Evening Post. SATURDAY, MARCH 31, 1934. "OUR SPIRITUAL HOME"

Evening Post, Volume CXVII, Issue 76, 31 March 1934, Page 10

Evening Post. SATURDAY, MARCH 31, 1934. "OUR SPIRITUAL HOME"

Mr. Bernard Shaw has had much to say during the fortnight since he landed in New Zealand, but most of it is not to be taken seriously because it was not meant seriously. Among the things not covered by the terms of his charter as .a humorist there was, however, one which was unwise, unkind, and purely mischievous—r and therefore calls for serious attention. To the Earl of Wemyss, as to most other visitors, from the Old Country, the manner in which the average New Zealander, not as the result of any set purpose or conscious pose but as the natural expression of his British, sentiment, speaks of that country as Home is a pleasant experience which helps to make them feel as much at home in this remotest of the Empire's outposts as we should like them to feel. But what the ! broad mind "of the cosmopolitan Mr. Shaw might at least have been expected to tolerate as a harmless indulgence produces upon him the) ! exactly opposite effect.

Take, for example, ho says, the sentimentality of calling England "Home." New Zealand is your home because it isthe- country where yon live and do youi daily work. From what I have seen of it you ought to consider yourselves lucky. Ido not imagine that yon would care to call the- slams of London "Home." If I had insisted on remaining- an Irishman, although I was living in. London, where should I be now? In. the War Englishmen, only had to be patriotic; if I had adopted the Irish patriotism, o£ that period I should probably have got into communication with the enemy and finished where Casement did. What the slums of, London have got to do.with the question we are quite unable to see. If Mr. Shaw, himself had made his home in the slums the argument might perhaps have had a vestige of relevance. But seeing that on his becoming a Londoner he did not find it necessary to become a slum-dweller, bis imagination should have allowed him to see that the New Zealander also may have other associations with London than those'dark blots on the escutcheon of the city. St. Paul's, with the tombs of Nelson and Wellington, is the centre of some of these associations. Westminster Abbey, with its centuries of British history behind it—history in which even the native-born New Zealander is proud to know that he may claim as" intimate a share as the Londoner of today—is another of these centres. It is there that in the Poets' Corner visitors from New Zealand, as one of them has recently described, may be helped by the simple inscriptions "Alfred Tennyson" and "Robert Browning" to renew their "kinship with the deathless dead," and may pass on to an experience of far wider and deeper appeal. _ No grave in the Abbey, writes this New Zealander, has the poignant interest bf the Unknown Warrior's tomb. . . . No seeiet stirs the imagination more than the secret of this Unknown's identity. Did he in the days before youth was blasted by duty see the summer sea sparkle under the deep green and red of thepohutukawa on a Christmas morning, or breathe the dry, sharp air of tussock lands ? . Once as I stood by it an elderly woman in black—poor by her looks— laid a tiny bunch of flowers at the head Of the tablet, beside a harp that had been placed there in memory of fallen Irishmen. These two tributes, personal and collective, embraced all remembrance. That harp was, indeed, of as happy a significance as the widow's mite of flowers, and served the writer's purpose as admirably as it now serves our own, for the writer is a patriotic Irishman as well as a patriotic New Zealander: His combination of the two roles and the eloquence with which he speaks both supply a perfect answer to the assumption of another Irishman that a double patriotism of a much less difficult kind is impossible. The writer is Mr. Alan Mulgan, of Auckland, an Irishman born in New Zealand whose charming account of his first visit to England is well calculated to shock by its title, "Home: A New Zealander's Adventure," and perhaps to strike him dumb—just for a few,minutes—by its opening sentences. As far back as I can remember, says .¥£ Mnlgan, it was "Home." In the little New Zealand country community in which we lived it was as natural to talk of England and Ireland as Home" as it was to will New Zealand a colony. •;'.'■ A son of Irish parents, who has always had his home in "New Zealand, can nevertheless think of Britain as his Homeland and can write of the association with a thrill which no ordinary reader can fail to feel. Yet this strange anti-Irish Irishman or anti-English Englishman —^we really do hot know under which thimble our volatile visitor should be placed, arid possibly he does npt know himself— would deny the same privilege to a population which in :the purity of its British origin is virtually indistinguishable from that of Britain!

We may point out that Mr. Shaw has slandered the Imperial patriotism of his own country when he says, "If 1 had adopted tie Irish patriotism of that period [the period ;of the War] I should probably have got into communication with the enemy and finished where Casement did." At the time when: Mr. Shaw wrote the "Common Sense About the War" in which he sneered at the incident which rallied the whole British Empire to die support of Belgium as "the obvious barrister's point about the violation of the neutrality," and for a long while afterwards, the spokesman of Irish patriotism was not Roger Casement but John

Redmond. That tract of his insulted the patriotism of Ireland no less than that of the rest of the King's Dominions, and the Irish harp that Mr. Mulgan saw on the tomb in the Abbey is evidence that not all Irish memories are as short as Mr. Shaw's. When a man makes such an elementary blunder about the affairs of his own country, what right has he to set up as an authority on another country of whose affairs his ignorance is necessarily profound? It is, of course, conceivable that the idea of a double patriotism might be carried too far. If New Zealand were so doting in her admiration of the Mother Country as to be in any danger of neglecting her own interests, there would be some sense in Mr. Shaw's warning, but the suggestion is, of course, a fantastic "absurdity. ■ Self-complacency, self-suffi-ciency, and a purblind parochialism may on the contrary be justly laid to pur charge, and it is against the best available antidote to these limitations that Mr. Shaw directs his shafts. He accuses New Zealanders of "sentimentality," but from their point of view, he has put them in very good company. Had he not in the preface to "John Bull's Other Isknd" ridiculed the boyish sentimentalities, susceptibilities, and credulities that make the Englishman the. dupe of every charlatan and the idolntor of every numskull. Mr. Shaw is certainly a much cleverer man than the Englishman whom he delights to insult, but the cleverest man is not always the best guide. We recognise that Britain has her_faults, and our admiration of her is "on this side idolatry," but we are nevertheless proud to be chips of the block, and thankful that we can still look to her for the sympathy and the help that have never failed us yet. New Zealand's faith received fit expression in Mr. Downie Stewart's great speech in London eighteen months ago:

We in New Zealand regard Britain not only as being the financial leader! of the -world, by virtue of her integrity' and probity, but, what is of still more' supreme importance, she maintains tho moral leadership of the world, and if peace, order, and prosperity are to be restored to a troubled world we believe that it will be through, the- example and leadership of this great country which we regard as out spiritual home. ' '