FROM A SCRAP-BOOK

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXI, 21 April 1928, Page 4

FROM A SCRAP-BOOK

FOR PAUSES BY THE WAYSIDE i i "Life is sweet, hmlher. 'I here's a day and night, brother, Imtli sweet things; sun. muon. j and stars. all sweet things ; j there's likewise a wind un the heath." Laveiigro.

"In 179'J Constable had settled in Cecil street. Strand, to apply himself i seriously to the business of becoming a .painter," (says "I he World's Famous : I’iettires.") "lie intended to simlv {Claude and Ruisdael in order to obtain j the finest models po-sible for his work. | In lti(J2 v.r gel a eolilessioii of how this • method succeeded. "For the last two years I have j be.mi running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand. I shall return to Hergholt, where I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing! the scenes that may employ me. There is room for a natural pa in If w. The great vice of the day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth." "One remarkable fact about Gilbert's satire (said Maurice Paring in a discourse delivered before the Royal Justi-j tutiom. is litis: Jus! as those subjects j which, when lie tpsded them, were j thought to be the mot* local and I ephemeral, have turned out. as treated I by him to he the mo.-t perennial and enduring Take 'Patience' for instance. 'Patience' was a satire ni the aesthetic craze of the 'eighties. It si aproduced in 1881. It was aimed at the follies and exaggerations of the aesthetic school—the greenery -y; 1 1 levy. Grosvonor-ga-llcry, i foot-in-tho-grave, liollow-eiteekcd, long- j necked and long-haired brood of de j voices of blue china and peacocks' I feathers mid sunflowers, who were the imitators, the hangers-on and the parasites of a group of real artists and innovators, such as Whistler, Burne-Jones j and Rossetti. . . . In writing this

satire. Gilbert, if lie magnified the follies of Ids contemporaries, hit, the bull'seye of a wider target, lie struck the heart of artistic sham, so that- Ids satire is appropriate to any time and any place. "Some people will never forgive Sullivan for being popular, and never admit that a t nue. which can be as infectious as smallpox in a slum, should he taken seriously. But the whole point- of really great, art is. that while it. satisfies the critical, it pleases the crowd, that while children can enjoy it. it fills the accomplished craftsman with despair at being unable to emulate it. Bunyan s ‘Pilgrim's Progress, "Alice in Wonderland",’ Gray's Elegy.’ and 'The Midsummer Night's Dream’ tire instances in point.”

Alice Meynell writes of John Freeman's poem ".'Sleeping Sett" in this way: “Note the effect of silence that words can give. Tn the long lines of the metre I feel the motion—hardly motion—of a silently rising title, ami in the, short lines the little’ pause before another long, soft, advance.” Tile Sea Wti s even ns y little chi Id th«il* Mceps And keeps All night its great unconsciousness W day No spray Flashed when the wn\o wse. drooped, and slowly drew away. No sound From all the slumbering, full-bosomed water came; The Sea Lay mute in childlike sleep, the moon was as a caiidlc-fiame. No sound Save when a faint, and inothlike air fluttered around. No sound Tint as a child that dreams, and in his full sleep cries, So turned the sleeping Sett - and heaved her bosom of slow sighs.

‘'Humour may not- bo a rjnality fh;it. niosf fr>lks who have on!v_ a cursory acquaintance with the Wessex novels are apt to attribute to them, but to those who know their Hardy those touches of drollery that relieve the pessimism of the most sombre of his stories form an essential, and not tho least engaging, part of the literary personality of the narrator,” (writes A. H. Oarsting on “The Humour of r I homas Hardy” in the “Fortnightly”). “His true inspiration lay in tlie countryside, whence he draws his gallery of rustic characters with their interplay of human passions and emotions, almost primitive in their intensity. • . - ‘Under the

Greenwood Tree’ is an idyll in prose written under a blue and sunlit sky, flecked with only an occasional fleecy cloud. But wit’ll tin's exception, and some of the Wessex Talcs, the best of his pictures of rural life liavcv a hackground of grey skies relieved occasionally. as in Tess, with bursts of hot sunshine ; and even in 'I css one feels there is always thunder about. . . . It is not (hat humour is ever purposely introduced by wav of comic relief. It Torms part of the life of Hardy’s Rustics, and occupies its due proportion in his picture, of village life, a picture that would bo correspondingly less faithful to the gloomiest- of his realism had it been omitted. Occasionally one nearly misses it. but. the tveiitual chuckle is all the more irresistible “Tho gift of character-drawing and analysis, one of the tests of great, fiction, which Hardy possessed to a supremo degree, rccpiires an amount of personal detach nent that only sparingly permits revelations of the personal sympathies of tlie writer. T lie characters interpret, tlieinsel.es through the action and the dialogue, and the attitude of the author is. mostly, impersonal. But such repression lias its limits and in Ilardv the. personal factor outcrops in most refreshing fashion now and then. He. was no anchorite. How many, indeed, of the really great writers and poets were ■'ndil’fercnt to the good things in life? ... “How happily in a sentence he sets off for you the. picture of (lie professional waiter. Elliclborla'x father. Chiekerel {delight fill cognomen!) ruled at home, liv a. martinet of a wife, when Etlielberia suggests it. is time he retired. Her mother knows bolter. lie’ll never give up his present wav of life, if lias grown up to be a part of his nature. Boor man. ho never feels at home except in somebody rise’s house, and is nervous and <iuitc a stranger in his own. “The description of the wounded undo of the organ-blower at Melcliesler Cathedral because of bis fancied slighting by Julian, the organist, is another delicious bit of character drawing in the same book. I never seed Midi a man as Mr Julian is. lie’ll meet me anywhere out of doors ami never wink or nod. 1 don't find fault, but. you'd hardly expert- it. seeing how I play the same instrument, as lie do himself, and have done it for so many years longer than lie. How I have indulged that- man, 100. Jf 'tis .Pedals for two mart el hours of practice T never complain, ami bo lias plenty of vagaries. When tis hot summer weather there's nothing will do for him blit, Choir, Groat and Swell altogether, till your face is in a vapour, and "n a frosty winter night, lie’ll keep me there while he twecdles upon the Twelfth and Sixteenth till my arms lie scrammed

for want of motion. And never j speak a word out of doors.” j "A sense of liumotn is tut integral | constituent of the genius of all great | tragedians. Hardy shares il with the {greatest of tin -e Immortals whose ranks be has joined. i Ihe last sentence was probably an •illusion to the habit ol mind, among j contemporary artists and their patrons must have tremendous nags in landscapes and would rather have an j carth<|iiakc, or at the least a thunderslorni, which might serve as a setting | tty seme classical tragedy, than an in- { spiral ion front a turn in a lane. These people would lain- asked each other: j ''ln* wants to see a lane? \Vc have a good inn' at the hack of our house. .’ ■ I hey would want something unfamiliar,

something whose died depended on its size and strength, thus, at the worst. 1,11 mug art into a soil of rtiree show. Jis lor Constable, lie said of East Bergnoli, whoro he was Imrii and lived. I love every stile and stump and lane in the village, as long as 1 am able to hold a brush. 1 shall never tease to paint them, lie realised that to see beauty and reproduce it was an artist’s function.”

A Idle German cannon were bombarding Baris there died to that rude accompaniment the most sensitive musical Henchman of his generation, a creative artist tv ho had done more to enrich ami deepen (he Aesthetic traditions of his country than any modern master save Rodin (wrote Lawrence Cilinan in the "Leiiturv Magazine." I ?t is strange that these two .men. of profound and delicate genius, because of whom the music and the sculpture of l Yanre wear to day new aspect;., Lou Id ha'.e come to their ends in the most tragical hour of the nation which they had supplied with fresh claims upon the love of ciitlisee] men, "Rodin died in the fullness of a general public appreciation of the nature and value of his achievement. Dcbussv died in the fullness of a general misunderstanding as to the scope of his genius and the significance of his contribution tn musical art. Indeed, Debussy's importance might lie conveniently indicated to those familiar with the history of creative innovation by simply remarking that lie Inis provoked all the familiar reactions caused by the exhibition of Aesthetic novelty. Io have produced a work of art that in the same year was hailed by one 'distinguished appraiser as a revolutionary masterpiece, and repudiated by another, equally distinguished, as abominable rubbish, is to have established one's right to an olympian passport ns dearly as Mozarf and Beethoven and Wagner established theirs.

"It seems to ns merely amusing that the "Eroica" Symphony should have been .a bard nut for many of Beethoven's contemporaries to crack: and the antiW agnerites of the early ’eighties who could find no melodic beauty in ‘Siegfried' and 'The MaslcrsingerV appear as absurd and incredible at Ibis remove as the opponents of Galileo. Yet the contemporaries of Claude Debussy have bravely incurred (lie laughter of posterity by describing as ‘a miniaturist’ the composer who found intense and large-mould-ed utterance for the tragic passions of the fourth act of “Pclens et Melisande” ; who filled his “Rondos de Prinlemps” with the green tides of May, with the freshness of orchards and gusty skies, and the lovely merriment. of dancing and singing children : who captured the rhythms and colours of the sett and set them pulsing and shimmering on his orchestral canvas, leaving us a- picture of sunrise over lovely waters that stands almost, alone in tonal impressionism for breadth and splendour of imagination. “And this 'anti-lyrical' composer who taught modern music how to weave new spells of melodic loveliness, so that dozens of his eon tern nova vies, enchanted by these fresh and limpid songs, dedicated their pipings exclusively to the task of tin attempted duplication—this little master,' engrossed, they said, by ‘vaporous subtleties’ given over to ‘delicate trilling and (lie search for new sensations,’ who searched out the. souls of ‘Melisande’ and ‘Golaud’ and ‘ArkcT and 'Belle,-is’ and made them speak in his music with a poignant veracity and a. sustained intimacy of revelation llial can never lie forgotten by those who have felt its power —this grotesquely misunderstood composer had to endure tho crowning affront of hearing himself dismissed as f*jie unfaithful to the best traditions of French art. As a matter of demonstrable fact no composer was ever more essentially French than Debussy.”—(To be continued).