AIMS AND IDEALS

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3445, 19 March 1932, Page 3 (Supplement)

AIMS AND IDEALS

A PLEA FOR NEW STANDARDS. (By Gladys Owen.) Iti is odd how, from year to year, new words swim into our ken to become at once the staple currency of daily talk. Perhaps in many instances they -are not new words —they are merely the unfamiliar jargon of some business or science which all of a sudden are on every tongue and applied to every topic. In these days we hear of nothing but scarcely-under-stood phrases of economics, bimetallism inflation, deflation, control and de-control of currency, gold standards, reappraisement of values, and a dozen other stock arguments of our depression. Buti all these words are used in their strictly literal .and material sense, whereas there might well be a very shrewd suspicion that for renewed happiness in our time we need more than anything a new personal system of economics, a fresh control of the currency, of conversation, and a completely new spiritual and intellectual standard of values to govern our lives.

Ever since the war our outlook in New Zealand has been, entirely material, based on standards of money only and what money can procure for us. More so, perhaps, than in any other country in the world has our population assessed all its ideas and hopes of success upon a purely cash basis. We have admired the man who by good luck or ability, made a large income, and spoken with scarcely concealed pity of the student or research worker who made no " practical " use of his undoubted ability.

Above all, we have rated our pleasures and our intercourse with our friends on a purely luxury basis. Consciously or unconsciously, we concentrated on the amusements which cost money, and the entertainments which vied with each other in magnificence. NO LONGER AN EXCUSE. In early days in New Zealand we had every excuse for a severely practical outlook. Our grandfathers were pioneers, struggling for very exist--ence in a strange country, and, even

now, small blame to the country man who fights his battle all the hours of daylight, and finds even the paper too long to read at night. But town -dwellers have fallen between two Stools. They are neither pioneers with a great struggle for existence to strengthen their characters, nor are they spiritual pioneers standing on their own feet after a day in the office or business, re-making their minds in some way to rise superior to material disasters.

There must be a firm realisation of •an importance of the world of ideas, Art of every kind is a necessity, not •only reproductive art, but that instinctive appreciation of the beauty of all that goes on around us, which -often is a shut book to us until some artist in line or colour sets it on record.

Books, too, await us, a gate opening on to wide landscapes far removed from wage standards and taxation sheets. Books are dear to buy, but lending libraries are cheap, and free public libraries are at our daily disposal. Let us choose our reading carefully. By all means let us study economics up to a point, for our main troubles in New Zealand come from a childish refusal to understand the principles of simple arithmetic. But let "us escape from economics sometimes. Let! us try a course of Jane Austen or of Anthony Trollope, and meander quietly through the country lanes of a less-troubled century than the twentieth.

Let us struggle witih a new language, and thereby get the satisfaction of digging our teeth into a tough proposition, and learning the point •of view of a new country through the words which convey its different outlook.

Music could help us much, according to our temperaments, more especially the robust, sane, weil-ordered magnificence of Bach or the merry, childlike beauty of Mozart. No one could admit that there could be anything wrong in the order of the Universe after hearing the triumphant progress of the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue. The wireless has a vast influence at its call, H only its programme directors could be made to realise more fully the universal nature of their possible subscribers. Unfortunately, we are very slow in following the well

considered example of the 8.8. C. in England' and the splendidly co-ordin-ated programmes of foreign stations. In England the musical life of the country and the standards of public taste have been revolutionised by the gradual education which has come to them over the air, and it has been all done so quietly and systematically. In the same way, talks on interesting subjects, criticisms of current music, drama, and books, have been regularly arrange'dTnot only as sporadic outbursts as here, but at reguTar set hours on regular days. Each evening for a whole English winter may be heard the entire piano and chamber works of Beethoven. Another winter Walford Davies held all England spellbound every Friday with his constructive history of music, simply illustrated, so that this dangerously " highbrow" subject became a joy and a delight to every man, woman, and child.

Above all, it seems that, in this time of drought so far as our luxuries are concerned, we must diligently irrigate and cultivate our human intercourses and our friends. In order to do that must we not rub up our tokens oS exchange, our ideas and interests, so that we may have something to offer now that champagne and caviare are no more?

One thing is certain, and that is that our inner and more serious depression can never lift until we can learn to faqe adversity with the old weapons of independent thought and new ideas, and until we can abandon our pathetic axiom that so long as our pleasures and our lives are expensive they are necessarily perfect.