Page:Soullondonasurv00fordgoog.djvu/111

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THE SOUL OF LONDON

tion to his actual work, we must think of this woman as paying too much.

Work in London to-day, if it have become in all its branches less of craft, depends more and more, if its worker is to make any individual success, on "temperament". Temperament in that particular sense we must take to mean the quality of inspiring confidence in one's employer or in one's customer. It is something akin to the artist's temperament, it is something akin to the charlatan's power to hypnotise mobs. The worker, if he is to rise out of the ruck, must impose his private personality upon a greater, or upon a lesser, public.

This tendency is most observable in the periodical press, that most enormous and most modern of industries. Here upon the whole the aesthetically intrinsic quality of the work offered by a young man does not matter much. The employer sits as it were in an office chair between the great public and the men who besiege him. It is not, obviously, his business to secure men whose work will remain, he wants staff that will "go". He will select for his permanent favours men who inspire him with confidence, men who have not any nonsense about them. Nonsense in this case is impracticable ideas of one kind or another.

X. will drive down to an editorial office in a nice dogcart and during an interview, interrupted by frequent calls at a telephone, will fidget towards a window overlooking the street in order to call pointed attention to the fact that his horse will not stand. In that case he may demonstrate that there is not any nonsense about

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