Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 3, No. 6

Defence of an Escapist

Defence of an Escapist

I saw Balalaika. And I thanked all the gods that were and all those still to be, that in a world so mad as ours, we still have Hollywood. For Hollywood may be mad, but there the madness takes a pleasant form.

Balalaika was not a great picture: it had many faults, aesthetic, historic, and others beside, no doubt. The highbrows and the pedants and the know-alls have already pointed out all of them. But I am greatly heartened when I think that I am not a highbrow, nor an intellectual, for their mission in life appears to be [unclear: allied] in some sense with Hitler's desire to smash and hart the simple things of the world. I do admire and love much that the [unclear: hbrows] profess to admire, but I bitterly resent the cult they have developed—refusing to recognise that a true lover of the beautiful and the good may find much to love in things other than the highest only.

Escapism has been much decried. But why? If, by some means of escape we are enabled to face again with renewed courage and fresh vigor the problems of to-day, why deny ourselves such an escape?

Balalaika was an escape, definitely. I enjoyed it because it gave me an hour and a half of romance and colour——a simple story of love amid the adversities of life: surely that is the oldest and most universal story, and the finest. Absurd to make Nelson Eddy a Russian prince, you say? No doubt, Yet for me he was a Russin prince for an hour and a half. And in a world of improbable realities, may we not be permitted a few improbable fantasies as well? This is not the time for grim social documents, stern dramas and poignant tragedies. Against a background of tragedy (one of