NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23057, 7 June 1938, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

LORD OF LANGUAGE "For many of us, Shakespeare's greatest title must remain that he was, above all, a great lord of language," said Mr. Norman Birkett, speaking at the recent Shakespeare Festival. "When the critics have finished their work, when his various qualities have been appraised —his giit of pure creation, his immense'and varied knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of men, his all-embracing and understanding sympathy, his saving and redeeming humour —lie yet remains for many a great lover of words, the creator of immortal speech and those magical phrases which once heard or read remain in the memory and imagination so long as lifo shall last. It is this last power, beyond all other powers, that exalts him and separates him from the rest." WHERE FREEDOM BEGINS "The struggle for freedom; what do these words mean?" asked Mrs. E. V. Parker in her presidential address to tho English National Union of Teacliers. "The woifl 'freedom' has a magic and an inspiration of its own. Poets have glorified freedom. Heroes have fought and died for it. Yet the struggle for freedom, as history describes it, has in the main been a blind and chaotic battle in the mist, in the course of which men have again and again exchanged one tyranny for another. Why has this been so? May it not be because, 'clamorous in his demands for freedom for himself, man has never thought of giving freedom to tho child; and the result has been that generation after generation has grown up, and still grows up, hardened, narrowed and materialised by dogmatic pressure, dominated by false ideals, incapable of self-discipline, unworthy of freedom and unfit to enjoy it?' " _t PRIVATE HEROISM It is an everyday commonplace to say of a man that "he cannot be driven," writes a correspondent in the London Evening News. And that is probably true of most of us. But we can drive ourselves, and he who has not learned to drive himself, sometimes on the curb, sometimes to accept almost the limit of self-discipline, to choose the unpleasant when the easy and the pleasant are within his grasp, will certainly never reach the true goal of life. Some men find it easy to choose the good and to turn their backs on the evil. Other men can only choose the good rather than tho evil, with a great effort and with personal suffering. Theirs, it is safe to assume, will be the greater reward. Every man has his own special temptations, and it is in the conquest of temptation that the soul expands. But no man, whatever tho nature of his temptation, can conquer by his own strength. But with the insistent desire to conquer, • comes di'ine help. To live well men must be heroic. The great majority of us are tragically unheroic. We fear the good because it demands so much of us—more than the evil that is often attractive. Evil has to be paid for, but the payment may be postponed and is easily overlooked. AGITATOR'S OPPORTUNITY "After tho 1936 election Father Coughlin faded out," said Mr. Raymond Gram Swing in his weekly "American Commentary" to 11 the 8.8.C. from America. "His new political party, based on his League for Social Justice, had hardly caused a ripple on tho surface of the election returns; his friendly bishop in Detroit had died and been replaced by a man who quickly showed that ho had little liking for Father Coughlin's broadcasting tirades. Father Coughlin stopped giving his talks, 110 dissociated himself from his former organisation, nnd he seemed like a shadow in a dream. I remember, when I first went to Detroit to write about Father Coughlin, a manufacturer there explained him in this way: 'You don't have to worry about him; people are poor now—they have to stay home—they haven't any money to go to the movies or run their cars —so they listen to the radio, and, naturally, they listen to Father Coughlin. But just give them money enough to leave home, and that will be the end of Father Coughlin. Just mark my words.' I did mark them, and sure enough, when we had recovery. Father Coughlin ceased to exercise influence, and now that our recovery has gone, and peopJe haven't so much money for the movies and their cars, they stay at heme and seem to. bo listening to his strident rhetoric again." ANGLO-ITALIAN AGREEMENT A first big step toward European reconciliation was taken in Rome when the Anglo-Italian agreement was signed, asserts the London Observer. Emerging out of the blackness of recent mistrust and misunderstanding, that great achievement will bo of enormous consequence to the whole cause of peace and good will in Europe. Tho really cheerful aspect of tho matter is that neither Italian nor British opinion derives its main satisfaction from the actual material content of those documents.' The material gain is indeed great; but the sense of relief and gratification ran ahead of any knowledge of the details, The fact is that war springs from persistent Ijad feeling, not from tangiblo difficulties or problems. When problems aro conditioned by good feel*, ing, they disappear. During tho past two years what poisoned Italo-British relations and insinuated the sinister fear of war was not a firm or diagnosable issue in rival interests, but an emotional sense of resentment and moral indignation. By contrast the now recaptured sense of confidence, good will, and friendship—the traditional heritage of the two peoples—is correspondingly effective as the agent of peace. Nor is tho good confined to the two countries. Where nations are concerned there is no such thing as a localised, bilateral relationship, good or bad. In either direction tho relationship spreads. It is not an accident that the 'period of British estrangement from Italy coincided with a steadily worsening British relationship with Germany and Japan. The triumph achieved of reversing tho trend of Anglo-Italian feeling and making peace, not war, the goal, will have an immediate beneficent effect in tho like sense throughout the world.