In the Limelight.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3400, 30 July 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

In the Limelight.

HUMAN DESIRE FOR NOTORIETY.

YET THE FEAR OF BEING CONSPICUOUS MAY j BE A POWERFUL RESTRAINT. I j PUBLICITY AN INCENTIVE AND A DETERRENT, j

The limelight has become a familiar figure or speech, and to be in it is the ruling passion of many a life. “ To be seen of men.” A certain religious community familiar to students of the New Testament were charged with conducting even their private devotions at street corners solely for that purpose. In seemingly the most magnanimous of human deeds motives are sometimes strangely mixed, and love of publicity is the most frequent admixture. It is not really for wealth itself that most people wish; their dream rather is that certain selected rays of limelight might centre upon them as a result of the use to which their wealth would be put. To the inveterate limelight seekers nothing is sacred, and, with respect to the methods employed to obtain it, they are never in the slightest degree sensitive. In the distribution of limelight Fate is undoubtedly extremely whimsical. By a single achievement certain individuals find themselves the centre of the picture with a suddenness they cannot account for and with a completeness embarrassing to those who are genuinely modest. Mr R. C. Sherriff, author of the phenomenally successful play, “ Journey’s End,” would appear to belong to this category. He has lately borne witness - that when the “ noted person ” atmosphere surrounds a writer it becomes a danger to the tip of his pen. “The sense of a certain separation from one’s fellow beings,” he says, “creates a mental loneliness far more frighten ing than physical loneliness. So long as a man is famous or in the public eye he is separated in a subtle way from his fellows, even from his most intimate friends.” People who can so regard the limelight are quite safe; even excessive amounts of it will do them no hurt. But many of life’s most ludicrous incidents are associated with the antics of that vast host who feverishly seek it and who find it elusive. Some people pass through life stage-manag-ing everything they do. The only real cleverness they display is in creating the impression that, whenever anything meritorious takes place, they deserve to be the sole recipients of the applause. They regard enviously the limelight which streams so charmingly upon the bride at the altar; when obsequies are in progress they are secretly covetous of the melancholy prominence assigned to the chief mourner. The type exists in both the smaller and larger spheres of life. The busybody who believes he runs the affairs of the little country town is kin to the pushing individual in the metropolitan area or political arena who always contrives to be just where the limelight chances to strike, who always secures the central place in the photographic group. The extent to which the passion prevails in high places is, of course, discreetly veiled, but its strength is disclosed by the use which is nowadays made of the publicity officer’s services. The publicity officer is a not entirely pleasing by-product of our modern political life. real, as distinguished from his nominal, function is to see that the public limelight is concentrated on the Ministerial pigmy to whom he is officially attached. When that is done judiciously it is possible to create in some Quarters an impression that the comings and goings of some very transitory politician are of world importance, and that celestial weight attaches to his every commonplace utterance. Neither Oliver Cromwell

nor Abraham Lincoln had a publicity officer, yet their place in the limelight of history and of posterity is much more sure than is that of most of those who are striving for it. The reason why some politicians cling so tenaciously to place and submit to so many humiliations in order to retain it is to be found in the fact that the loss of it means the loss of the cherished limelight. The world to-day contains a considerable number of politicians who once basked in as fierce a light as ever beat upon a throne, but who now go round scarce recognised, and certainly with none to do them reverence. The shifting of the limelights focus has made all the difference. In nothing is the littleness of human nature more glaringly revealed than in the lust for limelight. Such petty manoeuvres some people will employ solely in order to get and to keep their name before the public. Those titular distinctions which occasionally come to men are a form of limelight of which some people to whom such things make appeal can never get enough. The Roman Caesars insisted on being regarded as deities; the subjects of Louis XIV. worshipped him as a god throughout the greater part of his reign. In modern society there is to be found the occasional individual of wealth who goes about designedly shabby secretly hoping it will win him greater notice than if he dressed more in accordance with his financial status. And yet many of those who have honestly deserved the limelight have as honestly despised it. Those noble souls who are to be found working almost secretly in the world’s laboratories are utterly indifferent to it. Charles Darwin shunned its rays; Herbert Spencer spurned it almost to the point of rudeness; Lord Morley found it so hateful that he' destroyed all documents that would have been essential for his official biography. Time and again in the course of history the limelight has been applied to wider areas, and invariably with beneficient consequences. There is probably no medium so effective and so directly operative for the reforming of degenerate institutions and for the uplift of helpless humanity. When it shines upon social evils, secret industrial sweating or unwholesome housing it may not lead to complete extermination, but it makes impossible blatant continuance. Wilberforce concentrated the limelight on the slave trade, and the nevro stood free; Howard turned it upon English prisons, Dickens turned it upon the poor-law system, Shafesbury turned it upon factory conditions, and in every instance betterment followed. In the individual life probably many people maintain their reputation as good citizens out of fear of the limelight rather than out of respect for the moral law. But, whether it be fear of it or love of it, it is impossible to exaggerate the power of it. And, save when it takes the aggressive, offensive forms practised by the vulgar social climber, it is possible to regard it as simply another of the frailties that beset our common human nature. That even sub-human nature may not be entirely free from it has been suggested by Mr G. K. Chesterton in his striking poem “ The Donkev,” which he conceives as saving. “For I also had my hou~; one far fierce hour and sweet; There was a shout about my ears. And palms before my feet.” It was an ever-memorable streak of limelight.