PRESENT-DAY TASTE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 236, 5 October 1935, Page 1 (Supplement)

PRESENT-DAY TASTE.

HEADMASTER’S INDICTMENT. A FEW WORDS IN DEFENCE. (By CYRANO.) It is desirable that there should be periodical repetition of “Mr. Dooley’s” famous retort to the pessimists. Mr. Dooley said to his friend Mr. Hennessey that when he looked upon the degeneration of the times—the decay of family life, the corruption of politics, the breaking down of religion, etc., etc., he comforted himself with one thought. “What’s that?” asked Mr. Hennessey. “That it isn’t so,” said Mr. Dooley. I am led to quote a passage I have quoted several times before by an outburst of the headmaster of Rugby. Mr. P, H. Beberley Lyon looks out on to the world and sees it evil. “These are the days of slipshod English, American slang, journalese, rabid and sensational slogans and screaming capital letters. . . . It is a queer world when a sleek silky-voiced lounge and jazz lizard—the crooner—can perpetrate a few quatrains of noxious slush and forthwith be accepted by a whole manly generation, while the great creators of immortal verse sing in vain.” The headmaster has “sure slobbered a bib-ful,” but it is desirable to examine his charge both absolutely and relatively. Are there all these things in the world?

; The Crooner. Of course there are. I am especially ■with the Doctor—if he is headmaster of Rugby he must be a Doctor—in his condemnation of crooners. Not even Mr. Wodehouse—and he is a supreme artist in this respect—can do full justice to that sexless aberration, to slay whom with one's bare hands would seem not to be a heinous crime. I rank the

crooner with the ukelele as a corrupter of morale, and I have suffered for my conviction, for I was once advised to back a horse called Ukelele Lady and I refused on principle to have anything to do with such a name. She won. But when the headmaster of Rugby implies that this age is worse than previous ages by reason of its crooners, its slipshod English, slang and journalese, I am disposed to put in a respectful demurrer. One is entitled to set against all this the froth, vulgarity, false sentiment and bad English of previous periods. Think of the musichall songs of yesterday and the day before, the utter futility of nearly all of them, and the indecency of some. Think of the endless jokes about lodgers, mothers-in-law and drunkenness. Every age has its fatuity of humour, but it is difficult to believe that this age has anything emptier and sillier than many of the.“hits” of the ’seventies, ’eighties and ’nineties. Consider the vogue of “Champagne Charlie.” He sang a song about champagne—“slap, bang, here we are again!” To-day it is flatter than the flattest ginger beer, but London roared with delight at it, and the singer floated on

champagne to fame and fortune—and —- death. Remember the enormous vogue of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,”' a piece of humorless vulgarity saved by a fi,ne bouncing tune. And consider the vogue of the “dude” or “masher” in comedy—that deplorable figure with the tall jcollar and the eye-glass, with his “Bai ‘Jove” and “doncherknow,” and his ogling of girls; it is surely a gain to have out-grown him, , Better English. I take leave to doubt, also, whether there is any more slipshod English and journalese to-day than there was years ago. On the contrary there is probably less. There is an astonishing amount of good writing in newspapers, periodicals, and books. One is impressed again and again by the style of young writers. It might be said indeed that there is today more good second-rate writing, a larger body of really competent writing, than at any period in British history. Inflated and conventional styles used to be much more common. No leading newspaper would tolerate the jargon that used to be thought good form in English journalism. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch notes that if he sets his students to write about

Byron they feel that they must not repeat the name Byron, but call him “the martyr of Missolonghi,” or “the trailer of his bleeding heart,” or some such periphrasis. Well, a Londoq subeditor received a seasonable article on grouse and noted that the word “grouse” "was repeated several times. “What do you mean by this?” he demanded of the writer. “Grouse —grouse —grouse.” “Why, what else would you call them ?” asked the contributor. “Call them?” cried the sub-editor in astonishment, “Why, ‘feathered denizens of the moor,’ or something like' that of course”! Then there was the old-time reporting of sport. Boxing had a vocabulary of its own. You didn’t draw blood, you

“tapped the claret.” You didn’t hit a man in the mouth, you “rattled his \ ivories.” Such expressions were carefully employed through columns of description, which to-day would not be tolerated. Judging the Past. Immortal singers go unheard, it is complained. But have they not always lacked the full appreciation that is their due? Tennyson had a great vogue, and there is this much truth in Mr. Lyon’s complaint that poetry is not read to-day as much as it was. But it is a fact that the fatuous Martin Tupper, author of that “Proverbial Philosophy” which lives to-day only in the parody of it that Calverley wrote, wrote through the same period as Tennyson, and enjoyed a longer popularity. We are too apt to judge a past period by the survival of its best. We forget that side by side with the masterpieces by which we remember it, there issued streams of rubbish. A vast body of Victorian sentimentalism was enjoyed which to-day strikes us as incredibly weak and foolish. The other day an American delver into the past reproduced a number of old songs. One ■was called “Guard Her as a Treasure.” It is illustrated by a particularly touching scene. The mother, with melting looks, adjures her prospective son-in-law to care for her daughter. “ ’Tis thine the flower to cherish . . . and with cold neglect ’twill perish.” The object of this solicitude stands by with downcast eyes. Imagine the laughter with which such a song would bo greeted to-day. If poetry is less popular than it was, music has an. enormously greater vogue. The gramophone and the wireless have put good music within easy reach of millions who previously never heard it. In judging this age one must remember that it is different from all other ages in the eye of . its more or less educated public and in the facilities for enjoyment for persons of all ages. There may be a deplorably large body of bad taste, but there is also an ■ unequalled body of good taste.