DIGRESSIONS OF A DOMINIE
HALF-LENGTHS: By F. L, Combs: Progressive Publishing Sociéty, Wellington. R. COMBS is a philosopher, but hé is algo, now and again, a wag. As & philosopher he questions most of the things hé learnt at school and many of thos he later taught. "My real feelings," he says abotit a colourless lad who has just gained four firsts, "are compuiiction and afi ufiéasy désiré to get rid of the too convincing évidence of the
process of overstuffed cerebral malnutrition to which I have been accessory." It is not an easy sefitence, or (most teachérs would think) a permissible one, but theré is something wrong with the man who teaches for 40 years without wanting to say something like that. Mr. Combs says it over and over again, sometimes sadly, sometimes with amazing irreverence, but hé never leaves us in doubt about his reason for saying it. This is the kind of thing: "What of thé Charlotte who jérked and fidgeted in & dual desk? What of her ‘aptitudes’? Well, lessons she did not scorn, for scorh, aé psycho-analysis has éxplainéd in three voluinés and six appendices; is 4 réseritmeént complex with its roots in repressions, and there were no représsions about Charlotté: Let others wince and .cringe and m and frét under thé lash of jeatning. She solved her academic problems, a5, too late, I half wish I had solved mine, by simply not botheting about thém. Shé was one of the few out of thousands I havé ktioown who proved strongér than the System." Or this: "The school; an amazingly small edifice, half a mile from the store, hardly seemed cast for a spéakitig part: It was intérésting, if at all, because of the amazing diversity of its instructors, oné of whom had (or perhaps it was the other way found) been the main cause of the alcoholic relapsé of the mastét blacksriith. 1 suppose that from this échool & thin uncéftaifi tricklé of litétacy did proceed, but the sedimentary deposits in it of desiccated information rendered it anything but allufing to thirsty mifids and plitched spirits: McGintiity believed in it and i 6ducdtion, as he bélieved in éverything that was plainly and providentially sent to exacerbate moral uneasiness by mental diécomfort." But Mr. Combs can be a commentator of a different kind. If he is critical of the System-he usually spells it with a capital-he has tolerance to the point of tenderness for the system’s most unfortunate victims: the moral misfits and the mentally misled, That will not surprise those who know Little Ann, but it is something that you do not expect in this gallery till you come on it. For example: ~ ‘fer wholé life was a pity. Tf she was foolish in matters that required a callousédcommon gense, it was but a pire ty. Was she foolish or was she Let thosé learned the grasping morality of oa z préfer to rémemiber that in her which could not bedr to hurt in the slightest the feelings of another."
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 291, 19 January 1945, Page 16
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503DIGRESSIONS OF A DOMINIE New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 291, 19 January 1945, Page 16
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