NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23170, 17 October 1938, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

NOT IN VAIN Say not, the struggle naught availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been they remain. If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It may be, in yon smoke concealed, Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers, And, but for you, possess the field. For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main. And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light; 1 In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly I But westward, look, the land is bright! A. H. Clough, LIVING LANGUAGE Speaking oft- the Lancashire dialect in an address at Manchester Mr. T. Thompson said that it was said to him in these days that speaking the dialect prevented children from "getting on." Well, most of the people who had made Lancashire had spoken the diaI lect. He should say that tho people with the softest voices to-day were the people who were asking for Government assistance. There were those who would like to standardise English. He wondered at what period they would have standardised it —at tho period of Chaucer or Shakespeare or Shaw? A language was a living thing, always changing, and if they standardised it it became a dead thing. He agreed that dialect was vulgar, but it was vulgar in the very fine sense in which the word was used in the 17th century, when the Bible was authorised to be published in the vulgar tongue—the tongue understood by the v common people. INTERNATIONAL SCIENCE The creation by the British Association of a new "international division," concerned primarily with the social and international relations of science, is a new departure of considerable interest and quite possibly of considerable importance, notes the Spectator. If anything in the world is international it is science, and there is no field in which scientists can more profitably meet and pool ideas on advances in human knowledge and the application of that knowledge for the welfare of humanity. The projected formation of a world association for this purpose will take time to mature, but meanwhile it is wholly fitting that closer links should be forged forthwith between the British and the American Associations for the Advancement of Science. The use of a common language has naturally produced more interchange of ideas between British and American scientists than between either of them and scientists of any other country, and both have behefited in recent years more than any other country by the advent of scientists and scholars for whom life has been made impossible elsewhere. i TOO PERFECT PITCHES

If we go on making our cricket pitches like billiard tables the time will come when the schoolboys will refuse to bowl, said the Hon. Edward Lyttelton, formerly headmaster of Eton, in a letter to the Times on the cast iron wicket at the Oval prepared for the final test. We live in a freo country, and if our boys decline to put themselves on to a treadmill wliq can blame them? In 1869 an Etonian school fast bowler wishing to do honour to the truly magnificent hitter R.. A. H. Mitchell summed the matter up thus: "Bowling at Mike on an easy wicket is my idea of Hell." It is probable that some of our Australian visitors, though less theologically minded, must be harbouring similar sentiments on their return journey. My suggestion then is that the managers o£ cricket grounds f— especially at boardingschools —should provide pitches which, without being dangerous, will allow the bowlers to bowl difficult balls. This can be done where the soil has not been ruined by artificial treatment—top dressings and other mixtures; and wherever a fair bottom of grass is left by the mowing machines. Otherwise it is desperately difficult. In days when cricket was played for the fun of it there were no canvases behind the bowler's arm. These certainly ought to be abolished from school cricket; if not everywhere. LITERARY LEADERSHIP

Where are the writers who make the same appeal to this generation as Macaulay, Carlyle, Ruskin, John Henry Newman or, among the writers of fiction, as Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, Meredith, Hardy, Henry James, did to a previous generation, asks Mr. J. A. Spender, writing in/ the Yorkshire Observer. All through the 19th century there was a recognised body of writers whose leadership 'was acknowledged without question by the great mass of intelligent people. In spito of the greater accomplishment of a larger number there is no such leadership today.* There are a great many literary coteries which have their favourite authors, and a great many favourite authors who produce astonishingly clever books. But there is no company of authors whom I can think of as exercising at all the same influence as thq great company of authors which was still at work when I was young. Writing, it seems, to me, has for the time being got out of touch with thu common mind. i lt has lost the spontaneity which writes out of the fullness of the heart and damns the consequences. So many even of the best writers seem to bo thinking of what the clever young men will say if they seem to be unacquainted with thu latest foreign models, Proust, Tchekov and the rest, or the now sexual interpretation of life brought from Vienna. In this way- the simplicity which has always been the greatest quality of the best English writing is lost in complications borrowed from Russian, French and German sources. The result is sometimes learned and dull, sometimes; nasty and morbid,/, but in general it gives one the feeling that tha. writers litre burrowing underground for far-fetched explanations of facts and motives which explain: themselves. Again and again on reading books of this kind'one is tempted to say what a great and splendid writer this man or that woman might be if only they would islear their minds of fashion and theory and just let themselves go, j