The transient and pleasurable quality of the tragic emotions produced by novel reading is well known.

A man may weep over a novel which he will forget in two or three hours, although the same man may be made insane, or may have his character changed for life, by actual experiences which are far less terrible than those of which he reads, experiences which at the moment may produce neither tears nor any other obvious nervous effect.
Both those facts are of first-rate political importance in those great modern communities in which all the events which stimulate political action reach the voters through newspapers.

The emotional appeal of journalism, even more than that of the stage, is facile because it is pure, and transitory because it is second-hand.

Battles and famines, murders and the evidence of inquiries into destitution, all are presented by the journalist in literary form, with a careful selection of 'telling' detail.

Their effect is therefore produced at once, in the half-hour that follows the middle-class breakfast, or in the longer interval on the Sunday morning when the workman reads his weekly paper.
But when the paper has been read the emotional effect fades rapidly away.
Any candidate at an election feels for this reason the strangeness of the conditions under which what Professor James calls the 'pungent sense of effective reality,'[9] reaches or fails to reach, mankind, in a civilisation based upon newspapers.