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He was not longer tautological, he avoided tautology with the infernal art of a leader-writer, filling his wind bags and mincing words as if he had been a trained journalist on the staff of the Daily Post.
I left off writing for the Saturday and the Pall Mall and the Academy. Instead, and after I married, I took a regular post as leader-writer on the staff of the Standard. I also wrote a weekly leader for the Observer for the best part of a year.
The telegram concluded with the words: "Formidable as they seem to be, the Martians have not moved from the pit into which they have fallen, and, indeed, seem incapable of doing so. Probably this is due to the relative strength of the earth's gravitational energy." On that last text their leader-writer expanded very comfortingly.
Who can understand the mania of the leader-writer, who never thinks of a subject without discovering the possibility of a column concerning it, who never looks upon his plate of soup without mentally reviewing in elaborate periods the whole vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms? But what is the advantage of newspapers? Forsooth, popular intelligence.
Delubris happened to be the one word which Winton had not looked out and had asked Beetle for, when they were settling into their places. He forged ahead with no further trouble. Only when he rendered scilicet as 'forsooth, King erupted. 'Regulus, he said, 'was not a leader-writer for the penny press, nor, for that matter, was Horace.
The leader-writer did not spread himself abroad a hundred years ago. Indeed, soon after the Leeds Mercury gave up discussing the amiable weakness that it attributed to ladies with well-turned ankles, it ceased for a time to discuss anything at all. It was only in the beginning of the nineteenth century that it resumed its leading articles. But what leading articles they were!
A powerful minister makes a speech after eleven o'clock at night; the leader-writer receives proof-sheets; he must grasp the whole scope of the speech in a flash, and then proceed with the mere mechanical work of writing. Twelve hundred words will take about an hour and twenty minutes to set down, and then the MS. must be rushed piece by piece to the composing-room.
Blenkinsop, the leader-writer on The Plainsman, took a half-column in which to point out in emphatic and vigorous Western phrase the dangers that threatened the commonwealth in this very evident coalition of the railroad octopus and the machine.
News is scarce, foreign nations show a culpable lack of desire to kill each other, no moving accident has occurred and the paper must be filled. Then the leader-writer must take some trivial subject and weave round it a web of graceful and amusing phrases.
But, all the same, Townsend both in matter and in style had his faults as a leader-writer. Though he was never carried away by language, was never blatant and never hectoring, he was often much too sensational in his thoughts and so necessarily in the phrases in which he clothed them.
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