Truth. [volume] (Salt Lake City, Utah) 1901-1908, 1906-02-17
THE DESTROYER OF
LITERATURE.

Julian hawthorne, 1t uses mode OF
speech proper to it's state and the
mode of speech appropriate to the
material plane upon which our modern
money-worshipping society exists, he
goes on to say, is represented by the
newspapers. The characteristic utter
ances of the spiritual plane, on the
other hand, is literature Owing to our
unspirituality, Mr. Hawthorne asserts,
literature languishes, and journalism,
the lower voice, attempts in VAIN to
counterfeit it. $50 long as journalism
attends to it's own (materiaD bus!-
ness" he continues, ut is not onIy
harmless, but useful; but as soon An
it would usurp what is organically
above it, it becomes hurtful; not only
because the plausibility of that pre-
tence may lead us to accept it as gen.
uine, and thus atrophy the faculties
whereby literature, the true voice of
the spiritual, is apprehended." The
personal and the emotional, he argues,
are essential to literature while these
factors have no place in bright, hard,
impersonal, business-like, matter-of-
fact journalism" To quote further
from Mr.. Hawthornes article, which
appears in the February Critic:
'The news-adorned with what pho
tographs and headlines you will-but
the news free from dogmatism, bias,
and the personal equation, is what the
reader wants; and so arranged that
he may readily pick out what happens
chiefly to concern him, and skip the
rest.
Now all this, useful in its own de-
gree as it is, obviously involves no ap-
peal to the spiritual affiliations of man,
carries no message to his soul. Yet
so general and profuse is the distri-
button of the newspaper that a large
part of the public reads nothing else,
or what else it does read is (as we
shall presently see) infected with the
newspaper principle. The persistent
reflection of the. lower side of life,
which the newspapers mirror shows,
gradually induces the reader to accept
it as the whole of life,-prone as at
best we are to ignore our higher
selves,-with the result that heart
and soul are atrophied, as aforesaid,
and we are landed in a blank mater
ialism.'
To the question, "is not the news
paper an educational force, a sort Of
university of general knowledge" Mr..
Hawthorne answers that if we catchize
a graduate of this university the result
is not reassuring. We read:
"The area of his available informa-
ton is, indeed, unrestricted; but he
is also free to select from it only what
he fancies, and these are items which
tend to inflame, rather than to dissi-
pate, his provincialism and prejudices.
Finding, too, so many things apparent
ly incompatible offered for his be-
lief, he ends by drifting into scepti-
cism; while his sympathies are bank
rupted by the very multitude of the
appeals to them. Thus he acquires an
indifferentism which is rather that of
impotence than of philosophy; for the
indifference of the philosopher is due
either to faith in a state of being purer
than the eathly, or else to a noble SUI
periority to destiny; whereas the mind
of the newspaper graduate has simply
lost virility. Instead of mastery of
marshalled truths, he exhibits a dim
condemnation of half-remembered or
misremembered facts; and because the
things he cares to read in his newspa'
per are few compared with those he
skips, he has lost his faculty of fixing
his full attention upon anything. His
moral STAN IA has been assailed by
the endless procession of crimes and
criminals that deploys before him