ARISTOCRATS OF MANKIND

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 June 1939, Page 6

ARISTOCRATS OF MANKIND

THE TRUE HUMAN TRADITION. I believe in aristocracy—-not an aristocracy" of power, based on rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky, writes Mr E. M. Forster in a recently published essay. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent,victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke. I give no examples—it is risky to do that —but the. reader may as well consider whether this is the type of person he would like to meet and to be. On they go—an invincible army, yet not a victorious one. The aristocrats, the elect, the chosen, the Best People—all the words that describe them are false, and all attempts to organise them fail. Again and again Authority, seeing their value, has tried to net them and to utilise them as the Egyptian Priesthood or the Christian Church or the Chinese Civil Service or the Group Movement, or some other worthy stunt. But they slip through the net and are gone; when the door is shut they are no longer in the room; their temple, as one of them remarked, is the Holiness of the Heart’s Imagination, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world. With this type of person knocking about, and constantly crossing one’s path if one has eyes to see or hands to feel, the experiment of earthly life cannot be dismissed as a failure.