ARTS AID MAN IN LIFE STRUGGLE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19240, 29 November 1930, Page 28 (Supplement)

ARTS AID MAN IN LIFE STRUGGLE.

NEW ZEALAND HAS YET VERY MUCH TO DEVELOP (Written for the “ Star ” by E. J. HOWARD, M.P.). Life is a matter of compensations, pays an American writer. “Man, to live, must not be over confident. Neither must he be under confid'ent” But looking down through the ages we see this struggle of what we term, “we humans’* against great odds always onward, always upward, if upward means to greater understandings. In South Africa we can see this straggle in our time. Wild animals and wild men and every disease under the sun, almost resisted white .man’s attempt to enter that country. Fever, ague, millions of microbes and fierce animals contested every inch of the ground. At Durban, for instance, this thing called white man arrived in a crazy old ship and was dumped over the side in a coal basket. He had to fight from the moment he landed. And right on the point is the first grave. He fought the black man who tried to push him back. He fought the mosquito who pumped fever into his veins. Onward and inward, step by step, this fellow pushed his way. He built his cities, and the wild animals retreated snarling and growling, but giving ground all the time. Then this man discovered that years before his species had tried to capture this country. He found their ancient ruins dotted about the land. He saw the Hon and the elephant and other animals wandering through those ruins. So he set out to try and find out who these people were and why were they defeated. No one can say where Hfe began. History as written does not go back far enough yet to piece together this, to us, fascinating story. The rocks are being slowly interpreted, but every day almost man is pushing open more and more this closed door of the past. Running through the warp and weft of this picture of the past, there seems to be some purpose in this struggle, as if man had set out to fight and to conquer this thing called fate or any other name we may give it. There seems to be a plan that one can glimpse now and again and then lose it for a time. We know the purpose is there, but it appears like a dream that we can only remember fragments of.isuch men as Shakespeare, Ibsen,'Shaw and lately O'Neil focuses our vision to such a point that we can see for a time the vision clearly. The bringing into focus of the men of ancient and even modern times helps us to see that behind the struggle is this' purpose. Tricks of Fate. Were we given a crystal wherein we •'ould gaze and see the future, it may * *e that we should defeat that very purpose. This thing that we will call ‘ fate’* seefis to play some funny tricks at times and one wonders and loses f’aith for the moment. What was the purpose of the Great War? Why did it come? Was it part of the purpose or was it simply 31 boil on the thing we call life? Why have we reached the stage where man can produce all the things he desires but he cannot distribute them? Why are we hungry in the midst pf plenty? Have we lost our idealism and if so why? Is it the curse of having eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil? In the days when this province was first settled by white people, the old lands were going through hungry times. e I e^er to it as the hungry forties. Famine in Ireland, the same almost in

Scotland, and England no better. So history tells us that some fartseeing men in the Church of those days had a vision of what could be done in a new land. So we find these men forming an association for the founding of a Church of England settlement. It was to be called “Canterbury,” and the site • first selected Wairarapa Valley. That was in 1843. We can guess what happened in between that date and 1850. The disappointments, the heart-burnings until at last the vessels arrived at Port Cooper. What have we lost since those days? Is it the will to do, or is it that we are doing things so fast that we cannot see the movement? To use an Americanism, have we lost the punch and if so why? Those early pioneers then came to Canterbury with faith and hope and charity as their foundation principles. How do we know? How can we interpret their minds? Effect of Pictures. In the caves of South Africa there are thousands of pictures left by a prehistoric people but no writings. But those pictures tell us what was in the minds of those primitive people. There is the hunting of the lion; he was a fierce animal but his coat helped them on cold nights. There was the buffalo; he was good to eat. So we see the warriors returning with a lion’s skin, but the buffalo is coming home in great junks. How do we know what the early pioneers of Canterbury had in their minds? Can we take the stories told by the old people, the people we love and pay out our good thoughts to annually on December 16? Not altogether, because understanding something of psychology, we know the human mind sufficiently to say we cannot remember. But the early pioneers put their story in stone. Into their cathedral and into the Provincial Council Chambers. It may be said that it was purely a matter of environment. That, as this was a Canterbury settlement and as Canterbury Cathedral in the Old Country is one of the finest examples of the Gothic form of architecture, they did but copy a picture that was in their minds. That may be so, but that picture expressed their thoughts, their hope, and the idealism of the time. The laying-out of the Square in tfie centre of the city, too, expressed their idealism. Those who think the idea of the Square was a playground originally are wrong. As a fact it was to be the home of the Arts. It was originally meant to put the college . there Even in the founding of the college itself we get a glimpse into the minds of the pioneers. I am not sure that we have quite followed out the idea of the pioneers, although even to-day the Arts course is the highest of the degrees. In the term Master of Arts—or, as we say, ‘.‘he is an M.A.” —what do we mean? It means simply that he has mastered the art of doing things. What is art? Well, Nature has given us a world to which, as far as we know,, we can add nothing, nor take away anything. But Nature permits us to fit the things she has provided together to suit ourselves. When the first man rubbed one stone on another to sharpen the point, he became a master of art. fie would not have got his degree at Canterbury College, but if there had been a college in those days he would have passed. The Arts. So it is not surprising to find that their first professor at the college was a chemist. And then a lecturer in’ geology and then biology. The first professor was the late A. W. Bickerton. To read his address delivered at the college we can see where we went wrong slightly. Art means simply to put things together. But art is only one of the terms. The other half is science. Science is the “how to put

things together”. And Bickerton saw the possibilities of these twins in this young colony. And just as to-day we hear of agricultural bias, so Bickerton asked for a scientific bias. It is that scientific bias that we lack to-day—the how to put things together. For instance: Silk, said Reamus, in 1754, is but dried gum. With that in mind, many years afterwards, a young scientist said, “Well, why wait for the silk worm to produce this dried gum?” He set out to produce what we term to-day artificial silk. He studied silk, what it was made of, and how it was made, and he said, “I can do that better than any silk worm born yet.” So he dissolved wood pulp and cotton pulp into what he termed a viscous colloidal solution. Then he forced this solution through a set of pinholes and introduced a drying process as it was streaming through, and lo! we got those splendid stockings and other things so comfortable to wear. Now our New Zealand flax contains all the possibilities of the best pairs of artificial silk hose that we can think of. But we are importing this raw material with tons of it at our door. If we had cultivated the twins Art and Science no one can say where we would have reached in the art of putting things together. Take fish! New Zealand, by and large, is mountain tops poked up through the sea, just as Mount Cook appears above the clouds. We have domesticated animals, and put them to man’s use. But so far we have not cultivated what we term salt water fish. Why not? Why couldn’t we have fish farms around our coast? We shall some day when we understand the art of getting a supply of food • from the sea, the same as we understand" the art of agriculture. We have cultivated some fish but no’t as food so much as for sport. Fish love the coast. They seem to like the smell of land. Of course, there are deep-water fish, but it is near the coast we get the best eating fish. Some day we may breed the swordfish, too, and let them out for the sportsmen. Why not mackerel around our coast? It appears to be only because we cannot ( grow the food on our sloping mountain sides. But there are a thousand other things we can do with our twins Art and Science, if wc will attend to them.