Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 5, Issue 1 (May 1, 1930)

The Way We Go Ins and Outs of Life

page 49

The Way We Go Ins and Outs of Life

Domination! Most of us condemn it, but have not most of us a yearning for it? The admiration of Napoleon and other great conquerors is largely based on their power to dominate. How can we best achieve our more or less secret ideal? Some persons promise to transform the domineered into the domineering in a dozen lessons or so of a correspondence course.

* * *

If you look up the word angel in a large dictionary you will see that it is arranged in nine orders, which—from the highest to the lowest—are: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, or Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, or Princedoms, Archangels, Angels. I forget now whether Lucifer was originally in a class above the Dominations, but he had the Domination temperament, which he retained in his damnation, according to Milton, who makes the lost angel say: “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” Since Lucifer's fall many ambitious men have found damnation in their abuse of domination.

* * *

Some say that the best basis of domination is “Beef and Biff.” That was the belief of New Zealand's Tom Heeney, who tried for the mastery of Gene Tunney in the boxing ring. But Tunney knew that brain had to help brawn to get a pugilistic domination. It is stated that he took up boxing, not from any inborn love of the sport, but as a side-line of business, in which keen, careful study could help his hardy body to make big money. His domination was one of cold science, and when he had won enough cash he wisely chose a more comfortable way of life. He had no further eagerness for the lime-light and hero-worship of the ring.

* * *

Public opinion is the strongest force of domination in British countries to-day. In one of his essays, Gilbert Chesterton mentions that a certain type of person, under the domination of his greed of wealth, might sell his mother, or even his soul, for money, but in broad daylight, in a public street, he would not wear his trousers back to front for money. Why? He fears public opinion.

* * *

Some critics say that man has long been under domination by woman in the United States of America, and they say that woman is gaining a similar subtle dictatorship in British countries. If that is true, man has at least the comfort that woman herself is under the domination of fashion. She has cast aside old fashions, but the power of the new modes is just as strong as the tyranny of the old-time styles. So all skirts are more or less the same skirt, all hats the same hat, all stockings the same stockings.

* * *

Tootles, who is under the firm domination of his wife, has a fervent eagerness to reverse the roles. He has read up all the stuff that he can find on the alleged power of the human eye to dominate lions and tigers; he goes to any circus which has these beasts obeying a tamer. He has tried two or three stern stares at his wife, but as the chief result on each occasion was a black eye for himself, his hope of domination is not as rosy as it was. He forgets that the eye-power is no good unless it is projected from a strong personality. Otherwise it is like a lantern that lacks a light, or a bark unbacked by a bite.

page 50

page 51

Very few women have the courage to break away conspicuously from a standard style. Men, of course, are the same, even to the fashions of hair-cutting and shaving, and the fear of the third lighting of a cigarette with the same match.

* * *

Not often nowadays is the phrase, “The Fourth Estate” applied to the Press. It always was unworthy of the journalist's importance in world affairs, and to-day, of course, it would be almost an impertinence—it certainly would be an absurdity—to place the Press fourth. Sceptres are scarce in the world now, but pens are plentiful. The pen is the real sceptre of democracy.

* * *

An old almanac has some pictures of various men, with appropriate wording. Below a soldier was the line: “I fight for all.” A parson was linked with the words “I pray for all.” And finally came the farmer, saying: “I pay for all.” The statement was not wholly true, but it served its purpose. A reprint of that sheet today should have a journalist following the parson, and ejaculating: “I think for all.” Not strictly true, perhaps, but near enough. In this age of specialisation, the journalist's job is to think for all—if he can. He is certainly expected to think, for in the public view of the fitness of things the inky way is the thinky way, leading one knows not whither. “Send for the Press” has taken precedence of “Send for the Police,” as the first principle in democracy. Only one power can save democracy from itself—the force of the Press (unless a Mussolini happens to be handy).

In one form or another journalism has always been in existence, although in olden times the journalists were speakers and singers rather than writers—itinerant story-tellers, troubadours, village gossips, town-criers. Cicero was a journalist of a type who would have delighted an ancient Northcliffe. Julius Caesar was also a journalist with a less yellow style, and Napoleon's genius was as much shown in his journalism as in his havoc of war and play of love.

“Right Away!” for New Zealand's Thermal Wonderland. (Rly Publicity Photo) Mr. H. S. Robinson driver of the new “Rotorua Limited Express.”

“Right Away!” for New Zealand's Thermal Wonderland.
(Rly Publicity Photo)
Mr. H. S. Robinson driver of the new “Rotorua Limited Express.”

* * *

“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” said the philosophic Jaques in “As You Like It.” If journalism had been as well developed in Shakespeare's time as it is to-day he might have made his Jaques add, after players, a poetical equivalent of: “except the journalists, who are stage-carpenters.”

* * *

The journalist is the most public man in the community, and yet the least public. All his days he is of the public, to or for the public, but the public knows him not, for his work is mainly anonymous. Dispenser of publicity, he stays out of the public eye. The fame of the architect, the engineer, the lawyer, the medical man, can grow—often quickly—among the public, but the merit of a clever anonymous journalist is usually known only to a few outside the circles of his own profession.

* * *

We all begin life as interesting conversationalists, if not brilliant ones. Is there anything more enchanting than the chatter of toddlers? How direct they are! They do not beat about the bush. They get into the bush, and see a fairyland there. Their talk reaches into the heart of things—real insight into a real world (not a phantasmal nothingness of gog-eyed science).