ON FLITTIN’

Evening Star, Issue 17329, 17 April 1920, Page 2

ON FLITTIN’

Will there be any-such thing as a place that people can call home in the not distant future? It does not look like it. The -whole world is on the move. Years ago P. G. Ha-raerton, in his ‘ The Intellcc-' tual Life,’ pointed out that the invention of railways was producing a return to one | of the most marked phases of barbarism—j the nomadic life. Since he wrote that book wo have added to the trains the cycle, the motor car, the aeroplane, and what not. Fixity of residence is fast becoming a thing of derision or despair. People do not like to he, anchored long anywhere or to anything. We are even demanding “ leasehold ” , marriages and i free-and-easy divorce. Where is all this! to stop,’ or what is to be the result?! Where it is to stop is difficult to see. We. have at present the spectacle of _ huge migrations of people not .only from one parish to another, but from one continent to another. While a small number sit at home, countless multitudes are posting over land and sea. The great majority of them have left one borne in search for another; and hardly will that other be found till they will be getting ready for .a new change. Crowds of workmen not only drift in and out of cities to work, they cross the seas. TKey go from Europe to America iu the spring and return in the autumn. As transportation develops in efficiency and cheapness it will be possible' to carry tons of thousands of people from one zone and one country to another. Humanity is off the chain, and is fast becoming denationalised, unsettled,-wander-ing. It is reverting to old nomadic! conditions. 1 ******* j 'Che results of all this are difficult to j calculate, impossible to foretell. Some of I them are very visible at the moment. Jji : several of his books the alert mind and imagination of Mr 11. G. Wells have been fingering the problem. Ho points out that one of the most significant effects of this unsettled condition of life is to make! ]>eople loss and less interested in merely : local affairs. Already the suburbanite is I far out of the city and getting still {mother. and so he is losing his interest iu the city proper. In the same way the population of a country drifting about like clouds will become less patriotic. They will become more and more indifferent as their cosmopolitan experience is widened and tTeepenod. Having no roots deep in the soil, a national sentiment will be difficult to develop or preserve. Th’ey are iu a house here to-day, but it is not a home in the old sense ; it is merely a place to eat in and to find shelter for the night. They are ready to leave it to-morrow for fresh woods and pastures new. In America there are many cities in peril of political and municipal corruption because of the apathy of the growing crowds of unsettled, homeless men and women who drift into and out of them monthly and yearly. It is a curious but most disquieting prospect this vast floating population of wandering men and women* who are thus denationalised, and who are developing habits, customs, and moralities of their own. with ever lessening concern in the affairs of local municipal life or with the politics of either the State or the Federal Legislature. ******* There are those who think well of it, and who regard it as a mark of the progressive development of the world. We have grave doubts about it. We sometimes wonder if this wanderlust of humanity will enrich the soul as much as did the old home-abiding sentiments of- our forefathers. Long ago Buskin, in his ‘ Seven

yLamps of Architecture,’ denounced w-ith 1 characteristic energy the “pitiful concre-! tions” of worker*’ dwellings that sprang’ up about the great factories and workshops of Liitain. It was not merely that they disgusted the eye and desecrated the ■ landscape, bat that they destroyed the sentiment of home, sweet home—tire finest that has ever* flushed or fired a great people. It would have been well with Britain had she paid heed,a generation ago to this greatest of her prophets in other tilings as -well a* this. She would have escaped many of those trials that, have rent her asunder and well-nigh levelled 1 her into the dust. He insisted on the I need of beauty and permanence in the I dwellings which we constructed. But it | was in vain. The nation went on to erect j structures where the comfort, the peace, I the sentiment, the religion of a home became impossible; “ and the crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab and gipsy by the less healthy openness to the air of heaven and less happy choice of their spot of earth, by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain, of rest and of stability without the luxury of change.” About 40 years ago another less notable writer was insisting on the same thing. In on© of the opening chapters of ‘Daniel Deronda’ George fEliot refers to the necessity of a home in life being well rooted in some spot of a native land. She goes oil to point out that this was an experience unknown to Gwendolen Harleth, and it had much to do with her after sorrows and overthrows. It may not be popular to express an agreej ment with these old-fashioned sentiments, I but we are well Content to incur whatever | scorn it may entail since we shave it in I such good company as John Buskin and George Eliot. ******* But our disqnisit-on so far has been more general than we originally intended. We set out with the idea, of dealing mainly with such a commonplace thing ns a simple flittin’. It is an cvervday occurrence. On the streets and along ttie country roads we constantly meet the furniture vans transferring the family impedimenta from one place to another. And it is a specially common feature in this Dominion. New Zealanders aro said to be the most restless people on the face- of the earth. On an average- we learn that they only remain about four years in the same place. That- must be injurious to the growth of character. '.Ye I have already _pointed out its evil effects upon children. To have no place that they can ever look back upon as “ home, sweet home,” gives an aridity to after life that detracts sadly from the sanctification of memory. One wonders sometimes if this craving for change of house and occupation is a healthy thing. Our ! forefathers spent their lives in the same j places. But the desire to better themi selves has bitten deep into most people’s ; nature. So they are ever on the outlook. ; and ready to pull up their tent poles at a moment’s notice. One of our most delightful essayists announced a good while ago that ho was some day going to write a ‘ Plea for Dullness, Stability, and Repose.’ There is a great need to press that plea. It is a very difficult problem to determine when we should make a change, and it is rendered doubly difficult if we forget that the end of life is not the accumulation of money but the development of character. In that case we shall be sure to be constantly on the outlook for new places and occupations. One needs in these breathless days such pictures of calm, repose as we find in Austin Dobson’s ‘ Old World Idylls,’ or in more prosaic form in ‘Adam Bede,’ with

a certain wistful longing that such days might return: -hut it is all in vain. Lie softly Leisure ! Doubtless you. With too serene a conscience, drew Your easy breath and slumbered through The gravest issue: But we, to whom our age allow* Scarce time to wipe our weary brows, Look down upon your narrow house, Old friend, and miss you ! * */ * * * * *

So we do. But it-is of the furniture vans that we arc just now mainly thinking. What pathos, tragedy, and comedy lie in their wake! There is an Irish proverb to the effect that “ two flit-tins arc equal to a funeral.” And there certainly 5e a peculiar sadness in leaving behind us places and things that are associated with memories glad or sad. It is strange how some places that we disliked appeal to us pathetically when the time comes to leave them. The ship that we were sick of, the house that had grown dull and monotonous, acquire a new ascendancy over ns when we come to bid them goodbye for aver and aye. Oliver Twist leaving Mrs Moon’s —that “wretched, home where one kind word or look had never lighted the gloom of his infant years’’— is said to have burst into tears when the cottage gate closed behind him- “It is uo light thing,” says another rvriter, * to fold np and lay by for ever a portion of one’s own life, even when it can be done in honor and with thankfulness.” But it is the things rather than the place that create the pathos of a flittin’. There are impedimenta that must be left behind; that have either served their time iu the old house or would ho no use in the new. There are, .perhaps, the clothes of those who are gone and will need them no more.—the dresses or bootees of little children now grown to manhood and womanhood- There are the books that ministered to our enjoyment in an earlier day, but are now dusty and dead. Then there are the accumulations of old letters and papers. As \vc look through the pages, brown with age, what memories crowd up! Many of the writers are dead or changed, yet one shrinks from the desecration of destroying correspondence that once took us like tha fragrance of honeysuckle in a summer gloaming. Yet their transformation by fire may be bettor than that they should he kept only to be stared at by strangers’ eyes behind which there was no heart, no friendly sympathy and recognition. A good many years ago the genial ‘‘Claudius Clear,” in answer to a query from a Dunedin correspondent, discussed in the ‘ British Weekly ’ the problem ‘ Should ■ Old Letters Be Kept?’ There, are many letters that most of us would like to keep—letters from sweethearts, lovers, -wives, children, etc. And perhaps there is no harm in doing so, provided,that we can he sure that we do not keep them too long. Dr Johnson kept those of his mother and Mary Aston, the sweetheart of his youth, till the very last. Then he burned them. If the truth were known, it would he found that most of us have some secretcorners where some such treasures are hidden.

There is no heart so commonplace But. if you search it, you will find Some secret chamber of the mind, Where worship still is done with tears That freshen the grey dusty years. That we suppose is true for nearly everybody. “We shall never let anybody in there to read the fading leaves. We should almost be glad to hear that all had disappeared in* ashes, and yet wc have not the murage to make an end.’’ Every flittin’ forces the issue upon us afresh ; and we hesitate about it, or maybe we do the deed and feel that we have performed an act of sacrilege in the doing of it. “ Claudius Clear’s ” opinion is that the few among us who may be written of after death will be wise to retain all papers that would explain their motives and conduct. That Is doubtless good advice; but it is of small concern to most of us. A nameless record and a forgotten grave are all that will remain for the vast majority-. For these “it will bo best to keep the sweetness and the bitterness of the pastin the sanctuary of their own hearts, and take ca-e that no stranger shall intermeddle therewith.” ******* But a flittin’, while a pathetic fact, is also a prophecy. Life rightly interpreted is full of premonitions pointing forward to what is to be. These changes from one place to another 5 these disentanglings of ourselves from tho impedimenta that have accumulated about us in the houses where we have lived—what are they all but prophetic of the last and final flittin’! Tire most wonderful of all houses is the House of Life that -ve call the body. Every year we are. flittin’ out of some part. Every year we are leaving behind us in the process impedimenta that we r.o longer need. Science tells us that there are already upwards of 70 remainders in the body that have been either superseded or transformed. Man' emerges through the animal laden with the spoils of his pilgrimage; and he has been forced on his upward way either to drop or transmute the remainders of the animal in his body. He ie a sort of “ old curiosity shop of abandoned tools and aborted organs.” And so in every individual body, as the years go by 7, we let go ' ne thing after another. Once the youth was an athlete ; now he only pays to see others. Once he had far vision and acute hearing; but age dims the #ya and dulls tho ear. Ro gradually- we are disentangled from the physical and fleshly’ tabernacle. As the race slowly evolved it put off the animal as mind and soul took charge. And so with the individual. There comes the day when the body .is felt to be a- clog, a prison, a weariness. As the spiritual gets the mastery it is more and more felt to be a kind of prison, from which the wish to escape grows increasingly insistent. As the dying girl, Catherine Linton, in Emily Bronte’s weird story ‘ Wuthcrinjr Heights.’ says; “Iho thing that irks me most ia tills shattered prism, I’m tried of beinn enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that, glorious world and to be always there.” So multitudes have felt. The flit-tins in this earthly life vary’ much in degree and rank. Some go into larger houses, fame into poorer and more cramped ones. Does that hold also in the migration from the material body? I*it also a prophecy of what happens when the fleshly tabernacle falls off and we go out into the Invisible? No doubt it is. All life 75 a body-builder. At whatever stage we find it we see that it builds one suitable to its environment. The grass, the insect, the animal, man—-each creates the body needful.for its life. The quality of the life determines the kind of body. And so the emphasis is thus thrown back upon life. What we are determines what we shall be. Death is but a stage in the evolution of life, and a necessary stage. It strips off the outer covering, the clayey tabernacle, and lets at free to further development. The development may be up or down, according to the kind, and quality of the life. To soma the flittin’ may bo a devolution, as when Kaisers and Kings tail from castles to hovels. To others the flittin’ from the house of the bony will be a great liberation, an unlajidsafeg fegughfr gnd

notion. JTo thorn may bs addressed Whittier’s words to Lloyd Garrison: Go up and on, thy day well done, Thy morning promise well fulfilled j Arise to triumphs yet unwon, . To holier tasks that' God hath willed. Go, leave behind thee all that mars The work below of man for man { With the white legions of *the stars Do service such ae angels can.