SOFT, WE ARE MASS-OBSERVED
Britain. By Mass-Observation. Arranged and written by Charles Madge and Tom Harrison. (Penguin Special. 6d.) ABOUT half of the new Mass-Observation book is devoted to the penultimate Crisis, the rest is concerned with All-In Wrestling, Armistice Day observances, a Lancashire ceremony concerning a cow, and the Lambeth Walk—in addition to two other themes whose exact nature or importance it is impossible to state with any confidence after only two readings of the sections concerning them. One should, I suppose, if one possesses a social conscience, find the book's main interest in its major theme. But in practice the snippets seem the more likely to attract. The Mass-Observers are not elegant or incisive writers. Their style, at its best, is an imitation of the clipped periods of Mr. William Hickey; elsewhere it achieves a level of banality exceeded only, among groups of writers, by contributors to motoring periodicals. They make no concessions to human weakness by arranging their facts neatly or by paying a decent attention to their grammar, and possess even the relatively rare art of making simple statistics seem confusing. If they wish outsiders to share their own estimate of their importance, they could do worse than hire one of the Fleet Street hacks whom they so much despise to put their conclusions into a less chaotic shape.
The Mass-Observers were affronted by the way in which, in September, certain journals asserted that "the whole country " was giving way to certain emotions or that " the entire public " was thinking certain thoughts. Most people, with lamentable unconcern, are content to recognise such statements as exaggerations and to continue reading unaffected. The Mass-Observers set out systematically to disprove them. Notebooks in hand, they buttonholed and catechised men and women in the industrial town where they observe. They asked whether there was going to be a war, whether there should be a war, what England should do, what the League of Nations should do, what was thought of Mr. Chamberlain's expeditions, what was thought of the Czechs. In this book they have given to the world the results of their researches. These results are neither surprising (the fluctuations of feeling are about what one would expect) nor useful (there is no method of knowing how typical are the views of the handful of people catechised of views throughout the country as a whole). Nor, even if this latter point could be decided, would it be of any consequence. The Mass-Observers seem to envisage as their ideal a system whereby the views of the entire population of Great Britain could be immediately canvassed on any subject at any given moment. Politics, on their admission, enter into less than 1 per cent. of Worktown conversations, so that indifference to foreign affairs may for practical purposes be said to be complete. No one but a lunatic could suggest that the views on so complicated a question as the Czech Crisis of persons with such interests can be of the slightest importance compared with the views of men who have given to it months of study, and whose conclusions are not automatically absurd, cowardly, or Macchiavellian because they do not coincide with one's own. To attempt to develop Mass-Observation to such an end, without proportionately interesting and educating people in the subjects on which their opinions are to be canvassed, would be (if it were practicable) to put a likely weapon into the hands of demagogues.
Of the other sections, that on the cow ceremony is perfunctory but interesting, that on All-In Wrestling fairly thorough and quite informative, and that on the Lambeth Walk interesting and entertaining—though it does not really seem that the observers massed in Lambeth have produced better results than might have been obtained by one competent reporter. As a whole the book does not materially alter one's opinion of Mass-Observation. It is no doubt an engrossing occupation for those who take part in it, and certainly has this to recommend it, that it keeps out of doors, exercising their limbs and organs, young persons who would otherwise very probably have been stuffing indoors churning out in- different verse. It is capable of producing interesting and (though seldom in this book) enjoyable reading. But it quite fails to justify its pretensions of doing science or the com- munity a service.
DEREK VERSCHOYLE.
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