Such in the main was the “great daily”: an affair of a “great editor,” talented leader-writers, and a few highly-paid correspondents in certain big capitals. The rest of the staff were nobodies, inferior in education, in social standing, and in professional status; and there was a sort of Chinese wall, moral and sometimes even physical, between them and the aristocrats. This rigidity was unfavourable to progress, and it so happened that about the beginning of the Nineties the supply of really “great editors” fell short. Mr. Buckle, of _The Times_, might, indeed, be accounted such, but he had special difficulties in his way—perhaps the chief of them was the great blow of the Pigott forgeries—and among the controllers of the other “great dailies” (except the _Daily Telegraph_, which has always been peculiar in having a most active and vigilant proprietorial element) there was none of quite the same calibre as the Mudfords and the Delanes. There was thus a deadness about the Press which positively invited the invasion of a robust competitor.
The first who made a burst into that silent sea was Mr. T. P. O’Connor with _The Star_; Mr. W. T. Stead’s experiments with the _Pall Mall Gazette_ were not of long duration, and the enterprise of _The Echo_, one of the earliest pioneers of popular journalism, was not specially distinctive. _The Star_ may be taken as typical of the newer journalistic school of the early Nineties. In those days it was a strange blend of seriousness and flippancy. To the rather stodgy decorum of the old-established papers it opposed a curiously insincere rowdyism. I say “insincere,” but perhaps the better adjective would be “forced.” _The Star_ was really not at all vulgar. On its literary side it stood for the very opposite of vulgarity; the true vulgarity was on the side of the staid and respectable critics. And in politics it was mainly for all that was honest and of good report; one might smile at the enthusiasms of a purely Cockney print for “Home to the village and back to the land,” but one could not accuse it of an unworthy or trivial outlook. But it tried with extraordinary strenuousness to give the impression of vulgarity. In dealing with the gravest matters it affected a riot of titular fantasy tending to scandalise the steady-going. On the whole, it clung to the narrow range of subjects affected by the older papers, but it dished up the meetings and despatches piping hot and with a _sauce piquante_ of “bright” headline. The news of the “Wife Murder at Stepney” might be substantially the same as in the ordinary paper, but _The Star_ sought to induce cheerfulness by heading the paragraph “Bullets for Mother.” A criminal who cut his throat while trying to escape from the police was described as “A Scarlet Runner.” But this jocularity was often too abstruse to be really popular. _The Star_ was staffed chiefly by clever and rebellious young men, most of whom have since done well for themselves and perhaps for others, and they were incorrigible in inferring, not only much mental alertness in their readers, but a considerable acquaintance with the dead languages and the French and English classics. Thus, if there happened to be a strike of bakers settled by compromise, the glad news was pretty sure to be announced under the headline “_Dough ut des_,” which might have delighted a frivolous man of education, but could hardly have failed to leave the ordinary proletarian (supposed to be the main support of the paper) in a state of angry mystification. Suppose, also, that some gorgeous Maharajah happened to come over to one of the recurrent royal pageants, dropping diamonds wherever he went—“Lo! The Rich Indian,” the predestined headline, might tickle an idle man who remembered the original quotation and recalled the rest of the couplet. But to the brewer’s drayman it would seem a mere gratuitous silliness. It was this disastrous cleverness, perhaps more than anything else, which prevented the ultimate victory resting with the newer journalism, and left the way open to the newest school.