persons: Selections from The New Age 1908-1911
Things That Have Interested Me
Journalism For Women
Chapter I. The Secret Significance of Journalism
Chapter II. Imperfections of the Existing Woman-Journalist.
Chapter III. The Roads towards Journalism
Chapter VI. The Outside Contributor
Chapter VII. The Search for Copy
Chapter VIII. The Art of Corresponding with an Editor
Chapter IX. Notes on the Leading Types of Papers
Chapter X. "Woman's Sphere" in Journalism
Chapter I
The Secret Significance of Journalism
For the majority of people the earth is a dull planet.
It is only a Stevenson who can say: "I never remember being bored;" and one may fairly doubt whether even Stevenson uttered truth when he made that extraordinary statement. None of us escapes boredom entirely: some of us, indeed, are bored during the greater part of our lives. The fact is unpalatable, but it is a fact. Each thinks that his existence is surrounded and hemmed in by the Ordinary; that his vocations and pastimes are utterly commonplace; his friends prosaic; even his sorrows sordid. We are (a few will say) colour blind to the rainbow tints of life, and we see everything grey, or perhaps blue. We feel instinctively that if there is such a thing as romance, it contrives to exhibit itself just where we are not. Often we go in search of it (as a man will follow a fire-engine) to the Continent, to the Soudan, to the East End, to the Divorce Court; but the chances are a hundred to one against our finding it. The reason of our failure lies in our firm though unacknowledged conviction that the events we have witnessed, the persons we have known, are ipso facto less romantic, less diverting, than certain other events which we happen not to have witnessed, certain other persons whom we happen not to have known. And such is indubitably the case; for romance, interest, dwell not in the thing seen, but in the eye of the beholder. And so the earth is a dull planet--for the majority.
Yet there are exceptions: the most numerous exceptions are lovers and journalists. A lover is one who deludes himself; a journalist is one who deludes himself and other people. The born journalist comes into the world with the fixed notion that nothing under the sun is uninteresting. He says: "I cannot pass along the street, or cut my finger, or marry, or catch a cold or a fish, or go to church, or perform any act whatever, without being impressed anew by the interestingness of mundane phenomena, and without experiencing a desire to share this impression with my fellow-creatures." His notions about the qualities of mundane phenomena, are, as the majority knows too well, a pathetic, gigantic fallacy, but to him they are real, and he is so possessed by them that he must continually be striving to impart them to the public at large. If he can compel the public, in spite of its instincts, to share his delusions even partially, even for an hour, then he has reached success and he is in the way to grow rich and happy.
* * *
We come to the secret significance of journalism:--
Life (says the public) is dull. But good newspapers are a report of life, and good newspapers are not dull.
Therefore, journalism