In the towns, then, you see bustling streets where electric tramways run out into roomy suburbs, and where motor-cars have already ceased to be a novelty. You notice that the towns are even better drained than paved, and that the water supply everywhere is as good as it ought to be in so well-watered a country. The visitor can send telegrams for sixpence and letters for a penny, and finds the State telephone system as convenient as it is cheap. If the hotels do not display American magnificence they do not charge American prices, for they give you comfort and civility for twelve-and-sixpence a day. Theatres and concert-halls are commodious, if not imposing; and, thanks to travelling companies and to famous artists passing through on their way to or from Australia, there is usually a good play to be seen or good music to be heard. Indeed, if there be an art which New Zealanders can be said to love, it is music. Their choral societies and glee clubs are many, and they have at least one choir much above the average. Nor are they indifferent to the sister art of painting, a foundation for which is laid in their State schools, where all children have to learn to draw. Good art schools have been founded in the larger towns, and in some of the smaller. Societies are buying and collecting pictures for their galleries. At the International Exhibition held in Christchurch in 1906-7 the fine display of British art, for which our people had to thank the English Government, was welcomed with the enthusiasm it deserved. The picture galleries were thronged from beginning to end of the Exhibition, and the many thousands of pounds spent in purchases gave material evidence of the capacity of New Zealanders to appreciate good art when they have the chance of seeing it.
The same may be said of literature. To say that they all love books would be absurd; but of what nation can that be said? What can truly be affirmed is that all of them read newspapers; that most of them read books of some sort; and that all their books are not novels. Booksellers tell you that the demand for cheap editions of well-known authors is astonishing in so small a population. They try to write books, too, and do not always fail; and a small anthology—it would have to be very slender—might be filled with genuine New Zealand poetry. Domett’s reputation is established. Arthur Adams, Arnold Wall, and Miss Mackay, when at their best, are poets, and good poets.
Of course, however, it is in the newspapers that we have the plainest evidence of the average public taste. It is a land of newspapers, town and country, daily and weekly, small or of substantial size. To say that the best of these equals the best of the English provincial papers is not, I fear, true. The islands contain no daily newspaper which a journalist can honestly call equal to the Manchester Guardian or the Birmingham Post; but many of the papers are good, and some of them are extraordinarily good for towns the largest of which contains, with its suburbs, but 90,000 people. No one journal towers above the others. If I were asked to choose a morning, an evening, and a weekly paper, I should perhaps name the Otago Daily Times, the Wellington Evening Post, and the Christchurch Weekly Press; but the Auckland Weekly News has the best illustrations, and I could understand a good judge making a different selection. The most characteristic of the papers are illustrated weekly editions of the chief dailies. These good though not original products of island journalism are pretty close imitations of their Victorian prototype, The Australasian. The influence of the Press is considerable, though not perhaps as great as might be looked for from the numbers and success of the newspapers. Moreover, and this is really curious, they influence the public less in the politics of the colony than in several other fields.
In a book on New Zealand published ten years ago, I wrote in my haste the words, “There is no Colonial literature.” What I meant to express, and doubtless ought to have said, is that there is no body of writing by New Zealanders at once substantial and distinguished enough to be considered a literature. I did not mean to suggest that, amongst the considerable mass of published matter for which my countrymen are responsible, there is nothing of good literary quality. It would not have been true to say this ten years ago, and it would be still less true to say it now. Amongst the large body of conscientious work published in the colony itself during the last quarter of a century there is some very good writing indeed. A certain amount of it deserves to be better known outside our borders than it is. Putting manner aside for the moment, and dealing only with matter, it is, I think, true to say that any thorough student of New Zealand as it is to-day, or has been since 1880, must for authentic information mainly go to works published in the colony itself. I have some right to speak, for I have been reading about New Zealand for forty years, and all my reading has not been desultory. Slight as is this book, for instance, and partly based as it is on personal recollection and knowledge gleaned orally, still I could not have written it without very careful study of many colonial writings. In scanning my list of later authorities consulted, I am surprised to find what very few exceptions there are to the rule that they are printed at the other end of the world. To begin with, the weekly newspapers of the Dominion are mines of information to any one who knows how to work them. So are the Blue-books, and that bible of the student of nature and tradition in our islands, the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute. Then there is the Journal of the Polynesian Society; after which comes a long list of official publications. First among them rank Kirk’s Forest Flora and Mr. Percy Smith’s Eruption of Tarawera. The best general sketch of Maori manners, customs, and beliefs, is that of Edward Tregear; far the best book on Maori art is A. Hamilton’s. Quite lately Mr. M’Nab, the present Minister of Lands, has made a very valuable contribution to the early chronicles of South New Zealand, in his Muri-huku, for which generations of students will be grateful. Mr. Carrick’s gossip—also about our South—and Mr. Ross’s mountaineering articles must not be passed over. Furthermore, there is an illustrated manual of our plants by Laing and Blackwell, which is something more than a manual, for it is full of reading which is enjoyable merely as reading. And there is a manual of our animal life in which the work of Hutton, Drummond, and Potts is blended with excellent results. Dr. Cockayne’s botanic articles, Mr. Shand’s papers on the Chathams, and Mr. Buick’s local Histories of Marlborough and Manawatu deserve also to be noted. Much of Mr. James Cowan’s writing for the Government Tourist Department is well above the average of that class of work.
NAPIER
Society in the towns is made up of a mingling of what in England would be called the middle and upper-middle classes. In some circles the latter preponderate, in others the former. New Zealanders occasionally boast that in their country class distinctions are unknown; but though this is true politically—for there are no privileged classes and no lower orders—the line is drawn in matters social, and sometimes in odd and amusing ways. The townsfolk inside the line are financiers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, manufacturers, clergymen, newspaper owners, the higher officials, and the larger sort of agents and contractors. Here and there, rari nantes, are to be encountered men who paint or write, or are musicians, or professors, or teachers of colleges or secondary schools. Most of the older and some of the younger are British-born, but the differences between them and the native-born are not very apparent, though shades of difference can be detected. Money, birth, official position, and ability are passports there, much as in other countries; though it is only fair to say that money is not all-powerful, and that ability, if not brilliant, has a slightly better chance than in older societies. On the surface the urban middle class in the colony differs but little from people of the same sort in the larger provincial cities of the mother country. Indeed the likeness is remarkable, albeit in the colony there is no aristocracy, no smart set, no Army, Navy, or dominant Church; while underneath there is no multitude of hungry and hard-driven poor for the rich to shrink from or regard as dangerous. Yet, except for the comparative absence of frock-coats and tall silk hats, and for the somewhat easier and less suspicious manner, the middle class remain a British middle class still. It is, then, pleasant to think that, if they retain English prejudices, they have also the traditional virtues of the English official and man of business.
THE BATHING POOL