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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 68

Arrow Heads

page 3

Arrow Heads.

. . . "Arrow-heads of sandstone,
Arrow-heads of chalcedony,
Arrow-heads of flint and jasper,
Smoothed and sharpened at the edges,
Hard and polished, keen and costly."

Song of Hiawatha.

Just seven years after the colony of New Zealand was founded Charles Dickens wrote of himself—" Inimitable very mouldy and dull. . . . Disposed to go to New Zealand and start a magazine." At that time it was the height of exquisite absurdity to suggest starting a literary magazine in the [unclear: ne] of savage cannibals, and yet in less than four years from that time the attempt was actually made; and failed, of course, as it did when tried again twelve years after. The time was not yet ripe. From that day to this New Zealand magazines have appeared with the regularity of spring flowers, and withered away almost as quickly. Their promoters did not accurately gauge the pulse of popular taste. Once more the effort is to be made, but this time upon lines such as the great master of English literature himself would have chosen had he carried out his threat and brought his genius to our shores.

I make no secret of my desire to model Zealandia on the lines which I believe Dickens would have chosen under like circumstances, although I am well aware that there exists in certain quarters a growing affectation to sneer at and depreciate the warmest-hearted pourtrayer of human joys and sorrows that ever touched a pen. It is only affectation, and so I treat it just as I do the comical superciliousness of those who affect to look down upon Shakespeare, because their minds are not capable of the expansion necessary to the comprehension of his most beautiful thoughts.

For my part I regard the thraldom of English literary princes as one of the surest and most binding ties between the Mother Country and her Colonies. However successful we may be in establishing a national literature in New Zealand, no lover of the true and beautiful would wish to shake off the pleasant bondage of the British master-minds of the literature of their ponger days. Imperial Federation may, probably is, steadily approaching—and a good thing too, from a purely practical point of view;—but it never will lined the British in England to the British in New Zealand, mind to mind and heart to heart, half as closely as a common literature.

This may be regarded as a sentimental way of viewing our connection with the Home country. And that is so. I strongly approve of the judicious use of sentiment even in the most important questions. In fact, sentiment of some sort or another, much as it may be despised, wraps the hardest of business men about in a way they little suspect. A disastrous thing it would be for all were the last remnants of sentiment rooted up and cast aside. Then, even more than now, would business be conducted in the same way that a brigand secures a purse—by holding a knife to its owner's throat. That the readers of Zealandia may never become deadened to the practical value of sentiment is the earnest hope of

The Editor.