Dull Dogs Needed

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30811, 24 July 1965, Page 4

Dull Dogs Needed

I (A Fourth Leader tn “The Times"! ' It is apparent in some of the books and plays now greeted with applause that writers Who claim to ventilate ideas are quite ready to foul the air. In order to be regarded as advanced thinkers they have to aggravate and even disgust those whose minds are deemed to be lagging in the rear. It is necessary, they say, to wake up the "stuffy.” Shock treatment must be applied by those called ‘‘switched-on” to the bourgeois dullards without a spark. It is not a new trend. None hammered the sluggish and conventional with more energy and better prose than Bernard Shaw. He confessed to playing the fool at. times in order to scold more effectively. Ft shocked with a startling saying or a pungent paradox. He did not think it necessary to outrage the conventional by staging repulsive spectacles or using offensive language. He was readv to whip folly, but he did not need a Theatre of Cruelty, an orgy of squalor, or gutterlanguage to do so. His method took time, but it prevailed. The dull dogs began to wake (up. ' For rebels it is always essential that there should be somebody at whom to scream. To attract rewarding attention there must be a steady supply of the inattentive. Shock-treatment is a waste of effort and electricity without an abundant presence of shockable people. If would be a sad day for the “switchedon" script-writers and performers if nobody rang up the 8.8. C. to say that he could not believe his ears or wrote to the papers about his outraged sensibilities.

The progressive without | the backward is as much lost as an angler with np fish in the river. The cynic who sneers at conventional rnorali ity and dismisses all earnest .citizens as “do-gooders” is a ‘poor frustrated creature unless others still believe in the i importance of being serious. Amid his successes of today he might reflect that he is in fact a parasite, dependent on : the yelp of the dull dogs and J the outcry of the despised .bourgeois for the publicity which he finds so precious. The supposedly stodgy fellow i can always retort to the shock-therapist: "At least I ; made you possible.'’