NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22936, 14 January 1938, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

ANSWER TO ISOLATIONISTS "I do not wonder there aro some who say, 'Why don't we turn our backs on tile rest of thp world?' " said Mr. Winston Churchill, in a recent address. "But it is not much good turning your back oil a tiger which lias not had a meal. We cannot encircle this island with chains and tow it out thousands of miles into the ocean. It is our duty to play our part among other nations in tho Western world." EXPERIENCE ALLIED TO YOUTH The foreign viewpoint of the recent changes in the high command of tho British Army, as expressed by French, German and Polish experts, is interesting, writes tho London correspondent of tho Liverpool Post. These foreign experts point out that those now promoted have never had to plan operations on the scale imposed by modern war conditions, and while agreeing that youth should be represented on the high command, they are of the opinion that in Army hierarchies it is desirable that there should be a happy blend of youth and experience with their complementary attributes. History, according to them, has shown that tho most successful campaigns have been waged by such a combination —an elderly commander with a young ehief-of-stnff or vice versa. Outstanding examples which they quote in support of their theory aro Napoleon and Berthier, Roberts and Kitchener, Hindenhurg and Ludendorft', Foeh and We.vgand, Mackensen and Seecht, and Phuncr and Harington. But there's always the case of Wellington, whose Waterloo came in his forties. THE ENGLISH The English, observes Mr. J. S. Collis in his book "An Irishman's England," have no Church, in the full meaning of the word. Deprived, therefore, of the undiluted religious sense, and devoid of the capacity to philosophise absolutes, they have, nevertheless, evolved an ethical behaviour of immense potency. They do not enjoy life, but they contrive to make it fair. Though they lack tho rudimentary ingredients of communitj*, they aro still the greatest organisers in tho world. They are toneless, minimising, yet they breed natural mystics and sublime poets. Conscientiously educated, they despise culture, starving their best or original minds, while lavishly endowing those of average content but high vitality, who hit the mean between land and water. Their freedom, ancient and tough-fibred, genuinely prized, angrily defended against any sort of dictatorship, is not, however, a daily or consuming passion—rather, the two-handed engine at. the door, waiting in* reserve. It is concluded, and some of Mr. Collis' predecessors have subscribed to it, that the Englishman is an individual eminently sincere, trained by ages of public discussion to almost boundless tolerance, to couple hatred with the sins of heresy and schism, and by long ease of life, perhaps, to rank play at least as high as work, and used quite frankly to honour success.

ART FOLLOWING PHILOSOPHY "Among the truisms, among the things that are obvious, is the infinite mischief done by the two great evils of the modern world—war and poverty," said Viscount Samuel, in an address to the British Institute of Philisoph.v on the trend of civilisation. "Mankind will come to see that by far tho greatest dangej- to its own welfare is tho existence of States which combine technical strength with moral weakness, the possession of great means with indifference to good ends. Nor will the future bo likely to tolerate that mingling of splendour and squalor which the 20th century has inherited from the 18th and 19th —a brilliant garment on a body dirty and diseased. We see that tho movement toward such ends as these has already succeeded in setting a fresh value on simplicity. Art follows, as always, tho predominant trend of thought. We see it now no longer creating ornament for ornament's sake; catering less for private luxury and more for ordinary comfort and general civic needs; aiming'" at imparting beauty to everyday things. Wo cannot doubt that that tendency will develop. There have been signs indeed that this movement may overpass itself, going beyond the simple and beautiful to the merely primitive, which may also bo the ugly. prefer a Doric temple to the Albert Memorial that is no reason #vhy we should prefer tho art of' Easter Island or Benin to tho Doric temple; no reason why we should prefer Epstein's 'Genesis' to Michelangelo's 'Dawn,' the style of the Futurists or Surrealists to that of Rembrandt, or negroid music to the purity of Bach or the majesty of Beethoven."

NOT A POETIC SUBJECT A lively diversion on meat is included in Mr. Robert Lynd's latest book of essays, "In Defence of Pink." We have various reasons, Mr. Lynd writes, for suspecting that the pleasures of meat-eating have been exaggerated. One is that no great poet has ever addressed .to meat lines as ecstatic as havo been addressed even to the humbler flowers of the field. Wordsworth was obviously more profoundly moved by the sight of a lesser celandine than by the sight of a saddle of mutton. Shakespeare never put into the mouth of a heroine a catalogue of meat dishes to rival Perdita's catalogue of flowers. The birds of which the poet sings are not birds on the table, but birds in the freedom of the air. Keats was a poet with appetites, yet ho never hymned roast pheasant as he hymned the Hampstead nightingale. When Browning's thoughts turned home to England in April, he longed to bo in England, not in order to bo in time to eat the last pork of the season, but in order to hear the thrush and the whitethroat. Go through the groat poets, and you will find that in their attitude to meat there is not a tittle of evidence of romantic love, of that spirit of adoration without which, it seems to me, life is not worth living. Homer's characters are least interesting when they are eating. Meat-eating has been celebrated comically by Bon Jonson and others, but the great lyric in praise' of meat has yet to be written. The very word " meat " is slightly disgusting. " Mutton " is not disgusting, but ugly. The language of the butcher's shop contains scarcely a word that a poet could use. Rmnp steak, chump chop, kidney, calves' liver, tripe, pig's clieek, trotters, sausages—what a list of barbarities of speech 1