He Who Got Slapped
BY JAN STRUTHER.
" WHEN Primo Camera was leaving The Ring, Blackfriars, the other day, a man steppedont from the crowd and slapped the giant boxer on the cheek.
Asked why he had done this, the man replied `Just for fun.. >, You can take this news item how you like : you may see in it an exhibition of foolhardy courage-:-for, although the police intervened, they might not have ; or a rash act which might have led to international complications ; or a joke in poor taste ; or material for a Bateman drawing ; or what you will. But to me, at any rate, it has a noble significance. It is a symbol of the age-long antagonism between the large and thc small. In the old days, when might was right and when Size and strength meant bread, money and acres, the small man feared the large man and tried to destroy him. Hence Hop-o'-my-thumb, hence David, hence Jack the Giant-killer. But nowadays, when hulk is not only useless but, in a world of flats and 'buses, inconvenient, the small man no longer wants to kill the large one, because the latter no longer represents a physical danger. He remains, however, a social and psychological menace; for mere size still has a certain spurious publicity value, a base hold over the enfeebled imaginations of the crowd. A fine figure of a man . . . stands six-foot-three in his socks . . . tall and broad-shouldered . . as strong as a horse. . . . So run the admiring whispers, thither turn the adoring eyes of Her whose favours you yourself are seeking ; past he strides in his immense tweeds, or saunters in his vast immaculate flannels, that godlike nitwit, that six-foot-three of curly-headed inanity : while you look down, discomfited; at your size-seven shoes, a mere sixty-five inches or so away. There are no prizes for neatness, no tokensof gratitude for taking up less room- on an overcrowded planet. The most you can hope for is pity, or an amused and tolerant friendship : she may even like you well enough to sweep round upon you, after he has passed, those dazzling (but spiritually myopic) eyes, those eyes which are; alas,-so nearly on a level with your own, and squeeze your arm -affectionately, and say,
with a maudlin sigh, " Isn't he marvellous ? " , So the old rivalry persists, though in a ren diffet guise;
the battle still rages, though in Another Part of the Field. Yon,- as the small man, have the choice of two weapons : you can outwit the large man, or you can make fun of him. The first is easy but dangerous : women arc mistrustful of brains except in the rare instances when they are combined with bulk. If you get the better of the large man in business, they will suspect you of being a bit of a cad : if you outshine him in conversation, they will label you an insufferable highbrow, while he himself takes refuge in a bluff and engaging Philistinism. " I can't keep my end up against you writing fellows," he murmurs, wagging his blond, Neanderthal head ; and immediately it is he who is the hero, you who arc showing off. The small man, therefore, must fall back upon his only infall- ible weapon—ridicule. If lie can make the large man look silly he has gone a long way towards making him, as the saying is, look small. For although people in general, and women in particular, find stupidity tolerable or even charming, they will not easily forgive mere silliness. And they will forgive it still less in a large man than in a small one ; perhaps they have an illogical feeling that the former is the further removed of the two from the status of child- hood, as he is from its stature, and that therefore he has less excuse for looking undignified. Be that as it may, when a small man slips on a banana-skin, or falls over a rug, or runs after his own hat, or sits down where there isn't is chair, the incident strikes people as laughable but not incongruous ; they think no less of him for it (though that may be partly because they thought so little of him before) : but when a large man does any of those things the laughter of the world has a crueller ring ; his own magnificence is the measure of his own defeat ; the greater the bulk, it seems, the greater the bathos. And though it is not always easy to arrange deliberately for any of these accidents, on the material plane, to befall your hulk- ing rival-at the right moment, there are many, as it were, spiritual banana-skins towards which, in Her presence, you can adroitly lead him. . . .
That is why (for I am no great height myself) I feel such an overwhehning rush of sympathy towards the man who did this admirably symbolic deed ; the man who, with a single sharp movement of the hand, expressed the feelings of all the small ones of the world towards all the large ones. There were many other less direct and less personal ways in which he might have done it. He might, for instance, have gone to the Zoo with a peashooter in his pocket and spent the morning making some of the larger mammalia jump ; he might have gone stealthily on a foggy night to Parliament Square and balanced a paper hat (or what you will) upon the head of each of those more-than-life-size statesmen ; he might have contented himself with taking a running kick at the Albert Hall. But he did none of these things. With the simple directness of pure genius he just made a bee-line for the largest man he knew of, and slapped Slapped him, you notice, not hit him. To hit a giant, especially when he happens to be a boxer and there- fore accustomed to being hit, is simply to make yourself, and not him, ridiculous ; but to slap a giant boxer—that is sublime... And to say, when questioned, that you did it " just for fun "—that is sublimer still ; that is the ulti- mate snook which David, in these bloodless days, can cock at Goliath. .
You should be grateful, you tweed-clad Apollo, to the man who slapped Camera. For his one inimitable gesture has taken all the itch out of my own fingers ; I feel vindi- eated,.satisfied, assuaged. I will not (as I had planned) tweak away that . shooting-stick from under your vast person just as you are going to sit down, in order that She may see you looking silly. No, I will _be magnanimous : go on and win her if you can. I wish her joy of you.
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