There is one other point, but it is rather a delicate matter: Messrs. Mump and Gump say to the prospective Candidate, "Your constituents must see and know you before you can hope for their vote." Are they quite right? I have seen a good many Candidates in my time, and I can think of some to whom I should have said, "Your constituents must never see you if you hope for a single vote." I mean, when one looks round the present House of Commons, one really marvels how.... But perhaps I had better not go on with that. The point is that a Candidate of that kind never need be seen by his constituents now. A handsome young private secretary, uniformed and beribboned, and the film does the rest.
Then I rather resent the assumption that Members of Parliament, Mayors, Lecturers and Actors are the only people who require publicity. I should have thought that those who spend their time writing things in the public Press, which are read by the public (if anybody), might have had at least the courtesy title of Public Man. Anyhow, I am going to have three guineas’ worth. The only question is, what sort of picture will most thoroughly "get" my personality before a third of the population once a week? The moment when I am most characteristic is when I am lying in a hot bath, and to-morrow is Sunday; but I doubt if even a sixth of the population would be really keen on that. I don’t mind writing a letter or two, only, if it meant an extra reel every time I decided to write it to-morrow instead, it would be rather a costly advertisement.
Really, I suppose, one ought to be done At Work in His Study; but even that would require a good deal of faking. Ought one, for instance, to remove the golf-balls and the cocoa-cup (and the rhyming dictionary) from The Desk? Then I always write with a decayed pencil, and that would look so bad. Messrs. Mump and Gump would have to throw in a quill-pen. And I have no Study. I work in the drawingroom, when the children are not playing in it. To go into The Study I simply walk over to my table and put up a large notice: "The Study. Do not Speak to Me. I am Thinking." Do you think that had better be in the film?
Or I wonder if a Comic would be more effective—a Shaving reel or a Dressing reel? It is the small incidents of every-day life that one should look to for the key to the character of a Public Man; and once a whole third of the population had seen for themselves what pain it gives me to put links and studs and all those things in a clean shirt, they would understand the strange note of melancholy which runs through this article.
But of course an author should have several different reels corresponding to the different kinds of work which he wants to publicitise. (That is a new word which I have just invented, but you will find it in common use in a month or two.) People like Mr. Belloc will probably require the full politician’s ration of twenty or more, but the ordinary writer might rub along with four or five.
When his Pug, Wog and Pussy is on the market there will be a Family reel, in which he is pretending to be a tree and the children are climbing it. And when he has just published The Cruise of the Cow; or, Seven Hours at Sea, he will be seen with an intense expression tying a bowline on a bight or madly hauling on the throat-halyard—at Messrs. Mump and Gump’s specially-equipped ponds. And for his passionate romance, The Borrowed Bride—— But I don’t know what he will do then.
And even now we have not exhausted the list of Public Men. There are clergymen. Don’t you feel that some of those sermons might be thrown on the screen—and left there? A. P. H.
The Merry Bishop.
The Dean of Cape Town with a critical frown
To the jests of St. Albans’ gay Bishop demurs;
But the Bishop denies the offence and implies
’Tis the way of all asses to nibble at Furse.