Not So Idle Boasts

Press, Volume C, Issue 29656, 28 October 1961, Page 3

Not So Idle Boasts

(A Fourth Leader ta "The Time*”! It is curious that boasts should so invariably find themselves labelled as idle. Of course not everything that is called a boast is a boast at all—it is a convenient term of denigration for any statement or prophecy with which someone disagrees, and the "idle" gets tacked on automatically. But if boasts are sometimes idle in the sense that the boaster’s bluff can be called and that he fails to live up to his vainglorious promises, that is, in general, the last thing that the boaster himself is. It is difficult indeed, to think of a more exacting occupation than full-time boasting and all that it entails. There are, to be sure, armchair boasters, as there are armchair critics, but the latter infinitely outnumber the former, and, generally, the boaster is active enough to cause dismay to those in contact with him. Boasters come in all shapes and sizes, and the least attractive, perhaps, is the one with the disease of megalomania coursing through his veins—the young Henry VIII was a perfect example of this type of boaster, and what a trial, with his insistence on his unique excellence in the tournament lists and the tennis court, as a poet and a musician, he must have been to his poor courtiers. Far more harmless and less unattractive are Bottom and his tribe, whose boasting, although they probably would not recognise it as such, is as natural to them as breathing. It is the boasting of the small boy carried on into adult years and is. somehow, innocent of offence and easy to indulge. Then there is the impersonal, jingoistic boasting of a Faulconbridge and of Kipling, In certain of his moods, and the sparkling Gallic boasting of the trio of musketeers Dumas created.

All these, a random selection, were, in one way or another, strenuous characters, and, just as it is a fallacy to assert that all bullies are cowards, so is it a mistake to assume that the boaster is, in reality, a fellow of insignificance and ineptitude. It is pleasant to think that all great heroes are modest, and so. Indeed, in the main, they are, but the boaster who makes good his boast is not quite the monster that we, with our famous passion for understatement,

are inclined to imagine.