Part 1

Chapter 13,744 wordsPublic domain

_Religio Journalistici_

OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

_Fiction_

PARNASSUS ON WHEELS THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP KATHLEEN TALES FROM A ROLLTOP DESK WHERE THE BLUE BEGINS

_Essays_

SHANDYGAFF MINCE PIE PIPEFULS PLUM PUDDING TRAVELS IN PHILADELPHIA THE POWDER OF SYMPATHY INWARD HO! RELIGIO JOURNALISTICI

_Poetry_

SONGS FOR A LITTLE HOUSE THE ROCKING HORSE HIDE AND SEEK CHIMNEYSMOKE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CHINESE PARSONS’ PLEASURE THE BOWLING GREEN

_Religio Journalistici_

_By_

_Christopher Morley_

_Garden City_ _New York_ _Doubleday, Page & Company_ _1924_

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

_First Edition_

_Religio Journalistici_

RELIGIO JOURNALISTICI

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall.... I too knitted the old knot of contrariety, Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak, Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant.... Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting, Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word. --Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

The secret thoughts of a man run over all things without shame or blame; which verbal discourse cannot do farther than the judgment shall approve of the time, place, and persons.--Hobbes’s “Leviathan.”

I was coming home from Buffalo in a train delightfully called “The Black Diamond.” I had any number of books in my bag, but my lower instincts were uppermost: I was tired, and pined for the narcosis of newspapers. I asked the porter, also a black diamond, to see if there were any lying around. He brought me a great mass of them: Chicago papers, Buffalo papers, Wilkes-Barre papers. With great happiness I browsed among their cheerful simplicities. From Wilkes-Barre I learned that

Shakespeare’s marvellous plays could never have been written by a dyspeptic. He ate carefully, sensibly, and had excellent digestion.

(I had just come back from the dining car when I read that, and wondered a little sadly if I had been sensible.)

From Chicago (“The World’s Greatest Newspaper”) I learned, in an article on “A Perfume to Suit Your Personality,” that

The vampire had best be sparing in her use of any odour. An oriental bouquet of jasmine, tube rose, cassie, and civet would enhance the individuality of the colourful type. For a perfume combination of this sort when used correctly can create a sensation akin to ecstasy, bringing to the wearer a feeling of tremendous vitality.

But in this Chicago paper I found so much to perpend that I never reached the journals of other cities. I learned in an interview with Lady Diana Manners (“Pressed for Precious Secrets of Pulchritude, She Reveals a Surprising Lack of Them”) that

The life of a newspaper person is not without its recompenses--aside from the weekly stipend. Sometimes it is a hard life--when, say, you scratch and pound upon the old dome, pleading, begging its tenant, Mr. Brain, to give up an idea, and you get in response a loud and hollow echo convincing you he has left for parts unknown!

I learned from Chicago that

The literary life of New York continues to rattle on. And it is a rather grand life: though a number of writers appear to scratch an existence from the soil of Greenwich Village and the purlieus of mean streets, most of the men who write our books live quite comfortably. One meets them every day--a prosperous crew--who lunch cosily at the ---- or at the ---- and not infrequently the ----, then are whisked homeward in shining limousines to put in another hour or so on the manuscript of a new novel.

A few days later, filled with pensive, affectionate, and somewhat irreverent thoughts about the newspaper business, I went uptown to the offices of a very great New York paper--a paper which, as a gatherer of news, though it does not claim the “Greatest” phrase, comes a lot nearer to it than that one in Chicago. A beautiful bronze elevator lifted me gently to the tenth floor, a beautiful bronze attendant took my name politely and asked me to wait until my host emerged from conference. I gazed amazedly into the editorial penetralia, churchly in aspect, with groined ceiling, panelled alcoves, like pews, and lead-veined glass. Very handsome young women came strolling from those shadowy cloisters of opinion. A scholarly-looking young man, with tortoise spectacles, sat under a reredos of books. If not a curate, at least a curator. It all came down upon me with crushing force. How could one chaff this magnificent thing? How could one speak jocularly of The Press? This was all so terribly real, so unmistakably there. I remembered my amazement when I first entered the Curtis Building in Philadelphia. Beside the humble little state house where a nation was founded rises that gigantic cube of Americanization; in more senses than one it is the exact spiritual centre of America. Does it not contain a mosaic glass picture with “over a million pieces”? It has been told, with the jolliest humour, how several of the world’s greatest artists were commissioned, one after another, to create a painting of Plato’s Grove of Academe for that lobby; but they kept on “passing away” before it was done. There is something most quaintly American, I believe, in adoring Plato with a vast painting rather than by listening to what he had to say. At a window on the seventh floor (I think it was the seventh) might have been seen the strong masculine face of the fashion editor of the _Ladies’ Home Journal_ gazing out with a sudden unaccountable nostalgia. The trademarked patroness of the “L. H. J.,” I remembered, was Pallas Athene. Pallas is right, I said to myself, studying that building. This _must_ be a home of literature, the walnut panelling is so fine. This huge bulk, edified from the ribs of a simple, shrewd, courageous, and strangely wistful little man from Maine--surely if the Muse were looking for a comfortable lodging, this is where she would habit?

Sometimes it is with an effort that one must remind oneself, a thing is not necessarily wrong because it is so large.

Well, all that came back to me as I sat waiting in the New York newspaper office. Painful doubts, too, as to whether what I am anxious to say is worth attempt. For it is sure to be misconceived. I am not satirizing anything. These matters are far too serious for mere satire, which is so agreeably easy. No, I am merely attempting to think.

I remembered also how, not long before, it strangely befell me to speak in a large church on a Sunday afternoon. I had not rightly apprehended the situation beforehand: I found that I should have to mount into what the cheerful minister called “the high pulpit.” Sitting behind a thin frondage of palms, and scanning the scene in some frightfulness, I waited my exposure. It was a beautiful church, and there was a large and friendly congregation. In one of the front pews there was even a gentleman with a silk hat. There was music, the thrilling tumult of the organ, a choir, a soprano soloist with a clear and lovely voice. There were prayers, and great words were said. And in the same way that the editorial magnificence of that newspaper office came down upon me from above, so I felt the whole weight and beauty and tradition of Holy Church moulding me and subduing my poor little premeditated ardours. I felt the awful hopelessness of attempting to convey, in those circumstances, my feeble and futile sense of the love and liberty of life. I knew then why Christ preached in the open air. And I knew that the people in those pews, dear friendly people the latchets of whose minds I was not worthy to unloose, desired me to say what was in my heart just as keenly as I desired to say it. Yet it could not, fully, be done. Holy Church was too strong for them as it was for me. I knew then, even in the small, imperfect way I know things, something of the whole history of religions. I knew how the majesty and glamour and noble gravity of institutions and authorities must have lain heavy on the hearts of schismatics and reformers. It is not that those poor brave souls did not love the rote they questioned. But the rote must be kept in its place. I knew then, for the first time, the real dangers of the pulpit. And yet even that polished wood was once alive, growing from earth toward sky.

§2

The world of newspapers and the life of newspaper men are for the most part vulgar, and therefore delightful. I mean vulgar in its exact sense: it is a word neither of praise nor blame, both of which are foreign to philosophy. O thrilling, delicious, childish world! The other day, from a green glade in the country, I telephoned to a newspaper office. “City room, please,” I said. The connection was made, and as the receiver was taken down, I could hear that old adorable hum, the quick patter of typewriters, voices on the copy desk tersely discussing the ingenious minutiæ of the job. No man who has dabbled, ever so amateurishly, in that spirited child’s-play outgrows its irrational and cursèd charm. Over miles of telephone wire that drugging hum came back to my ear, that furious and bewildering pulse of excitement which seems so frantically important and really means so little. O world so happy, so amusing, so generously emotional, so exempt from the penalty of thought! World that deals with quaintly codified and abstracted notions of life! How idle to ask whether newspapers tell the truth! With truth they have little concern. Their trade is in facts; like all prosperous tradesmen they are reasonably conscientious. To belittle newspapers for not telling the truth is as silly as to regard them as training-ground for literature. Literature and journalism rarely overlap.

For the newspaper world, that vast, brightly coloured, contentious, and phantasmagoric picture of life that it evolves for its readers, is mostly a spurious world evolved for hurried and ignorant people. It is a world so happily out of touch with the world of philosophy that when, on rare occasions, the newspapers get wind of the things that philosophers habitually and calmly discuss, it causes a terrible to-do in the headlines. The world of newspaper thinking is almost the last resort of the truly childish in heart. With princely accuracy is it called “the newspaper game.” Children are not friendly to philosophy, nor hostile. They are simply not aware it exists.

And the game of newspapers, which I greatly love, being at heart no philosopher, is enormously important. The prevailing temperament of its players is worth careful study. The mere existence of newspapers is a proof of the religious instinct among men, that passionate interest in one another which implies that we are all gossips together. Gossips are people who have only one relative in common, but that relative the highest possible; namely, God. There is truly some strange analogy between church and press. Whether it is the successful newspaper’s taste for making itself clerical in architecture, or the successful church’s appetite for front-page controversy; whether it is that they both make the cruellest and deadliest of enemies if annoyed; whether it is that the newspaper carries on the medieval church’s lust of persecution; or that they both mobilize for war sooner than any one else; or that both are vehicles of great realities, but vehicles so gorgeously mechanized and ritualed that the passenger has almost been forgotten--whatever the basis of the analogy may be, I am not sure; but I feel it to be there.

Journalism, like every skilled _métier_, tends to become a sort of priesthood. All such professional groups admit with cynical or humorous readiness, inside the circle, truths that it is unmannerly to gossip abroad. But now and then some happy member feels he has absorbed enough hokum to last him for a reasonable lifetime. He has enjoyed, perhaps even profited by, the sharp childishness of that way of life. He escapes for a time, with aspiration to think it over. He wearies of the tragic ingenuity of men at concealing their real thoughts. There are no longer any codes of manners to be considered, any possibly tender readers to be sheltered, any powerful patrons to be placated. Of course genuinely detached thinking, even if it were possible, is likely to be discouraged; for detachment is always assumed to be malignant. But, anyhow, let’s be at least like so many houses in the suburbs, semi-detached.

Yes, there is a sort of spring fever of the soul, a seizure when, in moments of golden tranquil intuition, we see Lucretius’s “coasts of light.” We would hope to savour, as he bids us, not merely the honey that is greased round the rim of the cup--the honey of our daily amusement and distraction--but even the chill purging wormwood of the draft. Suddenly the quotidian employ, the haggling scruples of detail, seem strangely insignificant. Languor and lassitude and uneasy hankering pervade the spirit--an intimation of unearthliness. There is passion to go seeking “those things that are requisite and necessary.” In Walt’s noble phrase, “to sign for soul and body.” Then, unashamed of the hunger and trouble of human spirits, it seems irrelevant either to chaff or to praise the dear farce of life. One dreams of uttering only some small granule of broken truth, something more than the jocund trickery of the press.

Every philosopher is a humorist who has been squeezed. And the newspaper man, odd as this may sound, is not the least appropriate student to pursue the wingy mysteries in divinity. For he is kinspirit of the parson in this, that church and press are perhaps the two professions that have most frankly regarded themselves as separate estates, above and apart from the common man. The priest esteems himself the vicar of God. The pressman appoints himself vicar of News. The priest transmits to the congregation as much of God’s doings as he thinks will be not too embarrassing for them to hear. And the newspaper man lays bare that portion of the event which he considers the public will be most anxious to pay for. Both are anthologists.

For some time I had been saving clippings of newspaper stories about recent religious controversy. I meant to sit down some evening and read them through, patiently, to see how much humane sense I could winnow. But I found I could not force my eyes through them. For the sake of record, to notify the quaintness of mankind, I copied down a few of the headlines. “CHRIST HELD DIVINE OR ILLEGITIMATE: Dr. Pettingill Makes Baptists Gasp by Strong Defense of Virgin Birth.” (New York _World_.) DR. GUTHRIE FINDS YULE ALL PAGAN: St. Mark’s Rector Says Gift Custom Was Roman, Mistletoe Celtic and Tree Teutonic. (New York _Times_.) MODERNISM FOUND HERE MID RITUALS, DOGMA MID GLARE. (New York _Evening Post_.) DR. GUTHRIE SCENTS CLASHES TO COME. (New York _Times_.) And so on. I threw the mass of clippings into the fire.

And yet throughout those naïve burblings the reader felt a strange mixture of exhilaration and disgust. For the newspapers, with their unerring instinct, realize that men are keenly and desperately interested in these matters. Hidden inside that mysterious carcass, your neighbour, is the universal cry, “I want to be happy!” And with all their agile and cautious skill at hiding what they really think, men wildly crave those liberating sorceries (liquor and love and laughter, perhaps even literature, too) that roll away the stone from the door of the heart.

Yet perhaps no man in his senses talks about religion except for the pleasure of the talk, which is a sufficient human excuse. For the less we talk about religion, probably, the nearer we come to the heart of it. By religion we mean, I suppose, our ligatures with an unseen world--a world not realized, as Wordsworth says in those “Intimations” that are a whole prayer-book in themselves. There are “high instincts,” he tells us, before which we tremble “like a guilty thing surprised.” Our guilt, surely, is that we know ourselves to have been so wearily and perversely disloyal to that unseen world of beauty and ecstasy; and our surprise, that when we escape into the honest solitudes of the mind we find it waiting for us. There is a great saying to the effect that wherever two or three are gathered together, I shall be among you. But, alas! it is even more true perhaps (one must not forget a plenty of perhapses) that wherever two or three are gathered together, there I am _not_. Human meeting introduces awkwardly human difficulties and embarrassments. It introduces, for instance, vanity and humility, both awkward encumbrances to truth. Is there a man who does not know, sorrowfully, that he is much “better company” when he is alone? As old Doctor Donne found in the absence of his mistress, there is a “close corner of the brain” where the purest and loveliest embraces are possible. Of all mistresses, the fairest and the farthest away is Truth. God is known, if at all, in solitude.

§3

The theological bickerings of our time and their “tincture of choler,” as Hobbes would say, are due perhaps to the uneven progress of a great shift in the human notion of God. The primitive imagination of Deity is often of a gigantic omnipotent and omnipresent personality. Then, later, men come to think of God as a kind of force or law, or a harmony among infinite laws and forces. This process of magnifying God from a person to a “far-off Divine Event” proceeds unevenly, as do all ideas. And there is no squabbling so violent as that between people who accepted an idea yesterday and those who will accept the same idea to-morrow. More important than the novelty of ideas is the differential in the rate at which people accept them. Or it might even be put the other way round--the rate at which ideas accept people as vehicles. An idea often hops into a person and uses him, more or less as we hop into taxicabs. Bernard Shaw remarked, not unwisely, that his “Irrational Knot” was a first try (on the part of “the Life Force”) to get the theme of “A Doll’s House” written in English.

Robinson Crusoe’s religion was merely a calculus of personal benefit. When he found that the seeds he threw away had sprouted and come up, he suddenly remembered the goodness of God. But gradually men tend to rise sufficiently above their own pangs and pleasures to relish the conception of a vaster God--a God who does not even know that we exist. There are still, astounding as it seems, actual and living parsons who tell us that the Museum of Natural History is an affront to the Deity. Their simplicity is as delightful as that of Edmund Gosse’s father (if you remember that great book, “Father and Son”). The rock that his reason split upon was the problem whether Adam and Eve, created _de novo_, had navels. There are others who find in the spider webs and redwood rings of the museum a powerful impulse to wonder and praise. At any rate, this process of magnifying God from an invisible bishop of friable temper to a universal phantom of legality is what Thomas Hardy had in mind when he urged “the abandonment of the masculine pronoun in allusions to the Fundamental Energy.” Nor, on consideration, do we find the masculine pronoun a symbol of such benevolent majesty that it need much longer be retained as spokesman for Deity. It is necessary for man to know, as astronomers do, the inconceivable minuteness of himself and his affairs.

Yet, knowing his unimportance, it is equally urgent for man to act as though his business were momentous. For the whole intellectual life is based upon paradox and dainty artifice. And here we encounter some fundamental characteristics of human behaviour which are highly interesting.

First of all, man is orderly. Finding himself in a grotesquely complicated universe, he hastily tries to reduce what he sees to some general principles. He concocts helpful formulæ, rules of thumb, mnemonic rhymes, all sorts of proverbs, to simplify matters. There has been a rather absurd eagerness on the part of the newspapers to reproach the church for its adherence to formalism. But man is a formula-bearing animal. And I doubt if the most rigid bishop who ever lived was more at the mercy of ritual and formulated ways of expression than the average city editor. An incident may be as interesting as you please, but unless it fits into his carefully ratiocinated scheme of what constitutes a “story” and how it should be “played,” it gets little attention. I have mentioned the Museum of Natural History; let’s take it again as an illustration. I took there a small girl four years old. At first she was appalled and horrified by the things she saw. Live animals, at the zoo, she was familiar with. But these so genuine-looking and yet motionless creatures, plausible enough in their synthetic facsimile surroundings, yet with a gruesome air of not-quite-rightness--she was badly puzzled. They fitted into no preconceived frame in her small mind.

“Are they real, Daddy?” she inquired.

“They were once real, and now are stuffed,” I said.

Her eager mind leaped at this. Here was a happy little formula. And at every succeeding specimen, whether a wolf or a puma or a walrus or a whale, with monotonous insistence she asked, “Is it real and stuffed?” To which I replied, each time, with patient repetition, “Yes, real and stuffed.” It satisfied her perfectly until we came to the figures of Indians and Eskimos. Here a new formula had to be devised, that they were “Not real, but made to look like it.” These trifling statements made the museum, for her, a rational and not too terrifying place.

Once in a while, if you are fond of self-scrutiny, you will catch yourself in the very act of creating or parroting some useful formula. Formulæ swarm in the mind just as birds do in an orchard. And though they destroy some fruit, they also help to exterminate lesser vermin which might do much harm. For the most part we are all mercifully unaware of our dependence on them.