egraded by art to its own level,
they have lost altogether that primitive and typical taste of man--the
taste for news. By this essential taste for news, I mean the pleasure in
hearing the mere fact that a man has died at the age of 110 in South
Wales, or that the horses ran away at a funeral in San Francisco. Large
masses of the early faiths and politics of the world, numbers of the
miracles and heroic anecdotes, are based primarily upon this love of
something that has just happened, this divine institution of gossip.
When Christianity was named the good news, it spread rapidly, not only
because it was good, but also because it was news. So it is that if any
of us have ever spoken to a navvy in a train about the daily paper, we
have generally found the navvy interested, not in those struggles of
Parliaments and trades unions which sometimes are, and are always
supposed to be, for his benefit; but in the fact that an unusually large
whale has been washed up on the coast of Orkney, or that some leading
millionaire like Mr. Harmsworth is reported to break a hundred pipes a
year. The educated classes, cloyed and demoralized with the mere
indulgence of art and mood, can no longer understand the idle and
splendid disinterestedness of the reader of _Pearson's Weekly_. He still
keeps something of that feeling which should be the birthright of
men--the feeling that this planet is like a new house into which we have
just moved our baggage. Any detail of it has a value, and, with a truly
sportsmanlike instinct, the average man takes most pleasure in the
details which are most complicated, irrelevant, and at once difficult
and useless to discover. Those parts of the newspaper which announce the
giant gooseberry and the raining frogs are really the modern
representatives of the popular tendency which produced the hydra and the
werewolf and the dog-headed men. Folk in the Middle Ages were not
interested in a dragon or a glimpse of the devil because they thought
that it was a beautiful prose idyll, but because they thought that it
had really just been seen. It was not like so much artistic literature,
a refuge indicating the dulness of the world: it was an incident
pointedly illustrating the fecund poetry of the world.

That much can be said, and is said, against the literature of
information, I do not for a moment deny. It is shapeless, it is trivial,
it may give an unreal air of knowledge, it unquestionably lies along
with the rest