NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23358, 29 May 1939, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

NATIONAL DEGENERATION "England needs a real national system of education, a system which would dedicate tho national intellect to tho solution of social problems forced upon us by years of disorderly, unco-ordinated and often undisciplined effort," asserted Mr. W. Barford, in his presidential address at tho annual conference of tho English National Association of Schoolmasters. Even Oxford, Cambridge arid the universities offered little concreto contribution to tho problem of disciplined social evolution, lie added. Rootlessness and a falling birth-rate had always preceded the downfall of an empire. They wore in danger of becoming prisoners of a freedom which had been their boast and pride. "Tho enemy is not across the water, but in the degeneration of ourselves," Mr. Barford concluded. "We can build the superstructure of the Commonwealth by laying the foundations in tho minds of the 5,000.000 children in tho primary schools." NEGRO AT WHITE HOUSE ' «» Listeners to Mr. Raymond Gram Swing's recent broadcast from tho United States heard Mr. Swing describe pointedly how Marian Anderson, the well-known coloured soprano, was, on account of her negro blood, refused by tho Daughters of tho American Revolution permission to sing in their Constitution Hall (one of the finest buildings in Washington, where the sittings of tho Naval Conference in l'J2l and 1922 were held). As Mr. Swing mentioned, one of tho first reactions was an offer by Mr. Harold Ickes, the United States Secretary of the Interior, to allow Miss Anderson to sing from tho portico of tho Lincoln Memorial —an unprecedented honour. She sang there on Sunday. Now Mrs. Roosevelt, who had already resigned her membership of tho Daughters of tho American Revolution as a protest, has invited Miss Anderson to sing beforo the King and Queen when they visit Washington. It seems, comments "Janus" in the Spectator, a decisive gesture, in worthy succession to the action of President Theodore Roosevelt in inviting Dr. Booker Washington, the negro leader, to tho White House.

RECOVERING THE INITIATIVE I hope and believe that the time has at length come for the Western Powers to recover their initiative, writes Mr. J. A. Spender, in the Yorkshire Observer. Uritain is evidently on much stronger ground than last September. In the subsequent seven months France lias had a remarkable recovery and British defensive armaments have greatly advanced. Hitler's attack on a non-German people lias roused the surrounding nations, especially Poland and Rumania, to a sense of their danger and opened np strategic possibilities which were not then in sight. Not least, Mr. Chamberlain's patience in pursuing a policy of peace, though it has exposed him to the charge of being a dupo and a simpleton, has had a remarkable effect in Europe, and has convinced immonse numbers —even in Germany and Italy—that if war comes it will not be his fault or the fault of Great Britain. Finally, if war had come last September, it would have been possible for Herr Hitler to represent it as an attempt by the Western nations to prevent 3,000,000 Germans from rejoining their Fatherland, whereas if it came now it would obviously "be the result of his aggression upon nonGerinans.

ENVIRONMENT AND HEREDITY We find everywhere that human communities are giving expression to their resolve to remove by their own efforts the disabilities that now disfigure the world, writes Professor F. A. E. Crew, an expert on animal genetics, in the Listener. On all sides you can hear the loud insistent cry for human and social betterment, and it is to this end that the sciences have been harnessed. A good many people hold the view—and with much reason —that if we were to provide a better environment, better housing, a better diet, better education, a better' faith, our successors would necessarily be better men; and no geneticist would seriously dispute this contention. But the geneticist holds the view that mankind is not essentially different from his own experimental mice and flies, his flowers and crops, in these matters, and lie has to express the firm opinion that the limit to improvement of any animal or plant stock through the manipulation of the environment alone is reached pretty quickly, and that you can only get a lasting betterment through improvements in the inborn qualities of the animals and plants themselves.

ARTISTS OF THREE KINDS Artists to-day may roughly be divided into three categories, writes Mr. Jan Gordon, the English art critic. The first pursues what might be called tho "heart" of tho Art, the second tho ",art" of tho Art, and tho third tho Art of tho heart. Tho first first includes tho inventivo and research artists —constructionists, expressionists, surrealists, and others — who are still exploring and extending the limits of painting and are educating tho spectator's response to novel and unusual forms of expression. With justice wo claim that theso aro really pursuing tho "hoaH" of tho Art. Tho second group is by far tho largest. It includes tho whole body of excellent painters who do first-class, straightforward work. Its ambitions aro to interpret Nature as sincerely and as brilliantly as gifts and personal idiosyncrasies will allow. They present tho ordinary, heightened partly by natural talent and partly, sometimes largely, by tho use of ideas or traditions borrowed or inherited from other painters. The third group is in some ways a sublimation of tho second; indeed, at their bost moments, regular members of tho second group may rise into the third for a picture or two. Yet oven a regular artist of tho third group may fail to bring off tho miracle. This consists in using 110 Extraordinary experiments, and yet infusing into a recognisable imago of reality some almost subconscious elements of an extraordinary naturo without straining tho appearance of simplo realism. The infusion of the, ordinary with tho subtly extraordinary has tho effect of heightening our powers of perception and of thus extending our vision.