THE SPELL OF THE PAST.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16610, 5 February 1916, Page 2

THE SPELL OF THE PAST.

lIOW IT PLUCKS AT THE PRESENT. By Constant Rkadeb. "Is it not plain, the experienced Past must bo wiser than any present?" So runs tho question put into tho mouth'of one of the characters in Alfred Austin's poetical play "Fortunatus the Pessimist." In the ■ spirit of that question I approached a pile of books which for some weeks had been waiting notice, and, as is commonly the case with books, I found them only too willing to respond to the approach. Which bears out what I havo for a long time believed, that the result of reading and its influence upon life hinjjes far more upon tho mind of the reader than upon the contents of the book. _ Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in a poem on which he laid considerable stress, called "The Cloud Confines," and which earned the encomiums of Swinburne, declares: The Past is over and fled; Named new, we naino it the old. There follows a stanza which has remarkable relation to the present time: — What of the heart of hate That beats in thy breast, 0 Time ?— Red strife from the furthest prime, And anguish of fierce debato; War, that shatters her slain, And peace, that grinds them as grain, And eyes fixed ever in vain On the pitiless, eyes of Fate. Still, we say as we go— "Strange to think by the way, Whatever there is to know, That shall wo know one day." In the concluding stanza of tho poem Rossetti commits himself to the statement:— Our past is clean forgot, Our present is and is not, Our future's a sealed seed-plot, And what betwixt thefti are we? "The Cloud Confines" was written by Rossetti in 1871, a year after the publication of tho poems recovered from his wife's gTave. Among tho many appreciations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti as poet, that of Mr A. C. Benson—who, by the way, has just been honoured at Cambridge with the LL.D.—stands supreme. I quote tho essential passago: —

Poetry had fallen under the influence of Tennyson in an almost hopeless fashion. Tennyson had himself lost his virginal freshness, and in the "Idylls," and still more in the "Enoch Arden'' volume, was tending to produce a certain empty form of blank verse, melodious, indeed, and sweet as honey, but still conventional and tame. Poets like Lord Lytton and Coventry Patmore (though the latter recovered, or, rather, won a nobie originality) had possessed themselves of the seed, and were able to gro w' the flower in luxuriant profusion. They ooaild torn out glowing verse, but verse which was soft, mild, aim able, with a certain taint of thought which may be described as priggish and parochial. Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and Swinburne struck boldly across the path, leaving a trail _of fire. They were not so much rebellious; but they did again what Tennyson had done in his early prime. They dared to use simple and direct words, which they infused with new and audacious charm; there was nothing didactic about them; they went straight to the source of pure beauty; they recharged, so to speak, homely and direct expressions with the very element of poetical vigour. But in all this Rossetti was the leader; and this process of breaking up a dominant tradition, which requires to be done at frequent intervals, and which is done when art is really alive, reacted on Tennyson himself, and gave a new impulse to the stream of English poetry.

This digression may ser7o to illustrate how wonderfully the present acts upon the past. The past re-acts upon the present; out of this action and re-action the future is created. It is this necessity to break up the dominant tradition in all departments of life and work which I shall endeavour to illustrate in the following books. I.—THE SORROWS OF SAILORMEN. Sailormen have always had their sorrows; but they have also had their glories; both themes have been fertile in the hands of poets and novelists. Men like Marryat and Conrad have written of the romance of the sea in the good old days before steam and usurped absolute control. And Masefield in verse and prose has made vivid the hardships endured in the merchant service in those good old days. Now, in a novel bearing the curious title of "The Bottle Fillers," Mr Noble gives the theme a present-day aspect and tells a story "of the all too common events of our sea history during the smug and soul-stifled days of a harnessed and peaceful competition." His book impresses the reader with the fact that, before the war, the life of the sailorman was being shorn of every vestige of glory until nothing. but sorrows remained. To use his own description of " The Bottle Fillers":— ' (

It has nothing more warlike in its structure than the war against odds, ashore and afloat, which is the perennial business of seamen. It treats of certain factors which belong to the dormant past, the stupid loadline and stupider deckload which we tamely adopted at the bidding of our competitors; of the officers and men, accoutrements rusty or flung aside, wearily engaged in directing great ships hither and thither upon the seas, and in the process filling the pantries and cupboards of the British nation. It touches on the attitude of that nation which has lately arisen from its sleep, honour and justice on its lips, to strike an enemy which long had strangled it. It touches, too, on the attitude of Authority. . . . an attitude which must never again obtrude, which must remain buried, as the war has buried it, deep—deep as the seas which lie over murdered Lusitania.

Mr Noble imparts to the story he has to tell a vigour and an intensity which carry all before them. If at times he seems guilty of over-emphasis, this fault—if fault it be—is more than redeemed by the remarkable power of some of his passages. His theme is. the ocean tramp, the straits to which huge and unwieldy vessels of this class are reduced, and the crushing burden imposed upon their officers and men by an Authority which deems the making of money the be-all and end-all of Britain's mastery of the waves. The glorious past is quite forgotten in the money-making present. In a sense " The Bottle Fillers" constitutes an elaboration of the moral so strikingly conveyed in John Masefield's well-known " Cargoes"—the degradation of the life of the sailorman, consequent upon the commercialisation of all shipping:— Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, Running home to haven in sunny Palestine With a cargo of ivory, And apes and peacocks, Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus, Dipping through the Tropics by tho palmgreen shores, With a cargo of diamonds. Emeralds, amethysts, Topazes. and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoko-stack, Butting through the Channel in the mad March days, With a cargo of Tyne coal, Road-rails, pig-lead,

Firewood, iron-waro, and cheap tin trays. The story of the fight made by Captain O'Hagan and the tramp steamer Sphinx, in tho voyage from New York across the Atlantio, the inevitable wreck in the Channel, and tho subsequent career of the luckless commander, is told in a fashion that instantly wins the sympathy of tho reader for the sorrows of the sailorman. These sorrows aro_ mainly duo to a dominant erudition which seemingly nothing short of the war could break. How completely that damning tradition is being broken is'thus referred to by Mr Noble, who says of the sailors of the merchant servico- — They were peaceful enough men in the days which this story concerncd, engaged

*1. " The Bottle-Fillers." By Edward Noble. London: William ileiiioniann. (,'ls 6(1.) 2. " Russia of To-Duy." By John Foster Frawr; with 44 plates from photographs. London: Cassell ami Co. (3a (id.) 3. " Wars of (lie Olden Times: Abraham to Cromwell." By Alfred 11. Miles; with numerous illustrations. London: Stanley Paul and Co. (55.) 4. " Fatigne." By A. Mosso; translated by Margaret Drummond, M.A., and Professor Drnmmond. London: George Allen and Unwin. (2s Gd uet») 5.

The Greek Tradition: Essays on the Ecooiistrnction of Ancient Thought." By J. A. K. Thomson; with preface br Professor Gilbert Mnrrav. T<ondon: George Allen and Unwic. (56 net.)

m extracting, unsung, such nourishment as Diiiy bo obtained from a nearly dry crust, and the nation waa unaware >of them To-day they ite warriors even as their brothers of the vvhito ensign, and hnvo given their quota of blood without chaffering'—commanders, lieutenants, midshipmen of (ho R.N.R., and Fleet Reserves, men for mine-sweeping, mine-laying, trailing lures for submarines, patrolling, trooping, lighting—anywhere where the seas roll and Britain's need was greatest. Men from the depths lifted to the heights; men without promise alive suddenly to the wording of his Majesty's order given last May:—" The King rc»aliacs what magnificent work has been done by the bravo officers and crews of his Merchant Service during the past months of war." The King realises! And the question arises, does the natioi also realise? It is to aid in such realisation that Mr Noble has written "The Bottle-Fillers," and ho will not have written in vain. lI.—THE RESURRECTION OF RUSSIA. Mr John Foster Fraser ie first and foremost a journalist and he has no desire to disguise the fact; rather does he revel in it. And in his latest book "Russia, oi To-day," ho sets out to do nothing more

than to make public such impressions as his ' journalistic soul reoeived during a recent sojourn in that country, which he had previously visited on several oocasions. When •repressions failed him, he has had resort to that favourable journalistic device —padding. Within these limitations Mr Fraser i has produced a book which is distinctly readable, which contains much new and interesting information, and which goes a long way to eettlo the question as to how far Russia's efforts and' influence will help to end the war. One or two of Mr leaser's conclusions are well worth repeating. Ho shows the absurdity of judging Russia from the British standpoint, and also deprecates the tendency to go from tho extreme which was wont to picture the average Russian as a devil and exalt him to the level of an angel. "The Russians," says Mr Fraser, " never were so black aa they were painted, and even to-day they are a great deal lower than the angels." It is important to remember that the Russians, true Slavs, are exceedingly temperamental. They are, as a people, neither warlike nor mechanical. They are essentially mystics and dreamers. Thoy lack strong will power, and depend for initiative entirely upon their leaders. "But they possess something which they would not sacrifice for all the mcchanical skill in the world —a soul, imagination, a deep love of beauty, in sound and in the written word." The Russian has tho ability, but not the determination to carry a thing through; he is at once a child and a fatalist. There ero other contradictions in his character thus alluded to by Mr Fraser I once knew a great Russian musician. By our standards he was a hypocrite, for he was openly bad in morals; and yet he was one of the most devout men I ever met. He was emotional, ho gave whatever he had in his pocket to those who needed help; but his method of life would 6hock any respectable English provincial town. The Russian has ideals, but in many cases he docs not place chastity as high as wo in England pretend to place it.

It is this emotionalism, idealism, running right through the Russian character, that makes one realise that until the leopard changes his spots the Russian will never become a handicraftsman, a scientific mechanician, an astute manipulator of the money market like his brother in the more western countries. Ho is romance and introspective. Russian literature, Russian music, Russian art, are individual, the growth of the soul, eerie, with a kind of rapturous sadness about them.

The Russian is fond of horse racing and loves good living; the picture film in which he delights would not pass the British censor, and on Sundays, in the summer, he bathes "en famille" in the "altogether." Nevertheless he has heirrtily submitted to a ukaee which at one swoop deprived him of all indulgence in strong drink. In the course of a most instructive chapter on "Teetotal Russia," Mr Fraser writes: " Viewing the. whole of the nation I don't believe that one person in a hundred has been able to obtain a drop of alcohol since the Emperor issued his prohibition. " Thus the part which Russia is destined to play in this war will be determined as much by the heritage of the past—the dominant tradition — as by the condition of the present. In this great Empire of 120 millions of people the spell of the past plucks at the present to an extent probably unparalleled in any other land._ Yet nothing can shake the Russian's belief in ultimate victory. "Millions may die, but Russia will win." The conviction left on my mind by a perusal of Foster Fraser's pages is that if Russian military effort is to be the determining factor, the war is going to last a good while longer. lII.—BATTLES OF BYGONE DAYS. If there be any department of action in which the dominance of the past would seem to have been entirely overthrown, it is the sphere of militarism; indeed, the surprises of the present war include the upsetting of many tenaciously held ideas concerning tactics and strategy. Nevertheless, there is a return to the past in matters like the wearing of helmets and the use of hand grenades—to cite only two instances. Be that as it may, Mr Alfred H. Miles's endeavour to sketch the " War of the Olden Times" from Abraham to Cromwell, with his promise to bring the record right down to the close of the present war. is very timely and full of inspiration. In a prefatory note, Mr Miles says:—

Without pretending to be a complete history of the period covered, it deals with the wars of the Hebrews, the wars of ancient Greece, Hannibal, the Scipio6, Julius Caesar, Alfred the Great, the Crusaders, and the wars of England from the Norman conquest to the end of the English civil war, including descriptions of- the chief battles, connected by synopses of intervening events. . It is not a book in praise of war, and contains nothing calculated to inflame the war spirit. It records the struggle of the world for the liberty which it values more than peace, and which it ever demands that peace may be made the more than secure. For hia facts Mr Miles has consulted the best authorities, and the labour thus involved must have been enormous. There are a large number of illustrations, including_ several reproductions of the work of eminent artiste. Altogether the book is both trustworthy and complete, and it serves a good purpose in contracting the size and scale of the colossal armaments of modern time with the comparatively puny munitions of the biggest battles of bygone days. I'V. —"THAT TIRED FEELING."

The issue. after an interval of several years, of a cheap edition of the authorised translation of Professor Mosso's well-known treatise on •' Fatigue " comes as a reminder that wo live in a day when the groat nations of civilisation are straining every nerve in a war such as the world has never before witnessed. The effects of such overstrain are likely to bo felt for many generations to come, and it is well that so valuable a work as the Italian professor' 3 scientific examination of this important subject should thus be placed within rcach of all. Thero is a general disposition to sneer at " that tired feeling" with the result that a premium has been placed upon nervous activity altogether out of proportion to its merits. The ancients understood the value of repose, and it is well ; n theso strenuous days that those high in authority should give heed to the maxims of the past. It is the same suicidal policy which keeps soldiers in the trenches without relief as that which asks workers in munition factories to work overtime continually and to labour for seven days a week without ceasing. Originally conceived as a work on education, Professor Mosso's book deals primarily with tho problems which beset teachers in dealing with school children. Nevertheless, many of his conclusions ha-vc a much wider scope, and occupy a larger area. The newer scicncc of psychology is here allied to the older discoveries of physiology, and thus the present reinforces the past in a most absorbing and interesting fashion. Allied to these two is the still more recent discovery of measurement, by which even sensations can be tabulated and compared. "So elusive are the phenomena that form the subject matter of psychology and much of that of physiology." write the translators, "that they might well have been thought beyond tho sphere of measurement. Yet, of into years, thanks mainly to the impetus given by the wonderful patience and ingenuity of tho Leipsig school of psychologists (Weber, Wundt, Fechner, etc.), scores of instruments have been invented to record and measure tho vital and mental processes. Of these, one of the most interesting and important is Professor Mosso's ergograph or fatigue-recorder, with which instrument ho performed the experiments described in the text, on which most of his conclusions are based."

The pith of the treatise is contained in the chapter on "The Law of Exhaustion," which is thus expressed: "The consumption of our body does not increase in proportion to the work done. If I do a unit o: work, I cannot say that I shall have a unit of fatigue; nor that, if I do twice or thrice the amount of work, 1 shall have twice or thrice the amount of fatigue." This law of exhaustion is further elaborated on the following lines: — On an examination of what takes place in fatigue, two series of phenomena demand our attention. The first is the diminution of the muscular force. The seoond is fatigue as a sensation. That is to say, we have a physical fact which can be measured and compared, and a psychic fact which eludes measurement. With regard to the feeling of fatigue, the same thing takes places as happens in the case of every stimulus which acts upon our nerves; we begin to perceive it only when it has attained a certain intensity. Light, sound, odour all require to reach a certain intensity before we become aware of them. Besides this, the sensaton produced in us at any moment continually decreases in force, not withstanding that the external force which produces it remains the same. There are two physiological conditions which render us insensible to fatigue. The first of these is habit. Thus, when j we are in a room with a great number of persons, we do not perceive the profound alteration which the atmosphere undergoes. The second is the gradual diminution of the excitabilily as the fatigue increases. Ocular fatigue then follows a course resembling that of the exhaustion of force in the muscles. From these and other data Professor Mosso concludes that the workman who persists in his task when he is already fatigued, not only produces leas effective work, hut receives greater injury to his organism. Clear proof of the working of the law is found in the Professor's native land: — The ruin which the exhaustion of fatigue _ brings about in man appears clearly in the degeneration of our race in some parts of Italy. In the province of Caltanissetta, for example, in four years, out of 3672 sulphur workers who presented themselves for examination, only 203 were declared fit for service. . . . Hero, then, is a province under the lovely sky of Italy, with a fruitful soil, and in a land r:ch in natural talent, which, out of 3672 youth of 20 years of age, counts onlv 203 able to bear arms. And when we t.hin'c of our country, it is with great sorrow and uneasiness that we read these figures. Cerebral exhaustion is eqqally deadly in its effects, and this side of the subject receives ample attention at the hands of Professor Mosso. _ He quotes Leopardi as declaring : " I insanely destroyed my health by seven years' study at the very time when I should have b<>en laying the foundation of a good constitution." He cites this as a summary of all that can be said on the subject of mental over-pressure. The book concludes with a paradox, stated but not explained—viz., that this great menace of fatigue is the basis of all creation in science as well as in the fine arts. V—THE GLOKY THAT WAS GREECE.

In Mr Thomson's volume on " The Greek Tradition " we get right to the root of the whole matter. These essays in the "Reconstruction of Ancient Thought," with their preface by Professor Gilbert Murray, are of extraordinary interest in view of the insidious attempts that are now being made to undermine the value of universitv training in Now Zealand by substituting a purely utilitarian course for the classical grounding which has spelt progress to the British Empire and the British race. Professor Murray, who has done so much to popularise the great Greek plays by his translations into English rhyming verse, explains in a word the reason why the study of Greek has tended to fall into disrepute. He points out that of recent years there has been an interesting change of emphasis in that study—viz., from the study of forms to the study of meanings. While admitting that neither study may be neglected with impunity, he shows tho reason for the modern emphasis:

From tho semantic point of view the central fact to grasp is that to understand Greek literature you must be able to understand literature, and that you cannot understand literature without using your imagination. Your imagination is, of course, faulty and liable to misleadjust like jour other faculties. You can never arrive at certain and complete knowledge of what Aeschylus had in his mind when he composed a particular passage. But, unless you prefer to give ud trying to understand anything at all, tho only help is to train your imagination, widen its range, and improve its sensitiveness, and by increased knowledge make it a better instrument for approaching the truth. Of course, a weak or lazy or irresponsible imagination is no use at all. In deed, the quality on whoso usefulness I am insisting might perhaps be called power of analysis rather than merely imagination. It is the power and tho practice of thinking out and realising as much as possible the facts with which

one deals, never, using them merely like counters or algebraical formulae, nor translating them carelessly into the lirst " modern equivalent " that comes to hand.

This sufficiently illustrates the value of Mr Thomson's studies. He takes such subjects as " Thucydides." "Greek Country Life." '' Alccstis and her Hero," or " Lucretius." and he manages to convey not only the facts concerning these men and women and the land in which they lived, but lie reveals to the reader the men and women themselves. :ind re-creates the actual atmosphere of their environment. Tho secret of Mr Thomson's success is set out in plain words in the essay which is perhaps the finest in the volume. " Some Thoughts on Translation." " The true business of the translator is not to_ get at tho sense of the author (which ho is assumed to know already), but to convey it to others. Grasping the sense is all work, as the deciphering of documents' is for the historian. His Droper work is finding tho

right English -words to render the Latin and Greek. And the reason why that is so peculiarly difficult is that the geniuß of the ancient languages differs profoundly from the genius of our own."

Among the more important of these differences Mr Thomson mentions the use of colour, and the realism both more abundant and greater in English poetry, and the greater exuberance or exelusiveness of English poetry. All of which leads the writer to say:

Greek poetry ie tho product of a different tradition from ours, and has all the associations of its traditions. The translator must be steeped in that tradition and in these | associations if he is to seize the values of the Greek poetical vocabulary. To do this he must be a scholar, and an accomplished one, as well as a poet. His version must produce upon the English reader the effect which the original has produced upon himself. This means not simply the transference of certain words and idioms into a different language, but tho adaptation of the old translation to a new habit of thought, a new direction of taste. It is a desperately hard thing to do.

This brings me right back to the point from which I started, the influence of the experienced past over the wisdom of the present. As final quotation, I take the opening paragraphs of Mr Thomson's essay on " The Springs of Poetry," which supplies another link in the chain binding inseparably together the past, the present, and the future. Briefly, the thought embodied is this, that poetry is eternal; it was in the beginning, it has no end. The poet is the pioneer, because poetry is primordial:— That in us which is moved' by poetry is evidently primordial, not recent or factitious. buppose we knew in what manner of reaction to the universe the earliest poetry was made, would not also the nature of poetry as the expression of that reaction thereby become clearer? We should at least find a common denominator between the moods of the old and tho new poets. The search for this has the advantage of dealing with the makei* of the poem rather than immediately with the poem itself; which seems the right way of approaching the question. By following it I have come to think that the emotion (if we may call it that) which is touched by poetry and expressed in it is a sense of the solidarity of our being with that of Nature and our fellowmen. . . . The further back we trace it, the more conscious und realised is this feeling of the unity of man's life with that of the beasts and plants and stones and the more nearly does poetry approach tho nature of a spell which aims at evoking this sentiment. And 1 conclude that poetry is still a spell or charm awakening or re-awakening the sense that we are organic with the world.