A Most Brisk and Giddy-paced Times
By JOHN WELLS
ON Tuesday The Times, yielding at last to the popular clamour for novelty and the tempting crackle of banknotes, cast aside the fig- leaf covering of the old front page and stepped naked into the limelight. There was a patter of polite applause, a quiet murmur of adMiration, and someone said 'How pretty!' But it seemed almost tragic at a time like this, when mystery is almost extinct, that one of the last of the Immortals should have been moved to reveal both his mortality and his corruptibility just like that.
In his leading article, suitably entitled 'Modern Times,' Sir William Haley made no reference to the rumours of financial crisis and even of a Thomson takeover that prompted the editor of a newspaper in Milan to start a 'Save The Times' fund last summer. He did, however, say that in putting news on the front page he was 'putting first things first,' and from the healthy full-page advertisements inside the paper it seemed that this policy had been successful. The financial argument can be proved only by results. His philosophical reasoning is more vulnerable. 'Change,' he says, 'is the law of life. If things do not evolve they die.'
Now this is demonstrably true of physical life on this planet: it is not true of those ideal sources of security and solace that we elevate above everyday reality. Like God or Her Majesty the Queen. The Times should be beyond reason and beyond time. Not, of course, the accidental details of news or Miss Gem Mouflet's dancing lessons. which must change every day or every fifty years, but the essential Times itself should be immutable. Because, like the idea of God or the Monarchy, the idea of The Times is basically absurd. To drop sixpence into the urn to listen to the rumblings of some faceless oracle is not the act of a reasonable man. But veil the Godhead, the Monarchy, or The Times in the obscure trapping of traditional magic, and by a willing suspension of disbelief we allow their mysterious power to grow, invisible, behind the veil.
Not that the traditional trappings of The Times were without their own beauty. All of us must have paused at some time or another in the arid wilderness of newsprint to examine some prehistoric or petrified joke gleaming in the Fourth Leader, or rested in- the cool shade of a golden afternoon in Samarkand at the turn of the century, described by 'a correspondent.' We may even have lingered with delight over a photograph of Afghan goatherds waiting for the coming of night, or a charmingly erudite note on mediaeval siege-engines. All of them peaceful and scented with incense burned to Eternity rather than to Time. But we have changed all that.
A gossip column, ominously entitled 'As It Happens,' brings us second-by-second shocks as the Leaning Tower of Pisa spins at a rate of one degree every nine hundred years: instead of having to surmise the paper's politics from the obscure stained-glass window of Sir William's leading article, a piece of plain glass has been inserted in the form of Mahood's car- toon. From Tuesday's joke about two capitalists sitting in the back of a Rolls-Royce they seem alarmingly left-wing. The old women's page, full of sage, grandmotherly advice and redolent of mothballs, suddenly goes off into shrieks of girlish giggles about Minnie Mouse. The old clock, always at six minutes past six between Times Past and the steel of the Scythe among the leaves of the Future, reminded thoughtful souls that even in the midst of life—or six minutes past it—we are suspended in the infinity of death. But six minutes past six 'does not mean anything' to the iconoclasts. The clock now says half-past four, reminding us not of the peace of eternity, but of the last-minute dawn panic when newspapermen close their last edi- tions of ephemeral trivia for the coming day.
But the most sacred of these veils, inducing mystery, was without question the- front page of advertisements. Seeing it ripped away we feel like Schiller's impious youth before the veiled
image at Sais, and fall back appalled. Not by the blinding light of truth, but by the drab finite reality. The mystery is gone, the -god is dead. Sir William as high priest will forgive the wor. shippers if they tiptoe quietly away. Perhaps nou the bishops will start writing letters to the editor of the Daily Mail
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