Chapter 10. The Newspaper Syndicate "Grey Bonnet"

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_ CHAPTER X. THE NEWSPAPER SYNDICATE "GREY BONNET"

For forty years Sweden had worked for the right which every man obtains when he comes of age. Pamphlets had been written, newspapers founded, stones thrown, suppers eaten and speeches made; meetings had been held, petitions had been presented, the railways had been used, hands had been pressed, volunteer regiments had been formed; and so, in the end, with a great deal of noise, the desired object had been attained. Enthusiasm was great and justifiable. The old birchwood tables at the Opera Restaurant were transformed into political tribunes; the fumes of the reform-punch attracted many a politician, who, later on, became a great screamer; the smell of reform cigars excited many an ambitious dream which was never realized; the old dust was washed off with reform soap; it was generally believed that everything would be right now; and after the tremendous uproar the country lay down and fell asleep, confidently awaiting the brilliant results which were to be the outcome of all this fuss.

It slept for a few years, and when it awoke it was faced by a reality which suggested a miscalculation. There were murmurs here and there; the statesmen who had recently been lauded to the skies were now criticized. There were even, among the students, some who discovered that the whole movement had originated in a country which stood in very close relationship to the promoter of the Bill, and that the original could be found in a well-known handbook. But enough of it! Characteristic of these days was a certain embarrassment which soon took the form of universal discontent or, as it was called, opposition. But it was a new kind of opposition; it was not, as is generally the case, directed against the Government, but against Parliament. It was a Conservative opposition including Liberals as well as Conservatives, young men as well as old; there was much misery in the country.

Now it happened that the newspaper syndicate Grey Bonnet, born and grown up under Liberal auspices, fell asleep when it was called upon to defend unpopular views--if one may speak of the views of a syndicate. The directors proposed at the General Meeting that certain opinions should be changed, as they had the effect of decreasing the number of subscribers, necessary to the continuance of the enterprise. The General Meeting agreed to the proposition, and the Grey Bonnet became a Conservative paper. But there was a but, although it must be confessed that it did not greatly embarrass the syndicate; it was necessary to have a new chief editor to save the syndicate from ridicule; that no change need be made so far as the invisible editorial staff was concerned, went without saying. The chief editor, a man of honour, tendered his resignation. The editorial management, which had long been abused on account of its red colour, accepted it with pleasure, hoping thereby, without further trouble, to take rank as a better class paper. There only remained the necessity of finding a new chief editor. In accordance with the new programme of the syndicate, he would have to possess the following qualifications: he must be known as a perfectly trustworthy citizen; must belong to the official class; must possess a title, usurped or won, which could be elaborated if necessity arose. In addition to this he must be of good appearance, so that one could show him off at festivals and on other public occasions; he must be dependent; a little stupid, because true stupidity always goes hand in hand with Conservative leanings; he must be endowed with a certain amount of shrewdness, which would enable him to know intuitively the wishes of his chiefs and never let him forget that public and private welfare are, rightly understood, one and the same thing. At the same time he must not be too young, because an older man is more easily managed; and finally, he must be married, for the syndicate, which consisted of business men, knew perfectly well that married slaves are more amenable than unmarried ones.

The individual was discovered, and he was to a high degree endowed with all the characteristics enumerated. He was a strikingly handsome man with a fairly fine figure and a long, wavy beard, hiding all the weak points of his face, which otherwise would have given him away. His large, full, deceitful eyes caught the casual observer and inspired his confidence, which was then unscrupulously abused. His somewhat veiled voice, always speaking words of love, of peace, of honour and above all of patriotism, beguiled many a misguided listener, and brought him to the punch table where the excellent man spent his evenings, preaching straightforwardness and love of the Mother Country.

The influence which this man of honour exerted on his evil environment was marvellous; it could not be seen, but it could be heard. The whole pack, which for years had been let loose on everything time-honoured and venerable, which had not even let alone the higher things, was now restrained and full of love--not only for its old friends--was now--and not merely in its heart--moral and straightforward. They carried out in every detail the programme drawn up by the new editor on his accession, the cardinal points of which, expressed in a few words, were: to persecute all good ideas if they were new, to fight for and uphold all bad ones if they were old, to grovel before those in power, to extol all those on whom fortune was smiling, to push down all those who strove to rise, to adore success and abuse misfortune. Freely translated the programme read: to acknowledge and cheer only the tested and admittedly good, to work against the mania of innovation, and to persecute severely, but justly, everybody who was trying to get on by dishonest means, for honest work only should be crowned with success.

The secret of the last clause which the editorial staff had principally at heart was not difficult to discover. The staff consisted entirely of people whose hopes had been disappointed in one way or another; in most cases by their own fault--through drinking and recklessness. Some of them were "college geniuses," who in the past had enjoyed a great reputation as singers, speakers, poets or wits, and had then justly--or according to them unjustly--been forgotten. During a number of years it had been their business to praise and promote, frequently against their own inclination, everything that was new, all the enterprises started by reformers; it was, therefore, not strange that now they seized the opportunity to attack--under the most honourable pretexts--everything new, good or bad.

The chief editor in particular was great in tracking humbug and dishonesty. Whenever a delegate opposed a Bill which tended to injure the interests of the country for the sake of the party, he was immediately taken to task and called a humbug, trying to be original, longing for a ministerial dress-coat; he did not say portfolio, for he always thought of clothes first. Politics, however, was not his strong, or rather his weak point, but literature. In days long past, on the occasion of the Old Norse Festival at Upsala, he had proposed a toast in verse on woman, and thereby furnished an important contribution to the literature of the world; it was printed in as many provincial papers as the author considered necessary for his immortality. This had made him a poet, and when he had taken his degrees, he bought a second-class ticket to Stockholm, in order to make his début in the world and receive his due. Unfortunately the Stockholmers do not read provincial papers. The young man was unknown and his talent was not appreciated. As he was a shrewd man--his small brain had never been exuberantly imaginative--he concealed his wound and allowed it to become the secret of his life.

The bitterness engendered by the fact that his honest work, as he called it, remained unrewarded specially qualified him for the post of a literary censor; but he did not write himself: his position did not allow him to indulge in efforts of his own, and he preferred leaving it to the reviewer who criticized everybody's work justly and with inflexible severity. The reviewer had written poetry for the last sixteen years under a pseudonym. Nobody had ever read his verses and nobody had taken the trouble to discover the author's real name. But every Christmas his verses were exhumed and praised in the Grey Bonnet, by a third party, of course, who signed his article so that the public should not suspect that the author had written it himself--it was taken for granted that the author was known to the public. In the seventeenth year, the author considered it advisable to put his name to a new book--a new edition of an old one. As misfortune would have it, the Red Cap, the whole staff of which was composed of young people who had never heard the real name, treated the author as a beginner, and expressed astonishment, not only that a young writer should put his name to his first book, but also that a young man's book could be so monotonous and old-fashioned. This was a hard blow; the old "pseudonymus" fell ill with fever, but recovered after having been brilliantly rehabilitated by the Grey Bonnet; the latter went for the whole reading public in a lump, charging it with being immoral and dishonest, unable to appreciate an honest, sound, and moral book which could safely be put into the hands of a child. A comic paper made fun of the last point, so that the "pseudonymus" had a relapse, and, on his second recovery, vowed annihilation to all native literature which might appear in future; it did, however, not apply to quite all native literature, for a shrewd observer would have noticed that the Grey Bonnet frequently praised bad books; true, it was often done lamely and in terms which could be read in two ways. The same shrewd observer could have noticed that the miserable stuff in question was always published by the same firm; but this did not necessarily imply that the reviewer was influenced by extraneous circumstances, such as little lunches, for instance; he and the whole editorial staff were upright men who would surely not have dared to judge others with so much severity if they themselves had not been men of irreproachable character.

Another important member of the staff was the dramatic critic. He had received his education and qualified at a recruiting bureau in X-köping; had fallen in love with a "star" who was only a "star" in X-köping. As he was not sufficiently enlightened to differentiate between a private opinion and a universal verdict, it happened to him when he was for the first time let loose in the columns of the Grey Bonnet that he slated the greatest actress in Sweden, and maintained that she copied Miss----, whatever her name was. That it was done very clumsily goes without saying, and also that it happened before the Grey Bonnet had veered round. All this made his name detested and despised; but still, he had a name, and that compensated him for the indignation he excited. One of his cardinal points, although not at once appreciated, was his deafness. Several years went by before it was discovered, and even then nobody could tell whether or no it had any connexion with a certain encounter, caused by one of his notices, in the foyer of the Opera House, one evening after the lights had been turned down. After this encounter he tested the strength of his arm only on quite young people; and anybody familiar with the circumstances could tell by his critique when he had had an accident in the wings, for the conceited provincial had read somewhere the unreliable statement that Stockholm was another Paris, and had believed it.

The art critic was an old academician who had never held a brush in his hand, but was a member of the brilliant artists club "Minerva," a fact which enabled him to describe works of art in the columns of his paper before they were finished, thereby saving the reader the trouble of forming an opinion of his own. He was invariably kind to his acquaintances, and in criticizing an exhibition never forgot to mention every single one of them. His practice, of many years' standing, of saying something pretty about everybody--and how would he have dared to do otherwise--made it child's play to him to mention twenty names in half a column; in reading his reviews one could not help thinking of the popular game "pictures and devices." But the young artists he always conscientiously forgot, so that the public, which, for ten years had heard none but the old names, began to despair of the future of art. One exception, however, he had made, and made quite recently, in an unpropitious hour; and in consequence of this exception there was great excitement one morning in the editorial office of the Grey Bonnet.

What had occurred was this: Sellén--the reader may remember this insignificant name mentioned on a former, and not a particularly important occasion--had arrived with his picture at the exhibition at the very last moment. When it had been hung--in the worst possible place--for the artist was neither a member of the Academy nor did he possess the royal medal--the "professor of Charles IX" arrived; he had been given this nickname because he never painted anything but scenes from the life of Charles IX; the reason again for this was that a long time ago he had bought at an auction a wine glass, a tablecloth, a chair, and a parchment from the period of Charles IX; these objects he had painted for twenty years, sometimes with, sometimes without, the king. But he was a professor now and a knight of many orders, and so there was no help for it. He was with the academician when his eye fell on the silent man of the opposition and his picture.

"Here again, sir?" He put up his pince-nez. "And this, then, is the new style! Hm! Let me tell you, sir! Believe the word of an old man: take that picture away! Take it away! It makes me sick to look at it. You do yourself the greatest service if you take it away. What do you say, old fellow?"

The old fellow said that the exhibition of such a picture was an impertinence, and that if the gentleman would take his kindly meant advice, he would change his profession and become a sign-board painter.

Sellén replied mildly, but shrewdly, that there were so many able people in that profession, that he had chosen an artistic career where success could be obtained far more easily, as had been proved.

The professor was furious at this insolence; he turned his back on the contrite Sellén with a threat which the academician translated into a promise.

The enlightened Committee of Purchases had met--behind closed doors. When the doors were opened again, six pictures had been bought for the money subscribed by the public for the purpose of encouraging native artists. The excerpt from the minutes which found its way into the columns of the newspapers, was worded as follows:

"The Art Union yesterday bought the following pictures: (1) 'Water with Oxen,' landscape by the wholesale merchant K. (2) 'Gustavus Adolphus at the Fire of Magdeburg,' historical painting by the linen draper L. (3) 'A Child blowing its Nose,' genre-picture by lieutenant M. (4) 'S. S. Bore in the Harbour,' marine picture by the shipbroker N. (5) 'Sylvan Scene with Women,' landscape by the royal secretary O. (6) 'Chicken with Mushrooms,' still-life by the actor P."

These works of art, which cost a thousand pounds each on an average, were afterwards praised in the Grey Bonnet in two three-quarter columns at fifteen crowns each; that was nothing extraordinary, but the critic, partly in order to fill up the space, and partly in order to seize the right moment for suppressing a growing evil, attacked a bad custom which was beginning to creep in. He referred to the fact that young, unknown adventurers, who had run away from the academy without study, were trying to pervert the sound judgment of the public by a mere running after effect. And then Sellén was taken by the ears and flogged, so that even his enemies found that his treatment was unfair--and that means a great deal. Not only was he denied every trace of talent and his art called humbug; even his private circumstances were dragged before the public; the article hinted at cheap restaurants where he was obliged to dine; at the shabby clothes he was forced to wear; at his loose morals, his idleness; it concluded by prophesying in the name of religion and morality that he would end his days in a public institution unless he mended his ways while there was yet time.

It was a disgraceful act, committed in indifference and selfishness; and it was little less than a miracle that a soul was not lost on the night of the publication of that particular number of the Grey Bonnet.

Twenty-four hours later the Incorruptible appeared. It reflected on the way in which public moneys were administered by a certain clique, and mentioned the fact that at the last purchase of pictures, not a single one had been bought which had been painted by an artist, but that the perpetrators had been officials and tradesmen, impudent enough to compete with the artists, although the latter had no other market; it went on to say that these pirates lowered the standard and demoralized the artists, whose sole endeavour would have to be to paint as badly as they did if they did not want to starve. Then Sellén's name was mentioned. His picture was the first soulfully conceived work within the last ten years. For ten years art had been a mere affair of colours and brushes; Sellén's picture was an honest piece of work, full of inspiration and devotion, and entirely original; a picture which could only have been produced by an artist who had met the spirit of nature face to face. The critic enjoined the young artist to fight against the ancients, whom he had already left a long way behind, and exhorted him to have faith and hope, because he had a mission to fulfil, etc.

The Grey Bonnet foamed with rage.

"You'll see that that fellow will have success!" exclaimed the chief editor. "Why the devil did we slate him quite so much! Supposing he became a success now! We should cover ourselves with ridicule."

The academician vowed that he should not have any success, went home with a troubled heart, referred to his books and wrote an essay in which he proved that Sellén's art was humbug, and that the Incorruptible had been corrupted.

The Grey Bonnet drew a breath of relief, but immediately afterwards it received a fresh blow.

On the following day the morning papers announced the fact that his Majesty had bought Sellén's "masterly landscape which, for days, had drawn a large public to the Exhibition."

The Grey Bonnet received the full fury of the gale; it was tossed hither and thither, and fluttered like a rag on a pole. Should they veer round or steer ahead? Both paper and critic were involved. The chief editor decided, by order of the managing director, to sacrifice the critic and save the paper. But how was it to be done? In their extremity they remembered Struve. He was a man completely at home in the maze of publicity. He was sent for. The situation was clear to him in a moment, and he promised that in a very few days the barge should be able to tack.

To understand Struve's scheme, it is necessary to know the most important data of his biography. He was a "born student," driven to journalism by sheer poverty. He started his career as editor of the Socialist People's Flag. Next he belonged to the Conservative Peasants' Scourge, but when the latter removed to the provinces with inventory, printing plant and editor, the name was changed into Peasants' Friend, and its politics changed accordingly. Struve was sold to the Red Cap, where his knowledge of all the Conservative tricks stood him in good stead; in the same way his greatest merit in the eyes of the Grey Bonnet was his knowledge of all the secrets of their deadly foe, the Red Cap, and his readiness to abuse his knowledge of them.

Struve began the work of whitewashing by starting a correspondence in the People's Flag; a few lines of this, mentioning the rush of visitors to the Exhibition, were reprinted in the Grey Bonnet. Next there appeared in the Grey Bonnet an attack on the academician; this attack was followed by a few reassuring words signed "The Ed." which read as follows: "Although we never shared the opinion of our art critic with regard to Mr. Sellén's justly praised landscape, yet we cannot altogether agree with the judgment of our respected correspondent; but as, on principle, we open our columns to all opinions, we unhesitatingly printed the above article."

The ice was broken. Struve, who had the reputation of having written on every subject--except cufic coins--now wrote a brilliant critique of Sellén's picture and signed it very characteristically Dixi. The Grey Bonnet was saved; and so, of course, was Sellén; but the latter was of minor importance. _

Read next: Chapter 11. Happy People

Read previous: Chapter 9. Bills Of Exchange

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