LAST, LONELIEST, LOVELIEST!

New Zealand Herald, Volume XL, Issue 12260, 2 May 1903, Page 1 (Supplement)

LAST, LONELIEST, LOVELIEST!

[by tOHUNGA.]

"Last, loneliest, loveliest!" It was Rudyard Kipling—was it not?---who thus apostrophised Auckland. But this was before Dr. Makgill had found out that our oysters had typhoid and our foreshore diphtheria, and when the small boy fishing on the wharf seemed to be imbibing God's own oxygen unadulterated with man-bred polywobbles. Yet Kipling saw only the rough outline of what might have been. We might put the beauty of Auckland out at compound interest and make it a vision of artistic insight into the joys of living instead of wrapping the talent given to us in the napkin, of indifference and burying it in the mouth of a villainous drain.

For can you not imagine what Auckland Harbour might become if dykes were thrown across its shallow bays and a great marine parade formed from Hobson Bay to the Whau, from Chelsea to Devonport, if the shallows were driven back and back until great ships could lie broadside on to the city front and pleasure yachts come anywhere, at lowest tide* to the land? Within, great parks and gardens, common as the sea-breeze and the sunshine? Without, water that knew nothing of sewage, broad channels that rose and fell with the ceaseless pulsing of the moon-loving sea? Compare this to the other possible city, crouching on slimy shores and by polluted watejs, plagued by its own good fortune as is the man born to riches that he knows not how to use, as is the man with a good horse that he cannot ride!

We talk of progress and development, and of a great future and of worldly success, but what are all these if we turn God's Garden into a slaughter-yard, if we do not keep intact and make still more beautiful the wondrous beauties of the world in which wo live? A millionaire gives twenty thousand pounds for a yard square of canvas, spends twenty times as much in beautifying his house with paint and gilt and barbaric stones and stuffs that human hands alone have wrought. And we envy him! Good heavens, envy the man his daub on canvas when a living picture, a million living pictures, that God Himself has made and seen to be good lie out before our eyes! We toil and sweat and worry over trumpery that might well make angels weep for sorrow while we destroy like children those rare works which might well make angels sob for very joy. After all, it is only what we have to toil and struggle for that we value. If paint and gilt were easily got, visions of earth and sky and sea, hills lifting to the clouds and waves laughing whitetoothed to the kiss of the wind, hardly got, we should let our follies go and turn wholehearted to the Beautiful. We value bread because in the sweat of our brow we eat it. We think little of the Beautiful because it has been showered upon us as a fond mother showers her love upon her careless babe.

Yet surely the Greek of old chose the better part when he ate his bread and olives in the groves of Artemis and drew his simple gown around him to stand hushed before Plato, the teacher, and flung back the Persian in the strength that is born where men love their country better than thev do friend or child or wife? For he loved his country. Not for the cows it carried, or the price of its butter, or the gold it bore in its rocks, or the size of its timber, or even the beauty of its women. He loved it because through it God spoke to him, because as he gazed upon its skies and its hills, its sea-arms and its grass valleys, the soul within him stirred and woke and he knew that Life was good. It was to him as the sea is to the sailingfolk, as the hills are to the hill-folk, as the stars are to the desert peoples. He drank its beauty in with all his heart. It was lovely, and he loved it.

But even though we might not be contented with bread and olives, as we should not, there is no reason in the world why we should not more beautify Auckland, already so beautiful, instead of" spoiling the wonderful charm with which Nature has endowed it. -As population spreads we begin to see that Nature only rough-hews its masterpieces, leaving to Man the touching up of weak and unfinished spots. There is nothing beautiful in a mudflat, when it is forced under your eyes, not to mention your nose; when it becomes a pest-bed it is still more undesirable. There is nothing beautiful in dusty roads or in slimy waters. There is nothing beautiful in a city given oyer wholly to the making of money/ and the buying of painted pictures. In fact, the great advantage of money-making is the increased power it gives of making life good and wholesome and inspiring, not for a favoured few alone, but for every mau, woman, and child with hearts to feel and eyes to see. The foreshores of Auckland have in them possibilities for public health and healthypleasure which cities less blessed would pay for .with half their worldly wealth. They are easily reclaimed, far more easily than were great acreages in the old countries where cattle now feed lazilv on soil that was once washed by every tide. They are getting to be needed by city-dwelling people whose children play in cramping yards and whose youth have to journey far to open ground. * They might be circled by broad boulevards, roaded for carriage, horse, and cycle, and graved with trees and carpeted with grass. It would make us too pleasure-loving! Is a man supposed to be made worse because when work is over he can find pleasure outside a bar, and can enjoy the lisp of wind-blown waters and the rustle of whispering leaves? Is a woman worse because she can take her children to play where the world is beautiful, and can gossip with her cronies where her highest senre3 are called into activity? And are the well-to-do hurt by being drawn from pleasant homes and walled lawns to enjoy themselves amid beauties that all may share and that remain unlessened however many take of them? We can have no true civic life, no true patriotism, unless to every individual in a community Nature speaks and Art calls. It seems a foolish thing to argue over, this need for cultivating the Beautiful around us, this craving in every healthy human heart for the purest pleasures that are known? Yet what is everybody's business is nobody's business, usually, and the public lets its foreshore become an eyesore where none would let his own grassplot go untended. Nevertheless, little by little it is done, if the people really seek it. Always there are Campbells in civic life, to work at "nobody's" work, and to make the place they love blossom like a garden. And be sure there is no place in the world that will better repay such work than will Waitemata-side, that now is being given over to the microbe, and cannot even let its seaward oysters open their mouths unpolluted.

We are told that as great cities rise they breed slums and misery and ugliness, fouling the skies with smoke and the waters with sewage, and stupifying in men's hearts the instincts which gold cannot satisfy, and which materialism destroys. But whv should this bo? Smoke can be burnt and sewage filtered and slums rooted up like weeds as they arise. For the helpless there is charity, for the criminal the prison, why not a beautiful city for all good citizens, when it is so easy to make it? We have money for gorgeous hotels, money for good clothes, money for the totalisator, and money for the churches. We can put water into every house and gas in every street, and electric trams in every thoroughfare. Why, then, cannot we have a great water front parkland, that would cost less than a daily 4 drink of beer apiece, and do us all more good than will wireless telegraphy? It. is not necessary that great cities should be blotches of ugliness upon the fair face of Mother Nature. Auckland may still be the " loveliest," although it may increase tenfold. At any rate, it may if we wish it to be, if we do really appreciate its beauty and train it in the way it should grow.