I have just been reading Jack London's _Michael, Brother of Jerry_, and
I am full of righteous rage. What a picture! It is the story of how
performing animals are trained, and before I had read half the book I
made a vow that never again will I sit through a performance of animals.
The tale of Ben Bolt the tiger, if known by the masses, would kill
every animal turn on the stage. Ben Bolt, fresh from the jungle, is
broken by the trainers. The method is unspeakable; he is lashed with
iron bars and stabbed with forks until in agony he falls senseless in
the arena. This treatment goes on for weeks . . . and in the end many
good, kindly people see Ben Bolt, a miserable, broken animal, sit up in
a chair like a human. And they laugh. My God!
Then there is Barney the good-natured mule that was once a family pet.
Later he becomes the celebrated bucking mule, and a prize is offered to
anyone who will keep on his back for one minute. Audiences go into
fits of laughter at his antics. But the audiences do not know that
Barney was trained with a spiked saddle, and that for months life was
one long agony of pain.
Is my anger due to the cruelty I am repressing in myself? I don't care
whether it is sadism or the spark of the divine in me. All I care
about is that this inferno of pain must cease.
Never has any book affected me as this one has done. By word of mouth
and by my pen I shall try my hardest to send dear old Jack London's
message round the world. Public opinion is the only thing that can
stop the misery of these broken creatures, and I suggest that the
anti-vivisectionists turn their energies to this infinitely worse evil.
The vivisectionists, at any rate, are working for humanity, but the
brutes who break performing animals are merely amusing crowds of good
people who know nothing about what goes on behind the scenes.
* * * * *
I see in the newspaper that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks held up
the traffic in Piccadilly. They appeared on a balcony at the Ritz, and
the crowd went frantic. The super-hero and the super-heroine of the
cinema drew the crowd's emotion to them, and Tagore the Indian poet
arrived in town at the same time unnoticed. It would seem that the
crowd responds to the presence of the unimportant person only. London
went mad over Hawker and Jack Johnson, and Georges Carpentier; and if
Charlie Chaplin were to come over, I fancy London would take a general
holiday.
No one will contend that these people are of supreme importance in the
scheme of life. Charlie is a funny little man; Douglas Fairbanks is a
fine lump of a fellow; Mary Pickford is a sweet little woman. But
Tagore will live longer; Thomas Hardy, Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell,
Sigmund Freud are of greater moment to humanity, yet each could walk
out of Paddington Station and be unrecognised by the crowd.
The morning paper shows well that the crowd is interested only in
unessentials. "Punish the profiteers!" was the press cry a few months
ago. Well, they punished the profiteers . . . and prices continued to
rise. A few years ago the cry was: "Flog the white slave traffickers!"
They flogged them, and yet I still see thousands of white slaves in the
West End of London. And while Europe is sinking into anarchy and
bankruptcy to-day, the only remedies the crowd representatives--the
press--can think of are remedies of the Hang-the-Kaiser type. I
believe that the crowd still thinks that juvenile crime is mainly
caused by cinema five-part dramas.
The crowd is rather like the individual unconscious; it is primitive,
and like the unconscious it can only wish. The crowd that welcomed
Mary and Douglas was closely akin to the personal unconscious. Douglas
stands to each individual in the crowd as the eternal hero, the man who
always wins. Each man in the crowd sees in Douglas his own ideal self,
so that when the office boy cheers Douglas he is cheering himself.
Mary has been well named "the world's sweet-heart"; she is the ideal
heroine, beautiful, wronged, protected by six foot of masculinity.
Both come from the world of make-believe, the world of phantasy. Their
arrival in England simply made a dream come true.
Now I am certain that if any individual in the great Piccadilly crowd
had met Douglas and Mary on the boat, he or she would have looked at
them with interest, but there would have been no cheering and throwing
of roses. What the crowd does is to raise an emotion to a superlative
degree. In a full hall you will laugh at a joke that would not bring a
smile to your face in a room. You become absorbed in your crowd, and
you are fully open to your crowd's suggestion. I generally laugh at
Charlie Chaplin, but one night a cinema manager, a friend of mine, gave
me a private view of Charlie's latest production. I sat alone in the
large cinema palace . . . and I couldn't even smile. Had a crowd been
there to share my laugh, I should have roared.
The Douglas-Mary episode makes me pessimistic about the future of
democracy. For democracy is crowd rule, and the crowd is a baby when
it isn't a savage. Yet we have no real democracy in this country. We
have a slave state, the exploiters and the exploited, the "haves" and
the "have nots." Douglas and Mary came over, and the poor
beauty-starved populace forgot for the moment its poverty, and showered
all its pent-up emotion on the people from picture-book land.
In Elizabethan times the world was a place of wonder; every mariner was
coming home with wondrous tales of Spanish gold and men with necks like
bulls. All you had to do to find a reality that was more wonderful
than fancy was to sail away across the sea. But to-day the world holds
no mystery; there are no pirates to overcome, no prisoned maidens to
rescue. Reality means toil and taxes and trouble. But there is a land
where men are dew-lapped like bulls . . . the land of phantasy. There
is a society where the villain always gets his deserts . . . the land
of film pictures. And when your hero and heroine walk out of the
picture and become real flesh and blood, what are you to do? After
all, you cannot pour all your emotion into your looms and office-desks
and counters. Sweet-faced Mary does not know it, but she is one of the
best allies that our capitalist system could have; for if the crowd
were not showering its emotion on her it might well be using it up in
the smashing of all the ugly things in our civilisation.
* * * * *
I have been thinking of the crowd in another aspect. Last year in a
merry mood I sat down to write a novel. I meant it to be a comedy,
but, having no control over the characters, I found that they insisted
in making the story a farce. The result was _The Booming of Bunkie_.
I thought it a very funny book, and I laughed at some of my own jokes
and murmured, "Good!" I impatiently awaited the book's appearance, and
when the day of publication came I sat down hopefully to await the
press notices. The first one to come in was lukewarm.
"Why do papers send a funny book to an old fossil of a reviewer with no
sense of humour?" I said, testily and waited for the next post. Well,
it came; it brought three adverse notices and a letter.
"Dear Dominie, I admired your _Log_, but why, oh why, did you
perpetrate such a monstrosity as _The Booming of Bunkie_?"
Then a friend wrote me a letter.
"Dear old chap,--You are suffering from the effects of the war. If the
war has induced you to write _Bunkie_, I am all for hanging the Kaiser."
For weeks I clung to the belief that the crowd had no sense of
humour . . . then I re-read my novel. I still hold that it is funny in
parts, but I see what is wrong. It is a specialised type of humour, or
rather wit, the type that undergraduates might appreciate. In fact I
was recently gratified to hear that the students of a Scots university
were rhapsodising about it. The real fault of the book is that it is
clever, and to be clever is to be at once suspect.
I naturally like to think that the circulation of a book is generally
in inverse proportion to its intrinsic merit. J. D. Beresford's novels
are, to me, much better than those of the late Charles Garvice, yet I
make a guess that Garvice's circulation was many times greater than
Beresford's. Still I cannot argue that the reverse is true--that
because a book does not go into its second edition it is necessarily
good. I find that the problem of circulations is a difficult one. I
cannot, for instance, understand why _The Young Visitors_ sold in
thousands; I failed to raise a smile at it. Again, there is my friend
although publisher, Herbert Jenkins. I didn't think _Bindle_ funny,
yet it has been translated into umpteen European languages. Jenkins
himself does not think it funny, and that, possibly, is why he is my
friend.
The most surprising success to me was Ian Hay's _The First Hundred
Thousand_. I read Pat MacGill's _Red Horizon_ about the same time, and
thought Hay was stilted and superior with a public-school man's
patronising Punch-like attitude to the working-class recruits. I
thought that he didn't know what he was writing about, that he had not
reached the souls of the men. MacGill, on the other hand, gave me the
impression of a warm, passionate, intense knowledge of men; he wrote as
one who lived with ordinary men and knew them through and through. Yet
I fancy that _The Red Horizon_, popular as it was, did not have the
sales of _The First Hundred Thousand_.
I was lunching with Professor John Adams one day in London. We got on
to the subject of circulations, and he said that he had just been
asking the biggest bookseller in London what novel sold best.
"Have a guess," said the Professor to me.
"_David Copperfield_," I said promptly.
He laughed.
"Not bad!" he said, "you've got the author right, but the book is _A
Tale of Two Cities_."
He then asked me to guess what two authors sold best among the troops
at the front during the war.
"Charles Garvice and Nat Gould," I said, and the Professor thought me a
wonderful fellow, for I had guessed aright.
There is a whiskered Ford story which tells that Mr. Ford took a new
car from his factory and invited a visitor to have a spin. They
started off, and went seven miles out. Then the car stopped. Ford
jumped out and lifted the bonnet.
"Good Lord!" he cried, "the engine hasn't been put in! The car must
have run seven miles on its reputation!"
I think that books run many miles on reputation alone. Like a snowball
the farther a circulation rolls the more it gathers to itself. But
what is it that makes a book popular? The best press notices in the
world will not send the circulation of a book up to a hundred thousand
level. What sells a book is talk. Scores of people said to me: "Oh,
_have_ you read _The Young Visitors_?" I hasten to add, as a Scot,
that I personally did not help to increase the circulation; I borrowed
the book from an enthusiast. Talk sells a book, but we have to
discover why people talk about _The Young Visitors_ and not
about--er--_The Booming of Bunkie_. The book that is to sell well must
be able to touch a chord in the crowd heart, and _The Young Visitors_
sold because it touched the infantile chord in the crowd heart; it
brought back the happiest days of life, the schooldays: again, its
naïve Malapropisms appealed to the crowd, because we are all glad to
laugh at the social and grammatical errors we have made and
conveniently forgotten about.
_Bunkie_ did not reach the hundred thousand level because it was too
clever; it was a purely intellectual essay in wit rather than humour.
And the crowd distrusts wit, and that is why the witty plays of Oscar
Wilde are seldom produced, while _Charley's Aunt_ goes on for ever.
I am tempted to go on to a comparison of wit with humour, but I shall
only remark that wit is an intellectual thing, whereas humour is
emotional. Humour is elemental, but wit is cultural. Without a
language you could have humour, but without language there could be no
wit.
* * * * *
I have just come across a small book entitled _Hints on School
Discipline_, by Ernest F. Row, B.Sc.
"Boys will only respect a master whom they fear," he says. I have been
preaching this doctrine for years . . . that respect always has fear
behind it . . . and it pleases me to find that an exponent of the old
methods should support my argument.
When I began to read the book I was amazed.
"Good Lord!" I cried, "this chap should have published his book in the
year 1820. He advocates a system that modern psychology has shown to
be fatal to the child. It is army discipline applied to schools."
I found it hard to finish the book, but I read every word of it and
then I said to myself: "The majority is on the side of Row. Eton,
Harrow, many elementary teachers would agree with him. He is evidently
an honest sort of fellow, and he must be reckoned with. I must try to
see his point of view."
And I think I see it. He accepts current education with its set
subjects, time-tables, order, morality, and he is trying to adapt the
young teacher to what is established. Hence to maintain all these
things, we must have stern discipline and swift punishment. But I
wonder if Row has thought of the other side of the question; I wonder
if he has asked himself whether order and time-tables and obedience and
respect are really necessary. I should like to meet him and have a
chat; I think I should like him, and further, I think that I could
convert him to the other way . . . if he is under forty.
Ah! Horrid thought! Is it possible that Row is pulling our legs? No,
he writes as an honest man. Perhaps he knows all about the modern
movement; perhaps he has studied Montessori, Freud, Jung, Homer Lane,
Edmond Holmes, and found that they are all pathetically wrong. Mayhap
he has proved that the child _is_ a sinner.
"The young teacher should never address a boy by his Christian name or
nickname," he says.
Oh, surely he _is_ pulling our legs!
* * * * *
At intervals during the past few years I have been puzzled when people
congratulated me on my village school in Lancashire. I had quite a
number of misunderstandings on the subject. Then one day I discovered
that there was a village schoolmaster in Lancashire called E. F.
O'Neill. I wrote him telling him that I was coming to see his school,
and one July morning I alighted at one of the ugliest villages in the
world, and I walked past slag-heaps and all the horrors of
industrialism to a red building on the outskirts. Three or four boys
were digging in the school garden. I walked into the school, and two
seconds after entering I said to myself: "E. F. O'Neill, you are a
great man!"
There were no desks, and I could see no teacher. Half-a-dozen children
stood round a table weighing things and cutting things.
"What's this?" I asked.
"The shop," said a girl, and after a little time I grasped the idea.
You have paste-board coins, and you come to the shop and buy a pound of
butter (plasticene), two pounds of sugar (sand), and a bottle of
Yorkshire Relish (a brown mixture unrecognisable to me). You pay your
sovereign and the shop-keeper gives you the change, remarks on the
likelihood of the weather's keeping up and turns to the next customer.