IS THERE A NEW ZEALAND TYPE?

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 14465, 3 September 1910, Page 1 (Supplement)

IS THERE A NEW ZEALAND TYPE?

No. 11. HY FRANK MORTON'. I have tried to suggest grounds for my honest and obstinate conviction that on* of tho most notable and least admirable characteristics of the New Zealand typo is its narrowness. All the typical New Zealander's good qualities ars subordinated .to that disability. He can only see with any clearness objects close at hand, and in the distance lie always imagines men as trees walking. His mental vision, to put the thing in another way, does not carry beyond the sea. By dint of long and morbid brooding on his own excellence (which he has had tho honour to discover and applaud), he has gradually come to assume that he is the centre of all things, and that from him all things worthy radiate and spring. He really believes that tho eyes of the world are on Now Zealand, and that foolish belief is chiefly due to the fact that he knows next to nothing of the world. This feoling is so instinctive that it cannot fairly be condemned as mere conceit, and it is this feeling that makes tho typical New Zealander more intolerant of criticism than any other man in the world. It is this feeling, too, that oddly blinds tho typical New Zealander to tho grosser defects and more ignoble pretences of his prominent local guides, philosophers, and—politicians. You may bo wiser than Solomon (it seems possible), but if you talk to the typical New Zealander without tacit admission of his supremacy in the nature of things, he will straightway condemn you for an upstart and a fool. And you may be a queerer dolt than Dogberry, but if you are careful to tickle the typical New Zealender's inherent conceit, ho will at once accept you as j a very wise and deserving person. For this reason, the sympathetic Cosmopolite finds it a matter of exceeding difficulty and delicacy to handle the typical New Zealander. 1 never knew another country in which it is so hard to be honest and straight'in one's personal relations with tho mass of the .mediocre. If a man sends me (let us say) a bundle of bad verses for my opinion, and I am in the mood to be cad enough to pretend that the verses have a sort of promise oozing from them somewhere, he will advertise my critical ability and buy the book or two I have been guilty of thus far. But if I am clean and candid, chaste and cold, if I tell him frankly that his verses are utterly bad and hopeless, he will at once go out with his muckrake to turn over my dreadful past, and two days later will be telling Hobbs, Bloggs, ami Muggins that I am a drug-fiend, an inveterate sot, a wife-beater, an infidel, a thief, a dullard, and otherwise a somewhat undesirable person. So far, you see, your typical New Zealander is utterly unable to separate men from matters. He holds, for instance, that a good man must be a good politician, and chat a good politician must be a good man—perhaps the most .Hiding fallacy of this or any age. He has no perception of halftones, and cannot understand that there is in nature no single thing absolutely bad or absolutely good—if you except Jews and pilchards. Ho has not yet risen to that penetrating sanity that scrupulously dissociates ideas. If you tell him that some nice girl is an execrable pianist, or that some perfectly respectable matron is the most horrid soprano that ever debauched sweet silence, he will be terribly shocked. I heard recently of an illiterate bagman who "wouldn't have Oscar Wilde on his mind," and I met a Christehurch man whose whole idea of Sara was that she is a most immoral woman. So the typical New Zealander will permit his parson to dictate his politics ; though, in the majority of cases, it would be just about as sensible to permit his cobbler to operate for hernia. He cannot understand that no man's opinion is of any true or special value, outside the limits of his specialty. All this folly is due, not at all to any inborn defect of intelligence, but to the fact that anything in New Zealand is accepted instinctively by the typical Now Zealander as essentially preferable to anything else on earth If you could show him the multitudinous magnificence of tho Andes, he would tell you that you ought to (oughter) see one of the sunsets they have in Kaiwarra. If you set him down, a midge on the bosom of infinity, by the ■ Amazon, he would swear that you couldn't have any true idea of a river till you ha 1 seen the Avon at Christchurch. Now, all this is very humourous and quaint, but all this, unwilling though he be to believe ; t, is very bad for tho typical New Zealander. Patriotism is something far greater and finer than belief in a borough or pride in a parish. Ideas coagulated form a sorry mass of mullock. The truly groat arc the men of open mind, and that sort of greatness lias scarcely come to New Zealand yet. Typical New Zealanders have told mo quite seriously that Auckland has a finer harbour than Sydney, and one chap assured me just the other day that the harbour of Wellington is the best in Australasia Otago Harbour, which begins timidly -it Port Chalmers, and ends disconsolately at Dunedin, is a mero ditch leading t-o a pond, but tho people of Dunedin aro very proud of it. They hang maps of it in their dining-rooms (it looks rather splendid on a map); they make speeches about it on every possible occasion ; wh°n any ship of decent size manages to get up to the pond, they blow hilarious bugles in honour of the glad day. The harbour of the Bluff, which is a sort of blinking treachery torn by squalls and scooped by blizzards, lias inspired unsuspected poets in Southlandwhich is otherwise no home of poesy, I do assure you. In Wellington, a man will lead you into his back garden, if he is millionaire enough to possess one, and, pausing in the muddy path between two discouraged gooseberry bushes, will tell you that ho loves to commune with nature in the splendid bush so near his own dwelling. Nelson consists of a big jam factory and some climate, and the Nclsonians, whenever they wake up, piously believe that tho place beside the Glassy 'Sea is rather envious of Nelson as a health resort. But it is when you are foolhardy enough to accompany the typical New Zealander into tho domain of art that he really begins to suffocate you. As to literature, he sometimes knows enough of Meredith to misquote him, and sometimes (though this wisdom is a rare and hopeful sign) enough of Miss Marie Corolli, that blessed damsel, to avoid mentioning her name. He is so far back in the middle ages that he will still refer with a nauseating smirk to Emile Zola, that laborious moralist, as an improper person. But when she —for it is she now, the inevitable —it is when she is what she calls cultured that you need the protection of heaven most. She has ail her goods mi the window, exorbitantly priced, and when she pulls them out for your inspection the dust rises in clouds, the moths hover, and the flies wonder what all this disturbance is about. Or, if you are trapped into afternoon-tea or some special illiterate convention of the deliberately literary, she will get you into a corner and pour forth deplorable Ibsenities till your eardrums buzz again. She will chatter perfervidly of Maeterlinck, whom she has misread at random ; or of Mr. Chesterton, whom she misunderstands with fluency ; and when she writes for such of the newspapers as are willing to print anything they got for nothing, she will use astonishing words like typiste and pianiste and artiste—till your disturbed imagination pictures her, a walking advertisement tor the dentiste and the chemiste, and you know exactly what she thinks of the bigainiste and the humouriste, and just what you would think of her favourite vocaliste and rhapsodiste and satiriste. She is a strange and fearsome fowl, and wo owe much to the wise discretion of nature that permits so few of her eggs to hatch. It would be easily to multiply instances [ of the typical New Zealander's instinctive

conceit. When a Minister for Railways goes to Australia, ho returns to tell you that our railways are better than theirs, and that in ours are incorporated in perfection all the finest railway ideas on earth. And so the game goes on, till in the end it becomes an irritation grievous to be borne. This is the quality we have to extirpate. We need the receptive and_ assimilative mind that works unfettered in an atmosphere of tolerance. Is it too much to hope for? I don't k-ow. I think not. Eternity is a great ocean, and it is probable that we have a good deal of time yet to run. You will please understand that I am speaking of the typical New Zealander. and not at all of the minority of intelligentia. The typical New Zealander is hospitable and cordial and energetic. He has great shrewdness, and is warm witfi esesntial kindness. But lie must get great things into perspective before lie can become the maker and saviour of his nation. Indeed, you cannot make a nation of typical New Zealanders at this stage. At most, you can have an interdependent association of oddly diverse cliques and factions.