Conclusion

Abstract

In July 1918, in one of his occasional contributions to the Nation’s ‘The World of Books’ page, Henry Massingham took as his theme the question of dullness. By arguing that the essence of dullness is the ‘mechanical simplification of human variety’, Massingham fulminates against ‘the flat, arid standardization of thought and idiom’ in ‘the Press and the mass-mind it nourishes’. ‘Could anything be more tedious than a routine of artificially stimulated excitement?’ he asks rhetorically.¹ Massingham’s critique of the mass circulation press has been a typical enough complaint over the past 100 years, but it is his emphasis on dullness as the suppression of human variety, which is the point I want to follow up here. In art, this suppression of variety takes the form of pedantry; in politics, tyranny: ‘Pedantry in art and letters’, he claims, ‘is the same thing as tyranny in life’, and in both letters and politics, ‘the aim of the reformer should be to banish dullness from the Commonwealth’. What we want, he says, quoting F. W. Robertson, ‘is life, more life and fuller’, and he concludes by stating that ‘mankind has to seek the remedy for dullness and lethargy or irresponsibility in himself, draw what he finds there into the light of day and embody it in the art of living, of which the work of art, both in process and achievement, is the microcosm’.²