The Norfolk post. [volume] (Norfolk, Va.) 1865-1866, 1865-07-18
THE TELEGRAPH AND THE PRESS.

ICuas peeH Salu CnaC the American peo-
pleare less aptthan othersto profit by ex-
perience, because the hustle of their
lives keeps breaking the threadof that
attention which is thematerial of MEM
DRY, till no one has patience or leisure to
spin from it continuous thread of
thought. We suspect, says Professor
Lowell, that this is not more true of us
than of other nations-than it is of all
people who read newspapers. Great
events are perhaps not more common
than they used to be, but vastly great
er number of trivial incidents are now
recorded, and this dust of time gets in
our eyes. The telegraph strips history
ofeverything down to the bare fac, but it
does not observe the true proportions of
things, and we must make an effort to
recover them. In brevity and cynicism
it is a mechanical Tacitus, giving no
less space to the movements of Sala, than
of Sherman, as impartial leveller as
It announces with equal sanafroid the
surrender of Kirby Smith and the cap
ture of fresh rebel Governor, reducing
us to the stature at which posterity shall
reckon u.s.. Eminent contemporaneous-
ness may see here how much space will
be allotted to it in the historical COM
ponds and biographical dictionaries of
the next generation. In artless irony
the telegraph is unequalled among the
satirists of this generation. But this
shorthand diarist confounds all distinc-
tons of great and little, and rolls the
memory with minute particles of what
is oddly enough called intelligence
We read in successive paragraphs the
appointment of Provisional Governor
of North Carolina, whose fitness or want
of it, may be the turning-point of our
future history, and the nomination of q
minister who will at most only bewilder
some foreign court with a more despe-
rately helpless French than his predeces-
sor. The conspiracy trial at Washing
ton, whose result will have absolutely
no effect on the real affairs of the nation,
occupies for the moment more of the
public mind and thought than the ques-
ton of reconstruction, which involves
the life or death of the very principle
we have been fighting for these four
years.
Undoubtedly the event of the day,
whatever it may be, is apt to become un-
duly prominent, and to thrust itself OBJ
scuringly between us and the perhaps
more important event of yesterday,
where the public appetite demands fresh
gossip rather than real news, and the
press accordingly keeps its spies every
where on the lookout for trifles that be-
come important by being later than the
LAST. And yet this minuteness of trivi-
atty has its value also. Our sensitive
sheet gives every morning the photo
graph of yesterday, and enables us to
detect and to study at leisure that fleet
ing expression of the time which betrays
its character, and which might altogeth-
err escape us in the idealized historical
portrait. We cannot estimate the value
of the items in our daily newspaper, be-
cause the world to which they relate is
too familiar and prosaic; but hundred
wears hence Sc, 'ue Thackeray will find
them full of pctu. "esque life and spirit.
The "Chronicle Oh 'he annual heg-
lister makes the England o. the last CEN
fury more wildly real to us uan any
history. The jests which Pom, 'eian
idlers scrubbed on the walls while Ves,'-
vius was brooding its fiery conspiracy
under their feet, bring the scene nearer
home to us than the letter of Pliny, and
deepen the tragedy by their trifiing con-
trast, like the grave-digger's unseemly
gable in Hamlet. Perhaps our judg-
ment of history is made sounder and
our views of it more lifelike, when we
are so constantly reminded how the little
things of life assert their place alongside
the great ones, and how healthy the con-
stitution of the race is, how sound its
digestion, how gay its humor, that can
take the world so easily while our conti-
nent is racked with fever and struggling
for Life against the doctors.
"Lst Hercules himself do what he may.
Ia asfx~ shaS rnu.t has. hfsda