The New Zealand Times. SATURDAY, JULY 24, 1926. “THE DANCE OVER FIRE AND WATER”

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12507, 24 July 1926, Page 4

The New Zealand Times. SATURDAY, JULY 24, 1926. “THE DANCE OVER FIRE AND WATER”

A book with the above title, jusf published in Paris, is a bombshell falling among the peacemakers of the day. It is a fervid praise of war, written iti passionately aggressive style, sustained by magniloquent writing. Publication, when the most thoughtful minds are striving to establish a reasonable basis of peace, makes one wonder if the author ought to be in a mental hospital. His book is certainly a cascade of howling absurdities. For example, without wars and revolutions, civilisation must lose its “style” ; and there will be no Art. For the sake of Art we must have wars arid revolutions. What Art is we are not told definitely. We read that “its birth marks a blinding flash of consciousness in human history.” Also we are informed that “a poem enters the world by a leap from the head of thfe Artjsj.” There is much more of this sort, the end of which is that as the world must have Art it must have wars and revolutions, becausfe Artists who love order and harmony can only be inspired by violehce, Upheaval, discord, and chaos. It might as well be said that no man can be a saint until all other men break the Ten Commandments; that no man can be manly until murder sets in around him; that honesty can only flourish in the midst of burglaries; that, in short, crime and vice are the great fertilisers of the human spirit. As there can be no joy without suffering, says this lunatic, so there can be no Art without wars and revolutions?

As this absurdity comes from Paris, one must resist the temptation it offers to link it with certain points of French post-war policy. In pointing out that this “camouflaged” bloodthirstiness pervAdrid a certain section of German literature before the Great War, we bring this subject on to familiar ground. That writing created, or, at all events, directed a great public opinion which acclaimed War with loud “Hochs,” followed by willing marchings to the front, namely, towards the rainbow, on which certain prophets wrote “For the superman.” It is, therefore, not pleasant to see this kind of thing raising its head in Paris to-day. The less so as the rubbish is respected, ori account of its aggressive megalomania, as a thing worthy of serious discussion. The world has had the most awful war of its record. The Bolsheviks have executed a million and a half victims in the name of Revolution. If anyone upholds war and revolutions, he ought to be executed. But confinement in a mental hospital, in company with his publisher, would meet this case well enough.