ECCENTRICS AND CRANKS.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 16116, 3 May 1923, Page 8

ECCENTRICS AND CRANKS.

The eccentric (says Mr. J. B. Priestley in "The Challenge") was usually an old gentleman who went his own way and only asked to be left alone; the crank is 'commonly a youngish person, who demands that everybody should go one way, that is, the crank's way, and will not leave anybody alone. Tho eccentric merely discovered, a mode of life that suited him; the crank has found a way for everybody; he possesses a panacea and is aggressive, militant, proselytising. The mark of the crank is his unshakable belief that his own particular crotchet Will save tho world. If wo laugh at him, it is not merely because bo is a faddist, and, like Don Odriano de Armado in the play, "too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, top peregrinate," but,because he displays a ludicrous of .any sense of proportion, and so tickles' tho comic spirit, which is very delicate in its appreciation of values, its sense of balance and proportion. There is nothialg peculiarly laughable about .persons who want to save the world; prophets, and reformers on the grand scale may inspire either hatred or admiration and love, but they do not awaken ; our kiughter and contempt because their, means are at least more or loss commensurate with the end they would achieve. The crank, however, who believes that humanity has but to take some curious littlo step to arrivo at perfection, who would brink back the Golden Ago with one wavo of Ins diminutive wand, is simply a. littlo reformer with the air and mannor of a great reformer, a prophet.