Yet The Oxford Looking-Glass reflected another spirit which Michael could not account for and the presence of which he vaguely resented.
“The O.L.G. is getting very priggish and serious and rather dull,” he complained to Maurice.
“Not half so dull as it would be if I depended entirely on casual contributions,” replied the editor. “I don’t seem to get anything but earnestness.”
“Oxford is becoming the home of living causes,” sighed Michael. “That’s a depressing thought. Do you really think these Rhodes Scholars from America and Australia and Germany are going to affect us?”
“I don’t know,” Maurice said. “But everybody seems keen to speculate on the result.”
“Why don’t you take up a strong line of patronage? Why don’t you threaten these pug-nosed invaders with the thunders of the past?” Michael demanded fiercely.
“Would it be popular?” asked Maurice. “Personally of course I don’t care one way or the other, but I don’t want to let the O.L.G. in for a lot of criticism.”
“You really ought to be a wonderful editor,” said Michael. “You’re so essentially the servant of the public.”
“Well, with all your grumbles,” said Maurice, “ours is the only serious paper that has had any sort of a run of late years.”
“But it lacks individuality,” Michael complained. “It’s so damned inclusive. It’s like The Daily Telegraph. It’s voluminous and undistinguished. It shows the same tepid cordiality toward everything, from a man who’s going to be hanged for murder to a new record at cricket. Why can’t you infect it with some of the deplorable but rather delightfully juvenile indiscretion of The Daily Mail?”
“The Daily Mail,” Maurice scoffed. “That rag!”
“A man once said to me,” Michael meditatively continued, “that whenever he saw a man in an empty railway compartment reading The Daily Telegraph, he always avoided it. You see, he knew that man. He knew how terrible it would be to listen to him when he had finished his Telegraph. I feel rather like that about the O.L.G. But after all,” he added cheerfully, “nobody does read the O.L.G. The circulation depends on the pledges of their pen sent round to their friends and relations by the casual contributors. And nobody ever meets a casual contributor. Is it true, by the way, that the fossilized remains of one were found in-that great terra incognita—Queen’s College?”