Nowhere in the whole Dominion did I come across concrete evidence of awakened consciousness on the part of the masses to their opportunities. None of that feverish haste to raise monuments of achievement to accompany the legislative enactments which have given New Zealand an illustrious place among the nations. True, the country is young; true, there are not enough people there to pile creation on creation. But that is not it. It is that they are not keyed up to any great notions of what they ought to expect of themselves, but are content with what freedom and leisure of life they possess.
Throughout the length and breadth of the two islands, islands more than two thirds the size of Japan, there isn't an outstanding structure of any great architectural value; there isn't a statue or a monument of artistic importance; there is hardly a painting of exceptional quality; nor, with all the remarkable beauty of nature which is New Zealand's, is there any poetic outpouring of love of nature that one would expect from a people heirs to some of the finest poetry in the world. Even British India has its Kipling and its Tagore. With all the excellence of their efforts to solve the problem of the welfare of the masses, New Zealanders show no excessive largeness of heart in the sort of welcome they extend to labor of other lands. Here, it would seem, is a land where the world may well be reborn, where there is every opportunity for the correction of age-long wrongs that have become too much a part of Europe for Europeans to resent them too heartily. Yet what is New Zealand doing and what has it done in seventy-five years to approximate Utopia?
This is not meant as a criticism of New Zealand; rather is it meant to let New Zealand know that the eyes of the world are upon it and expect much from it. Possession may be nine points of the law; but the utilization of opportunity which possession entails is the tenth point toward the retention of that which one has.
Babies are cared for better in New Zealand than any other place in the world, yet boys and girls still receive that antiquated form of correction, corporal punishment, and thought of letting the youth find his own salvation, with guidance only, not coercion, is still alien to the New Zealand pedagogic mind. Women have had the vote for over twenty-five years, but the freedom of woman to seek her own development, to become a factor in the social life of the community apart from the man's, is still a neglected dream. And young women are dying of ennui because they aren't given enough to do. The country is fairly rich, with its enormous droves of sheep, great pastures full of cattle, its coöperative capitalistic farming-schemes; but the human genius for beauty and self-expression must find opportunity in Britain or America. And even the old romance of pioneer life is virtually of the past. In all my wanderings I came across only one home that made me throw out my emotional chest to contain the spirit of the pioneer life of which we all love to hear. It was a house as rough as it was old, laden with shelving and hung with guns, horns, and lithographs, and cheered by a blazing open fire,—an early virility New Zealand has now completely outgrown. The house must have been fifty years old, to judge from the Scotsman living there. He was keen, alert, and quick, a most interesting opponent in discussion, most firm in his beliefs without being offensive. Here, in the very heart of one of the earliest of New Zealand's settlement districts in the South Island, he lived with his family; and something of the old sweetness of life, the atmosphere of successful conquest, obtained. And ever as I dug down into New Zealand's past, I found it charming. The present is too steeped in cheap machine processes to be either durable or really satisfying.
Discouraging as this may sound, he who has lived in the little Dominion and has learned to love its people and their ways, hastens to contradict his own charges. For in time, as one becomes better acquainted, one finds a healthy discontent brewing beneath that apathetic exterior. Just as the Chinese will do anything to "save face" so the Briton will do anything not to "lose face." He loses much of his latent charm in so restricting himself, but when assured that a new convention is afoot and that it is safe for him to venture forth with it, he will do so with a zest that is itself worth much.
Furthermore, there is in the atmosphere of staid New Zealand life a passion for the out-of-doors which is worth more than all the Greenwich Village sentiment twice over. Girls are always just as happy in the open and more interesting than when indulging in cigarettes and exposing shapely legs in intellectual parlors. Given twenty million people instead of one New Zealand would blossom forth into one of the loveliest flowers of the Pacific.
4
In the Auckland (New Zealand) Art Gallery hangs a picture representing the coming of the Maories to New Zealand. Their long canoe is filled with emaciated people vividly suggesting the suffering and privation they must have undergone in coming across the mainland some four hundred years ago. Venturing without sail or compass, these daring Polynesians must have possessed intrepid and courageous natures.
Yet at the time I was in that gallery the place was full of stifled boyish laughter. A half-dozen little tots, with spectacles and school-bags, one with blazing red hair, had come to see the pictures. They were not Maori children, but the offspring of the white race, which less than a hundred years ago came in their sailing-vessels and steamers, with powder and lead, and took with comparative ease a land won by such daring travail.
I had heard much of these natives,—idyllic tales of their charm and the lure of their maidens. Those lovely Maori girls! I expected to see them crowding the streets of Auckland. But they were conspicuous by their absence. Occasionally a few could be seen squatting on the sidewalks, more strangers to the city than I, more outstanding from the display of color and manner which thronged Queens Street than any American could be in so ultra a British community as dominates New Zealand. Where are the Maories? I wondered. Upon their "reservations" like our own Amerinds, or lost to their own costumes and even to their own blood and color?