Snobbish on Principle

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 941, 23 August 1957, Page 5

Snobbish on Principle

HINKING = about snobbery, and going, as usual, to the Oxford Dictionary (reluctantly, as usual, because that’s something that Cambridge hasn't done better), I read with delight the following: . + 2. Cambridge slang. Any one not @ gownsman, a townsman. 1865. c. One whose ideas and conduct are prompted by a vulgar admiration for wealth and social tion. Also transf. of intellectual superiorty. 1848, So I:am a snob, not on count C., but on the two others, the last of which, you see was born, appropriately enough, | in the Year of Revolutions. Yes, I am a snob, First, in the Cambridge sense, and, second, in the sense that the only aristocracy I’ll -admit to is that of. intellect, though it would add character as well-character which makes something of intellect instead of leaving it easily dormant. Put in undictionary terms, it means this: that, to me, the people who should be venerated and admired, used as examples for ourselves and for our young, when the holding-up of an example is likely to be beneficial (which is seldom enough)-the people who are to me the salt of the earth are those who by force of intellect and character stand head and shoulders above us, I am wholly joyful and unrepentant in this belief, and don’t give a tinker’s cuss who knows it, or who reproaches me with it. I will go further still, being slightly defiant this morning, and say that this snobbery is being sedulously passed on to my child, who had two famous grandfathers, and is (by me) constantly reminded of it. It is something he should remember and be proud of, especially in an egalitarian society such as this in New Zealand, where the safe and unspectacular average is aimed at, in our schools and many other places, ang to be in any way remarkable in one’s intellect or behaviour is generally deeply suspect. If I can bring him up as a New Zealander with a_ reverence for

brains and character, rather than with a distrust of both qualities, I shall have achieved something. If, for instance, he grows up with the feeling that A. R. D. Fairburn, whom he loved and admired, and Helen Wilson, whom he met last year, are even more likely to have enriched the stream of our national life than this year’s, next year’s, or any other year’s Captain of the All Blacks, he will, in my opinion, be all the better for being a snob in categories +2 and the last, but not first, section of C. (It’s interesting to read the whole Oxford Dictionary definition, by the way, and see how many meanings the word "snob" has, and how it has changed in those meanings from time to time.) ba Me bg OW to an occasion wholly lacking in any snobbery at all, a Festival of the Arts on the North Shore, organised by the Community Arts Service, and coming to a triumphant conclusion with a panel discussion arranged by the Arts and Crafts Circle of the North Shore Women’s Club. For a week or so beforehand there had been the show itself, to which thousands thronged, rather startling the organisers, who had not realised that so much interest would be taken: and then, on the night of the discussion, we all assembled, with the pictures, the pottery and the sculpture still around us, to hear a panel of one painter, two potters, and a sculptress, with an architect in the chair, discussing first "What is Art?" and second, even more provocatively, "Why is Art?" This may not be startling at all to Wellington, whose art is, I am told, both more vocal and more well established than ours. But for those of us who have in the last five years or so watched our North Shore growing in awareness, and have felt like pioneer wives looking out on what had been bush, but is now grassy paddocks sustaining fat kine or woolly sheep-for --

those of us last Saturday’s meeting was a milestone. I won’t maintain that all those who came to mock remained to pray, but I will declare that very few people who came in honest doubt about the more advanced of the examples or around the walls, went away feeling so perplexed, or so worried-or so irritated. Let’s put it this way: A chink was made, by the pleasantest means possible, in many a mind: and light will come through. For, in spite of one local newspaper’s doubts, here was the talent of the Shore being shown to the Shore, the local practitioners in the arts meeting those local people interested in the arts, on equal terms, each side acknowledging that the other is necessary to communal life of any richness whatever, each asking questions, each answering questions. We had Arthur Thomson, the painter, explaining with forthright honesty why the painter paints at all, and why he himself paints as he does: we had Mollie McAllister, the sculptor, talking about the impossibility of modelling a child’s head in bronze and producing a speaking likeness: You have to forget about

colour and living texture-you have to feel the child’s head, get the essence of that feeling into a medium as different from flesh and blood as it well could be. This, for many people like myself not at all au fait with sculpture, was a most revealing and significant remark: we shall look at bronzes now with a feeling of having been in at birth, of having had a hand in the joys of the struggle, and being" therefore more able to meet the finished product on its own ground. Finally, the two potters, Betty Brooks and artin Beck, talked of their craft with that dogged love which survives many a disaster of glazing, firing, and sheer accident. I think a great many people besides myself came away from that evening meeting with ‘a whole lot of new ideas and comprehensions fizzing in our minds, with a feeling that we have started something, for ourselves, which it was very necessary that we should start. The idea of the Shore as a mere satellite of Auckland is dying faster than the bridge is rising, and won’t be revived even if, and when. the workine

of that bridge seems to enforce the position. Like Sydney’s North Shore our own is growing fast, in character as in size: the time will soon come, when people live on this side by preference, not because they can find nowhere else to live. And in this birth of strong community feeling the Community Arts Service has used a wise midwife’s technique, slapping the newborn into full cry and then starting him off on his own, as an independent life. May this life be as long, as well-filled, as rich as we could wish for any other child.

Sarah

Campion