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He never realized what a position history would give him. To himself he seemed a gloomy failure, to his contemporaries a popular pamphleteer, but to posterity he is the creator of public conscience in Ireland. He was the father of patriotic journalism, and the first to defend Ireland's rights through literature.
It was but natural that these three dismal failures should find their way to the newspapers and that, in the hysterical condition of modern journalism, they should be flung out to the world at large with all the ostentation of leaded type and panicky scare heads, and that learned editors should discourse knowingly of "the limitations of mentality" and "the well-authenticated cases of the sudden warping of abnormal intelligences resulting in the startling termination of amazing careers," or snivel dismally over "the complete collapse of that imaginative power which, hitherto, had been this detective's greatest asset, and which now, on the principle that however deep a well may be if a force-pump be put into it it must some time suck gravel, seemed to have come to its end."
Blackwood's Magazine, the headquarters, the citadel, the place d'armes of the opposition to the Cockney school and of criticism and journalism that were Tory first of all, enlisted a younger set of recruits than those hitherto mentioned, and the special style of writing which it introduced, though exceedingly clever and stimulating, lent itself rather less to dispassionate literary appreciation than even the avowedly partisan methods of the Edinburgh.
"Really!" asked Mrs. Pasmer, with a glance at Boardman, whose droll embarrassment did not contradict his friend's words. "How splendid!" she cried. "I had, heard that a great many Harvard men were taking up journalism. I'm so glad of it! It will do everything to elevate its tone." Boardman seemed to suffer under these expectations a little, and he stole a glance of comical menace at his friend.
By a strange condition of things Friedrich was actively engaged at the moment in writing polemic reviews for the organs of Reichardt, one of Schiller's most annoying rivals in literary journalism; these reviews became at once noticeable for their depth and vigorous originality, particularly that one which gave a new and vital characterization of Lessing.
It permeates ordinary journalism, and all writing produced under commercial pressure. It taints the work of the young artist, caught by the romantic fever, who glories in the wealth of vocabulary discovered to him by the poets, and seeks often in vain for a thought stalwart enough to wear that glistering armour.
After some unsuccessful ventures in illustrated journalism, he started a pictorial weekly in New York in 1875. It was originally printed in German, but in less than a year it was issued also in English. It was not until 1879 that it sprang into general notice through Keppler's success in reproducing lithographed designs in color.
In more recent years the brothers Margueritte, both in novels and in journalism, have largely devoted their distinguished abilities and high literary skill to the courageous and enlightened advocacy of many social reforms.
Personalities of this kind were a novelty then, and mere novelty goes a great way in journalism. At this period he produced almost every kind of composition known to periodical literature, paragraphs and leading articles, poetry and love-stories, reports of trials, debates, balls, and police cases; his earnings ranging from five dollars a week to ten or twelve.
He would have been indolently content to remain a warehouse drudge, would have listlessly fallen into his father's ways about money, would have had no ambition beyond his desk and salary as a lawyer's clerk, would have never cared to piece together and supplement the scattered scraps of his education, would have rested on his oars when he had once shot into the waters of ordinary journalism.
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