W.E.A.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXV, Issue 18913, 26 June 1931, Page 3

W.E.A.

LITERATURE CLASS. On Monday night, to a good attendance of the W.E.A. Literature Class, Mr W. J. Scott, M.A., dealt v/ith “Anton Chekhov,” the Russian dramatist who is most widely known to the outside world. The lecturer stated that Chekhov, though not of the same calibre as a fiction writer, as the three giants— Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy—had nevertheless won considerable fame as a writer of short stories and short novels (he wrote no long novels). Russian literature had exercised a great influence over English, and no doubt our Katherine Mansfield’s tales owed much to Chekhc?v’s work, having the same delicate, gently morbid, almost despairing touch, and the same lack of virile movement. Born in 1860 at Taganrog, the son of a serf, Chekhov won an independence for himself, and was able to give his family a good education. Graduating at Moscow as a doctor of medicine, he practised the same for a short period; then turned to literature. “The tales he wrote run into thirteen volumes,” said Mr Scott, “and he dealt therein with the intelligentsia.” Two of the best of these short stories were “The Lady with a Dog,” and “The Thieves.” The important full length plays he wrote were, “Ivanov,” “Uncle Vanya,” “The Sea Gull,” ’’The Three Sisters,” and “The Cherry Orchard.” There were also a few short pieces, mostly of a farcical nature, which are still favourites with the Russian masses. His two great plays, “The Cherry Orchard” and “The Three Sisters” (extracts from which were read by the tutor ) were imperishable pictures of the pre-war writers, school teachers, Government servants, officers and old retainers, all convincingly alive and real; all important and fully drawn, and not like English plays in which interest usually revolved round a central figure. The unforgettable pictures of futile, aimless haphazard lives, miserably bored, and dimly aware of decadence and an approaching Nemesis, were foreign to British nature. In the “Cherry Orchard,” the plot was a fine one, but there was not progress; it was a creation of an atmosphere of great .skill, the work of a master. In the “Three Sisters. n their lives flow in three different channels of disillusionment. and frustration. “We have no happiness and never have —we merely long for it,” says one sister, and this expressed the atmosphere of the play. The feeling of misery was conveyed in Act 3, with terrible poignancy. Tragedy was not catastrophic death, but futile and ineffective living. The lecturer went on to say that

“these plays have appealed to the present Russian regime, because they showed the despair of the social order of their time, and that that order longed and appealed for a better one.” Galsworthy and the late Arnold Bennett had expressed great admiration for Russian literature—such as that of Chekhov, who, as a dramatist was a realist, and had imperishably embalmed this now non-existent section of Russian society, said Mr Scott in conclusion.

A good discussion on temperaments, people and plays of the Russians, compared with English, brought forth much interesting information. Next week, it was announced by the tutor, Masefield’s “The Tragedy of Nan,” would be read and studied.

PSYCHOLOGIST IN PRISON. Although the bad weather on Tuesday night reduced considerably the attendance at the W.AE.A. Psychology Class, the Rev. P. Gladstone Hughes continued his lecture on the application of psychology to crime and the treatment of criminals. Mr Hughes said that a knowledge of motive was essential in explaining and estimating conduct. Commonsense assigned emotion as the motive. Professor Hadfield, however, made clear the important distinction between the primary or initial motive, which was always an instinctive and therefore emotional force, and the end motive which was always the determining factor. For example, it was the 'parental’ instinct which was the source of Wilberforce’s energy on behalf of the slaves, but the end motive—the determining factor—was the desire for their liberation. If the instinct had been the only force operating. its satisfaction might quite as well have been gained by his keeping guinea-pigs. Hence Hadfield concluded that the force of an act depended on the instinctive emotion but the quality on the end. What made the distinction possible, said Mr Hughes, was that in man the instincts were vague and modifiable both on their receptive and executive sides. The more he developed mentally and morally, the more ways could the instinct find its outlet. It must be acknowledged that although the end motive might be clear, the primary motive might be unconscious. The lecturer then discussed the unconscious motive. As an example, he described an experiment of posthypnotic suggestion. A man was told, when he was in a state of hypnosis, to wrap a flower pot in a cloth, put it on the sofa, and bow to it three times. Shortly after he came out of that state, he went through the action suggested. When he was asked why he had done it, he said that he had wanted to protect the plant from the cold and, when he had done it, he was so pleased that he bowed three times. In similar fashion people offered excuses and made martyrs of themselves for reasons quite other than those of which they were aware. It was essential in the study of crime to remember that any tendency to action, when once it was initiated, and for some reason obstructed, tended to work itself out unconsciously. That was to say, it was liable to persist as a complex. A complex might expend its energy in a disguised form. The desire for self assertion had. many times, led men and women to become social workers, unconscious of their real motive. On the other hand, it might express itself during dreams or yet in the form of a mental disorder or a physical mannerism. It might find outlet in symbolic form as in the petty thief who must continually wash his hands, or in some altogether different activity. Students of crime must continually be on the look-out for a motive unknown to the criminal —a complex. When the gratification of an instinct became itself tfcie end motive as well as the motive force, it became selfish. Freud wrote of two principles of action —the Pleasure-Pain and Reality Principles. According to the former, each tendency was concerned with’ its own satisfaction, and was indifferent to the gratification of others. According to the latter, a man aclapated himself to the exigencies of reality, subordinated the demand for immediate gratification, and replaced it by a more distant but more permanently satisfactory one. It was evident that much socially undesirable conduct was due to the prevalence of the former. The criminal was often the lazy man who could not stick to his job. An interesting distinction wasthat between primary or imaginary gratification such as was got in daydreaming and secondary or real gratification. If there was any truth, said Mr Hughes in this view of the origin of crime—that very often it was the outcome, at first anyway, of unconscious desires —then the process of dealing with the criminal must be one of re-education and re-adjustment.