ALL ABOUT US

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 225, 28 January 1911, Page 9

ALL ABOUT US

OPINIONS 01' A GERMAN MEDICO. DR. MAX lIEIIZ'S "NEU SEELAND." Some time ago (says the Wellington Post's London correspondent) 1 mention ed that Dr. Max Her/, the popular German medical practitioner, who has spent some years in the Dominion, had published in his native land a small book on New Zealand which seemed likely to give our Teutonic cousins a much better idea of the country and its people than they would have entertained previously. I have now had an opportunity of looking into it, and some of the chapters are so interesting, and so good-natured withal, that one need not apologise for quoting them at some length. What Dr. Herz says of the New Zealander himself is full of interest. The New Zealander —he emphasises the factis essentially the product of an empty country, a place where he had all to make for himself, where he was bound by no traditions and influenced by no past. Most of the. settlers, he says, came from the poorer and peasant classes, and they had neither the leisure nor the opportunity to foster the higher culture or the aesthetic feelings. "Brave, steady and self-reliant, they faced the | isolation and paralysis of the backblocks, and they might be compared with the great stones on which are constructed strong breakwaters, the foundations lie invisible, but without which the superstructure could not have been built." The work, he says, made the hard-headed politicians and the men of reality of today. "Is it any wonder that they seek only the things that are of real and practical value; the things that mean money; that they hold life's others aspects in small esteem. They regard art, for evample, as a thing good enough in its way, but really not of absolute necessity." This condemnation is restricted, however, to the generality of the people. Amongst the educated classes are to be found many whose ideas are more or less the same as those of the corresponding classes in the older countries. "Normal people, everyday people, the New Zealanders are," .remarks our author, "and whatever their drawbacks may be, they are sound to the backbone. Their opinions are the opinions of com-mon-sense; their manners are robust, and their outlook on the world realistic, full of the buoyant joy of life, the red-cheek-ed optimism which Schopenhauer would most likely have called the accursed, and for which no one can blame the New Zealander. For can a State flourish whose citizens are sceptics, dreamers, or pessimists, without the tonic of action and hope for the future? There are no decadents. Far-seeing, enterprising, reliable, and absolutely honorable in his affairs, the colonial is a modern merchant in his methods of organisation and a.man of the world in his business life. But he is a Philistine, and Boeotian in matters of art." OUR DEPRAVED ARTISTIC TASTE. And here is the ground of our offence in this respect. "In a musical farce he sees an opera; in a trashy melody a song; in Tosti's 'Good-bye' the gates of heaven. A shallow sentimental picture of genre is to him the highest ideal in painting. Cheap oleographs of hackneyed subjects—even Christmas number supplements—are the most popular wallcoverings next to the inevitable photographic enlargements of members of the family. A good picture engraving or photo-graving is rarely seen in the New Zealand house. The shops do not stock these things., The old masters, Leonardo, Velasquez, and the great Rembrandt, are unknown, and so almost are Van Dyck and Holbein, although they lived for a long time in England—to say nothing of the modern masters, with the exception, perhaps, of the cold, correct Lord Leighton. The public' galleries would be much better advised to purchase good copies of the old masters in place of the comparatively worthless, though original, efforts of mediocrity that one sees in them." Our architecture and furniture carry the same deadly design of monotony, and the colonial is said to have discovered neither the beauty of simplicity nor the value of good material. The houses are "over-laden with senseless ornaments, stuck on for the sake of the pleasing effect." Small china ornaments by the dozen are stood on brackets; cane chairs are put in the New Zealanders' drawingroom, and he chooses wall-papers of the most appalling colors and patterns. Ninety-nine out of one hundred New Zealand houses are built on the same pattern, with the long corridor running right through them from front to back, and rooms on either side. "A lady friend of the writer was justified in comparing it with a shooting gallery, in which one could pick off the fowl in the backyard while standing at the front door." Dr. Herz is the more astonished when he remembers that the English have good traditional styles of architecture and furniture, which the colonists seem to have forgotten to take with them. This lack of taste is said to extend to our clothes, which are neither elegant nor fashionable. The men wear rough clothes, and they are too fond of their soft collars and soft caps, while the heavy gold watehehain invariably carries the greenstone ornament at the end.