CASUAL COMMENTS

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19220, 28 January 1928, Page 13

CASUAL COMMENTS

NEW AND OLD INTERESTS.

(SFJCIALLT WBITTSIT »0B THS P8159.)

[J3y Leo Fanning.]

One sunny afternoon this week a young woman, rather grim of visage, and a bonny girl of two or three summers, had a long seat to themselves in a tram car. The woman absentmindedly loosened her hold of the child, and away the bright bundle scampered along the seat, chuckling at the gay life in the street. What a moving picture for those starry bluo eyes, wide with wonderment! In a moment the merry laughter turned to tears. A pitiless hand clutched tho little skirt and an iron will compelled the truant to sit primly as an adult with her back to the view. The saddened eyes and puckered brow told of pain and puzzlement at this stern suppression of an interest. * * * Watching that subjection of young human interest in the world to the more or less necessary or unnecessary tyranny of propriety, this commentator dug as deep down as he could through the memory layers of long years and managed to uncorer a few of his four-year-old impressions of the giants who sometimes stood or ran between him and the things which he wished to see or do. Perhaps they were saving his life, but he did not know that; he certainly did not believe so, at the time. Indeed, his feeling was that they had no interest in the real life that called to him with a thousand voices. They were blind, deaf, dull, and excruciatingly unreasonable in their opposition to explorations of frog-ponds, hedgerows, and tangles of brambles. That kind of thing comes into the life of most children. Every parent, alas, is obliged occasionally to play the part of the augel with the flaming sword at tTie gate of the Garden of Eden. Civilisation demands much compression and repression of human instincts and impulses—and the discipline begins early for most children.

* * * 1-1 The only real world is the one winch the young child sees as a revelation. That is the only time when colours, sounds, scents, and tastes have their proper values, clear of the unromantic confusion caused by scientific explanations. To tho simple child Nature's bank (full of notes of birds, gold of flowers, and liquid currency of rivers) gives compound interest. Rockefeller would gladly cast away his millions to regain the paradise of his early boyhood.

Perhaps the main difference between modern civilisation and the culture of ancient Greece is in the multiplicity of interests in 1928 A.D. Of course the great majority of those interests are fussy or trivial. The toy or joy uses of wireless would probably account for about ninety per cent, of the business done in radio equipment. This latest craze is one of the little extras that do their bit in adding to the cost of living. As soon as marvellous machinery, mass production, and all kinds of industrial efficiency and what-not do something which should ease the cost of living, new interests are invented to increase the white man's burden.

Yet how would the world employ otherwise the persons who provide the new interests, however unnecessary they mav bo? At any given time the world seems to have enough persons busy in producing food, materials for clothing, housing, and other needs. But this article must keep away Trom the dry ground of economics.

* * * Multiplicity of interests has its disadvantages from various viewpoints, but it does make for peaoetulness among the public. Shrewd rulers or the Roman Empire worked on that principle with their lavish amusements for the populace. The emperors strengthened their personal positions temporarily, but weakened the foundations of the State. When the public mind is spread thinly over a wide field of interests it is not a good seedbed for sowers of disaffection. When that mind is rolled up between walls of difficulty and drabness the insurrectionist and the revolutionary have their chance. That was the kind ot seed-bed which Lenin found in Kussia.

* * * Lenin! His' ashen face was gazed at by thousands the other day on the anniversary of his death. He was a man of one interest—pre-eminence of the proletariat—but the proletariat can no more run itself unaided to peaks of prosperity than a motor chassis can climb a mountain without an engine and an expert chauffeur. The chief interest of Lenin's Soviet to-day is not in saving the Kussian proletariat, but in saving itself.

* * * Interests in thii world and other worlds of space (and beyond)—how they grow from day to day! Every morning some new league arises to beckon humanity onward. Mr H. G. Wells is preparing to issue a new book on "How the World Should Go," or something like that. The world as a whole will not read the book, and will not be guided by it, but some thousands of folk will peruse the work, and it _ may do some good. It must be a continual astonishment to some of the philosophers that the world has gone on so long, passing well, without taking advantage of their theories.

Popular interests are now so many and so varied that steadfastness of purpose becomes increasingly difficult. The booths of Vanity Fair daily become bigger and brighter, if not better. Yet a man knows that if ho will not stick to his purpose he still stick in the mud of mediocrity somewhere some ' day. Aware of those alluring distractions, Lee Wilson Dodd wrote his "Ode to a Sitting Hen" (envying the bird her "patient fixed efficiency"). A preceding article quoted one verse; here is another:—

"Would that I might acquire Your stubbornness of purpose, O calm hen I Having a job to do, Yon do not tire L'nhastingly you sit and see it through. But I, with errant pen, Having a job to do, a piece to write, Alael I funk it quite, Poor restless fool! I leave the nest, and all ite eggs grow cool. Thoughts, warm and hatchable, while I'm

away Turn oold and lifeless lumps of clay. It doesn't pay, 0 hen, it doesn't pay! That's all I've got to say." And so say all of us. * * * Financial interests, social interests, family interests, national interests, Imperial interests, political interests, scientific interests, religious interests —the mere listing of them could fill this column. In many countries "political interest" has something of the sinister sense which James Bussell Lowell gave it in his "Biglow Papers":— "I du believe in prayer an' praiee To him that hez the grantin' 0' jobs—in everythin' that pays, But most of all in Cantin'. This doth my cup with marcies fill, This lays all thoughts o' sin to rest; I don't believe in princerple, But oh, I du in interest. * # * When interests are so numerous and different and conflicting the word "interesting" is becoming as vague as " considerable. ">' To- a leech-gatherer a swamp is more interesting than a ('meadow trim, with daisies pied," and

to a tired labourer a pint of beer maybe more interesting than a nip of whisky, but these "interestings" do not prove that the swamp is better than the meadow, nor that beer is better than whisky. G. K. Chesterton, in his quaint way, has pointed to the glory of colour in marshes, and it would be easy for that genial, whimsical observer to disclose entrancing beauties in a brickfield, even on such a hot day as dear Leigh Hunt described —"Now doors and brick walls are burning to the hand; and a walled lane, with dust and broken bottles in it, near a brickfield, is ft thing not to bfl thought of.'^