Poverty Bay Herald PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING GISBORNE, THURSDAY, JAN. 4, 1934. A BOOM IN HISTORY

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18287, 4 January 1934, Page 4

Poverty Bay Herald PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING GISBORNE, THURSDAY, JAN. 4, 1934. A BOOM IN HISTORY

It was reported in recent mail ad vices from England that the film magnates have been giving their history books a look over and have discovered that in these there arc rich fields for exploitation. No less a sum than £1,000,000, it is stated, is actually being spent in digging up the past for the screen, and early in November fifteen films with historical setting were in course of production. The stars have turned their attention from the marble and glitter of Hollywood to the stately houses of England and the grim mediaeval castles and baronial halls of Europe. The theory that the public would not stand Ihe sword and dagger stuff and were bored with costume plays had been put to the test and disproved both on stage and screen. In the studios that lie along the north-western suburbs of London, writes one correspondent, you ran puss through sets which march down the centuries, and painstaking performers are steeping themselves in the atmosphere of the past. (Joining from English producers it may be safely assumed that the pictures, with allowance for dramatic presentation, will bear some semblance of historical accuracy, though Lord Raglan’s recent address before the British Association attempted to show that many of the heroes of the past were scarcely entitled to their halos of romance. “It's absolute rot," he saul, “to look back enviously on the good old days —we are living in them now. The so-called age of chivalry was a time of inhuman, cruelty and of flagrant immorality of which we should be thoroughly ashamed. Most of the ligurcs of history we have been brought up to admire were an immoral and unscrupulous set of rapscallions. That is, of course, judged by our present standards, and in fairness or.o should make it quite clear that in those days people looked at things differently. ” Be Lord Raglan right, or wrong, and even if many of the stories appertaining to the characters of the past are, as lie claims, pure fiction, it will do no harm for the people of the present generation to have their thoughts turned from the vapid trash of the jazz era to the historical past. If the films now in preparation capture something of the distant times and present us with c.on-

vincing stories of moil and women moved by motives not much unlike those which wo ourselves experience, a good purpose will have been served. There is too much tendency these days to disregard history. Frequently we hear it stated that the schools give greater attention to the records of the past than their importance justifies. It is refreshing to have a contrary opinion. The New York Times told its readers the other day that "what this country needs most is a good still' dose of knowledge of its own past, and of the past of all humanity.” The paper asserted that the education system of the United ..Stales had gone wrong in the direction of too much ignoring the human tradition. “\\n should be experiencing greater poise in difficult, times,” it, said, "if people were, aware that our perils and remedies were nol quite so new as they think. The American people would have dealt better with the depression if their education had enabled them to lie temperamentally aware there had been other nations and times than their own.” 'J lie assertion need not be confined to Americans. It is applicable to New Zealanders as well. Whilst we can all gain profit from the lessons of the past, it is well to remember that every generation is writing and carrying on history and that we in this present, day are living in what probably is the most extraordinary period in the history of the world. Our times, within the memory of men not yet of middle age, have been eventful and fateful beyond the record of any similar period in the experience of mankind. The magnitude of the events of the last twenty years will

employ some future Gibbon for quite a considerable time in his attempt to describe them. The history of the (treat War, with <ls million men under arms, would need much time and space, and then wliat a range of survey the historian would have to take to faithfully tell how that vast conflict had touched the lives and altered the destinies of a thousand million people. “ Perhaps," says a Canadian contemporary, “the entire history of the Middle Ages is not comparable for its dealing with succeeding ages with the single event of the Russian revolution. You can take the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, and the Napoleonic Wars, and the industrial revolution, and all the spiritual and the intellectual changes in mankind which were wrought by those two hundred years, and you can set them all alongside the mighty unlicavals of the last twenty years, and you can say that, probably they were not so much as these. The moral and the lesson of our presence in these great events ran not be dismissed in any gesture ot weariness or bewilderment. Weary we may he and bewildered surely we are, but there is an instinct; within us which answers to the challenge of those tremendous and universal events. Those times of ours, we feel beyond all argument, are witnessing profound aud incalculable stirrings of the human spirit. Wo have an irrevocable persuasion that our twenty years must be equal in promise for the future to the size and scope of their unparalleled achievement. As far as we can know, we people of the Twentieth Century have seen the greatest adventure of our species in all the ages of mankind, l! is worth while living in this time, even if only to see a little of what is to come."