Great Priest Sees Hope in Workers

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 419, 30 July 1928, Page 13

Great Priest Sees Hope in Workers

Britain's Intellectuals Held to Have Failed

PRESENT-DAY WRITERS ARRAIGNED

In spite of a nastily bruised face, and a heavy swathe of bandages about his head, Father Cyril Martindale, who was injured a week Cambridge, can still smile, and unloose an entertaining and intellectually refreshing flow of talk. He dees not, however, go far down the conversational way before he mentions his affection for miners, and his faith in the intellectual potentialities of the working-class.

Father Martindale', one of the great men in the Roman Catholic Church in England, is an eminent classical scholar, and author of over 60 books on varied subjects.

Although he has seen little of Auckland, he told an interviewer to-day that what he could see from his bedroom window —the creamy walls, deep red roofs, and dark evergreens—reminded him of the loveliest towns of Lombardy.

Speaking on the question of emigration, he said people would say the English emigrated because they could notget jobs at home. In considering unemployment in England, it was not so necessary to take into account the men who would not work at all. as the men who would not work outside the towns.

“This is usually under-emphasised,” said Father Martindale. “Despite everything that can be said against agricultural work in England, there exist a great number of jobs on the land that men will not take. Hence England •is over-populated in patches only.”

He went on to say that he would like to see vigorously developed a homesystem for giving a preliminary training to emigrants. This would improve the value of migrants, particularly the girls. LITERATURE TO-DAY Father Martindale is a stern critic of contemporary drama and fiction, and feels that the great things in these realms will happen elsewhere than among the highly-educated. “I would a thousand per cent, sooner speak to miners than to a West End audience,” he said. “I have found that the most intelligent, attentive audiences, who argue with a wish to get somewhere, are working men—especially miners.” Speaking of modern literary tendencies, he said he thought the after-war confusion would welcome solid, constructive work, but education had made it less and less possible for this to be available, and in consequence, people inclined to put up with anything, usually, therefore, with the easier-going version of any art. OXFORD CONDEMNED “I mean,” he said, “that the most elaborate education (I won’t say the best, though it ought to be), such as is got at Oxford, has long been analytical and critical rather than constructive.” “This produces a brood which can say clever things about almost anything, usually tb its disparagement. “Anatole France is an example,” he said. “He charmingly puts this view and then that before you, then bayonets the lot. Royalism, republicanism, art, the soul, materialism, and religion: he gracefully dispatches each just when he has persuaded you that no one could speak so gracefully of them without believing in them.” Father Martindale contended that there were hardly any English writers of great intelligence apart from Chesterton and Belloc. They stated thought .clearly, and pursued it. “H. G. Wells,” he said, “falls in love with a thought, worries it as a cat would a mouse, gets bored with it, and then leaves it gasping on his suburban villa-flat gatepost.”

Galsworthy, he says, has more of the grand manner and works on a larger scale, but he too displays the problem, pulls it apart and leaves the shreds.

“Dean Inge and Arnold Bennett,” he said, “have each great though different possibilities, but each has succumbed to journalism as the easier and more remunerative course. Bennett is a joy none the less, but the Dean is too shrewish, and appears so cordially to dislike everyone. He has now become tiresome, and people have lost syrhpathy with him.”

The man who stands out, in Father Martindale’s opinion, is Maurice Baring, who has largeness, minuteness, accuracy of vision, economical craftsmanship and versatility. Among the modern poets he observes no greatness, and says that Faith, Hope and Charity have been replaced by surmise, detachment and sensitiveness. Speaking of the stage, he said the rush of sex plays had rather annoyed people. No one got an ounce of philosophy from “Fanatics” or “Young Woodley,” and the crook drama has a run because it was so easy. “People won’t take trouble,” he said. “Who takes the trouble that Ellen Terry did, or even Marie Tempest ? “The best of them, T expect,” he added, is Sybil Thorndike, and she thrives most at the Old Vic. The best acting of all is at the Yiddish Empire, down Whitechapel way, where the audiences are critical.”