Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/393

Rh to appreciate the value of sentiment—direct sentiment as it were. Otto H. Kahn tells of a famous financier who was unable to endure listening to a violinist play Chopin's "Funeral March," because it always moved him to tears; there are many who are sensitive to beauty in the same way, yet the knowledge that the violinist was starving would move them little. Yet it is such men, keen for subtle beauties, who, in democratic leaders, see mere exponents of demagogy.

Pulitzer was distinguished from most of his predecessors in journalism, not so much for his financial success, or for his sentimental treatment of the news, but by the fact that he saw that the Fourth Estate was so great a power in the country that the men who were to be its votaries should be trained, as well and as thoroughly as those who entered any of the other professions. It was this knowledge of the responsibility that is placed on every man in the profession that led him to suggest the school of journalism at Columbia University. Like most of the great editors of the country he had been obliged to work for his own education—and a great education it had proved to be—but he desired that there should be some better system; so that those who were to take up a career fraught, when that career was a downward one, with so much of peril to the public, should be trained under auspices that would tend to develop character.

Pulitzer has been called an adventurer in journalism, but such characterization takes little account of the depth and genius of the man. When we find that the journalism with which his name is associated had the qualities of romance and sentiment of drama, we must remember that such was the man. He had lived a most melodramatic life. Was it possible that the journalism that bore the