LITERATURE AS LIBERATOR

Star (Christchurch), Issue 20044, 6 September 1920, Page 6

LITERATURE AS LIBERATOR

~ + THE VISION OF THE FULLER LIFE. ESSENTIALS BELOW THE SURFACE. “ There is no tyranny sn devastating ms the tyranny of the fixed idea,” declared Air \V. I). Andrews, m a public lecture entitled “ Literature as Liberator/’ ’delivered under the auspices of the Workers’ Education Association on Saturday night. “Breadth of mind and wideness of outlook are the essentials to, shall wo say, spiritual sanity. Literature ? breaks otf the bonds and i bondages of custom and ignorance and lack of sufficient original force, and opens your eyes to a thousand unsuspected sights and your minds to a thousand fresh relations, new sympathies, new sources of Joy, and springs of fresh emotion. 1 The poetry of earth is never dead.’ “I wonder if any of you have oven tried to call up. before your mind’s eye a moving picture of life as it is Howmg on in the next street, away m Kangicra, down the ranges in Hokitika, beyond the ocean in Sydney, far rip in the northern seas, where the deep «ca fishermen are toiling half the year f 1. find it hard myself to have any real sense of life and movement beyond or outside of that with which I have some direct or indirect personal link, and I think 1 got my first sense of . that and of the fulness of life streaming round on all hands from an article in •' Good Words,’ which i rend when little moro than a boy. It was a very charming and sympathetic sketch of some humble German poet.—a cobbler poet, if 1 remember rightly—and it described how, as tho old man sat at Ins stall,, day after day, ho‘saw the children, pattering past him on their way to school, and the vision gradually grew on him of tho endless and numberless ranks of children, in country after country all round tho world, going out to their work or their play, thoir schooling or their crow-scaring, as tho. case might be, dressed in their thousand varied costumes—those wore tho days before blast and West had blended and a uniform clothing type largely displaced traditional costume—their little tongues going like clappers in a thousand forms of speech. And ho sot it all down in ono of his poems, and so centuries later opened my blind eyes to "one aspect of life that had hitherto completely escaped them.” Many aspects of literature' ns liberator wore touched upon by Mr Andrews, and ho interpolated his remarks with a number of illuminating extracts. “Literature may, and should, liberate us from pettiness, provincialism and parochialism,” Mr Andrews asserted. “ 1 have seen it suggested that working men, the people, as the phrase goes, should elaborate a literature for themselves, reflecting their own interests, outlooks, prejudices and aspirations, because the literature that we already possess is the outcome of a culture alien to their habits of thought. Such a suggestion is to my mind mere midsummer madness. .It is worse. it is to erect narrowness into a cult, and class consciousness into an ultimate f|ct, instead of a stop in the progress to a wider, fuller life, and a more generous' sonso of human fellowship. To cut oneself off from the past, and to shut oneself too straitly into the present,, is to make hut a sorry prevision for the future, and it is one of the liberating effects of literature in the larger sense, that it helps ua to a fuller realisation of the solidarity of tho race. Deep dotvn below the superficial fashions and conventions, that he on the surface of life, and 100 often sadden or embitter, there lio the great essential things—love, hate, joy, sorrow, absence, parting, death. These are the common properties of man, and these are the warp woof the poet of prose writer weaves into poem and talc. . ... Literature cuts across all divisions of age, or country, or clan, or circumstance, and it is in some sort, as old Carlyle points out, the Bible of the human jace. Of all tho illusions that lead us astray, perhaps the narrowest, the most dehumanising, is the illusion of superiority. Wo are all only too prone to bow down and adore, whether in social life or in business or in education or in philosophy, or what not, tho brazen image with tho feet of clay set up by tho Mebuchadnezzan fashion of the moment. The present boasts itself against the past, and consequently forgets that it will soon bo one with it." “ From this idol worship, literature, can'do .much to sot us free, by showing us that in essentials man is much tho same in all ages of tho world’s history, a blend of selfishness and altruisrii, swayed by alternate impulses from Maven and from hell, capable of the loffciefet thought and of the vilest, and .tho most sublime self-sacrifice and of tho very basest and most naked selfishness. And above all, it presses homo the brevity of life, and tho folly of forgoing substance to grasp at shadows.” “ But remember,” concluded Mr Andrews, “ ‘it is the good reader that makes the good book/ for books are dead things unless the reader is a living soul, who can kindle their soul to life. The sweetest lyric, tho most impassioned drama, the strongest and' noblest prose, demand from us too, in our measure and degree, sweetness and passion, and strength and loftiness of nnnd, if they are to work thoir perfect work, to liberate us from the thraldom of the moaner commonplace and set our feet once more upon tho. mount ...of vision, whence wo may, with unsealed eyes, behold, the essential things that belong unto our peace.”