THE MATTER-OF-FACT MIND

Evening Star, Issue 19521, 31 March 1927, Page 14

THE MATTER-OF-FACT MIND

mi “ USE " ARE NATURE AM THE ARTS? A primrose by the river’s brim A yellow primrose is to him, And nothing more “ England,” declared Burke, “is peopled with prosaic utilitarians who value only what they can measure with a two-foot rule, or count on their fingers.” Doubtless Burke was guilty. of_ a statement that was far too sweeping and perhaps unjustifiable (says a writer in,‘John o’ London’s Weekly’), yet it is indeed surprising to learn of the lamentable lack of emotional appeal with which some very eminent minds have so unfortunately felt. • It is most natural that the great propounders of the philosophy of utilitarianism should have been unable to understand and appreciate the inner beauties of Nature and tho arts. To Jeremy Bentham, poetry, which Wordsworth saw as “tho breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,” was a subject of despicable’ contempt—•“a useless and meaningless collection of words.” “The game of push-pin,” he said, “is of equal value.” It was indeed only a gracious concession that he allowed that poetry is an amusement. ■BOETRY DESPISED. John Stuart Mill held similar views, as also did John Locke, who thought poetry “to be of no more service to the church or State than a good player at nino-pins.” It is hardly believable that he was speaking of the samp art of which Bacon wrote, “it was ever thought to have some participation of divinencss, because it doth raise and erect tho mind by submitting the shows of things to the desires of tho mind.” It is most natural that the poets in their turn khould refer slightingly and even derisively to these literal, unimaginative minds. The American poet Charles Sprague, in his splendid poem, ‘ Curiosity,’ ridicules the ' unnatural commercialisation of Nature’s resources. He speaks of men Who placed where Catskills forehead greets tho sky, Grieve that such quarries all unhewn should lie; Or, gazing where Niagara's torrents thrill, Exclaim, “ A monster stream to .turn a mill! ” - NATURE A MILCH COW. Schiller, the famous German dramatist and poet, in a study of Nature, says:— To some she is a goddess great. To some the milch, cow of the field, — Their only cave to calculate How much butter she will yield. In an admirable essay on ‘ A Matter-of-Fact Man,’ William Matthews _says : “Show him the coat in which Nelson died at Trafalgar, and he would wonder whether the cloth was of West of England or Bradford manufacture.” “It was another such man,” ho tells, “who, when his pastor, finding him sick and unable to attend church, proposed to bring one of his sermons and read it to him, replied: ‘Do so, for I have had. no sleep since tho attack began.’ ” So that even sermons can be put to merely utilitarian uses.