As Others See Us

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 64, 13 September 1940, Page 4

As Others See Us

N the general principle that every dog is entitled to one free bite, we allow a correspondent on this page to take some liberties with our legs. What he wants he does not know, but it is clear that he will never be happy till he gets it. So we shall tell him. He wants us to be highbrows; to be priggish; to assume airs; to give readers what he thinks they should get and not what they think they have paid for; to print programmes and nothing but programmes; to print those programmes only that he wants; to accept his assurance that what he doesn’t want is " piffle" and "twaddle"; in short, to butcher ourselves to make a Russian holiday (if Tschaikowsky. is, was, or ever will be Russian). But worlds are not won like that. The Listener is a compromise. Like all publications that depend on sales, it is neither that thing precisely which its staff would like to produce nor that other thing precisely which some readers would like to receive. It is something between the two, never the first and seldom the second, but a frank adaptation week by week to wind and weather and circumstances. So are the songs we sing and the pictures we see and the books we read and the sermons and speeches we listen to. Even when all things are lawful-which is not now-many things are not expedient. No one can, or should, ever say all that he thinks, or do all that he wishes to do, or be all that he might, left to himself, become. Since fortythousand people buy The Listener, and a hundred and forty thousand read it, there are a hundred and forty thousand reasons why it can’t cater for a single mind. We do not, however, wish to bite the dog. If there were fifty thousand listehers in New Zealand sighing every day for Tchaikovski, we should give every programme in full in which that morbid Russian appears. But for every reader who wants symphonies, a thousand want hill-billies, and ten thousand Sandy Powell or Gracie Fields-and within reasonable limits of dignity and decency, he who pays the piper, still calls the tune.