We can hear you clamouring to know the answers to these exciting
questions; they are right here before us; but our duty is not to solve
problems, only to propound them.
But you must get it clearly in your minds that the Buddha is not a God.
The Buddhist Catechism expressly rejects “a personal God-Creator,”
and “distinctly denies the doctrine of a creation out of nothing.
Everything owes its origin and development to its own inherent
vitalism, or, what comes to the same, its own will to live.” The Buddha
was not a God, but “a man far superior to ordinary men, one of a series
of self-enlightened sublime Buddhas, who appear at long intervals in
the world, and are morally and spiritually so superior to erring,
suffering mankind, that to the childlike conceptions of the multitude
they appear as Gods or Messiahs.”
This is all tremendously exciting and leads to many pure and thrilling
speculations that are much too honourable to pursue here. They would
get us into horrible trouble, we feel sure. Indeed we are not at all
certain whether both Frank Shay and ourself are not already subject
to possible legal duress for vending and discussing so dangerous
a book. But a noble analogy occurs to us which we venture with
humility. Charley Chaplin is a great comedian. But the simple-minded
drama critics are not content to leave it at that. They will have it
(although it is now _vieux jeu_) that he is really a Great Tragic
Artist. And so the tradition will go down to posterity that he was
a Secret Hamlet, an Edgar Poe in clown’s trousers. Charley himself,
finding that his intellectual disciples insist upon this, perhaps
acquiesces in the idea. Only by doing so, he may feel, can he get his
stuff across.
It is really very astonishing; at this moment our Employer brings in
to us a letter he has had from a publisher, which begins:
_Do you agree with me that there is a need for a book on the
fundamentals of public opinion, for a book that will endeavor
to define the new profession of public relations counsel, its
scope and its functions and its relations specifically to the
press and to the public generally?_
A Public Relations Counsel, of course, is simply the post-war name
for a Press Agent. But we mustn’t be ribald. The press agent, if
conscientious, may contribute a valuable function. We ourself have
worked as a free-lance Press Agent for George Fox, Sir Thomas Browne,
Herman Melville, Thoreau, Lao-Tse, Pearsall Smith, and various
other people who have seemed to us to have the Right Idea. But one
of the troubles is that there have been (and always will be) a lot
of unauthorized Public Relations Counsels who get the ear of the
crowd and limn upon the great canvas of the public a portrait of the
Prophet which is very different from what that poor dreamer himself
may have wished. Even the humblest of authors has frequently cursed
the publisher’s man who writes the copy for his book-jacket. If you
want a really pregnant speculation, weigh in your mind how many Public
Relations Counsels there have been in the world of religion, and how
amazingly they have interpreted and toned down the simple dissolvents
of the founders of their creeds.