And the game of newspapers, which I greatly love, being at heart no philosopher, is enormously important. The prevailing temperament of its players is worth careful study. The mere existence of newspapers is a proof of the religious instinct among men, that passionate interest in one another which implies that we are all gossips together. Gossips are people who have only one relative in common, but that relative the highest possible; namely, God. There is truly some strange analogy between church and press. Whether it is the successful newspaper’s taste for making itself clerical in architecture, or the successful church’s appetite for front-page controversy; whether it is that they both make the cruellest and deadliest of enemies if annoyed; whether it is that the newspaper carries on the medieval church’s lust of persecution; or that they both mobilize for war sooner than any one else; or that both are vehicles of great realities, but vehicles so gorgeously mechanized and ritualed that the passenger has almost been forgotten--whatever the basis of the analogy may be, I am not sure; but I feel it to be there. Journalism, like every skilled _métier_, tends to become a sort of priesthood. All such professional groups admit with cynical or humorous readiness, inside the circle, truths that it is unmannerly to gossip abroad. But now and then some happy member feels he has absorbed enough hokum to last him for a reasonable lifetime. He has enjoyed, perhaps even profited by, the sharp childishness of that way of life. He escapes for a time, with aspiration to think it over. He wearies of the tragic ingenuity of men at concealing their real thoughts. There are no longer any codes of manners to be considered, any possibly tender readers to be sheltered, any powerful patrons to be placated. Of course genuinely detached thinking, even if it were possible, is likely to be discouraged; for detachment is always assumed to be malignant. But, anyhow, let’s be at least like so many houses in the suburbs, semi-detached. Yes, there is a sort of spring fever of the soul, a seizure when, in moments of golden tranquil intuition, we see Lucretius’s “coasts of light.” We would hope to savour, as he bids us, not merely the honey that is greased round the rim of the cup--the honey of our daily amusement and distraction--but even the chill purging wormwood of the draft. Suddenly the quotidian employ, the haggling scruples of detail, seem strangely insignificant. Languor and lassitude and uneasy hankering pervade the spirit--an intimation of unearthliness. There is passion to go seeking “those things that are requisite and necessary.” In Walt’s noble phrase, “to sign for soul and body.” Then, unashamed of the hunger and trouble of human spirits, it seems irrelevant either to chaff or to praise the dear farce of life. One dreams of uttering only some small granule of broken truth, something more than the jocund trickery of the press.