Irreconcilables?
T is the practice of the Brains Trust to take no question for granted, Someone asked, in a programme broadcast from 4YA, how the Brains Trust reconciled the two opposing characters of the ruling classes in Georgian timés -on one hand, the love of cruel sports, gluttony, and vice; on the other hand, a fine appreciation of the arts of music, painting, and literature. To the listener this might have seemed a poser. To the members of the Brains Trust no problem existed; the question itself was immediately suspect. Why should cruelty and aesthetic appreciation not exist together? Hitler attended Wagnerian opera with every sign of enjoyment. Pursuit of the fox (a cruel sport, said one member, from the fox’s point of view) does not mean that the huntsman may not hang a Gainsborough in his drawing room just because he likes looking at it. And anyhow, were the Georgian ruling classes so full of vice that we moderns can afford to patronise them? Have we no vices of our own, in spite of our predilection for symphony concerts? The questioner had asked for a reconciliation between two traits that had not quarrelled; victims of vice need not be aesthetic morons, any more than cultured persons need be puritans. I hope the questioner, after hearing such great argument about it and about, was content to come out by that same door where in he went.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 326, 21 September 1945, Page 9
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236Irreconcilables? New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 326, 21 September 1945, Page 9
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