CHRISTCHURCH.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 13544, 17 March 1906, Page 8

CHRISTCHURCH.

(Bv Prask Morton.) I was in Christchurch four days only, so that these enn only lie offered as the rough outlines of a rapid first impression.

I had been eight, months in Dunedin, and chance excursions had only taken me south and west of my home. I found Christchurch surprising.

There is, to start with, the. weather. The heat is almost tropic, the sun is glorious and all-compelling, there is no rain. It is just such weather as wo used to get ia Brisbane at the golden apogee of spring, when we all knew that summer would be with us on the morrow. There is in these Christchurch sides a something indefinable—call it amplitude, although it is something intimately and wonderfully different,—whioh suggests the skies of Brisbane at their purest, after a wash of rain. Then there is, of course, the pervasive homeliness of Christchureh. Dunedin is Edinburgh with the edge hardened; Christchureh is the South of Eneland with the chill off. The virtues of Dunedin are Spartan; but the virtues of Christchureh are gracious and Athenian, all white and gold. To Mie stranger. Dunedin says, " Come awa' ben," and intimates that tho stranger is welcome for so long as ho may behave himself. But Christchureh stands with a gentle flash, of greeting in her tawny eyes, stands with her fair ringed hands out' stretched, and says, " Dear man, come in! Our heart has been hungering for you for more days than our regrets can count. Whatever wo have is yours!" I frankly confer that I prefer the method of Christchurch in that matter. In that delicate hospitaWeness lies the great secret of Christehurch's unquestionable charm. Hospitality is an Knglish virtue, and Christclmrrh is English to a fault. She is more English than Simla, and almost as Knglish as Bath. (This side the gates of Heaven, there is no place more English than Bath.) Christchureh people, ask you to their houses, not because they want to,do the correct thing, and not because you happen to be anybody in particular (should that bo your misfortune), but because they know hospitality for the qucenLV.st and humauest of the minor virtues, and find in the exercise of hospitality an ever now delight. In proportion as its members have discovered these things, a community is free, and sweet, and reasonable, and glad. Christchureh is incomparably less beautiful than Dunedin. She seems to have but few or our morning splendours, and none of our glows of night. As I write, there is a fire among tho scrub over towards Tomahawk. The smoke drifts in dense masses over the headland, and thins and shreds away in a wavering veil of shade across the town, A little out to seaward, however, there is a great rent in the haze, and through that there is visible a patch of sky of such an alluring blueness that it seems to pulsate and sing. On the Flat, the greens this morning are especially harmonious and appealing, so that by contrast in this quiet light the trees about Forbury Park look positively black in their shadow's. You get nothing like this in Christchureh. Up there there is no such tremendous and magnificent suffusion of transfiguring colour as we get in and about Dunedin every day. Of scenery, apart from the matter of colour—if scenery apart from colour can be in any way imagined or ap-prchended-there is very little in Christchurch. There are few prospects, and what there aro are essentially artificial and in their nature commonplace. Christchureh is, you see, of an absolutely depressing, deadly "flatness.

The river is a compensation. It is also a standing testimonial to the fine feeling and communal spirit of the people of Christchurch. Here, threading a big town in a wide. Bat land, you have a stream lovely,' pellucid, unpolluted—a delicious stream, so gay, so lazy, so careless, so impertnrbably "unbusinesslike, that here in the south it could scarcely pass muster as respectable. Of colour in patches and glimpses there is abundance on the Avon. It is rich in delightfully decorative touches, natural and acquired. There are numerous bridges, not one disfiguring. There are inviting sylvan nooks in which young love can loll" contented through these summer afternoons. There are the superb swans, familiar yet ineffably exclusive. There are no abominations anywhere, no sewer-out-falls, no defiling trickles from gasworks and dyeworks, no evidence of the encroachment of any vested _ interest other than the interest vested in a discerning people to keep a lovely waterway c'».an and sweet. Put. has does -ChrfetchnicL Piosper? How

has the • persistent, devastating spirit of modern business been so long held in check? How are fifty thousand honest folk restrained from throwing all their liquid and semi-Hquid refuse into the nearest water?. Standing perplexed before these problems, one thrills with a great respect fo' Christchurch, a heightened sympathy, a still more enthusiastic appreciation. Let it be remembered that this cleanness of Avon water, this scrupulous conservation of Avon beauties, is an utterly remarkable effective defiler of rivers. Hundreds of instances might be cited. Over at Hobart, in Tasmania, there was a stream known as the Hobart Rivulet. It leapt down from the oil mountain in jets and cascades of crystal purity. It wound its cheerful way through the early town like a ribbon of living silver. To-day it is a common sewer, a reeking menace to the public health. Following the swift heels of our thought across the world, we find the supreme]? horrid example in the Tync at Newcastle. The Tyne was a noble and beautiful river. But now—well, permit, mo to quote from quite unbiassed testimony given on Tyneside—

"Among the various sights, I don't know whether you saw, along with theatres and slums, and political meetings, and rosthetic houses, what fo roe must always seem one of the most impressive of all spectacles, short of hell—the Tyne at Newcastle. Impressive spiritually as well as physically. A. vast mass. of leaden water, polluted with every foulness, flowing heavily, or scarce seeming to flow at all, between lines of docks and factories, their innumerable masts and innumerable chimneys faint upon the thick brown sky, faintly reddened with an invisible sun, and streaked in various intensities of brown and grey and black, with ever rising curls of smoke. This'river flows, most often as deep as in a gorge, between banks of blackish cinders, of white poisonous chemical refuse, or worst of all, of what was once pure live soil, now stained and deadened into something unnatural, whereon (ho very weeds refuse to grow. Down these hanks trickle, from black blast furnaces, and rotting greenish docks, and while leprous chemical works, crumbling with caries, foul little streams, vague nameless oozes, choking with ■their blackness, staining wi'Ji their deadly purple and copper-colour and green and white; while tho air is thick with the smoke as of brick kilns, with the hospital whiffs of chlorine. And against this sky rise the masts and riggings, and funnels and chimneys and crane?, tho long line of crumbling reddish roofs and black sheds, to whero the great river, thickening and thickening in the greyness, a great river of hell, winding in huge folds, spreads itself out at Jarrow into a grey and sullen lagoon, marked with serpentine posts, and ribbed with rafts, a, Stygian lake, among the dim lines of chimneys and rigging." In the agonising hopelessness of sad James Thomson's "City of Dreadful Night" is there, in effect, anything sadder and more hopeless than that? It seems to me, at this first, glance, that Christchurch might easily lead in a muoh-nceded a?sthetic revival in New Zealand. Wo have a laborious system of inechauical education, depending on a etaff.of teachers depressed and discouraged By the mcagroness of their pay. We trouble ourselves much about the pretence of culture, and -little about, the reality of delight. Tilings are too grossly dominated by the commercial side; we are clutched like serfs by tho greasy claws of trade. In iwlitics we are becoming the heedless creatures of a, purely negative gosjiel. Our Government, is more eager to repress the impulses than to extend the freedom of the people. Enslavement to an idea is often bad; but enslavement to a formula is always vicious. Whatever is illiberal, whatever is intolerant, whatever is bigoted, whatever is selfish and mean, is utterly antagonistic to the vital purpose and justification of any free democracy. It is not creditable to' New Zealand that, while our soholarly men unselfishly strive to lead our youth into the places of sweetness and light our Customs officials arc tho censorsof our literature, and the most prominent logrollerß among our politicians the arbiters of our taste. It is not creditable to Now Zealand that our young men should think moro of Jimmy Duncan than they do of Shakespeare. It is not creditable, to New Zealand that our circulating libraries should degenerate into tripe-shops, while our hucksters roll in fatness and our artists starve.

I used lo wonder what became of the glut of bieyclfls that, falls on Australasia. I know now. All the surplus bicycles go to Christchurch, and thither all the aged, decrepit, derelict bicycles retire. In other parts of the world peoplo ask you whether you ride a. bicycle; in Christchurch they ask you what bicycle you ride. There is a theory that for every man liom into the world there is the filling woman somewhere, and it has even been argued (against all decent probability and reason) that the rule holds (ho oilier way also. For every baby born in Christohurch, a bicyclo is being put together somewhere. The place literally creaks with bicycles; and if ever motorbicycles como into, general use—well, the prospect is appalling anywhere, but in Christchurch it is inhuman. Outside one shop in Christchurch, one afternoon, at one time. I counted 67 waiting bicycles; and the place is full of shops and counting-houses, honeycombed with consequential little offices. When two cyclists collide, they just brush the dust, from their clothes and the gravel from their faces, nod a smiling apology each to the other, and go their respective ways.; it. is all in the day's work. I was informed that a man is inventing an indoor bioycic, for the use of the waitresses in tea-rooms; but this may not be true.

Tho tea-rooms are excellent—no less. I lave not seen the convenience and completeness of.the appointments, the delicacy and quality of the faro (at tho price), equalled anywhere in the world, and the courtesy of those smiling, comely waitresses is as consistent, as it is charming. The Christchureh girl deserves a column to herself; but, being timid of my disposition, I do not daro to write it at this stage. She wears her clothes, which often fit a.nd suit her, with unerring grace and a. daintiness almost Parisian. Her Jiair is often golden, but I only saw ono instance of injudicious dying. Her smile is ready and modest, and slic seems to be always bubbling over with tho joy of life. Her manpel's, so far as my observation went, are almost impeccable, easy without being hoy. doiiish or " fast." I got a little book dealing with scattered types of girl the other day. It came from Paris, and the author, M. 0. Diraison-Seylor, wrote sweetly of the Christchureh girl. Christchureh he called "the gentlest city of New Zealand." The phrase rings true, and the Christchurch girl is tho gentlest thing you can find there—gentler, even, than tho tender Avon.

You may find a symptom of my characteristic mania in the fact that every city I visit oddly suggests to me a similarity to the style and tone of some man great in literature. Sometimes the suggestion is clear, and sometimes it is very vague. In Christclmvch it was very clear, and utterly inexplicable. Why should cverrthintr in that flat, companionable city—the fine cathedral that shames the Anglicans of Dunedin, th"e heavy wheezing trams, the laughing chambermaids at our comfortable hotel, the genial sub-editor who made my merriest night there vivid with the gay splashes of his anecdotes, the artist, who talked of Paris and the sick friend who pulled stoically at a heavy pipe between his fits of coughing— why should all things and everything cry out to me in reminder of that dear, whimsical, tragical, tempestuous, tender, mad, inspired genius. William Blake, of whom previously I hail not thought for months or years? Why, as I lazily rowed my wife and the two dear girls from Auckland along the willowed reaches of that gay enchanting river, should the lapping rhythm of the onr> pulse ceaselessly scraps such as these?— Come o'er the eastern hills, and let our winds Kiss thy perfumed garments. , . . ... oft Boiitalh our oaks hast slept while we beheld With joy thy ruddy limbs and flourishing hair.

The Spirits of the Air live on the smells Of fruit, snd Joy, with pinions light roves round. Why, I wonder? And why. as I steered in comfort while the dear girls pulled, ahead of us nothing more depressing than a reach of shimmering water and dappled sunflecked shade, should I find myself quoting— And. I saw it wis filled with graTes, And tombstones where flowers should be; And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires. Why? Who can tell? Anyhow, I like Christchureh. After DunecEn.