AGE OF MEDIOCRITY

New Zealand Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 6042, 29 October 1906, Page 5

AGE OF MEDIOCRITY

Sir William B. Richmond, R.A., has declared that this is an ago of mediocrity. “I am forced ito the conclusion,” ho says in “Great Thoughts,” “that people do not want the higher' efforts of thought or imagination in my department of life.” It was not always thus: —“Take Homer, for example. I aek, Would Homer's poetry have lasted from nine centuries before Christ, and have exercised such an enormous influence on the human mind if it had not. represented the very best ? Or would Dante, or Shakespeare, or Milton, or some five or six other people that one could mention, have become immortal if they had not striven to reach the high-water mark of excellence? Tho fact of their immortality proves that they-dealt with subjects which were not merely fashionable or passing, but which were everlastingly true ? That things used to go more slowly we know,” added Sir AV. B. Richmond. “It took some SOO years for the Norman stylo of architecture to fade out into the Perpendicular. But now things change in a week. There is no stability nowadays.” The present condition of things Sir William attributes to the fact that we have grown so materialistic that we aro only kble to describe some passing phase of the moment. Everything we produce is ephemeral:—“No doubt we moderns are • philanthropic. . There never was an age in which so much was given away. But everything seems to be regarded from a materialistic standpoint.

. . . This; is ■ not a sensual age ;• it is a weak age. If anything, I should say the ago is not sensual enough. It is not au age of strenuous fight, in which great crimen go along with groat virtues like the times, say, of Fra Angelico, when, the streets of Florence ran blood. But it is an age of mediocrity. The ;worst forms of crime, committed nowadays ’ are produced by tho love of wealth, by the endeavour to- become rich at all costs. It is a pushing age. People thrust one another aside. Everything is done for the immediate advantage of the ego. Only tho concerns of the moment are thought of. and therefore this is hound to be an ago of mediocrity.” ' : ■ ' ; . ' <r Do you think we are never going to have great again Sir W. B. Richmond was asked by an interviewer: “Things may get worse, and then X think thev will get better. I think, as I said in iny letter to the Press the other day, that there is a natural lull in the procession of great men. Nature qons .tejjv 'jjasroq imdsu 0} orail a vigorous epoch as wo have had; after a century which has produced such men as Macaulay, Hallam, Mill Gladstone, Disraeli, Wagner, Brahms, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson,' Browning, Turner Watts, Alillais, Rossetti, Leighton, and Burne-Jones', wo are suffering from exhaustion. We'are just lying fallow, and something will some day arouse us from our state of torpor.” What, that will he Sir AV. B'. Richmond could: not say. “Anything big that will touch the sense of the- nation. Only some magical touch something affecting everybody, can recall us from an ago of materialism to an ago of idealism.”