Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 105.djvu/157

146 In this way, then, the editor proceeds, compiling by regular rule. He does not cram the paper with too much of one thing, even if it happen to be a good thing; he does not make the paper all accident, or all murder, or all joke, or all politics; but he mingles these elements as skilfully as he can, so that, when served up in the broad sheet, they may form a pleasant literary salad. He gathers an argument here, an anecdote there, a fact from another place; he strips a report of its verbiage, strikes out the repetitions of a paragraph, perhaps transposes its sentences, so that the cart may come after the horse—that is, the catastrophe or climax at the end instead of the beginning of the narrative; adds a fact to make it exact, or a line that it may read more smartly; in short, he works up old materials into new stuff, or, as Admiral Burney says, makes new soles out of old upper leathers.

Contemporaneously with the editor, at his task, the reporter has been attending the police court, gleaning a few facts amongst the hard-sworn fictions of witnesses; or the county court, abstracting the grain of law from the legal chaff; or a vestry meeting; or the town council; or with flying fingers he has been following the local orators through a maze of language at a public demonstration. In the latter case, only, he refers to the editor to know "how much the meeting shall make." Just as the captain of a man-o'-war orders the officer of the watch at mid-day to "make it noon," and "noon it is," so the editor orders his aid to make the meeting (say) three columns, and three columns it becomes. As a general rule, speeches, like balsams and cock's-combs, will bear a good deal of squeezing, and be all the better for it—a good deal of mangling, and read all the smoother. "Speeches," once said Mr. Perry of the Morning Chronicle, "cannot be made long enough for the speakers nor short enough for the leaders." The length of the report is governed by many considerations—by the importance of the proceedings, and the space that can be spared. Often a prominent member of "our party" gets a Benjamin's portion of the report; and if any person must suffer, then an opponent is clipped of his fine language, and his ideas are stripped naked, just as convicts are shorn of their flowing locks without being deprived of the necessary thatch for their heads. Reporters undoubtedly play havoc sometimes with speakers, who, not content with speaking what the purpose suggests, endeavour to haul in, head and shoulders, figures previously concocted and imperfectly remembered; but they never garble them, as people who have said foolish things sometimes say. That would not only be unfair to the speaker but discreditable to the reporter, and injurious to the journal. If a speech is maltreated it is from unskilfulness or inattention, not from malice, or because, as Lord John Russell once said in reply to an oration from Chisholm Anstey, "there is no chemical test by which the solid matter can be detected in the quantity of its fluid contents."

On Thursday the business grows serious. Whatever disposition the editor may have had yesterday to hang back, to put off work, to reserve his judgment, to-day he must buckle to the work, clap his shoulder to the wheel, be up and doing. There is no time to loiter in the streets gathering news from friends, nor for gossiping in the counting-house with a customer; while everybody who penetrates into the "sanctum," or the "den," as the editor's room is styled indifferently, is positively and absolutely a bore. Time is abreast of the editor, and if the latter is not brisk, will