BOOKS AND THE SPICE OF LIFE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 15900, 24 April 1915, Page 4 (Supplement)

BOOKS AND THE SPICE OF LIFE.

V.uirETT is the spice of life. This. I believe, has been said before but then most true things have. Their very triteness testifies to their profundity, for the simple reason that any saying which has managed to survive its day. has proved its validity. Take, for example, the axiom— scorned of the cynics—that honesty is the best policy. Well, it just is, you know. Consider for yourself, as the French do not say. Would you not rather be an ordinary healthy man, with a free-working appetite and a villa in the suburbs, than Mr. Gorgius Midas, with his dubiouslyacquired hoard of untold millions, and only a diseased conscience where his stomach ought to be?

Variety "is" the spice of life. And yet we have so distinguished a litterateur as M. Anatole France declaring that this is no time for books! No time for books'. If this is not the time for books, I should dearly love to know when is the time. . . . Our forefathers were wiser, saner than we are. They saw to it that no single silly obsession should divert their minds from the joys of literature and art. Indeed, that was one of our greatest literary and artistic periods. Especially was it an epoch of most glorious revival in real poetry and romance.

Wordsworth and Coleridge and Scott were writing then, and Byron and Keats and Shelley, to name only a handful of the most illustrious. In their train came scores of other authors less well known than these giants I have named, but in their day as popular. They were not great, these lesser lights- To our modern taste their work seems insipid and tedious, their heroics mere rhodomontade. their wit and humour flat as ditch-water. Yet to the people of their own age they seemed as brilliant as our many most up-to-date geniuses, the only difference being that they stuck to their last and left military matters to the military. Gaily they went on cracking their jokes, sweetly they went on singing their immortal songs, spinning their fancies in romance and drama. And they were read and enjoyed and discussed, despite the shadow of threatened invasion and the dread presence, just across tho Channel, of the ogreous Napoleon, with whose name mothers are said to have frightened their babies.

And as it was then, why should it not be now?—E.P., in the Cartoon.