OLD TUNES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 18910, 7 January 1925, Page 5

OLD TUNES.

They were celebrities once, as familiar as tho Primo Minister of England, when every butcher's boy on his bicycle pursed his lips to re-embody their shape. IP their day was as brief as a butterfly's, it was at least as brilliant (writes V. Satkvillo West 111 an English exchange.) They were personae gratae in every rank of society, on tho most tinny of gramophones as on the most velvety of vocalions ; tho concertina played them no less than tho orchestra; they entered the boarding-housn and the Ritz; they penetrated into the intimacy of lovers. They could not, know, poor things, how fickle and fleeting tho enthusiasms of man, or how soon those who had seemed happy only in their company would sicken with the surfeit and toss them on to the scrap-heap of forgotten things. So they grew old and were discarded, and knew the bitterness of seeing their place taken by tho impudent young. Especially bitter must havo been the lot of those pretty melodies that immediately preceded tho advent of jazz, for h£re was a thing with which they could not—no, simply could not—compete; something they couT3 not understand: something so utterly outside their experience. I daresay they went almost thankfully, so great was their disgust; almost thankfully, that particular batch, with a last indignant flounce of their pretty lilac muslins and a toss of their golden heads. But they don't die. the old tnnes —not altogether. Somewhere in odd corners and backwaters they linger, a little tired, a little worn, perhaps even with a dash of cosmetic to make them look younger; but there they nre to he found, at enfer. in foreign towns or at. unfashionable watering places in England, readv +0 bring out those fnded graces which once so int.oxicnting'y charmed, and which now induce only a not unpleasant melancholy. For it is our past life which thev resuscitate, the old tunes; moments which we had forgotten as completely as the tunes themselves.