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Updated: June 19, 2025
People talk about the pride of tyrants; but we in this age are not suffering from the pride of tyrants. We are suffering from the shyness of tyrants; from the shrinking modesty of tyrants. Therefore we must not encourage leader-writers to be shy; we must not inflame their already exaggerated modesty.
No doubt we could, if necessary, carry on for a time without the press; and I agree with those newspaper writers who have been saying recently that the importance of the press is monstrously exaggerated by some of its critics. The working-man, so far as I know him, does not depend for his patriotism on the leader-writers of the newspapers. He takes even the news with a very large grain of salt.
No subsequent acquaintance with editorial rooms ever led him into materialistic explanations of that enchanted piece of work a newspaper. The editors might do their best and succeed surprisingly in looking like ordinary mortals, you might even know the leader-writers, and, with the very public, gaze through gratings into the subterranean printing-rooms, the mystery none the less remained.
To have a style so gorgeous that it conceals the subject is one of the highest achievements of an important and much admired school of Fleet Street leader-writers, and this school Janus Weathercock may be said to have invented.
"Proceed!" said the Angel, letting his eyelids droop. "Public morality," his dragoman began, "is either superlative, comparative, positive, or negative. And superlative morality is found, of course, only in the newspapers. It is the special prerogative of leader-writers.
The subject may seem to border upon the ridiculous, as an influence upon one's general point of view; but at that time it was really more tragic than farcical, and I know that what was called "the servant question" as such it was gravely treated in books and papers, and even by leader-writers and lecturers formed the basis of a great deal of my mother's conversation, just as I am sure that it coloured her outlook upon life, and strengthened her tendency to worry over everything, from the wear-and-tear of house-linen to the morality of the people.
Thus, we may distinguish two kinds of criticism, as in painting we may distinguish art from practical dexterity. Criticism, after the pattern of most contemporary leader-writers, is the expression of judgments formed at random in a more or less witty way, just as an advocate pleads in court on the most contradictory briefs.
The Introduction briefly points out the foolishness of orators and leader-writers who had assumed that Culture meant "a smattering of Greek and Latin," and then addresses itself to the task of finding a better definition.
Leaders shook grey heads, and leader-writers disclaimed a responsibility which primá facie had never rested on them; Quisanté was told that he would wreck the party for a quarter of a century to come. It would perhaps have been possible to meet Constantine Blair's precedents with other precedents, to quote newer gods against his established deities.
You beginners seem able to write nothing but your views on politics, and your reflections on art, and your theories on life, which you sometimes even think original. Every paper has its regular staff of leader-writers, and what is wanted from the outsider is freshness.
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