LIFE TO-DAY.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1809, 23 July 1913, Page 9

LIFE TO-DAY.

"FRIGHTFULLY THRILLING."

TWO VIEWS,

Is life, to this generation, more exciting than it was to the men of the past? nsks William Archer in the "Daily News and Leader" (London). Professor Guglielmo Ferrero says it is, and "The Times" says it isn't—you pays your tuppence and you takes your choice. The professor declares that— Never has man lived in such a state of permanent and increasing excitement. If the ancients could come to life again, their first impression, you may be quite sure, would be that men had bccome mad 1 . There be ancients and ancients, says "The Times," very justly; but it suggests that the ancients par excellence, the Greeks of tho best period, lived a much more diversified and more jumpy life than ours. Compared with the Athenians of the ago of . Pericles, we, even in Fleet Street, are like gossips discussing far-off rumours beside the village sips. Tho roar of events actually sounded in their.ears; tho fate of tho world was decided at their gates. Wo hear only the roar of mechanical traffic; and for us nothing ever does seem to be decided that immediately concerns us. "Max Nordau," savs the leader-writer, "based a whole theory of degeneration upon the supposed wear and tear of modern life. It would bo just as easy to base ono upon its unexampled security and dullness.''

Professor Ferrero might possibly reproach "The Times" with talking for victory" in countering his thesis by a reference to the most vital spot in all the ancient world, at the intensest moment of its vitality. No. doubt a Greek city state had plenty to occupy its mind, especially in a period of crisis; but it is manifestly unfair to contrast Athens during the Peloponnesian war, with England in time of peace. A fairer comparison would lie between Athens in the last three decades of the fifth century and Paris between 1789 and 1815. I fancy tho Parisians could hold their own against the Athenians in tho matter of "thrills." But the question at issue cannot really be decided by pitting one selected instance against another. As usually happens when two sane persons contradict each other on such a point as this, it will be found, oii examination, that they are talking of different things. Tho form of excitement "The TinW has in mind is, in the last analysis, personal apprehension, or, more bluntly, fear. Tho Athenian's country] it says— "was to him not an abstraction of which he could remind himself and be proud in his leisure moments, but a little fortified town, with fl, hostile army round its walls, that might by one error or treason disappear from the face of the earth, with all its citizens that survived changed into slaves."

Noiv this form of excitement—the sense of constant personal insecurity—is assuredly much less prevalent in modem than in anciprit times. For that matter., it was much less prevalent in Athens than in the primeval forests, where prehistoric man had .only his cunning to protect him against monstrous and savage animals far stronger .. than he, and where, moreover, his uuperstition. peopled the circumambient darkness with phantoms of malignant might. The shiver that runs down our spine today at a well-told murder story or ghost story is a faint reniinisoence ot ancestral tremors. Fear was the price that man paid for his, higher intelligence; but it' was also an .invaluable stimulus. It taught him to arm himself; it taught him to stand shoulder to shoulder; it helped liim to survive; Other animils are susceptible to fear;, man alone can conquer and exorcise it. As one of'the most real meanings of civilisation is'.the progressive existing out of fear, it folloira'that,' if'wte'defihe "excitement" as the sense of . personal insecurity, we can easily prove this to be the most humdrum of all the ages.. In Western Burop)?, 'at' any Tate, the spectre of war is really the one thing we nave left to fear. For the rest, law, polico, hygiene, and theological sanity have reduced the grounds of. apprehension almost to a minimum. No doubt' much remains to be done in the way of extirpating disease and diminishing the liability to accident; but even disease and accident have been robbed of half their tenors by anaesthetics. Though all of us, no doubt, run many risks, we are seldom conscious of them. The sense of danger in modern life is sporadic, not endemic. This Professor .Ferrr-ro would certainly not dr-ny. If he and others hold,-with Miss Hilda Wangel, that modern life is "frightfully thrilling," it must be because they find excifcfment olsewhero than in the sense of personal danger. Where, then, do they find it? Firstly, I think, in .the Immensely accelerated pace of life; secondly, in its incalculably intensified intellectual interest.- Compare, for instance, tho business man. of a century ago whose whole armoury was a ledger, a ruler, and a bundle of 'quill pens, with his successor of to-day. with a dictaphone at his right hand, a "ticker" at his left, and in front of him not only a tiephone,. but a switchboard of, p'erhaps, a dozen, stops! He has twenty irons in the fire to.his predecessor's ono; the news of nil tho markets of the world pours in on him hour by hour; he-has to decide in a moment where his predecessor could reflect for a month: he lives upon shocks and thrills, as Mithridates lived on arsenic. As for the intellectual fascination of the world-spectaole, wo have only to take np a volume of Boswell to see how unexciting were the problems which interested the leading "minds of the eighteenth century. Compare any discussion at "the Club" with a discussion between, say, Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, Lord Moriey, Mr. Balfour, Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Rnmsay, Professor Gilbert Murray, Mr. Wells, and Sir. Bernard Shaw, and wo shall seem to be living not only in a new age, but in a new universe.