It is apparent in some of the books and plays now treated 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 than BERNARD SHAW. He 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 ready to whip folly, but he did not need a Theatre of Cruelty, an orgy of squalor, or gutter-language. His method took time, but it prevailed. The dull dogs began to wake up.
For rebels it is always essential that there should be someone at whom to scream. Shock-treatment is a waste of effort and electricity without an abundant presence of shockable people. It would be a sad day for the “switched-on” script-writers and performers if nobody rang up the B.B.C. to say that he could not believe his ears or wrote to the papers about his outraged sensibilities.
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The progressive without the backward is as much lost as an angler with no fish in the river. The cynic who sneers at conventional morality and dismisses all earnest citizens as “do-gooders” is a poor frustrated creature unless others still believe in the importance of being serious. Amid his successes he might reflect that he is in fact a parasite, dependent on the yelp of the dull dogs and the outcry of the despised bourgeois for the publicity that he finds so precious.