The Simple Peasant

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 752, 11 December 1953, Page 11

The Simple Peasant

-[AVING listened to as many of Patricia Godsiff’s talks as were available from 4YA, and always with appreciation of their good sense and vividlycaptured background, I was astonished to hear her recently for the space of an entire talk fall into the old "noble savage" fallacy. Peasant culture, peasant art, peasant simplicity, peasant indifference to money were extolled, and contrasted with our own middle-class vices of "pop songs, mass-produced ugliness, and keeping up with the Joneses." Patricia Godsiff is a most convincing speaker, but I was left with a host of doubts. My acquaintance with the peasant is limited to what I have read about him-as, I suspect, is the case with Patricia Godsiff-and we have, presumably, then, read different books. My impression of the French peasant, for example, is that he is a creature of financial: acumen, tremendously interested in money. Peasant costumes I have seen have certainly lacked the peasant virtue of simplicity, being equalled only by the Coronation regalia, or the parade of babies in a Plunket waiting room. I should not dare to deny that there was an element of truth in Patricia Godsiff’s remarks, but there are "peasant" virtues in the middle-classes to which we belong, if we have eyes to recognise them, just as there are "middle-class" vices to be found in the peasant group. To make an imprecise and emotional distinction between the groups tends to obscure, rather than illuminate, the truth,