A Spectator's Notebook
TN the War we harnessed the talents of a great number -I- of private gentlemen to the task of government. But what was needed in the War is just as necessary in the complexities of peace. The truth is that the business of administration to-day is getting too big for any Civil Service, and we may be compelled to enlist to a far greater extent the abilities of the nation at large. This is the opposite of nationalization ; it is not putting the private citizen under an official bureaucracy, but getting him to do some of that bureaucracy's work. This is the principle on which our local government is based, and now every year it is being extended to matters of national interest. What are public utility corporations like the B.B.C., the Port of London Authority, and the Central Electricity Board but experiments in this direc- tion ? Presently we shall have a Wheat Commission and a Tariff Advisory Committee. The fact that members of such bodies will be highly salaried does not make them ordinary officials ; they remain private citizens of special knowledge and capacity who are recruited for the work of government. Is this development in constitutional practice sufficiently recognized ? * * * *
There is a certain common measure of agreement about the printed word, and he who can hit upon it makes a fortune. The popularity of Edgar Wallace was a proof of the sound taste of our people, for he was read by every- body from bishops to barmen. He wrote plain, clear English, and he had far more literary skill than most people realize, for books like The Four Just Men and some of his West African tales show real craftsmanship. His supreme gift was for story-telling, romance in a rapid sequence and not too far divorced from reality. His astonishing fecundity was joined to remarkable powers of application, gifts possessed more or less by all the world's great story-tellers, to whom every hour brings fresh material for the creative imagination. I met him first in Johannesburg after the Boer War, where he was the editor of a local paper, and I remember the gusto and humour with which he butted his way through life. Most people who make much money are in bondage to it, but Edgar Wallace treated his winnings as lightly as his losings. He was a glutton for sport and work and com- panionship, the friend of every down-and-out, with a heart as capacious as his fancy. A pleasant figure to contemplate among the anaemic ranks of letters ; a
great Bohemian and a cheerful adventurer. * * * *
Under the pressure of circumstances we are gradually elaborating an Imperial machinery. Mr. Stanley. Bruce, who has the gift of putting solid political thought in the light-hearted phraseology of an undergraduate, is, after the Ottawa Conference is over, to be for a time Australian Minister resident in London, while remaining in the Australian Cabinet. Mr. Bruce himself made the experi- ment some yearS ago of appointing his own liaison' officer here, but I alwaYs felt that something more was needed. If there is to be unity in executive action—,, which is the way in which we think of Imperial Federation; to-day—the representative of a Dominion in London- should not only be in close touch with the British Govern- ment, but should have a high position in his own. The experiMent, I think, is likely to inaugurate a new technique: in Imperial affairs, and it brings instant united action in
an emergency well within the sphere of the practical.' * * * *
I have every sympathy with Mr. Smythe's protest. against the coldness of the film industry towards his picture of Kamet; but I do not think that the renterS_ and exhibitors should be too harshly blamed, for they have to consider their public, and the ordinary cinema public wants, something crude and sentimental. They draw their audiences in the main from half-educated adoles, cents. This is no doubt largely the result of the corruption of taste caused by the baser kind of American film, but the mischief cannot be remedied in a day. Obviously there is a different public if it could only be organized, a public capable of appreciating, for example, the beauty of some recent Russian films, and of such subjects as Kamet. 'But I understand that there are only five or six houses in the country capable of showing such pictures with success, and that is not enough for a commercial return to the exhibitor. What is needed is an increase in the number of such houses, and the organization of that cinema public which looks to a film for something more than melodrama and buffoonery. In books there is a public for both the crude and the refined, but the approach to the two publics is different. Cannot the same thing be done with the film ? No tariff is any good, for, the cost of the imported negative is of small importance in a successful picture. In Italy, I understand that a film of a certain quality must be compulsorily included in every programme, while in Germany the inclusion of a good film, approved by an examining Board, carries with it a lowering of the Entertainment Tax.
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The Warden of New College has been enumerating certain relics of an almost mediaeval Oxford which he remembers nearly half a century ago, and Sir Herbert Maxwell has added to the list the famous distinction in his day at Christ Church between " tufts," gentlemen- commoners and commoners, one of the most brazen pieces of class snobbery in history. But some of these relics of the past still remain in Oxford to-day. Let me set down a few. There is the Chancellor's Court with its odd. jurisdiction, first given it by Henry VIII. There is the outdoor service at Magdalen on St. John's Day, which carries us back to the times of the peripatetic teacher. There is the boar's head brought in at the Christmas dinner at Queen's, and once in a century the Warden and Fellows of All Souls hunt the college roofs for an imaginary mallard. There is the May morning Latin hymn on Magdalen Tower, and at the Sunday evening service in Christ Church the special verse sung after the anthem which dates from the residence of Charles I in the college. Also the old Norman-French summons to dinner at New College has been revived after a lapse of nearly a century.
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If anyone is in want of a subject for a book, let me offer a suggestion. We have had some brilliant excursions in irony at the expense of members of the household of faith by those who do not share their beliefs—witness Lytton Strachey's pictures of General Gordon, Florence Nightingale and Arnold of Rugby. A return *Etch is overdue. Let some writer with the gift of ironic urbanity give us a gallery of a few selected agnostics. Herbert Spencer, to begin with, whose biography is a feast of delights ; John Stuart Mill for, a second ; John Morley for a third—there are infinite possibilities of. comedy in some chapters in his Autobiography. These " saints of rationalism," to use Gladstone's phrase, were all estimable men, but they had about them an indescribable air of being descended from a long line of maiden aunts. " Honest doubt " is quite as good a subject for respectful irony as " simple faith " ; a better, perhaps, because it is apt to have about it more intellectual vanity and
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