PREJUDICES IN PROSE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 159, 10 July 1942, Page 8

PREJUDICES IN PROSE

-LEND ME YOUR EARS.

Essays by

F

Sinclaire,

Caxton Press, Christ-

church:

HE fool has said in his heart, | There is no God. Professor Sin- | claire says, Let us not suffer fools. Whether they have degrees in science or certificates of proficiency in cynicism, let us make them look as silly as they are. So he hits them in the solar plexus with this: These well-meaning and often amiable cranks in their thousand libraries and laboratories, indulging their mania for counting and collecting, and exefcising their talent for uncouth platitude, might be a joke if they could be kept under lock and key, in a sort of mild and humane detention. Their proper place is the Academy of Lagrado, where Gulliver saw some of them busy extracting sunbeams from cucumbers and inventing a substitute for language. No great harm is done, and some amusement is provided, by these Poloniuses of research so long as they play the fool nowhere but in their own house. The mischief begins when their fooleries become public, Then it becomes only too plain what spirit they have served, and to what end they have unconsciously been labouring. There is no new savagery, but they have blessed and approved it with a text, no new tyranny, but they have provided it with an imposing formula of justification. Obscurantism? No. Just an inkpot at the devil, and a bad boy’s delight in the splash on the wall. See how he rubs it in: On Christmas Day, millions of us repeated the Nicene Creed. That stupendous symbol contains enough spiritual dynamite to blow to ‘smithereens all the Hitlers who ever were or will be. Why do we recite it in an apologetic ‘mumble? And the blind mice. See how he makes them run: What the English rationalists tried to do was, in fact, to incorporate as much of Christianity as pleased them in a naively optimiistic gospel of progress. Their success may be measured by the degree to which they have influenced the minds even of professing Christians. It was not a Christian theologian, but Nietzsche, the author of Anti-Christ, who forecast the twentieth century as an era of wars, Yes, a bad boy-one thumb to his nose and the other to his little finger. No attempt to conceal his delight in annoying us. Take, for example, his "pro--visional" acceptance of "the luminous axiom of Burke that the rich ought not to have their throats cut." A bad boy, but a mighty big boy, too. How many in New Zealand can write like this: If all WHazlitt’s criticisms were lost, he

being only flesh and blood, I furtively skipped an occasional parenthesis of forty or fifty pages, and that when I parted with Ulysses I did not feel at all like Calypso, who was, you remember, inconsolable. . . . If I made no progress, I say again that the fault was not wholly mine. It was, I maintain, the impatience of my teacher, his inhuman pedantry, his godlike superciliousness, his delight in talking over my head, that lost the day and spoiled all. I have sometimes heard people say that Shakespeare was spoiled for them at school. That is where Joyce was spoiled for me, Young people, give us better schools, or we perish in our ignorance!" And who else could exalt Handel high over Mozart and Schubert, and almost over Beethoven, and get away with it? Don’t buy this book if it hurts you to be touched on the raw-to be contradicted, questioned, and often made to feel ridiculous. But buy it if you can take these experiences and not misunderstand ‘what is happening -a scholarly, wise, but no longer youthful professor indulging his prejudices in matchless prose.

O.

D.