Page 15 Advertisements Column 1

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20089, 19 November 1930, Page 15

tho horo-hearted who rush first into the conflict. One could narfte fifty sinning names of poets and writers, whose influence, wero they living to•Jay, would have made it impoagiblo for so many "half men and their dirty songa and dreary," to drown everything else with their ugly clamour. Men who would have been great scientists; mathematicians, who could have unlocked the sealed gates of mathematical knowledge for lack of which the physicist is hindered and blocked—politicians who could have saved our time from tho worst of our failures—all these perished in the war. Is it indeed a settled modern platitude that to be "satisfied with life" is a certain proof of shallowness What kind of people are "satisfied with life"? ' It is always those who have borne "the heat and burdon of the day." Since tho beginning of human society until some three decades ago the majority of women, for twenty to thirty years of their lives, were continuously occupied with child-bearing, a process which involved as much suffering, danger, and tragedy (through a high infant deathrate) as anything that men suffer iu any war. Yet most of them endured to a serene and triumphant old age—without any decorations, rewards, or praises. Antarctic explorers do not despise Tennyson and Browning. Both were read in Scott's winter quarters, and when Scott was preparing for the Polar journey we see him contriving to find room on his sledges for his Browning, though every added ounce of weight made his arduous task more difficult. Sir Krnest Shackleton found infinite help In Browning. When his ship was crushed in the Weddell Sea, and he and his party were adrift all summer and autumn on the floes, he and his tentmates fortified their souls with Tennvs< Keats, Service, and, above all, Browning. At last, when the floes cracked under their camp and they embarked in their small boats in those tempestuous frigid seas, they won through because of the indomitable courage and almost superhuman faith of their leaders. E%'en torturing thirst, frozen clothes, frost-bites, sea-boils, fatigue, suspense, and disappointment never induced them to rail against life and their "stars." Rather they revealed a most extraordinarily simple and humble faith in Providence. And, upon the frozen shore of Elephant Island through the Antarctic winter, they cered themselves with "Juanita" and such sentimental songs as that! "Worse than Tennyson!" But the dear, disillusioned modernist passes by on the other side. He is not interested in people who are so crudely "satisfied with life." —Yours, etc., PESTALOZZT. N'.'rembcr I'tb, 1330.