Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/345

 AN HONEST AND SANE NEWSPAPER PRESS 331

by crazy, silly, and grotesque headlines, by headlines that bear no relation to the text, by ridiculous misuse of words? Let some one criticize a remark of any sort, and the headline an- nounces that so-and-so "flays" or "scores" so-and-so. Let some- one do a very ordinary thing, and he is described as having delivered "a crushing blow" at this or that person or enterprise. What has been called the catastrophic "style" is painfully over- worked by the headline builders.

This vice is by no means limited in journalism to headline writers. Reporters, special writers, reviewers, and critics are also addicted to it. The straining after striking, picturesque, impressive language defeats its own purpose, and when trivial things are treated in a "grand" style, the effect is doubly per- nicious. The attempt is ludicrous, and there is no style left for the things that invite or impose "pomp and circumstance," rhetorically speaking. Who has not felt the hollowness and in- efficiency of much of our newspaper literary and dramatic criti- cism? To read the adjectives and adverbs so lavishly bestowed on current fiction, for example, would mean to infer (if one did not know better) that at least a dozen masterpieces are produced every month. The insight into character, the art, the humor, the vitality, the breadth, the originality which are attributed to scores of contemporary authors would provide ample literary equipment for a whole group of Scotts, Thackerays, Balzacs, Tolstoys ! Yet the reviewers themselves, characteristically contemptuous of their own extravagant praise, assert several times a year that the aver- age contemporary novel is a poor, crude, commercial affair ; that there is a lamentable over-production of novels, and that few of these are remembered or read six months after their appearance ! How can one reconcile the generosity, the optimism, the enthusi- asm of the separate notices with the censoriousness, the gloom, the pessimism of annual and semi-annual "surveys?" No recon- ciliation is possible; the reviewers maintain a double standard and their left hand knows not what their right hand is doing.

Inefficiency is also constantly exhibited in "splurges" and needless repetitions. The reader may indeed be profoundly inter- ested in a certain event — a discovery, a court decision, a piece of