Questions of Taste

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 474, 23 July 1948, Page 8

Questions of Taste

T was obvious from Ngaio Marsh’s two last talks ("Defending the Hackneyed Classic’ and "The Angry Listener") that here was. a woman nobly planned to warn,,to comfort, and command. The comfort ¢ame mostly in the first talk, where Miss Marsh gave us groundlings the moral support of her approbation’ on two grounds: the first, that we had resisted the snobappeal inherént in pursuit of the not-so-well-known but perhaps not-so-classic classic, the second, that we had the happy knack ,of picking on the best for our nefarious purposes, so that years of hand-to-hand-and mouth-to-mouth circulation had not succeeded in wearing the hackneyed classic completely thin. More "credit perhaps belongs to those ‘who selected what we must con or play by ear, To Be or Not To be, Minuet in G, Mende!ssohn’s Spring Song. For aesthetics too can be taught by sheer grind, and many a man has taught himself first to stomach and finally to appreciate bananas or Picasso merely by keeping at iit long enough. I felt more at ease listening to the second talk, in which Miss Marsh denounced with righteous indignation those so sure that their own tastes are the sole criterion of the Good that’ they begrudge time on the air to brows of other depths.