ON SUPERIOR PEOPLE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 59, Issue 4220, 6 December 1939, Page 3

ON SUPERIOR PEOPLE

The word “superior” gives us a fine illustration of a fact known to all students of language; the fact that words, like eggs, tend to go bad. There are hundreds of examples in our own language. Perhaps the most famous is “villain;” it is not easy to explain how a word meaning a peasant occupier of land became in the course of centuries to mean a scoundrel.

Generally speaking, this word-de-generation has been due to the kindliness of the ordinary human being. For instance, people were too kindhearted, too considerate, to call an idiot an idiot—they preferred to call him “happy,” and the word for happy at that time, was “silly.” Later, since the only happy people on this queer planet of ours are the ignorant, it came to mean “simple, unsophisticated”; and later still, from being used as a polite description of a fool, it acquired its present meaning.

Take, again, the word “enormity,” which originally meant simply any departure from the normal; a specially saintly character could be described as an enormity. But gradually, since the kind of abnormality that most often meets the eye, is abnormal wickedness, the word got its present moral significance. I could bore you with a long list of such words—words now disreputable, once thoroughly respectable, words that have seen better days. That very word,. “respectable,” is a notorious example. It once meant just what it appeared to mean, “worthy of respect,” but who, to-day, would not feel insulted if you called him respectable? Respectability has become almost a vice. At its best, the word has a flavour of contempt—as when you call a man a respectable billiard-player. Once it was pleasant to be called “good-hearted,” but nowadays the word is practically the same as “weak-headed.” It was once a compliment to be called “well-meaning”; today that is a term you never apply to a man except when he is not there. “Superior” has endured a like deterioration. Once, but it was long ago, when you called a man a superior person, you meant what you said; you meant that he was a better man, morally or intellectually, or both, than the common run of men.

But now you mean something quite different; when you call a man superior, you allude, not to his possession of certain qualities, but to his consciousness of possessing them; or, more frequently, to his too conspicuous belief—possibly ill-founded, that he possesses those qualities. When you say, “For Heaven’s sake, don’t be so superior,” you mean, “Don’t give yourself sueh airs.” The superior person looks down his nose at the weaknesses and follies of us common mortals; his habitual expression is the sniff. “Superior” has come by the process I have spoken of, to mean “insufferable.” But the superior person is not literally insufferable; you can suffer him all right, provided you have a good temper’ and a sense of humour.

A friend of mine who gives admirable addresses, marred by a shade of superiority, was once described to me as “the Almighty talking to a black beetle.”

How well we know that feeling of being black beetles, or pupils in an idiot school, being lectured to from an enormous height. When I am reading one of our younger literary critics I pass through three stages, in the first I am conscious of being a miserable worm. Since worms turn, the second stage is of exasperation. In the third stage, a sense of humour comes to my rescue, and I see the superior person as a bit of a joke. I like lan Maclaren’s quotation from the prayer of a Scottish minister, “and we pray thee, O Lord, to succour our friends wrecked on the Falkland Islands, which, as thou knowest, are in the South Atlantic Ocean.” To carry your superiority to such lengths as to give the Deity a lesson in elementary geography was perhaps possible only in Scotland, a country which produced that other' preacher, who, in the course of a sermon, began a sentence with the words, “The Lord said (and rightly said) . . .” Superiority is a disease very prevalent among two classes of men, clergymen and judges. This is no doubt due to the fact that in the pulpit, and on the bench, you can say what you please, and nobody contradicts you. It is very dangerous to be in a position where you are not contradicted. Cases of the malady have also been known among university professors. The superior person becomes, in the sphere of morals and religion, the self-righteous person. On the whole, and after due consideration, I conclude that self-righteousness is the very deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins; the most detestable of vices, because it spoils whatever virtue you may possess; a weed that poisons every flower in the garden. Also because it is the one incurable vice. You can never argue a man out of it, because your arguments are, to him, merely signs of your perversity. You can never laugh him out of it, because your ridicule glances off his impenetrable armour. A glimpse of himself as he really is might help, but he never sees himself in the cold light of day; this vice blurs all mirrors. The Englishman has always had

the Scots to laugh at; and the Scot has found the English more or less of a joke; and both have made fun of the Irish, and the Irish have made fun of both; a very happy arrangement, each race with ' two candid critics beside it to tell it just where it fell short of the sublime. I rather think this has been one of the luckiest chances in our history. Because of it, we of the British breed are humorously self-critical; we can scoff at ourselves as the Germans cannot do; they would be a happier race if they could. But I must beware of such comparisons! because to acquit ourselves of self-righteousness would be a lamentable exhibition of that very vice; and the whole purpose of this article—the point of it—is to suggest that we should strive against that weakness for self-glori-fication. which has helped to make Germany so exasperating to her despised neighbours. But, after all, it is with ourselves, as individuals, that we must begin. It is ourselves that we have to warn against the danger of becoming superior persons. We have to learn to recognise that persons whose tastes .are not ours—even people who like listening to the crooner —are, after all, our fellow-creatures, possibly our betters, both in intelligence and in character. The weakness of much of our literature to-day is that it is written for the few, by persons who despise the many; whereas the really great literature has been written by men of a large and liberal humanity, men like Shakespeare and Fielding and Dickens, men who saw no steep inequality between themselves and the common man; finding beauty and

splendour in obscure and unregarded corners, and recognising that a star may be reflected as brightly from a puddle in a back street as from the stretch of water aptly named Lake Superior.