“Now, I want to tell you about another thought of mine which may puzzle you--or it may make you laugh as it does other people. There’s a woman here--a very bright woman but not, to my taste, a lovely one--who is very learned in a superficial way. She knows everything that is current in science, art, literature, and fashion, though she seems to me deficient in thoroughness. She ‘has the patter of it all at her tongue’s end,’ as they say here, but I don’t think she knows much behind the patter. A wise editor whom I met at dinner a few days ago, described her as ‘a person who holds herself qualified to discuss and decide anything in heaven or earth from the standpoint of the cyclopædia and her own inner consciousness.’ She writes for one of the newspapers, though I didn’t know it when she talked with me about Darwin. I told her I thought of Darwin’s book as a great poem. You would have understood me, if I had said that to you, wouldn’t you? You know I always think of the grass, and the trees and the flowers, and the birds and the butterflies, and all the rest, as nature’s poems, and this book seems to me a great epic which dominates and includes, and interprets them all, just as Homer and Milton and Virgil and Tasso and especially Shakespeare, dominate all the little twitterings of all the other poets. Anyhow it seems to me that a book which tells us how all things came about, is a poem and a very great one. I said so to this woman, and next day I saw it all printed in the newspaper for which she writes. I shouldn’t have minded that as she didn’t tell my name, but I thought she seemed to laugh and jeer at my thought. She said something witty about trying to turn Darwin into dactyls and substitute dithyrambics for dogmatics in the writings of Sir Isaac Newton. Somehow it all sounded bright and witty as one read it in the newspaper. But is that the way in which a serious thought ought to be treated? Do the newspapers, when they thus flippantly deal with serious things, really minister to human advancement? Do they not rather retard it by making jests of things that are not jests? I have come to know a good many newspaper writers since I have been here, and I am convinced that they have no real seriousness in their work, no controlling conscience. ‘The newspaper’ said one of the greatest of them to me not long ago, ‘is a mirror of today. It doesn’t bother itself much with tomorrow or yesterday.’ I asked him why it should not reflect today accurately, instead of distorting if with smartness. ‘Oh,’ he answered, ‘we can’t stop to consider such things. We must do that which will please and attract the reader, regardless of everything else. Dulness is the only thing we must avoid as we shun the pestilence, and erudition and profundity are always dull.’ “‘But doesn’t the newspaper assume to teach men and women?’ I asked. ‘And is it not in conscience bound to teach them the truth and not falsehood?’