"IMPERFECT PARADISE."

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 402, 7 March 1947, Page 18

"IMPERFECT PARADISE."

Sir-‘For the unorthodox, the social non-conformist, the eccentric and the solitary, there is probably less scope here than in Britain’ — thus Ian> Stephens in his commentary on New Zealand’s Imperfect Paradise. In my view the scope for individuals in the foregoing categories is mainly a matter of population. You can be as eccentric as you like in, say, London, where seven million people are congregated, and very few of them will take any _(continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) notice of you. But if I take it into my head to walk down the main street of Oamaru, which has a population of 8,000, and array myself in a pale blue jacket and pink trousers, the whole town will know of it in a very short time and probably somebody will write to the press to suggest that my proper place is Seacliff. The bright young university man who yearned for Britain on the grounds of Mr. Stephen’s criticism has probably, as you suggested, already discovered that unorthodoxy and cccentricity are no more welcome there than here. But the main point is that to-day non-conform-ity is to-morrow’s orthodoxy. To lard oneself with a lotion and broil oneself brown in the sun, lolling on a public beach in a state of almost nudity, would have struck a Victorian maiden’ as the height (or depth) of shameless indecency. To-day it is so orthodox that the press carries advertisements extolling the virtues of the lotion. Take Wesleyan Methodism, the Salvation Army, women riding bicycles, the hatless brigade, and teetotallers: all these in their time were condemned and derided as unorthodox, nonconforming, and eccen- tric; to-day they are the orthodox. The tendency to wunorthodoxy or eccentricity may perhaps be a manifestation of nature’s machinery for securing a variation of the species; given enough encouragement and scope, the unorthodox very rapidly become gospellers aiming at a new orthodoxy which is their unorthodoxy. I doubt whether Paradise itself will be free from this tendency-there will be some angels with a kink for wearing their haloes askew.

J. MALTON

MURRAY

(Oamaru).