FREE SPEECH.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20508, 8 March 1930, Page 1 (Supplement)

FREE SPEECH.

VITUPERATION.

BY KOX ABB,

The Athenians believed that their rise to greatness had been due largely to the perfect freedom of speech allowed their citizens. They were a tolerant people who valued tho spirit of inquiry far more than acceptance of dogma. In the best days a man was esteemed not by the exactitude with which lie walked the old paths, but by the new trails he was blazing for the human mind. Under very special circumstances when tho public emotions were unduly stirred and when fear the worst enemy of peace and brotherhood, mado the citizens shelter behind what tho past had left them, they became intolerant for a brief spaco, and roundly labelled as traitor any man that seemed by his teaching to be undermining the established order of things. Socrates had tho misfortune to bo caught in such a back-eddy and he had been done to death before the main stream of Athenian life was flowing in its old course again.

I fancy that perfect liberty to express what was iu tho mind was a cunning device to give the public something to play with. Let people say what they will and they will end as they do in all democracies, by persuading themselves they are accomplishing things when they are only talking about them. There is small sense in sitting on tho safety valve. Where there was no restriction on speech, bosoms could be purged of a lot of perilous stuff with a minimum of discomfort and danger to the State. To Mediterranean races speech means both more and less than it does to the colder-blooded, more deliberate Saxon. It is almost a modo of action, as writing was to the Elizabethans. Kindled emotions burned out through a vigour and facility of speech that had nob been taught the necessity of restraint. Words were not resented and remembered as they would be with us. They were used far more frequently and savagely, but they meant a great deal less. In Athens. So the wise Greeks encouraged a frankness of speech that would not be tolerated in any modern land. Tho greatest men of Athens would attend the theatre and hear unmoved tho most outrageous description of their characters and motives. The dramatist would possibly be rewarded for the vigour and thrust of his vituperation. When tho demagogue Kleon was almost dictator of Athens, Aristophanes, the leading writer of comedy, put on a whole play whose sole purposo was to insult him and make him look ridiculous. The visitor to Athens might be pardoned if he gathered from the theatre the impression that Athens was ruled by criminals and idiots. The Prime Minister with a fine air of detachment listened to such declamation as this: Our city never knew / Such* a scoundrelly brigand a3 you. I suppose that Athens was the first and last of the great cities of the world to permit unlicensed and uncontrolled expression of opinion. Our TCtuStU t6" permit unlimited vituperation in the public press or on the public platform may bo due to an improvement of manners. But again it may not. It is not perhaps that we are less ready to hurt one another's feelings, but we conceive it to bo a mark of modern civilisation that whatever wo think, what wo say should be kept strictly within bounds. I may think a man is an ass; I may be able to prove it to tho complete satisfaction of the public. But I am not allowed to tell the public so in just so many words. It may be my firm conviction that So-and-so is an unmitigated blackguard, but custom and the law make me water down my statement till the man I am aiming at probably purrs with satisfaction when he reads. Old Days. Once a writer or speaker who had overstepped the limits of polite abuse could be called to face his victim's rapier or pistol. Now the law of libel takes the exaction of vengeance out of the individual's hands and puts on the State the responsibility of vindicating a man's good n.-jme. More civilised, no doubt, but not nearly so effective nor so exciting. Still, with all the limitations polite usage and tho law of the land place on the expression of opinion, some of our great ones have not found their stylo in any way cramped. Byron was always gaine to have a shot at any mark, however exalted. Thus he addressed George 111., who, he admits, had all the domestic virtues, but was a tragedy as a king. ■ Although 110 tyrant, one Who shielded tyrants, till each sense withdrawn "■ Left him nor mental nor external sun; A better farmer ne'er brushed dew from . lawn. , A worse king never left a realm undone. After all, Byron merely'reiterates the tremendous indictment that the poor man was both mad and blind. I never did think much of Byron as a man; but his own physical deficiencies might have made him a little more tolerant of human weaknesses over which their unfortunate possessors had no control and for which they were in no sense responsible. Shelley was a man of different mould, yet he could be more scathing than Byron. Tho two leading politicians of his time he characterised in one blistering poem as, first, crows sniffing for human carrion, then two obscene night-birds adding a new horror to darkness; then a shark and dog-fish accompanying a slave ship to feast on what flesh is thrown them from its vile freight; and finally as a whole menagerie. Are ye two vultures sick for battle. Two scorpions under one wet stotie. Two bloodless wolves, whoso dry throats rattle, , . , Two crows perched on the murrained cattle. Two vipers tangled into one. It takes a poet to do justice to a theme in that fashion. It is a pity Shelley could not. have kept to his sylarks and left politics severely* alone. The Critic, I recently became I he owner of the first issue of Blackwood's Magazine. I have read most of the volume, and tho only lirpe the stately pages blossom into vituperation is when they have occasion to mention William Wordsworth. Strange (hat the mild historian of idiot boys and Lucy Grey should have been tho red-rag to the Blackwood bull. But such seems to have been tho case. " Mr. Wordsworth, with the voice and countenance of a maniac, fixes his teeth in the blue cover of the Edinburgh. He growls over it—shakes it violently to and fro—and at last wearied out with vain efforts at mastication, leaves it covered over with the drivelling slaver of his impotent rage." And to round off tho matter let me quote a few of the choice obiter dicta of this wild and whirling assault on sweet William; narrow-minded bigots, the enraged poet's low and vulgar abuse, his restless and irritable vanity, his unparalleled insolence, his miserable doggerel, the egotism for which he is so disagreeably distinguished. And all this because Wordsworth published a pamphlet in which he sought to state how a life of Burns should be written, i There is a literary hate no less venomous than the odium theologicum.