THE NEXT STEP.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21100, 6 February 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE NEXT STEP.

BY KOTAJLE,

OPINIONS OF SANDY.

I had heard that Sandy was confined to his bed and I guessed he would be making pretty heavy weather of it. I found him full of apologies and very heartily ashamed of himself. It seems that his doctor suggests his present trouble is whooping-cough, and he is passing through a phase of withering self-contempt. " Whooping cough! Would you believe that now ? At my time of life! Second childhood—that's what's wrong with me. I don't expect to miss my share of decent human ailments. There ia even some satisfaction in knowing you have contracted some obscure disease with a name as long as your arm. At least you are attracting somebody's attention, and your friends will say you could always be trusted to do something out of the ordinary. But there's no honour in whooping-cough. Ugh! I'd rather have measles or housemaid's knee, or rickets." I tried to stir him out of his vile melancholy and self-disparagement by asking him if he had any ideas on the present discontents that afflict the world. I saw a gleam in hia eye, but his humiliation had been too deep. " What right has an old fool who has no more sense than to catch every infantile ailment that comes along to have any opinions on anything ? Bles3 my soul! when I think—" I interrupted his torrent of self-con-demnation. I told him I wasn't interested in his confounded whooping-cough. Ho had it. He was getting better. There was no further conversational value in the wretched thing. I was prepared to agree to everything he had said about himself if only he would forget it and tell mo some of the things I had come to hear. Liberty. The old smile wa3 back, and the old glint in his eye. " You are right," he said. " I deserved it. And, man, I've been dying for a crack with somebody that has the grace of listening. . . It's being bottled up with no outlet but those infernal whoops that's soured me. Just give ine the floor for half-an-hour, and the doctor won't recognise his patient when he calls this afternoon. " I've come to this conclusion —the chief trouble with our times is that we demanded too much liberty, far more liberty than man at his present stage of development knows how to manage. Last century he had too little. That is why he has in reaction gone too far the other way. We don't like to admit it, but man moves with the greatest ease and comfort on the rigid rails convention or authority prescribes for him. Liberty in unskilled hands end 3in licence. There must always be, as the poet laureate says, ' certain bits in certain jaws.' " You won't get many people to accept that. Man, of course, must have a reasonable freedom. Russia conceives that she has the right to cancel all individual freedom in the interests of the whole group. The former rulers of Russia controlled the whole nation in the interests of a narrow privileged group. From our point of view, with our tradition of liberty, the complete submergence of the individual in the State is unthinkable; unless, indeed, we have got the world into such a hopeless mess that there is no way out except along Marxian lines. But we want a lot more evidence before we accept that as inevitable. " The trouble is to determine just how far man's liberty i 3 to be curtailed. Absolute freedom simply means anarchy. Absolute control is slavery. Between the extremes somewhere lies the path of peace and progress. The Victorians accepted limitations we have jettisoned. But these hard times, and the tremendous burden State-demands have necessarily assumed in our frantic attempts to cope with them, have brought home to the harassed citizen how" little he reallv lives to himself and how strong are the bonds that hold him to his social obligations. Authority, " I have come to the conclusion that man can stand only a certain amount of liberty, and if circumstances give him for a" time more liberty than he can wisely use he will deliberately seek again the comfort of the chains and shackles he so gaily threw aside. You remember what happened in the seventeenth century. The Renaissance imnulse drove man to self-assertion in every department of human life. In the State, parliament fought the king. There was no clearly defined constitution delimiting function and privilege and duty. The king had his ideas of what liberty meant to him: the parliament had "its ideas, and they did not tally with the king's. In the absence of any recognised and final rule in the matter there was nothing for it but civil war. " In the Church there was the same conflict. There was too much liberty, too few guiding lines. And the result was mere confusion —party against party, civil war again. In literature the Elizabethan freedom had degenerated in smaller men into licence. There were no canons of good taste, no generally accepted standards. When the fighting was over, one thing only was clear—for the future men must know exactly where they stood. " In the State for the first time the king's power wa3 clearly defined. Parliament had its rights and duties and privileges outlined and accept.ed at last. It was a triumph for liberty, but liberty's privilege was to mark out its own limits, to make the new rules by which it would abide. So in the Church the confusion was ended by an Act of Uniformity—by setting up clear boundaries within which liberty must exercise itself. The direst enemy wa3 seen to be unfettered individual liberty, fn literature the classical school established its standards. Poetry was to be written only one way. Hie final outcome of the soaring Elizabethan freedom was the hobbling of Pegasus to a narrow routine path. A period of individual liberty always sees the freeman asking again for some of his fetters. The Future. " And that is what I see happening in the world to-day. I am not a prophet, neither a son of the prophets. But I am certain that we shall use our liberty to submit ourselves again to many of the rules we thought we had thrown overboard for good. I see Mrs. Grundy coming back in full force, a much more rigid rule of social conduct, not fixed by any external authority but arising spontaneously out of the social sense of a community that is tired of not knowing exactly where it 3tand3 on moral issues. " And in a year or so all eccentricities of literary and artistic form in poetry, music, sculpture, painting, will be swept into the discard. What are they anyway but the reductio ad absurdum of individual liberty as applied to the arts ? And in their placs classical standards will come again—restraint, form, polish, beauty, intelligibility, will resume their away over the hearts of men, In the State, in the Church, in all the artistic expression of the soul of man, the world weary of chasing will o' the wisps will come back to shelter itself for a 3eanon under the shadow of atathority."