NOVELS OF JOURNALISM.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 821, 21 May 1910, Page 9

NOVELS OF JOURNALISM.

Blowitz in his reminiscences remarked .that although Delane of "Tho Times" was a great man and deserved a biography, yet no one- would dream of writing it, because he was a journalist, and peoplo aro not interested in journalists. Things have changed since then. •■ Delano's biography has been written and had its sale, and it may perhaps be- said that people now-■ida-ys are as interested in eminent journalists as they are in men of letters generally. Sir William Robertson Niool was the first to give practical recognitiooi to that fact, and his papers and paragraphs on newspapers and newspaper men have been as extensively read as his moro specially literary intelligence. Tho novelists also have recognised it, and Mr. Montaguo's "Hind Let Loose" is only the latest instalment of a scries which includes not only, as Sir. Bennett pointed out, Oliver Onion's "Little Devil Doubt" but also Gissing's "New Grub Street" and Philip Gibb's "Street oi Adventure." Such hooks appeal far beyond tho circle of journalistic craftsmen,, and testify to a widespread interest on tho part of the public in those men who, as Davidson put it, wear the shoes of swiftness and tho cloak of invisibility, and who hivo in those mysterious buildings which, only half-awake by day, by night, when all tho world sleeps, thunder and tremble with machinerv in motion.

Tbo greatest and also the gloomiest of all the novels of journalism, 1-ow-over, is Balzac's "Illusions IVrducs." In the second part of that hook wo aro introduced into that shadowy and sinister under-world of letters with which tho novelist's own bitter experience had made him well acquainted, where hack writers, living in ,an atmospliero of fraud and bankruptcy, blackmail, and lampoon, and where every principle of decency and honour is sacrificed in tho hot pursuit of money. It : s 'Mβ ono hook of hie, says Drandes, ■ in which Balzac ceases to be impartial. He v.&es tho darkest hues ho can find in his palette to paint tho iurpitiide aiid shame of tho profession, and takes a hitter and mirthless joy 'in limning tho miseries and insults which are tho journalist's portion. Lucieii, ''"o cci Iral figure, has, however, his hour of success. His first article, in wiiieh ho slashes a book which ho knows to b? excellent, compels tho 'publisher of it to give him three thousand fmres for a volume of poems which ho 1 °d p'cviously rejected, i.nd the nuMior, v.jio is formidable as a jouriiJlist, is conciliated by sin article in another pai/or in which Lucieii cordially oulosjira his work. Success turns his i'e.irl, I <v,--ever, mid when he goes over fioni Republicanism to Boyalism his c'd I'neniis shun and his new allies uisttast bini,

and Ilia career ia ruined. l\i\crty conies upon him, and ho is reduced "to begging from tlio man ho lias mast

cruelly injured. At last he is overwhelmed with debt, and Uio most striking scene in thp whole book is that in which, by the- light of tho candles that surround tho corpse of little Cornlio, the actress of niuetecii years of age, lie writes songs-—drinking songs and worse—in order to pay tho expenses of her funeral. After that ho returns to

liis n.itivo Angoulomo, but Paris has still this one drop of bitterness for him to drink —tliat ho can only do so by accepting from his maid money which sho has gone out into the streets to earn.—' 'Manchester Guardian. , '