PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

lives that seem at first glance dull, repulsive, or eccentric. But
that is rare. In almost every story that catches our attention we
become a character and act out the role with a pantomime of our own.
The pantomime may be subtle or gross, may be sympathetic to the story,
or only crudely analogous; but it will consist of those feelings which
are aroused by our conception of the role. And so, the original theme
as it circulates, is stressed, twisted, and embroidered by all the
minds through which it goes. It is as if a play of Shakespeare's were
rewritten each time it is performed with all the changes of emphasis
and meaning that the actors and audience inspired.
Something very like that seems to have happened to the stories in the
sagas before they were definitively written down. In our time the
printed record, such as it is, checks the exuberance of each
individual's fancy. But against rumor there is little or no checks and
the original story, true or invented, grows wings and horns, hoofs and
beaks, as the artist in each gossip works upon it. The first
narrator's account does not keep its shape and proportions. It is
edited and revised by all who played with it as they heard it, used it
for day dreams, and passed it on. [Footnote: For an interesting
example, see the case described by C. J. Jung, _Zentralblatt f¸r
Psychoanalyse_, 1911, Vol. I, p. 81. Translated by Constance Long,
in _Analytical Psychology_, Ch. IV.]
Consequently the more mixed the audience, the greater will be the
variation in the response. For as the audience grows larger, the
number of common words diminishes. Thus the common factors in the
story become more abstract. This story, lacking precise character of
its own, is heard by people of highly varied character. They give it
their own character.
2
The character they give it varies not only with sex and age, race and
religion and social position, but within these cruder classifications,
according to the inherited and acquired constitution of the
individual, his faculties, his career, the progress of his career, an
emphasized aspect of his career, his moods and tenses, or his place on
the board in any of the games of life that he is playing. What reaches
him of public affairs, a few lines of print, some photographs,
anecdotes, and some casual experience of his own, he conceives through
his set patterns and recreates with his own emotions. He does not take
his personal problems as partial samples of the greater environment.
He takes his stories of the greater environment as a mimic enlargement
of his private life.
But not necessarily of that private life as he would describe it to