5
Both these men, Thunderclap and Bendigo, had an air of really wanting new policies for the country, though they were essentially crazy policies. They were at least kinetic, they wanted to make things happen even if they did not quite know what or how, but the other and really conservative newspaper owners and directors Rud approached seemed simply holding on to the established order.
They displayed not simply a disposition to be unbelievably dull in political matters, they displayed a partisan attitude to dullness; they even carried on a dullness propaganda; by way of political education they inundated their readers with the exemplary memoirs of the empty eminent of the Victorian and Edwardian days. They still thought that people would thrill at the pomp and splendour of Lord Grey's mental processes or Lord Oxford's academic dignity. They ignored every social process afoot and everything new, unless it was in some way assimilable to the old order. Nothing, Rud realised, was to be got by a direct association with them. That meant mere submission. It was clear that to win their attention something very emphatic and quasi–successful had to be done.
"Maybe," said Steenhold, "they'd take up our stuff if it came as news from America, much more readily than if it grew under their feet. Or from China. It wouldn't seem so disturbing that way. They still think America and China are oceans away…"
"Couldn't we get a man to write a series of articles warning people against the dangers of the Common–sense Movement?" said Chiffan. "We might launch a controversy. Say it was unspiritual or something of that sort, and drag in the broader–minded bishops to vindicate us…"
"Is there no press for ideas, as ideas, in. England?" demanded Irwell.
"Only in what they call the silly season," said Chiffan.
Chiffan was inclined to think that the country was in what he called a "phase of discordance" between its press and its public. He sprouted an engaging theory that there have to be "periodic modernisations" in the newspaper world. ("As in everything else," said Rud.) Newspapers succeeded, fell into routines and grew steadily more out of touch with the public mind. They became great estates. They became pompous and aloof. Until at last the gap between them and the latent mental possibilities of a new generation broadened enough to admit a new type of journalism. This, he declared, had happened to Britain with the onset of the new popular halfpenny paper at the beginning of the century, and in America recently with the appearance of the Time type of national weekly newspaper. And with each of these phases of modernisation a quickening of the public mind had been made manifest. The times were ripening now for a fresh move in England.
Bodisham picked up this idea and, looking ahead, said that if the movement was to grow it must have an aggressive competitive press of its own. "We must have a press section of the movement—a separate organisation, of course, not a Party organ. We must try out a paper to pay. We must try a group of papers…Find men for it. Find men. And keep a Party contact with them. None of these proprietors for us—with their abortive dreams of power—it's editors and managers we want to have with us. We've got to re–democratise the press. Dictatorship is just as bad in a newspaper office as it is in a country. It stiffens. It mechanises. It devitalises."
When the Group turned its attention to the existing leftward papers, Chiffan found still more support for his theory that there were periods of opportunity for publicity, and that now was the time to vary the production and distribution of newspapers. Rud listened to all they had to say, and then went off like a drummer to interest the left press in this new movement he was selling the world.
And by the time he got talking to them, his bright adaptive mind had developed Chiffan's theory of stale newspaper forms and methods into a general theory of collective fatigue.
He addressed various discreet and dubious Liberals: "What I want to do is to refresh Liberalism."
Liberalism, he said, was practically empty. Why not have it done–up thoroughly from roof to basement—repainted? "You want to be fresh. How can Liberalism be anything but something fresh?
"The world," he generalised, "is always getting tired of its ruling phrases. Always. Fresh every morning are the old hopes, but the words for them have to be different. People want the same fundamental things age after age, you say; yes, but they want them in a new dress. We're living in an enslaved and militant world. You say that and so do I. And why? We're living in a backward–looking world—black with debts and old histories. 'We?' you ask. We common men. (Think of me, please, as just one of your readers come in to tell you off.) We're perplexed and baffled. We hate the fears and patriotisms that enslave us. Subconsciously if not consciously. We imagined these patriotisms meant local freedom, and now we find they mean universal slavery. Patriotism in a little state is the first resort of a scoundrel. And nowadays all states are too little. Strangulated. We're crushed to death with armies and navies and air forces, and nobody wants them to fight. The common soldiers least of all. We are bored to death of being ordered about—and we don't like the new catering. And the taxes. We're sulking and we want a lead. But where is the chink of light yet in our prison? Where is your light? Why don't you go on to something? Everything Liberalism offers the world as an alternative to drill–ground slavery is either really stale or it looks stale.
"Why is Liberalism so hopelessly conservative? Worse than any Tories. Everybody is tired of your League of Nations, for example, and yet you are still boring away at it. It's no good arguing whether it's right or wrong or good or bad. It's stale. It's—infected. It's infested. It never was anything more than an insincere gesture. No one believes in it now. No one at all. It has missed fire with the common man. Alter it at least, do it up, give it a new name. Wash out the Wilson stuff. Make it world–rationalist instead of internationalist.
"You keep on boring away at that old, old story. Why? Don't you really want world unity? Are you really clinging to national politics subconsciously? Have you asked yourselves that? I misjudge you? Do I? Well, even as a political fraud the old League is pretty well played out. What good will it do you or anyone now? Forget about it.
"That's where your support of the World Common–sense Party would give you a chance…We have new formulae…
"We English are profoundly tired of our Empire. Indeed we are. Tired and bored. Don't you realise that? The Empire's become public–schoolmasters' cant and the boys know all the answers. It's being stripped and exposed; it's an empire of kraals and slums, loincloth villages and Bombay sweat–shops; it has never educated, never released; it has no constructive vitality at all; it's nothing to be proud of. The intelligent boys are ashamed of it. At heart Germany and Italy are just as sick of their regimes. But what can they do? They just go on doing the same old exercises and repeating the same old catchwords until something comes along to crystallise their discontent in a positive form. Who can deliver them from the body of this death? They ask that; everyone asks that…
"You didn't know of our movement? You don't know anything of any movement. Your fault, not ours. You just know stale politics…I can understand Liberalism getting stale. All things get stale. But why should it want to keep stale?
"The world, I tell you, is bored—bored now to the explosive pitch. It's bored by all this incessant war preparation. It is bored by aimless violence, now here, now there. It is tired of hatred politics. It's tired of fresh murders every day. It is not indignant, not excited; it is bored. Bored and baffled…
"I don't believe a man begins to know anything of politics until he realises the immense menace of mental fatigue, of world–wide mass boredom. It accumulates. It makes the most frightful convulsions and demoralisation possible. It makes them at last inevitable. Nobody wants fundamental changes in a world where hope and interest prevail. Then people accept their careers, settle down to them, rear children. But throw them out of work, in and out and no sense of security, deprive them of bright expectations, regiment them in masses, underfeed them, bore them with organised mass patriotism, and they begin to seep together into a common morass of discontent and impatience. Almost unconsciously…
"They're like that now.
"If you Liberals really had a progressive idea ready for them now, new–phrased and released from old obligations and old associations, you could set the world afire with it. If you had. Eh? Well, we have. We Common–sense men are the real New Liberalism. Why be so stuffy about it? You've got to bury old Gladstone sooner or later, just as the Socialists have to bury Karl Marx…
"After all, what we want is to go on with the Radicalism of the first French Revolution. We're just revitalised Radicals. That's what we are. Napoleon was a traitor and the Commune a blunder. Forget about them. We want real liberty, real equality, real fraternity…How about 'Back to the Taking of the Bastille' as a slogan? How about 'The Liberators of the Bastille'?"
"But I thought you were all for scrapping old traditions," said the Liberal editor, with an air of making a point.
He had made a point, and Rud had to pull his argument together.
"Scrapping old corruptions," said Rud. "Radicalism—the indignation that stormed the Bastille—is eternally young."