Nineteen-Eight.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XL, Issue 1, 4 January 1908, Page 13

Nineteen-Eight.

I don’t know whether people really do still make good resolutions on New Year’s Eve. Personally, I am so busy, in making and breaking them all the year round, that no single day seems in this regard to stand out from the vest. A New Year, however, Is even with me never without its stimulus, although I must admit that that stimulus is rather of an intellectual than a moral character. The rate of the world’s progress has so far accelerated that a twelvemonth must mark some big move forward is almost every quarter of the globe—not big. perhaps, in one sense (for a whole century fails to realise many a grand dream), but big in the sense of some tangible, valuable achievement. Nineteen-seven did not serve us badly. In material things it stood for the first certainty of the conquest of the air, for Brennan’s invention of the probably epoch-making gyrostatic railway,, for a marked advance in the prospects of successful inoculation against the germs of disease. It promised us in particular rapid communications which bid fair to transform our country by bringing us within the inner pale of civilised interrelation; it laid the foundations for a

Pan-Britannic organising of education; while on the darker side it showed us that cloud no bigger than a man’s hand in the belief right or wrong—and dangerous either way—in a “yellow peril.” 1 should call that an important, if subeditorially speaking, an uneventful year. But whatever separate years may do, the mind needs a five years’ lapse of time to value, the grand march of civilized progress. One is so apt to forget that all this time the Cape to Cairo railway, the Panama Canal, great schemes

of waterpower, and a thousand projects that need time for their fruition are being pushed forward with mighty and sustained effort. Another five years and Pekin and Paris will be little more than ten days apart; ten years more and perhaps no part of the world save Australasia will be a fortnight’s journey from London. Such thoughts may not appeal to the poet, but all the same I hold that they are worthy of any New Year’s Eve! And perhaps, anyhow, the poet will presently find a rapidly contracting world too small a field for his pen and will have to let his imagination travel at least as far as the moon or Mars (without its “canals”). Either that or he will find with me the grandest of all inspirations in the coming union of every part of this jarring old planet. The time was when dreams and practical progress were things incompatible. The very, young man, posing unknown to himself, is apt to sneer at material advancement as something almost intellectually indecent. He is “not sure that the savages are not better off,” “that the Chinese are not happier than we.” Thank Heaven, we do get beyond this

shallow sophistry at last, and come to learn that a dream is not worse because it has some chance of fulfilment; that a dream of the practical amelioration of human wrongs and human sufferings (ami this is implied by every civilized improvement) is on the average better than a dream of a love-sick nightingale, or a reverie in the character of an errant, or aberrant knight. At the same time I love nightingales and knight errants, and to read about them in comely verse, so that I am no nearer the other extreme of a business-like materialism. The point is that there is poetry in the power of civilized man as well as in the power and beauty of wild Nature. On another side, New Year’s Eve arouses personal curiosity as to one’s own destiny during another year. One is not sure whether one will not be dead or married or rich or still poorer, or abroad, or what or where one will be before another first of January comes round. To the callow youth the sense of destiny is not strong, and it is. perhaps, as well that he should content himself with making good resolutions, and leave conjecture to his elders, who have lost that delightful feeling of earthly immortality which is youth’s best gift. Above all, the New Year has a freshening force. You never open a new year-

book without a sense that the world is making a fresh start. Of course, it is not really, but it is difficult not to think that January is the month of wide change, that it opens a new epoch in world activity. And in your own ease, too, you can hardly help feeling a momentary rejuvenescence, the sense that you are passing a fresh turning-point in your career. Every year, no doubt, this feeling diminishes in force; but there are probably very few who can see the arrival of a New Year without some small sense of impending change. To the Scotchman there is an added zest, because he (poor fellow) has largely to take the New Year instead of Christmas—which has always seemed to me to be rather an unfair exchange. And when 1 suggest this I don't wish for one moment to imply that the individual Scotchman is to blame. I have just enough Scottish blood to make me properly respectful to the New Year; but I always think if a fortunate circumstance that the non-Seottish elements in my blood have also added a love of Christmas, and that thus I can celebrate both occasions with pleasure to myself ami

without harm to anybody else. A good deal that is put down to the drastic influence of a change of year roav quite possibly, of course, be due to the mere fact that people are in the habit of taking a holiday at this season of the year, and of returning to their work minus many a cobweb, and \.ith a larger and healthier vision. Health usually means hope, and overwork means depression in which the next day promises to offer no more than the hist. A man newly returned from a holiday Is com monly not a pessimist ; and a man newly returned from his holiday on New Year's Day is apt to foresee a twelvemonth of perhaps unlikely contentment. By the time the dissillusionment has sunk deep in the mind, another year has past, and New Year's Day sings its syren’s song afresh. Perhaps the standing remedy against this disappointment is altruism, or at least the avoidance of a tragic degree of egoism. For whether the individual sinks or swims, stands or advances. the progress of humanity from New Year’s Day is continuous, and ever increasingly rapid. And if that is not complete compensation for individual ills, it is at least something to keep the prospect of each New Year bright with the fair hopes of a future better for all. “Pierrot,” in “Auckland Star.”