A Fit of the Blues

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLI, Issue 18, 28 October 1908, Page 42

A Fit of the Blues

Dy

“PIERROT.”

A wonderful summer has given way at last to days of greyness and gloom. From the Embankment the towers of Westminster show up in ghostly bluegrey outlines —beautiful, but depressing. Perhaps it is only natural that such a day should best serve to colligate the less joyful impressions of my revisit. For no one eould live in England—no one, indeed, could live in any old country in these days of a neck-to-neck contest for supremacy—without some foreboding. To-day that foreboding happens to be strong in me. To be just to its claims, however, it has been gaining strength over many weeks, and through countless conversations, many with men of high mental power. But those grey ghosts of buildings fit the mood to perfection, and I am constrained at last to give utterance to my little jeremiad.'

When I say that men of high intellect admit that there is room for foreboding, and sit still to forebode (if I may be pardoned the atrocity), surely the case is worse than if their sense of danger took a vigorous and fighting form. The Englishman is certainly too passive, too philosophic, too academic in face of the deadly perils that beset the British Empire (for, England fallen, where is theEmpire?) But lam not in a mood for political eventualities, for tariff discussions, nor for lay theories as to the number of requisite Dreadnoughts. I want to look at things from a more inclusive point of view—from the point of view of national character, which

must ever be the determining factor of the future.

In the seven years I have been away from England, there has been a change. Whether it is advancing democracy, whether it is increased relations with foreign countries, I don’t know, but the Englishman has lost some of his most salient traits. He is less positive, less himself. The street crowd look more continental, less individual than in older days. And this impression gains ground in detail at every moment. Positiveness of personality, fixity of opinion, pertinacity. vigour, freshness, have suffered a decline. And these things are needed by the nation that is ultimately to survive.

England, I am almost tempted to say (speaking relatively, and in evil days), is suffering from her better qualities. It is hard to make a cultivated Englishman see that beauty in big issues must in these days be frequently sacrificed to utility, not because it is advisable, but because it is a life-and-death necessity in the struggle of the nations. He refuses to be dragged from his lofty throne of academic criticism, and by taking off his coat and fighting his way to find the quickest means to an issue. The word “Conservatism” would meet the case, I suppose, except that it is such an abominable stereotype, so often ignorantly used. It is also a constitutional neglect ®f the obvious, which, however Contemptible it may be in theory, is never negligible in practice. Last night I looked in with a friend

at one of the leading music halls. Tta atmosphere was suffocating even to a fairly hard smoker, -and the |>er4prmance added to the general sense of oppressiveness. It contained no item of even passable freshness—which excuses a multitude of intellectual lapses. Sentimentality, stale and nauseating, banal efforts at re-creating ancient jokes, commonplace “novelties” that were not even novel —here was a pretty dish for al visitor to the greatest city of the greatest empire the world has ever seen! In one item a young man in a red shirt and a slouch hat stands on a tree-trunk in al clearing in the Australian bush, amid strains of “Auld Lang Syne” and the ringing of joy bells, and sings the flattest of sentimental ditties in the flattest of voices. My friend—a new school “intellectual”—drinks it in eagerly. “I wish ‘the Venerable’ were here,” he says. “The Venerable” is editor of one of tho greatest literary weeklies in the British Empire, and I gathered that he loved this stuff, not cynically, but in a spirit of reaction that welcomed mental commonness as a relief. This seeriis to bd the latest “pose,” and certainly not one encouraging of a high order of art. Anyhow the song was rapturously encored, and I believe that it is one of the songs of the day.

Now - , the man who sang that very poor song was really rather a lifeless, inert sort of a person, who reflected the current absence of strenuous desire to be fresh and original, and he was liked the bette'r because he was neither original nor fresh. That, I think, is a sad parable—if, indeed, the story of a parable may happen to be true. Both at that music-hall and at dinner at Frascati’s—— another speaking fact—there was quite a host of Eton-suited youngsters, first gobbling dainties, and then watching th'a antics of danseuses, one of whom at leasjj was not dressed even for an evening call. Sometimes one wonders, whether people are not crazy, and not merely stupid. If our Empire has to collapse—through disease at its heart —for goodness sakd let our race die fighting and not drunk!) There is something indecent in the wayin which people are frivolling through their danger—which, be it remembered, threatens New Zealand as well as England. It is painfully life the revels ore the eve of a decisive battle. The difficulty is to find a serious man—or rather a man at once serious, practical and farsighted—in England to-day. Everyone seems to know the nation is in peril/ and everyone casts off the idea as ai disturbing fact which had better not be allowed to interrupt his pleasures. Patriotism in the mass is a veritable gift cf our race; patriotism 'in detail—> watchful, energetic, resourceful —is what England at least has yet to learn. And the nightmare dread of any thinking man is that she may learn it too late.

I sometimes wonder whether the cursd of specialism is not blinding men to every general, world-important problem. It must be rather difficult for the doll’s-eye manufacturer—(at least after a tenhour day)—to take a broad view of the Yellow Peril, or the possibilities of al German invasion; and in theee days the doll’s-eye manufacturer is not quite unrepresentative of the limited sphere of the utility of the individual. But eyenl the doll’s-eye manufacturer inust do if, or all is lost. And the thinking men of the community must learn that the question is not a stale commonplace of the smoke-room, but a problem of practical import, that must be faced in spite cf its commonplaceness. In brief, it) is no longer a joke; and it would he both sensible and more patriotic to face it, seriously. Even the philosopher is ) living in a highly inflammable building, from which he would do well to study the exit.

The Count, replying to the Single Tax League's congratulations on his birthday, eulogised the teachings of Henry George, and said he would be pleased to assist the Leaguers in any way in his power. (Cabled last week.)