THINGS AND THOUGHTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2672, 31 May 1905, Page 77

THINGS AND THOUGHTS.

By J. Christie.

I— Brown and Robinson ; also Smith and Jones. — *'Brown," said Robinson, "I think we owe you an- apology. Here you have been coming and going amongst us for all these years, and yet it is only to-day, so tj speak, that we find you are a man ot genius. All this time we have never given you a look or a word of appropriate tecognition, while we have been lauding Smith and Jones to the skies all the time, though they are merely clever — merely men with marketable talents, and in another generation they and their work will be as much forgotten as last year's mushrooms."

"Like tt, like, and from like to like, dear bey,' was Brown's reply. "But how does the tide run in this case? Have you changed sufficiently to care for my efforts, such as they are ; or are these, after all, only such as might be expected to attract, sooner or later, the sympathetic attention of the loyal worshippers of Smith and Jones? I ask for light on these points ; for though lam willing to regard what you say as creditable to your heart, yet, you know, praise like that of you and your friends is, prima facie, calculated fcj unsettle a man's conceit, if he happens to have any in respect to his mental endowment or achievement. Those who bave for many years regarded Smith and Jones as geniuses must, I fear, be held still liable to error; as being, indeed, not the best of witnesses or judges. The judge is judged by his judgments." "I suppose you think you are a hard hitter," observed Robinson.

"I certainly am not soft enough to care much for the praise of the whilom worshippers of Smith and Jones." "Perhaps they are geniuses, after all." '^Perhaps their appreciators are wise and learned men, and highly capable critics — judging thetn by the jadgments of their kind in past ages, apart from, their own discriminating hero-worship. These be thy gods, O Israel." "I hate poetry and everything that smacks of what some fools of fellows call literature:"

"Then stick to the swill-troughs of Smith and Jones ; they are flowing to the brim. TTncover, dogs, and lap.'"

"Sir, you are a beast ; you are a beast, sir!"

"Thrice blessed words from lips like thine ! Pray, repeat them ; not that 1 may cleave thee to the nape, but thank thee from the bottom of my heart. Like from like. I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word. Happy the man who is execrated by the lips that call Smith and Jones blessed! Peradventure when he falleth into his last sleep he shall awake ta find- that he was a genius, though no such, thought occurred to the good folks of his own day. Go thy ways, Robinson — none but thyself can be thy parallel. Thou art indeed very mortal, and, by-and-bve, shalt be as non-existent as thjie own understanding is now. and as divinity is in thine idols. Needless it were to ask any god to have mercy on thy soul, for soul thou hast none : but, instead thereof, a great and abounding emptiness, which yet is full of inane noise and foolish phantasmagoria — like the eenius of Smith i»nd Tones. Were it possible to persuade thee to turn from thy literary slush to literature, thou mightest yet acquire a soul, and be saved from thyself and thine idols, and thine idols, too. from thy damnin? idolatry. But enough, and more than enough, in view of thy woeful lack of sense and abundant self-sufficiency ; and likewise,

For words divide and rend, But silence is most no"ble till tne end."

Yet, even as he finished speaking, Brown wished he had not spoken ; but bad contented himself with civilly smiling ac- poor Robinson's compliment, and then gone on his way, rejoicing neither more nor less than aforetime. But even geniuses — supposing Brown to have been a genius — apparently find it easier to be wise after the event than before it.

— Hooked and, Caught.—

A young man and a young woman went fishing together one afternoon amongst acme shelving rocks at the seaside. They set their rods, threw their lines, and played them with exemplary patience for a long while ; but neither of the two caught any fish. Yet both appeared to be very happy when they returned home together in the evening. As a matter of fact, she, whilst playing her rod, had hooked her companion by the collar of his coat ; and he, whilst endeavouring to suve ber from slipping into a small rocky pool, had caught her in his arms. No wellbred person would suggest that that was what they had gone out for ; and yet things happen with a provoking suggestiveness — sometimes. At anyrate, the human comedy is surely a pleasant thing, even ia its minor incidents.

— Social Dregs. —

There are social dregs of both sexes, but the most pitiful are those that belong to womankind. The absence of the right kind of social feeling and the right kind of legislation is responsible for a great deal of the degradation that exists in this connection. It enables scoundrels to rain innocent and ignorant girls with in punity, and to leave their victims to the contumely of society and to their own sdlftorture. Indeed, though the girls inevitably suffer, the scoundrels themselves remain practically untouched by the law, unpunished, unbanished by society ; while How and then they may even become lawmakers for countries whose people as a whol« believe in the verity of the old saying that "it is righteousness which exalteth a nation.'' Can nothing be done to reform this state of things, or are men not really in earnest about such matters': Women certainly should be ; and they Would be, if they bad the welfare of their

sex thoroughly at heart. Some of them appear to be callously selfish, others unnecessarily timid or falsely delicate in such matters. They should cultivate the vigorous spirit manifested by Byron's Eve when she denounces Cain for the murder ot Abel; May the eternal serpent's curse be on him. May all his days be desolate; may his dreams Be of his hapfesa victim; may the woods Deny him shelter, earth a home, the dust A grave, the sun his light, and heaven her God. If an adequate proportion of this vehement vengeance were socially and legislatively meted out to the miscreants to whose evil passions maiden innocence falls a prey, one prolific cause of social dreggage would be modified, if not quite removed, and many a poor girl, instead of. becoming a waif, a wreck, a pest, would in all probauiixcy become an honourable wife and a happy mother.

— A Touch of Kinship. —

Some persons, not without mental power or originality, are given to thinking aloud, even m the presence of very young or stupid people, and are astonished and annoyed if they are misunderstood by them. They forget that, though their own minds are accustomed to the process, it is quite a foreign matter to their listeners ; with ■whom, after ail, they thus show themselves to have something mentally in common. If they had not, would they think aloud within the hearing of the. young or the stupid, or expect to be understood by them?

— Reasonable Restraints. —

Law and civilisation hinder men from harming each other; but do we go far erough in hindering them from harming themselves. For example, can it be to the interest of society or to that of any individual section of society to prevent men or women from following courses which are indisputably foolish, or wasteful, or vicious, or mad? In such cases should the State, in the name of society at large, not step in and say, "Thus far, but no further"? Or is it better to leave tilings as they are, with the result that human wrecks are abundant, progress is retarded, and society itself is drained and burdened in many ways? Take, for example, the case of a man who jnherits a fortune, and thereupon begins to lead a desperately dissipated life>. Is it right or reasonable that the freedom of the individual should be aTowed to run into such destructive and ruinous excesses? Any man who behaves in this vray is certain to make himself bankrupt in health and fortune; the wretched people who get his money seldom, if ever, turn it- to any good account ; indeed, the probability is that it simply enables them to become more powerful as evildoers, from whose ongoings society is a heavy sufferer. Then there are other contingencies. There is a strong probability that men like the one here implied will* in due course become paupers, and will have to be supported at the expense o* quiet-living ratepayers, who have enough to do to maintain their own families. Sure'y there is something very much out of joint in this, and surely it would say n-.ore for o\vs civilisation if there were a law which would enable the Statp in all such cases to step in and say, "Well, you ara going headlong to destruction. Come, you must give up this abominable nonsense." And having said this, the State, by process of law, should thereupon become trustee in the man's affairs, and should tt-arch him oJf to some asylum designed •especially for madmen of his stamp. At the very least, if the State did not go so far as this at the outset, it should at once, in the case of every person who was obviously wasting his means in dissipation, pimex a proportion of his property, and thenceforward apply it in such a way as would prevent the waster and those legally dep«ndent upon him from becoming paupers, maintained at the country's •expense. It; should not be so very difficult to frame a law for this purpose ; and no one, surely, v.ould hold that it amounted to an unnecessary or unwarrantable interference vrith' the freedom of the individual. Those vho did would say in effect that a man has a right to destroy his efficiency as a citizen, and to make himself a burden to his country. — The Unknown God —

Man is eternal, but the gods are only for a season ; "they com© and go, according to the mental mood or spiritual insight of their maker — man. They are types of what men tibink God should be, or of what they would like Him to be; but the real God, the Infinite Spirit of Eternity, is necessarily for eyer beyond the comprehension of the finite human mind. It is true that men have, with pathetic ingeniousness, frequently represented God as revealing Himself to man ; but the revelation can never have bt-en adequate, or otherwise than provisional, for the sufficient reason that it mu6t have been, of necessity, circumscribed by the limitations of man's understanding and spiritual nature. Study might show that this very fact has had much to do with the acceptance and continuance of some religions : for men like certitude : it accords with their constitutional egotism to dogmatise about the unknowable, and to find satisfaction in their own assumptions and assertions concerning it. Hence, the reverent Greek agnostic, with his altar to the utoknown God, may have reached a far liigh-er spiritual plane than the dogmatic Hebrew with lus pragmatic affirmations about the God of Israel. Surely the man who believes in God without presuming to know Him shows much more reverence and intellectual insight than he who grates familiarly about the eternal enigma, its nature and purposes. Still, of the two conceptions, the narrower is likely for a time — perhaps for hundreds of generations — to be the more generally accepted ; yet the larger and non-dogmatic view will, nevertheless, be found indispensable to human progress ; to^ which it will contribute, and witfi which It will increase in effectiveness a3 a reverent expression of tho infinite au a reverent expression of the finite spirit of the universe.