Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/144

 I hasten to exempt from my indictment those journals that are not professedly critical; to exempt trade journals, for instance, medical journals, journals of sport and fashion, and the daily newspapers. The most one can fairly require of one's daily newspaper is that it should give one the news of the day. I'm not denying that a craving for the news of the day is a morbid craving, but it is to gratify it that the daily newspapers are daily born, daily to die. We can't with any sort of justice ask our penny daily for a considered criticism of books. That were to ask for more than our pennyworth; and besides, the editor might reasonably retort upon us, "You have come to the wrong shop." We don't go to the ironmonger's for a leg of mutton, nor to the stationer's to get our hair cut. Wherefore I in no wise reproach the penny dailies (nor even the formidabler threepenny daily) for sedulously eschewing anything remotely in the nature of considered literary criticism. Let me add, at once, that I don't reproach them, on the other hand, for their habits of printing long columns of idiomatic Journalese, and heading the same NEW BOOKS. They thereby give employment to the necessitous; they encourage publishers (poor dears!) to publish—and to advertise; they deceive nobody within the four-mile radius; they furnish the suburbs with an article the suburbs could probably not distinguish from the real thing if they saw the two together; and (to crown all) it is the inalienable privilege of the British reader to skip. I buy my Morning Post, that I may follow, from my humble home in Mayfair, the doings of the Great in Bayswater; my Daily News, that I may be informed of the fluctuations of Mr. Gladstone's health; my Telegraph, that I may learn what is happening in