PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18293, 9 July 1921, Page 4

PASSING NOTES.

Nothing done or said on this side of the -world wilt make better or worse the condition of Ireland. None the less, however, must we talk about it, since it interests us. But to talk of the condition of Ireland as Mr Lloyd decree talks, and tjir Hamar Greenwood, and the majority in the British Parliament, who are not all knaves or fools, is to set our local .Sinn I'einevs dancing. It is as though you pulled the string of a Jumping Jack wherewith to please the children. Personally I have no pleasure in the galvanic convulsions of a Jumping Jack, nor in pulling the string that produces them. Quite the contrary,—l sympathise with the local Sinn Feiner in his embarrassments. Tell him that if Ireland is a nation, then Wales is a nation, and Scotland is a nation, and the Jews are a nation, the Gypsies no less, and—as Aristophanes has it—even the frogs of the Acherusian marsh. Tell him that when Ireland was “granted” to Kngland and the Plantagenet kings by the Pope (of all people in the world!) Pope Adrian the Fourth of nious memory, the Plantagenets found, when they went there, not a nation but .a chaos of barbarian tribes who lived by cutting each other’s throats. Tell him this. Galvanic jerks and jumps are his only possible answer. I sympathise. Also in the wail: Ireland a nation! 1 tjelf-Determination! Dismal jingle. In no part applicable fo Ulster, however, —oh clear no! Selfdetermination is sauce for the goose, not sauce for the gander. Someone sends me copies of a Glasgow monthly publication calling itself ■’Liberty,’’ price threepence, in appearance a rag from the gutter, and by its appearance not belied. Anger, hatred, and malice are its principles, England is the target of its slanders, the restoration of the Stuarts and the independence of Scotland are its aims. Nowhere else could vou buy so much concentrated malignity for a threepenny-bit, nor anywhere else such an overflowing bushel of lies. The altitude of the British Government towards sedition in this form—call it magnanimity, call it contempt—is both hazardous and perplexing. The publisher of “Liberty” must himself be perplexed—wondering why his martyrdom is delayed. “Liberty” forsooth!—Under any other government the irony of that specious title would be brought home to him by a diet of bread and water in durance vile. Here are some of “Liberty's” gems; If wo were asked to name the outstanding characteristic of the English wo should unhesitatingly say Hypocrisy. John Bull is the world’s champion hypocrite and humbug. Throughout the ages he has been guilty of the most foul and abominable acts, but always he has covered them with the cloak of sanctity and religion. Having, with the aid of most of the other nations and by various moans crushed Germany, England proceeds at once to give the lie to all her pretensions and proclaim herself liar, hypocrite, and humbug. Sho gets Germany, deserted by her allies and starving ns a result of the English blockade, to

agree to an armistice on the basis of President Wilson’s fourteen points, chief among which were:-—“No annexations; no indemnities.” Having got Germany to lay down her arms and equipment on this solemn understanding, thus rendering , her incapable of further resistance, England at once tears up the document, dismembers and annexes German territory, destroys Germany’s transport and agricultural facilities, and crowns all by imposing a crushing indemnity that threatens to bring chaos and ruin to a onceprosperous nation, and to wipe out civilisation itself in the affected coun-

tries. The miscreants who say these things do not themselves believe them. They say them for the pleasure of saving them—the pleasure that any foul-mouthed blackguard may feci in “swearing at large.’’ SIGNS OF THE TIMES. When drapers sell at “sale price’’ AH the year round; Ami ox-boef-butchers cow-beef At leas per pound; When cofton-thrcnds are lonely In etuff of silk; And filtered water only Dilutes the milk; When sport has naught of baneful Or bitter in the sequel; When at the tote the divvies Pan out at top, and equal; When capping frolics run no risk Of Pharisaic strictures; When classical refinement Commends us to the pictures; When the unions trounce the Bolshevist, And Labour goes to church; "When not for "economics” Is acne© left in the lurch; When never another Irishman In Sinn Fein seeks resource; When St. Joseph’s makes MacGregor Its text-book on divorce; When Presbytery ventures A text from Robert Burns; “Tak nil your dram,” —and so it’s back On Prohibition turns; To drouthy Soots conceding Their whisky at a pinch; While the Reverend Howard Elliott

Takes tea with Father Lynch; —. When these things in the present The future hold in pawn, Take off your hat and humbly greet The true millennial dawn. A vindication of blank verse, by one who is well exercised in suit and service to the Muses, and knows what he is talking about ; Dear ‘‘Civis,” —livery now and then we come across this sort of thing;— “Modern heroism has a superb nonchalance entirely destructive of the blank verse atmosphere.’’ That s btorm Jameson, as of course you know. You will remember how he girds at Yeats for his “blank verso maundering's.” Now, what docs he mean precisely? What is blank verso “atmosphere”? If ho would say that modern heroism is averse to loud modes of expression, braggadocio, and so forth, is not “expansif,’’ as cur French friends say (which is perhaps best slargily translated as “does not spread itself”) —why then, wo are with him; hut what has it all to do with blank verse? That has no “atmosphere” in this kind! It is, as every student surely knows, one of the noblest instruments of literary craft, and can bo used to express anything at all that is expressible in words, he it, sprung of thought or of emotion. It can convey the fieriest or the iciest phrases of human consciousness; it can catch us up to heights of spiritual aspiration. or appal us with its revelation of the depths that, wo may sink to; it can show us delicate pictures; it can argue; it can shake us with great laughters—there is no chase of human thouirht, and feeling which it cannot adequately set forth. Whv will our critics atmosphere with mode?

Here let me nut in a word. Blank verse destitute of rhythm is merely prose measured off into lines by a foot-rule. Some weeks hack I gave an example from Robert Bridges. One from Matthew Arnold is given by Fronde in his “Essays on Literature." : The gods are happy; they turn on all sides their shining eyes and see below them earth and men. They see Tircsins sitting stuff in hand on the warm grassy Asopus bank, his robe drawn over his old, sightless head, revolving inly the doom of Thebes. They see the Centaurs in the uppef glens of Polion, on the streams where the red-berried ashes fringe the clear brown shallow pools; with streaming flanks and heads reared proudly, sniffing the mountain winds. They see the Scythian on tho wide steppe, unharnessing his wheeled house at noon ; ho tethers his boast down and makes his meal, mare's milk and bread baked on the embers; all around the boundless waving grass plains stretch, thick starred with saffron and the yellow hollyhock and flag-leaved isis flowers. Apply the foot-rule, arrange in measured lines, and you have a passage from Matthew Arnold’s poem, the “Strayed Reveller”—a passage which satisfies the schoolboy’s definition of poetry, “Where every line begins with a capital letter.” But it reads equally well as prose, set solid.

My correspondent may now resume,—to finish at his leisure; though hazarding a breach of the unwritten rule that governs this column. Ne quid niniis—Not too much of anything.

Ono of our War penmen, Chaa. G. Harper. I remember, had his fling at blank verse also. lid me turn up the passage. Here it is:.— “A wounded Tommy meandered into view. 1 thought vividly of the stagedirection in “Macbeth,” “Enter, A Bleeding Soldier,” but he did not hold forth in Shakespearean blank verso. Not at all, ho merely said, wiping away with gory hand the trickling blood running into his eyes, that lie had “caught it in the napper.” That is your British Tommy all over, and every lime. lie will not play the hero to an audience.” and of course wo agree in toto, but listen further: and there is no blank verso about him. The same obsession as we see in Jameson, that blank verse and braggadocio are move or less synonymous! Mr Harper seems not to understand that Shakespeare, if ho wrote to-day, would make his soldiers talk as soldiers do, blank verse restricting him in no wise. He would take n holy joy in “napper” and its familiars, and the soldier “cant” (for it is cant rather than slang) would run smoothly from Ids pen, as, of course, you “Givis” are very well aware. Why, it runs even from Mr Harper’s pen. though lie doesn’t in the least suspect it, Listen to how he makes his soldiers lalk;—

Oh! Vs all right if ’o can talk like

that—a perfect Shakespearean (soldier scone) blank verso line. Then but for Iho ono introductory word “Take” wo get another, two. in fact, —immediately observe, not far down the page, pickt out at random: — Take A ceegar? Thanks! Light it for me, ole man; I've only got ono useful ’and. You’ll dot

After this amusingly unconscious concession to a law greater than critics’ little notions of correctness, he adds;— I am sorry that I cannot give you any fine heroic writing here, but these are things as they happen when the dramatist and the novelist aren’t looking, and are merely life in the rough. “Fine, heroic writing”—just so : the “atmosphere” again confused with (ho mode of laying word to word as music, rhythmically, instead of as in ordinary speech. A wounded man’s speech—be it a physical or a subtler wound from which ho suffers —is hardly “ordinary”; and the marvellous rhythm that sways this cosmos from top to bottom, as every poet knows, tends in such case to show itself. But your genius need not wait extraordinary happenings: he can make ordinary humdrum life a thing of rhythm. If modern blank verse plays make no appeal to us, it is' simply tlmt the writers of thorn have not tho power that justifies the- use of (hat particular form. Were they groat enough, they would sway rs even as Shakespeare did.— l am, etc., Swara.

From New Brighton, Christchurch : Dear “Civis,” —In your issue of June 21, writing of tho derivation of_ words such as “jury-rudder,” you mention that tho origin of tho term “dog-watch” is equally obscure. To me “Taffrail’s” idea of a dog-wntch—ono that is curtailed, —seems as plausible as the story you quote from the Oxford Dictionary of the origin of “chestnut.” “Taffrail” was perpetrating a pun; respecting which lowest form of wit Dr Johnson said, or is said to have said, that the man who would perpetrate a pun would pick a pocket. The nautical dogwatch is a watch of two hours —a half watch, and so a curtailed watch, or, since a cur is a dog. a dog (tailed) watch. Fo’c’sle humour, I suppose. As etymology, let him believe it who can. Noting the use of “dog” as a depreciatory prefix, we are on a more hopeful track, —dog-rose, dog-violet, dog-latin, dog-cheap. In this succession may naturally come dog watch.

From Oamaru: Dear Civis,—May I ask your aid lo solve a little shopping event whicli leaves me puzzled? My friend and I go buying apples. In the first shop I buy 30 apples at three for one penny, equals lOd; at the second shop I buy 50 apples at two for one penny, equals Is 3d; making a total of 60 apples for 25d. My friend went into a shop and bought 6C apples at five for two ponce, equals 2s. Tho apples I bought averaged two and a-half for one penny and my friend’s also averaged two and a-half for ono penny: yet he got 60 apples for 2s and my 60 cost me 2s Id. Would you please tell m© how I came to lose my penny ? Let no one mock at this quest, for the fugitive penny. The books of the Bank of New Zealand would bo ransacked from end to end if the year’s balance were a penny out. Auditors and staff would search for that penny till they found it. But finding the Oamaru penny is not my job ;—let other people have the pleasure. Question remitted to the winter evenings, and to the combined intelligence of the back-blocks. Civis.