JUST NORMAL.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11685, 29 April 1916, Page 1

JUST NORMAL.

A NOVELIST'S VIEWS. At the beginning of the world it is only decently reasonable to suppose human beings were made with healthy bodies and healthy minds. That of coiiree was the original scheme of the race. It would not have been worth while to create a lot of things aimlessly ill mads. A journeyman carpenter would not waste his time in doing it, if he, knew any better. Given the power to make a man, even an amateur would make him as straight as he could, inside and out. Decent vanity would compel him to do it. He would be ashamed to show the thing and admit he had doue it, much less people a world with millions of like proofs of incompetence Logically considered, the raca was built straight and clean and healthy and happy. How aince then it has developed in multitudinous less sane directions, and lost its normal straightness and proportions, I am, singularly enough, not entirely competent to oxplain with any degree of satisfactory detail. But it cannot be truthfully denied that this has rather generally happened. There are human beings who are not beautiful, there are thos-3 who are not healthy, there are those who hate people and things with much waste of physical and mental energy, there are people who arc not unwilling to do others an ill turn "by word or deed, and there are those who do not believe that the original scheme of the race was ever a decant one.

This is all abnormal and unintelligent, even the not being beautiful, and sometimes one finds oneself called upon passionately to resist a temptation to listen to an internal bint tbat the whole thing is aimless. Upon this tendency one may as well put one's foot firmly, as ib leads nowhere. At such times it is supporting; to call to mind a certain undeniable fact that ought to loom up much larger in our philosophical calculations. No one lias ever made a collection of statistics regarding the enormous - number of perfectly sane, kind, friendly, decent creatures who form a large proportion of any mass of human beings anywhere and everywhere—people who are not vicious or cruel or depraved, not as a result of continual self-control, but simply cause they do not want to be, because it is more natural and agreeable to be exactly the opposite things; people who do not tell lies because they could not do it "with any pleasure, and would, o« the contrary, find the exertion, an annoyance .and a bore; people whose manners and morals are good because their natural preference lies in that direction. There are millions of them who in most essays on life and living are virtually ignored because they do none of the things which call forth eloquent condemnation or brilliant cynicism. It has not vet become the- fashion to re-.<*ualJdii-*'ito^^ newspaper filled with dramatic elaborations of crimes and unpleasantness, one somotimes wishes attention might be called to them—to their numbers, to their decencies, to their normal lack ot anv desire to do violence, and their equally normal disposition to lend a hand. On© is inclined to feel that the majoritv of persons do not believe m their existence. But if an accident occurs in the street, there are always several of them who appear to spring out of the earth to give human sympathy and assistance: if a national calamity, physical or social, takes place, the world suddenly seems full ot them. They are the thousands ot Browns. Joneses, and Robinsons who, massed'together, send food to fammcstrioken countries, sustenance to earth-quake-devastated regions, aid to wounded soldiers or miners or flooa-swept homelessnesfl. They are the ones who have happened naturally to continue to grow straight and carry out the lirst Intention. T'hev really form the majority : if they did not the people of the 'earth would have eaten one another alive centuries ago. But though this is surelv true, a happy cynicism totally disbelieves in their existence. When a combination of circumstances sufficiently dramatic brings one of them into prominence, he is either called an or a fool. He is neither. He is only a human creature who is normal- . „, m —Mrs F. W. Burnett, m "T. Tembaron."