NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23023, 28 April 1938, Page 12

NOTES AND COMMENTS

FORCE SUPERSEDES RIGHT Germany's annexation of Austria may be ominous of events still graver, says "Scrutator," writing in the Sunday Times. Hitherto, except in Spain, and there shamefacedly and on a relatively small scale, the German Government since the war has not threatened the independence of other countries. She has used her growing power to strike off the shackles imposed by the peace on her own dignity and independence. But now for the first time she has used it to attack the independence of her neighbours. So long as Germany's policy with her neighbours was determined by what was right and just, Germany could count on a great body of sympathy in Britain. But when the criterion is no longer "What is right or just for me to do?" but "What have I the power to do?" the whole atmosphere is tainted.

IDEAS AND TECHNIQUE The dictum, too often quoted, "If youth but knew, if age but could," must be inverted for the arts. I remember once, writes the art critic, Mr. Jan Gordon, a well-known but somewhat cynical painter and professor saying that the only benefit he had found in students' sketch classes was that he could borrow their often bright ideas. "They never can or will work them out for themselves," he said, "and by tho time they have reached my capacity they will have forgotten how to think of things like that." Of the artcrafts such as painting one could with justice misquote Wilde and say, "Yes, learning kills the thing it loves," for tho very act of studying the processes, tho pursuit of competence in a technical way, does tend to obscure the urgency of the original vision that drove the student to the arts. On the other hand, achievements of such comparatively inexperienced artists as Van Gogh or Christopher Wood might lead one %o reflect that:— Tho true divine afflatus Needs little apparatus, And only when it's weak Falls back upon technique. MR. CHAMBERLAIN'S ASCENT At the beginning of his Premiership Mr. Chamberlain seemed to put a definite limit on the heights which he would attempt, notes "Atticus," writing in the Sunday Times. Within those limits he was lucid, logical and effective. But eloquence, like all great arts, must have emotion, and it was in his resentment of reSent charges against him that Mr. Chamberlain broke away from the shackles of his own imposing. Now he sways the House of Commons where once he persuaded it. There was a dramatic moment in the House recently when he was being derided for having abandoned the League. Turning abruptly toward the Opposition, Mr. Chamberlain said: "The League to-day is mutilated; it is maimed; and those who, like mo, do their best to build it up afresh to be a real world League which could protect the weak and limit the powers of the strong, serve it better than those who would attempt to put on it, in its present state, tasks which are manifestly beyond its strength." There is the Lincoln touch in that. The words not only have clarity, but are obviously sincere. Mr. Chamberlain has become the stylist of the Front Bench. WESTERN FILM'S POPULARITY _ -A-fc one of the biggest West End cinemas they are showing a Western picture, notes the film critic of the London Observer. Not a Western-do-luxe, with stars from other branches of film-making, like "Texas Rangers" or "The Last of the Mohicans." Not a Western thinly dispensed as a pioneer story, like "The Plaipsman." Just an honest-to-goodness cowboy tale, without any trimmings, made in the routine way by a Westerner of 20 years' standing Buck Jones. The decision to put on this film in what is known as "tho heart of fashionable London" has caused quite a little stir in film circles. There were those at the private show who looked at the "Western" as though they were looking at a threeheaded elephant. But millions of people outside the heart of fashionable London have been seeing films like this for a-quarter of a century, and aro still seeing them, and enjoying them, every day. There is a theory fostered by the entirely false statistics of West End showmanship, that the cowboy film has gone out of favour. It might be true to say that it has gone out of fashion. But there has never been a time when the "Western" was not popular. Other "cycles" in films have come and gone, but the charm of the Western, it seems, goes on for ever.

FIERY PARTICLE The death of Gabriele d'Annunzio extinguished a fiery particle, ipdeed, one of those flaming spirits which shine the more fiercely in these days because of their rarity, says the London Observer. In a world of huge populations, universal education, steady levels of professional achievement and capacity, mechanical uniformity and mass production, d'Annunzio was the dashing amateur who would claim anything in his confident stride, from the greatest of actresses to the fastest of aeroplanes, from the city of Fiume to the peaks of Parnassus. Many have gone further, but few wept so far in different ways. As an Italian, he was the heir of the Renaissance, playing, as we may fitly say (for he was in many things a play-boy), on his own ground. But to the Italian heritage the passion to make ajid cherish beauty in all its richest forms, was added from the north the influence of Nietzsche. That keen wind dispelled the languors which Italianate luxury might have created in a gifted boy, rapidly acclaimed as the singer of his place and time, and implanted in the stripling poet the Dionysiac zest to live fully and the taste for all things heroic and dynamic. The mixture created a modern and a foreicn version of our own Elizabethan type, the mep who rejoiced in battle with "the huge army of the world's desires." Like them, d'Annunzio began young, for he was publishing poetry at 16, famous and married at 20. Like them, he rejoiced in hawk and horse and hound, apd would have all things handsome about him, costs not to be considered. Like them N he mixed action with brooding, battle with the Muse. Like them, he could justify his failures with the old and audacious plea that those who make no mistakes never make anything.