sad. There is somebody or something walking there, to be crowned with
flowers: and my pleasure is in some promise yet possible and in the
resurrection of the dead.




THE REAL JOURNALIST


Our age which has boasted of realism will fail chiefly through lack of
reality. Never, I fancy, has there been so grave and startling a divorce
between the real way a thing is done and the look of it when it is done.
I take the nearest and most topical instance to hand a newspaper.
Nothing looks more neat and regular than a newspaper, with its parallel
columns, its mechanical printing, its detailed facts and figures, its
responsible, polysyllabic leading articles. Nothing, as a matter of fact,
goes every night through more agonies of adventure, more hairbreadth
escapes, desperate expedients, crucial councils, random compromises, or
barely averted catastrophes. Seen from the outside, it seems to come
round as automatically as the clock and as silently as the dawn. Seen
from the inside, it gives all its organisers a gasp of relief every
morning to see that it has come out at all; that it has come out without
the leading article upside down or the Pope congratulated on discovering
the North Pole.

I will give an instance (merely to illustrate my thesis of unreality) from
the paper that I know best. Here is a simple story, a little episode in
the life of a journalist, which may be amusing and instructive: the tale
of how I made a great mistake in quotation. There are really two stories: