A Journalist's Note-Book. Frank Frankfort Moore
“Is it possible,” he asked, “that you do not perceive how strong an argument this incident furnishes in favour of our Church’s claim to the Apostolic succession of her bishops?”
I shook my head.
“St. Peter was a Jew,” said the meek chaplain.
Another of the casual ward of editors who appears on the tablets of my memory was a gentleman who came from Wales—and a large number of other places. He had a rooted objection to write anything new; but he was the best literary tinker I ever met. In Spitzhagen’s story, “Sturmfluth,” there is a most amusing account of the sculptor who made the statues of distinguished Abstractions, which he had carved in his young days, do duty for memorial commissions of lately-departed heroes. A bust of Homer he had no difficulty in transforming into one of Germania weeping for her sons killed in the war, and so forth. The sculptor’s talent was the same as that of the editor. He had the draft of about fifty articles, and three obituary notices. These he managed to tinker up, chipping a bit off here and there, and giving prominence to other portions, until his purpose of the moment was served. I have seen him turn an article that purported to show the absurdity of free trade, into an attack upon the Irish policy of the Government; and in the twinkling of an eye upon another occasion he made one on the Panama swindle do duty for one on the compulsory rescue of Emin by Stanley. With only a change of a line or, two, the obituary notice of Gambetta was that which he had used for Garibaldi; and yet when the Emperor Frederick died, it was the same article that was furbished up for the occasion. Every local medical man who died was dealt with in the appreciative article which he had written some years before on the death of Sir William Gull; and the influence of the career of every just deceased local philanthropist was described in the words (slightly altered to suit topography) that had been written for the Earl of Shaftesbury.
It was really little short of marvellous how this system worked. It was a tinker’s triumph.
I must supplement my recollections of these worthies by a few lines regarding a man of the same type who, I believe, never put pen to paper without being guilty of some extraordinary error. A high compliment was paid to me, I felt, when I had assigned to me, as part of my duties, the reading of his proof sheets nightly. In everyone that I ever read I found some monstrous mistake; and as he was old enough to be my grandfather, and extremely sensitive besides, I was completely exhausted by my expenditure of tact in pointing out to him what I called his “little inaccuracies.” One night he laid his proof sheet before me, saying triumphantly, “You’ll not find any of the usual slips in that, I’m thinking. I’ve managed to write one leader correct at last.”
I read the thing he had written. It referred to a letter which Mr. Bence Jones had contributed to The Times on the subject of the Irish Land League Agitation. After commenting on this letter, he wound up by saying that Mr. Bence Jones had proved himself to be as practical an agriculturalist as he was an expert painter.
“Are you certain that Bence Jones is a painter?” I asked.
“As certain as I can be of anything,” was the reply. “I’ve seen his work referred to dozens of times. I believe there’s a picture of his in the Grosvenor Gallery this very year. I thought you knew all about contemporary art,” he added, with a sneer.
“Art is long,” said I, searching for a Grosvenor Gallery catalogue, which I knew I had thrown among my books. “Now, will you just turn up the picture you say you saw noticed, and I’ll admit that you know more than I do?”
I handed him the catalogue. He adjusted his spectacles, looked at the index, gave a triumphant “Ha! I have you now,” and forthwith turned up “The Golden Stair,” by E. Burne Jones.
CHAPTER V.—THE SUB-EDITORS.
The old and the new—The scissors and paste auxiliaries—A night’s work—“A dorg’s life”—How to communicate with the third floor—A modern man in the old days—His migration—Other migrants—Some provincial correspondents—Forgetful of a Town Councillor—The Plymouth Brother as a sub-editor—A vocal effort—“Summary” justice—Place aux Dames—A ghost story—Suggestions of the Crystal Palace—The presentation.
IT would give me no difficulty to write a book about sub-editors with illustrations from those whom I have met. It is, perhaps, in this department of a newspaper office that the change from the old regime is most apparent. The young sub-editors are frequently graduates of universities; but, in spite of this, most of them are well abreast of French and German as well as English literature. They bear out my contention, that journalism is beginning to be taken seriously. The new men have chosen journalism as their profession; they have not, as was the case with the men of a past age, merely drifted into journalism because they were failures in banks, in tailors’ shops, in the drapery line, and even in the tobacco business—one in which failure is almost impossible.
I have met in the old days with specimens of such men—men who fancied, and who got their employers to fancy also, that because they had failed in occupations that demanded the exercise of no intellectual powers for success, they were bound to succeed in something that they termed “a literary calling.” They did not succeed as a rule. They glanced over their column or two of telegraphic news—in those days few provincial papers contained more than a double column of telegrams—they glanced through the country correspondence and corrected such mistakes in grammar as they were able to detect: it was with the scissors and paste, however, that their most striking intellectual work was done. In this department the brilliancy of the old sub-editor’s genius had a chance of being displayed. It coruscated, so to speak, on the rim of the paste pot, and played upon the business angle of the scissors, as the St. Elmo’s light gleams on the yard-arms.
“Ah!” said one of them to me, with a glow of proper pride upon his face, as he ran the closed scissors between the pages of the Globe. “Ah, it’s only when it comes to a question of cutting out that your true sub-editor reveals himself.”
And he forthwith annexed the “turn-over,” without so much as acquainting himself with the nature of the column.
“Do you never read the thing before you cut it out?” I inquired timidly.
He smiled the smile of the professor at the innocent question of a tyro.
“Not likely, young fellow,” he replied. “It’s bad enough to have to read all the cuttings when they appear in our next issue, without reading them beforehand.”
“Then how do you know whether or not the thing that you cut out is suitable for the paper?” I asked.
“That’s where the instinct of your true subeditor comes in,” said he. “I put in the point of the scissors mechanically and the right thing is sure to come between the blades.”
In a few minutes he had about thirty columns of cuttings ready for the foreman printer.
I began to feel that I had never done full justice to the sub-editor or the truffle hunter.
I have said that in those old days not more than two columns of wired news ever came to any provincial paper—The Scotsman, the Glasgow Herald, and a Liverpool and Manchester organ excepted. The private wire had not yet been heard of. In the present day, however, I have seen as many as sixteen columns of telegraphic news in a very ordinary provincial paper. I myself have come into my office at ten o’clock to find a speech in “flimsy,” of four columns in length, on some burning question of the moment. I have read through all this matter, and placing it in the printers’ hands by eleven, I have written a column of comment (about one thousand eight hundred words), read a proof of this column and started for home at half-past one. I may mention that while waiting for the last slips of my proof, I also made myself aware of the contents of the Times, the Telegraph,