NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20977, 14 September 1931, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

SPREADING THE HOLIDAYS. August is the great holiday month in England, because the schools then fake their summer vacations, but "the results of this arrangement are disastrous," the London Evening Standard declared recently. "Every family comprising children of school age wants to go away at the same time. But the heads of these families are the cogs which enable the wheels of business to revolve. They cannot all be spared at the same timo without loss of efficiency. In practice, more of them are spared than business can afford and some loss of efficiency is the result. Those who have been lucky crowd pell-mell into the holiday rcsorfs and suffer discomfort and over-charging. The holiday resorts have to organise themselves to function for one month out of twelve and to get their harvest as best they can in that short time. The holiday-maker has to put up with the inconveniences which arise out of that situation. There is a simple way out of this nonsensical difficulty. It is that the schools shall, by areas, take their holidays in rotation. This would no doubt cause hardships here and there, but none to compare with those that at present oppress the bulk of the population. It would enable holiday resorts to cater more economically and more comfortably for the holiday-makers. It would enable business concerns to arrange their schedules of leave with more regard to efficiency and with less risk of creating personal grudges and grievances."

WESTERN CIVILISATION. "It is strange to see the contradictory way in which modern industrialism works. On the one hand it has developed individualism in Western society, while on the other it is destroying this very individualism by turning men into machines," says Mr. Vasucdo 15. Melta, writing in the Indian Review. "It has also destroyed the artists' and artisans' pleasure in their work by making them think more of tho marketable quality of their work than of its artistic quality. It has destroyed men's sense of leisure and love of knowledge for its own sake. The beauty of silence and the capacity for meditation —on which depends tho spiritual development of man—are becoming unknown in the West. It lias made them lose their happiness. . . Industrialism has made modern Western peoples time-slaves. Tho watch and tho clock have become the gods of the European and American nations. And this time-slavery has made them restless and neurotic — thus making them incapable of proper moral and spiritual development. The deification of tho intellect has made Western peoples confound knowledge with wisdom and instruction with education. Tho Western ideal of progress has done tho Western man good in ono way: it has made him optimistic. The Westerner never despairs. lie is constantly hoping that better things will come and does all ho can to make those better things come. Perhaps he is a child in hoping in this manner. Cut children are not bad from every point of view."

CHANGING IDEALS. "The worship of saints or philosophers and of football-players cannot possibly go together," says Mr. Melta. "Western peoples—like other peoples in the world —have found permanent beauty in nature; they look rapturously at tho sun, moon, stars and flowers. Why then can they riot create permanent ideals of beauty in art? Indian women discovered thousands of years ago that the eari was a beautiful garment and bo they adopted it and have stuck to it ever since. Tho Far Eastern ideals of painting and the Indian ideals of architecture have after all not varied very much during the last thousand years or more: because tho Far Eastern peoples and Indians felt that the beauty of painting and architecture which they had created was so satisfying to them that it deserved to be eternalised. But Western peoples cannot remain satisfied with their artistic creations for any length of time. Tho Greeks created one ideal of sculptural beauty in which all the faculties of man were evenly balanced. But the modern Europeans have created another ideal of sculpture in which the body or the intellect predominates. Then, again, what English people liked in literature in the days of Elizabeth or George 111. or of Victoria is not liked by their descendants of to-day. What is tlio reason why Western peoples cannot remain faithful to one ideal of beauty in art? Is it because they do not know their own minds; or is it because they are changeable !'J