NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 14530, 18 November 1910, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

' ■ ATHLETES ON THE ENGLISH BENCH. ; The promotion of Mr. Eldon Bankes to a place on the Bench, says the Law Journal, f adds another to the kind of distinguished i*. athletes who have become judges of the High' Court. Mr. Bankes rowed twice in .. the Oxford crew in the University Boat Race. .No fewer than three of the judges now, entitled to sit in the House of Lords are old "Blues." The Lord Chancellor thrice ' played in the Oxford cricket eleven, arid , thrice represented his University at racquets ; Lord Macnaghten rowed for Cam- . bridge in the University Boat Race 60 years ago, and won the Colquhoun Scullsthe sculling championship of the University— in 1851 while the Lord Chief Justice was J famous both as runner and Cricketer, and to this day preserves a keen interest in the national game as president of the Surrey Cricket Club and an ex-president of the Marylebono Cricket Club. It is somewhat curious that there is no Blue among the present Chancery or puisne King's Bench judges; but Mr. Justice Ch&nncll, though he did not get a place in the Cambridge boat, won the Colquhoun Sculls 10 years after Lord Macnaghten, and rowed in the first Trinity boat which won the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley. And Mr. Justice : Scrutton, who recently mentioned in the Vacation Court how he granted leave to serve notice of motion between a shot from the tee and a putt, is an excellent golfer, and used frequently to play for the Bar Golfing Society, of which he was captain, before his elevation to the Bench. Yet in former days there has been an even more distinguished body of athletic judges, as when Sir A. L. Smith, Lord Justice Chitty, and Lord Justice Homer were together on the Bench, all ' as famous for their prowess on river and , field • while they were at the University as ; . they were later for their judicial eminence.; ; The connection between the double distinction . is not accidental j those qualities of • sound judgment, virility, and energy which carry our judges" to- the head of their pro- * !'■' J

feßsion are often developed in contests upon another field, so that it is no paradox to say that the victories of the Law Courts are won on the river and the cricket ground of the University. THE TWO TOLSTOIS. Tolstoi was not regarded by all men alike. Few, if any, modern authors have been more quarrelled about. To some, his Socialism was not only abhorrent, but a betrayal of Lis great artistic gifts to others, it was the essence of his worth. To some he was a renegade, a reactionary, one who would pull the world back into a darkness from which it only emerged after ages of effort; to others, he was the apostle of a new light and truth. To some he was the first great philosopher of art; while others declared him completely ignorant of the rudiments of aesthetics. And while some find two Tolstois, and are ready to acclaim . the author of "War and Peace," of "Anna Karenina," of ' Childhood," "Boyhood," and "Youth," of "The Cossacks," and "Polikoushka," but have no good word for him after his "conversion", late in, the 'seventies the Tolstoi of "The Kreutzer Sonata," "What is Art?" and "My Confession" there are others 'who maintain that the two Tolstois are one and the same, and that the later works, the Socialistic, the religious, and contra mundum writings, are merely the inevitable, development of the earlier, though it is possible, indeed, to fix the date at which that development took a. marked and sudden stride forward. It might, perhaps, be expressed in this way. From his earliest days there were two Tolstois, the boy who lashed his back with a rope, and the boy who lay in bed and ate sweet things and read novels. The spiritual and the physical in him were both acute, and always in opposition. Circumstances ruled that until he was 50 he should regard the antagonism chiefly from the physical side; and go we have the great novels, crowded with brilliant figures of. men and women whose physical presence is so keenly not and so vj.vidly expressed as to seem sometimes almost oppressive. . Then came what looks like a revulsion, but was only a shifting of the point of view from which the old antagonism was regarded; and thenceforth we have the doctrine of renunciation, the declaration of war on the body, the definite attempt to foster the spiritual life by the mortification of the physical. But this was a tendency that may be clearly traced throughout the "pre-conversion*' writings; it was not new, any more than the capital point of Tolstoi's philosophy was. new—the brotherhood of man. That idea can be traced in his writings long before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, or the efforts to improve the education of the children on his estates which the young landed proprietor and ex-officer made by teaching in the schools in person as well as by writing. It lies at the bottom of his most hideous pictures'of peasant life, like "The Power of Darkness," as well as of his highest dreams of the future it is the mainspring of that bombshell "What is Art?" the explosion of which set all but the most level-headed scampering for protection to old formulae it was the principle guiding his life since days long before he discovered that it. was useless to give away money while you had any money left, to give anything, unless, like Ibsen's Brand, you gave all. The exact degree to which he has succeeded in carrying into practice his doctrine of equality and renunciation is a question that does not concern the value ,of his teaching to the world.