In this day and age we hear a great deal of talk about the nefarious labors of the press agent and many good people denounce “publicity” as an invention of the modern devil of success, a new-fangled and disreputable method of attracting attention to a person or to a cause. But this complaint is as old as the hills. Events of the past, when examined without prejudice, completely contradict the popular notion that publicity is something of recent origin.
The prophets of the Old Testament, both major and minor, were past-masters in the art of attracting a crowd. Greek history and Roman history are one long succession of what we people of the journalistic profession call “publicity stunts.” Some of that publicity was dignified. A great deal of it was of so patent and blatant a nature that today even Broadway would refuse to fall for it.
Reformers like Luther and Calvin fully understood the tremendous value of carefully pre-arranged publicity. And we cannot blame them. They were not the sort of men who could be happy growing humbly by the side of the road like the blushing daisies. They were very much in earnest. They wanted their ideas to live. How could they hope to succeed without attracting a crowd of followers?
A Thomas à Kempis can become a great moral influence by spending eighty years in a quiet corner of a monastery, for such long voluntary exile, if duly advertised (as it was), becomes an excellent selling point and makes people curious to see the little book which was born of a lifetime of prayer and meditation. But a Francis of Assisi or a Loyola, who hope to see some tangible results of their work while they are still on this planet, must willy-nilly resort to methods now usually associated with a circus or a new movie star.
Christianity lays great stress upon modesty and praises those who are humble of spirit. But the sermon which extols these virtues was delivered under circumstances which have made it a subject of conversation to this very day.
No wonder that those men and women who were denounced as the arch enemies of the Church took a leaf out of the Holy Book and resorted to certain rather obvious methods of publicity when they began their great fight upon the spiritual tyranny which held the western world in bondage.
I offer this slight explanation because Voltaire, the greatest of all virtuosos in the field of free advertisement, has very often been blamed for the way in which he sometimes played upon the tom-tom of public consciousness. Perhaps he did not always show the best of good taste. But those whose lives he saved may have felt differently about it.
And furthermore, just as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the success or failure of a man like Voltaire should be measured by the services he actually rendered to his fellow-men and not by his predilection for certain sorts of dressing-gowns, jokes and wall-paper.
In an outburst of justifiable pride this strange creature once said, “What of it if I have no scepter? I have got a pen.” And right he was. He had a pen. Any number of pens. He was the born enemy of the goose and used more quills than two dozen ordinary writers. He belonged to that class of literary giants who all alone and under the most adverse circumstances can turn out as much copy as an entire syndicate of modern sport writers. He scribbled on the tables of dirty country inns. He composed endless hexameters in the chilly guest-rooms of lonely country houses. His scrawls littered the floors of dingy boarding-houses in Greenwich. He spattered ink upon the carpets of the royal Prussian residence and used reams of the private stationery which bore the monogram of the governor of the Bastille. Before he had ceased to play with a hoop and marbles, Ninon de Lenclos had presented him with a considerable sum of pocket-money that he might “buy some books,” and eighty years later, in the self-same town of Paris, we hear him ask for a pad of foolscap and unlimited coffee that he may finish yet one more volume before the inevitable hour of darkness and rest.
His tragedies, however, and his stories, his poetry and his treatises upon philosophy and physics, do not entitle him to an entire chapter of this book. He wrote no better verses than half a hundred other sonneteers of that era. As a historian he was both unreliable and dull, while his ventures in the realm of science were no better than the sort of stuff we find in the Sunday papers.