The Book Shelf

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XX, Issue 72, 8 March 1930, Page 9

The Book Shelf

LIVING To touch the cup with eager lips— To taste—not drain it—To woo and tempt and court a bliss But not attain it. To fondle and caress a joy But hold it lightly, Lest it become necessity f And cling too tightly— To watch the sun set in the West Without regretting; To hail its advent in the East The night forgetting. To hare enough to spare To know the joy of giving— To thrill response to all the sweets of life— Is living! MORAL VICTORY The fields of ancient battles gone before The victory of their travail in each hour Bring forth; and shall we fear then, if once more, The storms of strife and struggle seem to lower? The issue waits; it stands to face the foe, — New fears, old doubts, some strife renewed again Once thought for all time stilled—what though Such be the present cause, we shall be men. See big Goliath stride with boastful mien Before the army’s unprepared array, Then like young David, confident and keen Let us be armed with strength of well-fought day. Behold, again, that single well-sped stone Lays dread Goliath and his boastings prone. —Margaret Troili Campbell. I PLANT A TREE ’'Praise God from Whom all blessings flow!” Praise Him Who makes the trees to growl A little child may plant a tree, A tribute to posterity. Sapling, or seed, shall be for me The earnest of the future tree. I plant a tree, while yet I may, A tree to grace some distant day; Onoe planted, by my faith I know, The tree will root and upward grow.

And when the leaves appear each

spring That tree will be a lovely thing, (Whose ever-widening boughs will throw A grateful shade on all below.

And so the world will better be Because I thought to plant a tree; A tower of strength, a thing of grace, A shelter and a resting place.

Even though I may not stay to see Its glorious maturity, Others who follow after me , Will praise God for a noble tree.

Praise Him Who makes the trees to grow! f'Praise God from Whom all blessings flow!”

♦ ♦ * * THE CROUCHING BEAST By VALENTINE WILLIAMS. (Hodder and Stoughton.) “There’s the worst kind of trouble in store for anyone suspected of aiding me to escape," Major Abbott warned Olivia Dunbar after making his get-away from Sehlatz Castle, where he had been imprisoned, but though Olivia knew she was pitting herself against the German Secret Service she did not hesitate. Luckily, she had not then met Dr. Grundt, Der Stelz, The Crouching Beast, the head of the German Emperor’s special staff, or she might have hesitated,— she would have had reason to. The locale of Valentine Williams’s latest spy novel, “The Crouching Beast,” is Germany and the time the month prior to the outbreak of the Great War. Information of vital importance to Britain’s Fleet has been obtained but the net is drawn round the frontier and the information cannot be delivered. Major Dunbar knows where the papers are, but, sensing his coming death, confides in Olivia, who sets out to collect them and “deliver the goods.” She meets Nigel Druce, another Secret Service man—you’ll have remarked how the Allies had Secret Service men and the Germans spies?—and, in spite of the repeated attacks and plottings of Clubfoot, succeeds in reaching England with the docutnents.

The tale is crammed full of incident but the author seems to think the tense situations supplied are insufficient and sometimes adopts that old-fashioned, anticipatory method of arousing interest—“ Little did I realise that placid summer morning that but a week hence I should . . .” But that ought not to worry the reader much with the bright eyes of danger peering round every new paragraph. At the end we are left to infer that Olivia and Nigel, to whom proximity over a dangerous period had brought love, marry Though the love element is present throughout the story it is handled strongly and without a touch of the maudlin. A paragraph on page 238 a male reviewer who has noted the first half may commend to female readers: t'Why is it that in anger we women must always seek to wound ? Men, jfoo, say cruel things in their wrath,

the crueller, perhaps, because they come from the heart; but women deliberately barb their tongue with falsehood.’.’ Clubfoot is not unknown to readers of this type of fiction and it is lucky for them that Nigel withheld his hand when he had the German trussed up and at his mercy: they may hear of him again. » ♦ ♦ ♦ ART IN N.Z. This beautiful and interesting quarterly devotes its current issue to a study of the work of Charles Meryon, who spent some time as a young naval officer at Akaroa m the early days of the French settlement. It includes some fine colour blocks and black-and-white reproductions. Interesting articles on Meryon and on other geenral art subjects complete a very attractive publication which is worthy of the support of all art lovers. • * * ♦ EXCEPTIONALLY GIFTED “We should do far more for the education ot the exceptionally gifted,” writes Lord David Cecil in the “Daily Telegraph.” “Every effort should be made to discover them, and an extended scheme of scholarships should < be introduced by which a child of remarkable ability is educated at school and university at the expense of the State, and this without the strain of constantly having to pass competitive examinations as at present. “The scale of such scholarships should be higher than it is now. Three or four hundred pounds a year given to the best men between the ages of 18 and 24 would do far more for the spread of true learning and the advancement of intellectual truth than millions spent in scattering insufficient crumbs of French and science before the unwilling eyes of children of 15.”

♦ ♦ * * ADULT EDUCATION

The - importance of education in industry was stressed by Mr. Arnold flowntree, of York, the well-known industrialist, presiding at the Educational Settlements’ Association Conference. Mr. Rbwntree said:— “It is not in the national interest that industry and education shall be out of sympathy with each other, and be so often unacquainted with each other’s purpose and policy. It is just as important that industry shall be told what the educationist is doing with the worker in his leisure as for educationists to know how industry is treating the worker in his job.

“If this can be achieved it will he for the good of education and for the good of industry,” Mr. Rowntree declared. “Moreover, it would, T believe, induce industry to extend its interests from technical and vocational training to that liberal education which we are carrying out in our 21 People’s Colleges and Settlements.”

“What a liberal education gives is a sense of values,” says the “Yorkshire Post.” “That was the justification of the old classical education, for all its omissions. Mere technical or vocational education teaches us what to do; it cannot teach us, in the deeper sense of the words, why we should do it.

“We need always a strengthening of our self-realisation as citizens and as human beings, knowledge which will help us not to do, but to be. This may take innumerable forms. There is history, to open our eyes to the long story of human achievement and failure—it was wisely said that an educated man is a man who knows history—there is art, with its revelation of the significance of the aspect of things; there is literature with the heights and depths and breadths of its interpretation of human life.

“In short, there is no disinterested study a man may take up which will not, little by little, open his eyes to the wonder and beauty of life, and so make his own daily life balanced and happy. But against all this there is a conspiracy of articulate stupidity and ignorance, to which we are all now and then parties. “It is assumed that these good things are for a minority in every social class. ‘The man in the street’ and ‘the tired business man,’ sometimes complimentarily lumped together as ‘the plain man,’ are assured that these things are not for them. They are to be satisfied with the third-rate in art, in literature, in the theatre. They acquiesce with a humility which is only half indolence. “Intolerance of the inferior in all matters of the intellect is a patriotic duty nowadays, even on utilitarian grounds, for in Mr. Rowntree’s words. ‘lt is difficult to exaggerate the importance of adult education, not only to the social and spiritual progress of the nations, bnt to its industrial prosperity also.’ ” ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ OPERAS AND TALKIES Mr. Christopher Stone, editor of the “Gramophone,” at the conference of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, said:— “If the cinema were destined to set the standard for the world’s entertainment we should be in a bad wav, for the artistic standards of the cinema, generally speaking, are the standards of the servants’ hall, and the popular gramophone records are far below the standards of musicians. “Now is the time for you to take the devlopment of films seriously. Nothing can prevent operas being filmed with every device of sound and colour that money and inventive genius can produce. The musical side of this vast entertainment trust will I

be stupendous. You who have any experience of ‘talkies’ will know the unutterable degradation of Wagner and. Verdi we may expect unless musicians fling themselves into the fray.”

* ♦ * ♦ M. TARDIEU

“Andre Tardieu is the single statesman of post-war France who might be described as belonging exclusively to the modern world. He is a man without a political past antedating the great struggle,” says a writer in the “American Review of Reviews.”

“Ho has but just entered the Chamber of Deputies for the first time when the outbreak of the conflict took him to the front. There, as a captain, he shared the fortunes of the fighting men. Wounded, gassed, at last rendered unfit by hard service for more combat, he came back to the Chamber to become, almost overnight, the first lieutenant of Clemenceau, “When Clemenceau was refused the Presidency because of the failure charged against him by the French critics of the Treaty of Versailles, Tardieu shared hie fall. He was the almost unique defender of the Treaty and the Tiger in the first post-war Chamber. He was among the victims of the election of 1924; even his newspaper languished and failed. Tardieu seemed to have disappeared. But in 1926, standing fox a constituency in the East, he was triumphantly elected in a campaign in which his speeches electrified Fiance. “It was the moment when the franc had almost collapsed, when the nation p’as turning to Poincare, when the country was for the moment done with parochial politics and eager to find leadership. Returning to the Palais Bourbon, Tardieu became almost overnight the lieutenant of Poincare as he had been of Clemenceau. Minister of Public Works, Minister of the Interior, the latter the most important post from the viewpoint of domestic politics, in barely three years he made for himself a new reputation. “Tardieu is of the generation which was just coming on when the war broke out the generation which fought and won the war. which has already recovered hope and confidence. His is the generation which is in the real sense modern. Himself, Tardieu does not belong’to any political party, is not the heir to any of the old controversies. His platform is progress, national reorganisation. He believes in France as a great power for the future.” « * * * SOME GOOD HOWLERS The Howlers Prize Competition of “The University Correspondent” is always an appreciated annual event. A selection from the entries received is given below:— Lord Macaulay suffered from gout and wrote all his poems in lambic feet.

School boards were not introduced until 1870. Previous to this small slates had to be used.

Magna Charta was good and kind and everybody liked her. She was strong. George Washington was the founder of steam. His first steam engine was called the locomotive. The opposite of evergreen is nevergreen. Lady Godiva—a jockey. The population of London is a bit too thick.

The only signs of life in the Tundras are a few stunted corpses. Joan of Arc was called Joan of Arc because after taking Orleans she married Noah. Definition of “Craft Guild”—This is when' a man makes a poor thing, shines it up, and sells it to the people for twice as much as it is worth. A skeleton is a man with his inside out and his outside off.

Quinine is the bark of a tree; canine is the bark of a bog. Parallel lines never meet unless you bend one or both of them. When zinc reacts with hydrochloric acid it gives an “F of essence.” To take the King’s shilling is tc take the dole.

A poetic licence is a licence you get from the Post Office to keep poets. You get one also if you want to keep a dog. It costs 7s. 6d. and call it a dog licence. The opposite of flat-chested is humpbacked. . A witch is a woman who has to earn her own living, and has no husband or anything. A damsel is a little plum. R.l.P.—Return immediately please. Syncopation is emphasis on a note which is not in the piece. Post-mortem—After twelve o’clock. A compliment is when yon say something to another which he and we know’ is not true.

Foreigners are neutralised when they settle in England. Q.—Fill in the gaps in the following quotations: “You cannot make a out of a sow’s ear.” A.—rasher: “Caesar's wife is above ,” A.— forty: “1 awoke one morning to find myself ” A.—dead.

Q.—Write a sentence containing the exnression “cool and collected.” A.—“ The man was cool before the explosion bnt unfortunately he was collected afterwards.” o—What do yon know of the Bill of Pains and Penalties’ A.—lt was passed to punish people who broke windows. , Q. —Explain “sarcasm.” A.—When I say “God bless teacher.”

♦ A ♦ * WORLD’S GREATEST INVENTION

Who invented the wheel? One of the commonest and most ordinary things in the world, who was its first maker? That man, who, in an age when people had barely begun to think at all, conceived the idea of the wheel, must have been a remarkable person. With nothing to serve as a model that far-off genius somehow devised a new thing. Neither in the natural nor human sphere, was there anything even remotely resembling it.

There he was, that ancient man, in a world that had never known a wheel, giving to it its greatest invention. the thing that was to make all human progress possible. For, consider a wheel-less world. Gone at a stroke aie the motorcars, the trains, the ships of steam and oil, gone the spinning and weaving machines, the printing presses, the clocks and watches, the tractors and harvesters the vast factories with their medley of wheels and armatures, gone almost everything that makes for comfort and ease. Even the cart drawn by horse or ox, the simplest means of locomotion known, must disappear, feel not that lost man of

antiquity, in some wild hut, built the wheel. He made not just a wheel but nations and empires. How old is the wheel? None can answer. As fai back as knowledge

goes we see the wheel. Babylon, Egypt, those two most ancient races of the past, knew the wheel, as their sculptures show. Yet some time before the great cities rose on the delta of the Euphrates and Tigris that wonderful unknown man gave to the world its greatest and perhaps most dynamic invention, presage of the airplane and all the mighty engines that bestrew the earth today. his gift the spur that urged mankind on to an unguessable destiny.