CHANGED JUDGMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19418, 28 August 1926, Page 1 (Supplement)

CHANGED JUDGMENTS.

BY KOTAEE.

HISTORY REWRITTEN.

When I went to school we had most of the great historical characters summed up in a phrase or two. History had given its final judgment on them all; we knew them through and through. They all ran on remarkably simple and direct lines. Alfred was always Alfred the Great, England's darling in posse from his youth up. There was no need to analyse his motives: here were greatness and goodness in their highest expression. Somehow we felt it was all to his credit that he let the cakes burn by the fire; if he had been fit for that humble job, he would have lost some of his true greatness and goodness. Youth likes its pictures vivid and strong It likes to know just where it stands. Our educators felt that any expression of doubt was a mark of weakness; omniscience was the badge of all their tribe. There was nothing they did not know. So our historical characters were always clear-cut; definite, unmistakable: supermen illustrating some supreme virtue or vice. The valorous man was all compact of valour; in fact, there was little room for anything else in him Our great soldiers and sailors won victory after victory with a mere wave of the hand; it would never do

to suggest that sometimes they failed, and failed very badly. That would spoil the picture. Likewise, it would never do to suggest that they owed their victories to the fighting qualities pf the men who carried out their orders; for that would also spoil the picture. The coward was a coward in every fibre of him; the traitor a- foul knave with nothing but treachery in him. Power of Simplicity. It was all very clear, very simple, very intelligible; and it was as little like life as Swift's kingdom of the horses. Simplifications are always false; anything that is easily explained is not worth the explaining. Dr. Fishbein in his " Medical Follies" attributes the growth of modern quackeries for the most part to their simplification of the usually complex matters of diagnosis and remedy. If a healer can persuade the public that all diseases are caused by ingrowing toenails, and can illustrate his thesis with a chart or two, a jumble of pseudo-scientific jargon, and a collection of mouldy bones, the simplicity of the whole business will commend him to a certain type of patient. " He made it so clear; just what I had always felt myself, too. When you come to think of it there must be a sort of master-switch for the whole body; and he locates it in the toes. I'm afraid I can't express myself very well; but when he explained it, it was all so clear. And he had the most wonderful charts." I begin to see distinct commercial possibilities in the toenail theory. It has this advantage; I don't think anyone else 'has hit on it before. So I have a clear field. There are ten toes; that gives me ten types oi: disease. I can lodge digestive troubles in the right big toe; affections of the heart in the little toe of the left foot, and so on. For treatment I could have, threads of various colours 'which would be efficacious only if tied in a lover's knot and if purchased from me. A patient suffering from violent toothache would have a scarlet thread tied to the third toe of his right foot; as the pain became less, the colour would be altered to pink, and so in gentle gradations of shade, until a white thread with its lover's knot marked the perfect cure. I believe I have struck a sure moneymaker; a complete scheme of diagnosis and treatment originated and developed by me in fifteen minutes; while orthodox medical science is still ploughing heavily along after all these hundreds of years. However, I am in a generous mood to-day; and I make a present of it to any ambitious young man who wants a short cut to fame and fortune, and who has a sincere desire to live for service, not for self. The Human Hero.

' My enthusiasm over my theory has led me off the track. "Simplification is a sure sign that the vital matters have been omitted. Human motives are nearly always complex; human conduct can always be interpreted from half-a-dozen angles. One-track minds are few; and very few of that few ever attain eminence. It is safe to assume that every great figure in history was just as human as ourselves, with the same burden of conflicting prejudices, the same array of decent instincts, the same strange mingling of, good and evil. History, in which all the characters are superhuman in power and intensity, in virtue or in vice, is no true record of the past; it is a mere Punch and Judy show, the impossible antics of impossible caperers on an impossible stage. That has been realised so completely in recent years that the main ambition of many historians to-day is avowedly to knock the great men and women of the past from the pedestals upon which posterity has exalted them. An admirable pastime for the young, no doubt; ard one particularly congenial to the temper of our age. But this indiscriminate assault on pedestals has no virtue merely as assault. It is a good thing to tear down the undeserving mighty from their seats; but your iconoclast soon finds his pleasure in the mere act of breaking, of smashing. Destruction becomes an end in itself. Chesterton is responsible for one of the shrewdest criticisms ever passed on Bernard Shaw: " Shaw has been so successful in taking the gilt off gingerbread that he is now trying to take the gilt off gold" The Modern Way. Modern historians, then, are refusing to accept any standardised judgments on the great figures of the past. The fact that everybody praises is sufficient evidence that there must be something wrong somewhere. It is the old Athenian passion for novelty, in part; partly the revolt of a young and cocksure age against tradition and convention. Strachey's " Eminent Victorians " began the vogue. Here are Florence Nightingale. General Gordon, Arnold of Rugby, the three great unofficial British saints of the nineteenth century, canonised long since by public opinion, safe for all time, one would say, in our national hagiologv. But Strachey* sees in Miss Nightingale a woman of demoniac energy and concentration who drove her colleagues mercilessly to breakdown and death; in General Gordon a stiffnecked eccentric who kept himself going with brandy; in Arnold, the rigid conservative whose false notions of education have fixed upon England for a century a school system which worships athletics and good form, and have made genuine educational reform almost, impossible. * The modern treatment of some of the great Elizabethans we shall consider next week.