The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1856-1888, 1872-12-07
Journalism and its Heroes-Novelists.

The hero Of the coming American novel will be
a journalist. The long-haIged artist and the
author who parts his locks in the middle have
been trotting up and down the highways and by
ways of English, French and German fiction un-
til people are no longer curious about Bohemia
and the second heavens. They have bad their fill
of Keuensler laben. The struggles and sorrows
of the man with a picture or poem are almost as
familiar and as great a bore, as the plants of the
man with a grievance. We know all about Mr..
Vance, the painter, and Mr.. Copperield, the
writer, and what Bulwer and Dickens have left
unsaid on the subject of art and attics is plente-
ously laid open to us by Herr Freitag and Mime
George Sand, to say nothing of their predecessors,
the sentimentalists of the schools of Rousseau and
Goethe. The world of culture, with its sensibil-
tiles and aspirations, will always be a fruitful
source of creative suggestion and popular interest.
But culture changes It's conditions and forms. AS
journalism becomes a more intimate, integral part
of polite thought and action, and at the same time
a more positive influence upon ideas, manners and
customs; as 1t increases in wealth and respecta-
bility; as It's drdDdtiS persona are taken from
among the more attractive classes of society; as
the personal exploits and achievements of these
are elevated and multiplied, the theme will i'm
press itself upon the Imagination of the many
who read, and be reflected In the pages of those
who write to be read; SO that, if there be an
American novel, its hero is sure to be a journalist.
Indeed, the lives of many of our most successful
editors are eminently stirring and romantic, and
the story of any one of them could not fail to fire
the fancy of the rising generation of novel readers,
telling how Samson, who came to the city with a
brown-paper parcel under his arm, sought and
secured employment on the DAILY BIOgpipe at
three dollars a week, walloped his man eight days
in seven, rose to the position of fghting-editor,
then night-editOr, then managing-editor, then ed
itor-in-chief and proprietor, with an income Of
$50, 600 a year and a broken nose; showing how
Hercules, who, at the very outset of his news
paper experience, was fallen upon by all the poet
esses and actresses, resisted the Establishments of
beauty and devoted his noble talents and energies
in spiking the guns of the corruptionists, and was
promoted in consequence, for probity and vaIOr,
until now, like a witch astride a broomstick, he
rides the whirlwind and guides the storm in the
great city of Eatanville; showing how little Jack
the giant-killer saved his country by the writing
of three lines to a Geographic dispatch, which an
nounced that Thompson had been declared elected
constable by gigantic frauds, and how Fitz Gibbon,
the great philanthropic journalist, fitted out a fiat
boat at his own expense, and placed Capt. Lemuel
CULVER in charge of it, to 60 in quest of the
erudite DIR. Pangloss, lost in the wilds of Pata-
gonia! The man who says that the hero of the
coming American novel will not be- journalist, is
simply-an ass.-LOuisyiHe Courier-JournaL.