CORRESPONDENCE

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 30, 4 August 1931, Page 4

CORRESPONDENCE

MR. SHAW SHOWING OFF

(To the Editor.) . ' Sir,—Your leadiDg article in Saturday's ■".Evening lost," although in accordance with your usual.practice, may seem a Lttie puzzling to some of your readers, who might wonder why, at a time such as this, you allot over a column .of space ,to such an apparently insignificant topic as Joan o£ Arc. Your article, howevci-, has its sting in its tail, and you finish up quite naively, inferring that no matter how clever and -clear sighted Mr. Shaw may bo, one should not take any of his utterances at their face value. You thus adopt the principle used by Charles Kingsley in his famous controversy with. Cardinal Newman and could have headed the article •'What, Then, Does Mr. Shaw Mean 2" You could have quoted Kiugsley directly as in the following passage:—"l am henceforth in doubt then, as much as any honest man can be, concerning every -word Mr. Shaw raa5 r say. How can I tell that I shall not be the dupe of some cunning equivocation?" And Mr. Shiuv could reply as Newman did: "If I am natural ho-will say, 'Ars est celave artein'; if I an convincing he will suggest that I am an able logician;'if I show warmth, lam acting the indignant innocent; if I am calm, lam thereby detected as:a. smooth hypocrite; if I clear up difficulties, I am too plausible and perfect to be true. The more triumphant are. my statements, the move certain will bo my defeat." You are then by this process of "poisoning the -wells beforehand" hoping that when Mr. Shaw gives his conclusions on his tour in Russia, the public of New Zealand (if they ever get a full account of it in the papers) will treat it with the "contempt it deserves." In other words, your leader.is attacking not so much Mr. Shaw on Joan of Arc, as Mr.: Shaw on the "time lag of the Press," as reported a week or so ago, and Mr. Shaw on Bolshevism. However, your choosing of Joan of Arc as a diinuny on which to hang this, article is rather fortunate, as I would like to quote a line or two from the preface of Shaw's play, "Saint Joan": Any of our standard works of reference (on Joan) give accurately enough the facts, with their dates and the names of the people concerned." But they all break: down on the melodramatic legend of the wicked Bishop and the entrapped maiden and a]l the rest of it ... as it isfthey illustrate the too, little considered truth that the fashion in which wo think changes like the fashion of our clothes, and that it is difficult, it not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period. This, by the way, is why children . are never taught 'contemporary history. Their history books deal with periods of which the thinking has passed out of fashion and the circumstances no'longer apply to active .life. For example, they are taught history about Washington, and told lies about Lenin. In Washington's time they.were told lies (the same lies) about Washington and history about Cromwell, and so on. Two examples of time lag may be cited, the first being the long delay which elapsed before '"Mr." Gandhi was given sympathetic or respectful attention, and the second being the attitude of Britain to the French republic. Allow mo to quote one more extract —this time from Napoleon to King George 111., after a peace overture had been rejected on the ground that1 nov peace could bo.effected till France restored, the Bourbons:."lt cannot be doubted that His Britannic Majesty must recognise the right of nations" to choose their form of Government, since it is from that right that he himself holds his crown. . . . Such interference is no less injurious to the French nation and its Government than it would be to England and His Majesty if an invitation were/held out in 'the form.of a return to that republican form of Government which England adopted about the middle of last century, or an exhortation to recall to the Throne that; family1 whom their birtli had placed there and > whom a revolution had compelled to descend from it." Russia ma}° or may not be right in her attempt ,to solve the troubles, which undoubtedly are a result of our present economic system—-I do not say that she is-;-but surely we have a right to hear with an unprejudiced,mind the conclusions to which any visitor—particularly, one."of j Mr. Shaw's, eminence—may arrive.—l am, etc., | 1 ' TIME LAG. | 3rd August.