They look to life
for interest with the same kind of cheerful and uneradicable assurance
with which we look for interest at a comedy for which we have paid money
at the door. To the eyes of the ultimate school of contemporary
fastidiousness, the universe is indeed an ill-drawn and over-coloured
picture, the scrawlings in circles of a baby upon the slate of night;
its starry skies are a vulgar pattern which they would not have for a
wallpaper, its flowers and fruits have a cockney brilliancy, like the
holiday hat of a flower-girl. Hence, degraded by art to its own level,
they have lost altogether that primitive and typical taste of man--the
taste for news. By this essential taste for news, I mean the pleasure in
hearing the mere fact that a man has died at the age of 110 in South
Wales, or that the horses ran away at a funeral in San Francisco. Large
masses of the early faiths and politics of the world, numbers of the
miracles and heroic anecdotes, are based primarily upon this love of
something that has just happened, this divine institution of gossip.
When Christianity was named the good news, it spread rapidly, not only
because it was good, but also because it was news.
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