THE TWO PARIAHS OF THE WORLD.

Otago Witness, Issue 3383, 15 January 1919, Page 53

THE TWO PARIAHS OF THE WORLD.

By Jessie Mackay.

From the Hindoo we have stolen back an expressive word Into the Aryan speech. of the West. Though "pariah" with us does not convey the idea of priestly boycott, the word covers a world of gad meaning in Occidental thought and institution. It speaks of our self-willed black sheep who will not endure the bounds of the social fold. It also sj>eaks of the declassed myriads, the flotsam and Jetsam of our imperfect civilisation under which the laden proletariat has struggled on or gone under. Our modern Venice of industrialism has indeed been built in a sea of misery. The Hindoo pointedly denied the pariah a share in heaven; the Western practically denied him a share in earth.

Yet we have advisedly turned the word more to describe moral isolation rather than general disability of birth or class. We did not borrow speech from India when mediaeval superstition set aside "cursed races," like the Cagots of France as excommunicate. More and more, as outlook broadened and opportunity widened, the pariah mark has disappeared. But in the accepted Western sense of a voluntary or at least self-inflicted reparation from the soul of race and country, there still remain two pariah classes in the communion of modern civilisation, two classes, of which one would indignantly its pariahship, and the other as strongly insist on Its emancipation from every national bond. The two pariahs of to-day are the person of fashion and the untra-Socialist, the extremes of our present civic dispensation. It is nonsense to fix the cosmopolitan label of "fashion" on the so-called "upper classes." Any intimate light on the British peerage, for example, reveals down-at-heel barons and dowdy countesses, though the only Socialist Duchess, hor Grace of Warwick, was and is preeminently well-preened and fair 'to look upon. It is charged against Queen Mary by certain ephemeral critics that she was always more concerned to know her gown was British-woven than that it was le dernier cri in cut. The world of fashion likes a lord, but has its own nobility, its own hierarchy, its own monarchy. It does not ask for Beau Brummel's pedigree or Betty Gunning's proficiency certificate; it only asks that each makes a function of tying a cravat or adjusting a curl. Here in the colonies, far from the high fanes of fashion, it is more or less of a slip-shop ritual that the Just-so-Goddess must put up with. But all over the civilised world the snirit of the Smart Set is the same. There is a freemasonry among its members, the freemasonry of the jelly-fishes. The cult is known by its lack of .resistance, its worship, not of altruism the positive, but of other-ness the negative. It must dress just so, talk just so, and think, if think it ever must, 'just so. The standard is always set somewhere else—in London, in New York, in Paris, in Melbourne. "Everything and everybody seems anothers!" sighed Augustus Moddle, and in a less romantic sense the sentiment is blatantly true of Fashion's thralls, whose one religion is to conform to the varying standard of the hour in small things. Large things touch them not at all. Now,.-where in this apotheosis of la Mode is there room for racial affinity or national pride? Where, even, is there room for common loyalty in the fashionable microcasm, save in the catchable fever of flag-waving, or *he knotting of red-white-and-blue into favours? How the honest travelled colonial has smiled wryly to hear My Lady Jellyfish in London lisping ridicule on the strong young land that gave the ingrate birth! The world of art is cosmopolitan in scope, but essentially national in sentiment. The world of fashion is internationally standardised in trifles, amorphous in the Eternal Verities. In cycles of international disturbance the world of art fires, directs, and finally reconciles; the world of fashion forges no bonds that a zephyr of superficial change will not blow away next moment.

The Socialist who has cut loose from every environment but the lamp post, and •who longs to plant the dagger of Liberty, Freedom, and Equality In the breast of every fellow- countryman who owns ' ten acres of land or has acquired a liberal education, is the second pariah of the world. He lives in a diving-bell; the air he breathes comes from far unacknowledged sources; the element about him is as foreign to him as the Sahara would be to a frogj he talks in a circle, taking the unproved for granted, and the unprovable for common knowledge. His human charity, it would appear, covers the sins of every country before his own. He has cast overboard every relic of religion, and yearns to bestow neither gospel sermons nor pocket handkerchiefs on the heathen; but, having no sense of humour, he cannot see that the full-blown constitution he does yearn to bestow on the potential electors of the new Borioboola Oha would be even less useful to them than pocket handkerchiefs. He has the glass splinter of Northern legend in his eye, distorting even things shapely and graceful Into" crookedness. He is absolutely convinced that humanity has been cut off into lengths like timber, and the only drawback to setting them all going in a marionettes' paradise is the fact "that some have been, galvanised into inevitable wickedness by possessing something. Here, again, he fails through lack of humour to see his own literal reading of Benjamin Franklin's flight of genuine Socialist wit : "In the morning Smith had an ass, and consequently had a vote: In the evening the ass died, and Smith had no vote. Was }t the asa, then, that owned the vote, not Smith?" Our ultra-Soialist would seriously have to turn the matter over thus : "In the morning Smith owned as ass, and consequently was a bad man.

In the evening the ass died, and Smith became a good man. Was it not the ass who should have gone to prison," then, not Smith?"

But you cannot impale your potential Bolshevik on the horns of a dilemma like* this, because hi* logic belongs to the classes which feel the loyalties, the enthusiasms, the give-and-take element in humanity, nationally speaking. It does not belong to the citizen of no country. It is only by loving the country we have seen that we widen to love the country we have not seen. The two inevitable pariahs of to-day are the two types which deny the national bond. The war has made patriots out of burglars and heroes out of rag-pickers. But it has not. given a humarj ,soul to either of these de-nationalised beings of whom I speak. They are the two eternal bandaged players of blind man's buff, always failing to catch the whirling realities round them, and always Jeered by the ring.