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THE principal object of our adoration at the present day is noise. All our activities are accompanied by some form of inharmonious sound; we travel to our offices through darkness and amidst a racket worthy of the nethermost hells; we conduct our business to the incessant clicking of typewriters; street cries and barrelorgans madden our leisure hours; we eat to a band. So completely has noise entered into our lives, so much a part of us has it become, that the quiet of the country frightens us more than a bombardment, and we fly to the nearest railway station rather than face silence. Nor is the fear of quiet our saddest malady; we have fed so much upon noise that we have come to judge all things in proportion to the extent that they deafen us. The thunder impresses us far more than the lightning; the vociferous man is exalted into high places. Half the attraction which war affords to those who regard it as a pastime is in the uproar which it creates; and in such phrases as the din of battle,'' the clash of armies,'' the roar of the guns.'

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It is a curious and sinister phenomenon, this love of explosion, VOL. XCV-No. 566

475

II

when manifested in grown men ; it is an unfailing sign of immaturity of the mind; it is the boy's love of a bang, the pleasure in producing noise on a large scale which in youth we indulge with guns and fireworks. But war is only one expression of the cult of noise; in almost every walk of life they are the clamorous who succeed. The headline, the placard, the sensational poster, by these we live and are nourished. We judge the quality of merchandise by the number of square feet its advertisements occupy; we crown the poet with the most effective press agent. It is a state of things not confined to this country alone; indeed, we here may be thankful to have escaped as yet the worst excesses of advertisement. In America, so returning travellers inform us, things have come to such a pass that citizens, on the approach of some prominent person whose name is unknown to them, are heard to inquire of one another: 'Who is the big noise? '

There is a type of mind to which the loudest, the most immense, and the most extraordinary must always appear to be the best; the persons who possess it are those to whom the largest war memorial in the world would be, by reason of its very size, the finest, the longest film, by reason of the incredible number of its feet, the best. It is necessary for such people, in order to be happy, to have climbed the highest available mountain or to have kept the largest dog. They are the lineal descendant of those Romans who long ago exulted in the fact that the Cloaca Maxima was the largest drain in the world. To-day they are increasing among us, and small wonder, for all the harsh voices of modern city life agree in shouting that the loudest is the most worthy, and the biggest is the best.

The greatest exercise of self-control is needed if we ourselves are to avoid becoming worshippers of size and sound. The worst of modern methods of advertisement is their efficiency; we are affected by their stimuli whether we like it or not. We are filled against our will with terror and excitement; Armageddon, staring at us from a hoarding, gives us a curious sensation at the pit of the stomach; The Girl who took the Wrong Turning excites our morbid curiosity. Then there are the sky-signs; the night is made full of flaming words urging us to drink various kinds of wine, to smoke certain kinds of tobacco, to wash ourselves with particular brands of soap. Sooner or later our morale is bound to give way, we shall fall, and the advertisement kings will triumph over us. Something with a punch' is demanded by those who live by luring, cajoling, or threatening the public. The punch is forthcoming; we receive many punches every day of our lives, with the result that our delicately balanced æsthetic and apperceptive faculties are knocked flat and stamped on a hundred times an hour.

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This is not to imply that all advertisement is of the devil. Advertisement is a legitimate and indeed essential branch of business. In order that any transaction may take place the producer must announce the nature and price of his wares to the consumer, and, provided he keep within the limits of truth, it is perfectly fair for him to make that which he has to sell appear as desirable as he can. But the moment the line is crossed and, either by direct statement or implication, the goods are made to appear other than they are, or the buyer is startled into buying something which he does not really desire, then the advertisement becomes evil. All those advertisers whose chief aim is 'punch' are striving to gain, by means of shock tactics, an unfair advantage over the consumer; these only and not the sane and often beautiful advertisements of self-respecting firms are to be deprecated.

There are many varieties of ' punch'; sometimes it is a direct appeal to the conscience, like the famous soap advertisement; sometimes, like the announcements of many patent medicines, it is a stern reminder of the number of persons who die annually through neglecting to take simple precautions. But whether its stimulus be directed to the eye or to the physical passions, whether it be frightening or alluring, its aim is nearly always the same: it is to administer a shock of some kind. In many cases it succeeds, and the individual responds in one of two ways: either he becomes irritated by such persistent efforts to make him do things against his will, and, taking up an attitude of conscious superiority, ignores them all, or he is delighted by the excessive stimulus, feels that he is really alive and that he is seeing life. He proceeds from one sensation to another, always demanding a more intense experience, until at last he reaches the end, nothing satisfies him, and he becomes bored and blasé. The rake's progress is not confined to the life of the senses, it may be followed in the department of any human faculty, and the results of intellectual or æsthetic debauch are more far-reaching and difficult to cure.

It is a far cry from these methods of to-day to the letters of a century ago, yet in these letters, with their excessive use of italics, we find an expression of exactly the same spirit. It is one which cannot be content with a plain statement; it must underline and italicise. Unwilling merely to present the materials and allow the reader to form his own judgment upon them, it insists upon large capitals for that which itself desires to be thought important. This is equivalent to a confession of weakness on the part of the letter-writer no less than on that of the advertiser. For if the case to be put had intrinsic truth on its side, or the article advertised intrinsic merit, there would be no need to do more than point these out. No emphasis, headlines, large

letters, or underlining would be required, for the reader, being brought face to face with truth, would naturally perceive it for himself. It is when we are doubtful about the strength of our case that we begin to shout about it; it is then, as Sir James Barrie has pointed out, that we underline our statements by such a phrase as 'The fact is.'

In the matter of the misuse of italics women are supposed to be the worst offenders; but if this form of literary vice is a failing especially female there must be set over against it on the male side the habit of booming. Men of all ages and professions love to boom; the practice gives them a sense of that superiority of the senior sex which the daughters of Eve are at times unwilling to allow. The father of the family who, with back to the fire, declaims thunderously upon the frivolities of his son; the preacher who, crashing his fist on the desk before him, bawls out some anæmic platitude; the politician who by mere force of sound communicates to his hearers his frenzy over some trivial matter, all these enjoy themselves immensely in the exercise of the ancient and hereditary masculine pursuit of booming or roaring. It matters not that what they roar about is untrue, obvious, or unimportant; their pleasure is in sound, not in sense. They love to administer the 'punch' acoustically, to crush the minds of their audience under an avalanche of noise. Thunder is all very well if used sparingly and by one who understands it; many of the poets rely on the thunder of words for their effects. There is a kind of subdued rumble which runs like an undertone through the poetry of Browning and gives it a peculiar fascination. Vergil, too, knew well the value of thunder:

Sequar atris ignibus absens;

Et cum frigida mors anima seduxerit artus

Omnibus umbra locis adero. Dabis improbe pœnas.

Here the very sound of the words carries us to the climax, but when all the artillery of language is let off in order to announce the birth of a triviality we are justly indignant; the mountains are in labour, and there comes forth a mouse.

All these phenomena—placards, skysigns, italics, pulpit boomings, and the rest—are so many effects of one and the same cause. It is one which lies very deep in the roots of our nature, the desire for power, the desire to affect other people. We enjoy being loved; we can bear to be hated; the one thing that we cannot endure is to be ignored. Fundamentally necessary to our self-respect is a belief that we are effective, not wholly or perfectly effective, perhaps, for imperfection is the rule of the Below, but effective in some department and in some degree, in a word necessary to the

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