Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/362



Art comes into journalism late, as it comes into so many of the artifices of men. It is impossible to do justice to the life and work of Charles Anderson Dana unless one views him as a journalist in whom the artistic side of his profession was dominant. A common point of view has been that of the literary critic who declared that "in its exercise of its recording functions it (journalism) is a useful trade, and in its commenting office it takes rank as a profession, but it is never an art."

We have here an old-fashioned criticism, a point of view not so common now as it was before Charles Anderson Dana made of journalism an art. He saw his great profession as no one had seen it before him, as a whole, as a very human whole, and he left an impression on his time that can only be compared to that made by Addison and Steele on the essayists of the early eighteenth century. Despite his cynicism and the errors of taste and judgment into which his personal disappointments led him, his entire period of editorial control was sufifused with such an optimism as regards the intelli-