FLOTSAM AND JETSAM.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18553, 10 November 1923, Page 4 (Supplement)

FLOTSAM AND JETSAM.

• BY. H.f.o. - The Illusive Aspirate.

"Another illusion shattered b The aspirated' H, that pillar of the English social structure, is now declared to be itself a mere upstart. For, according to an eminent authority, the use of the aspirate in English does not go back further than a hundred years. Before.then, like the children of that golden age, it was seen but not heard. Nor was its use universal, even with the cultured class, in the Early Victorian era. Our grandfathers pronounced hotel, hospital, herb and humble as we still pronounce heir and honour. It was Charles Dickens who, perhaps unconsciously, helped. to make the aspirate fashionable. For Uriah Heep, by his constant assertion of his " "umbleness," made readers careful to dissociate themselves, even in pronunciation, from such a creature; and the habit, centring on this particular word, extended to others. *' Humour" is still on the boundary line, though " human" has long since crossed it. Readers of Addison's " Spectator" will find mention of " an hare" and " an hedge," while in a Parliamentary report of just a century ago there is a record of tb* payment of a sum of money for " an house" and lands. Strangely enough, the air of New Zealand, mild, and relaxing in comparison with the English" climate, has not deprived ns of the aspirate. Is it because we have among us so many sturdy sons of Ulster, who cling to their H's with as much tenacity as to all their other rights ? The Art of Advertisement, Which is, of all literary forms, "the most exciting, the most arduous, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities?" Yes. you have indeed guessed it. It is the advertisement. "No one," says a recent writer on the subject, " should be allowed to talk about the 'mot juste' or the polishing of style who has not tried his hand ;at writing an advertisement of something which the public does not want, Irit which it must be persuaded into buying." Like the sonnet, it is a limited and tpecialised form. Gone are the spacious days of Eno's fruit salts, when it was enough to fill a page with noble thoughts which, though no doubt rich in " Attic salt," had no other discoverable connection with the goods to be sold. Gone, too, most mercifully, like the dedications to noble patrons, are the yet older methods of " Heepish" obsequiousness and oily to the " nobility and gentry." Advertisement moves with the times. Prosy voluminousness is no longer the mode; stilted exaggeration has given place to the (professedly) candid, man-to-man all-the-cards on-the-table style, of which the Americans are to-day the supreme masters. Put just as the young lady with the chignon and th) girl with the bobbed hair are fundamentally not so very different from one another, so the advertisements of yesterday and of today, in their aim."' and objectives, are, like the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady, sisters under their skins! ' A Book cl the Sea. The sea and the hills have always exerted a mighty power over the mind ci man, and of all lovers of the sea none is better fitted to explore her mysteries and j to translate her moods than Joseph Conj rad, who sailed in the merchant marine for many a year before he began to write. Indeed, " Almayer's Folly," his first book, travelled -in manuscript many voyages with its author. "The Mirror of the ' Sea" is then, as we might expect, a true mirror; : it gives back no . distorted reflections, but a? perfect image. The winds :■ that sweep the sea are to him living ■■ ■ personalities, and the chapter that describes them should be , read together with Kipling's "English Flag." The one tells what they do, the other, what they are. There is a beautiful passage which deals with that most moving tragedy of the sea, the tragedy of missing ships. " Nobody .1 ever comes back from a missing ship to tell how hard was the death of the craft and how sudden and overwhelming the last anguish of' her men. Nobody can say with what thoughts, with what regrets, with what words on their lips, they died. But there is something fine in the sudden passing away of these hearts- from the extremity of struggle and stress . and tremendous uproar—from the vast unrestful rage of the surface to the profound peace of the depths, sleeping untroubled since the beginning of ages." - May we not feel proud and thankful that the author, a Pole, should have deliberately chosen English as his literary tongue?