PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18323, 13 August 1921, Page 4

PASSING NOTES.

Football has reigned and ruled in Dunedin this week, but without any damage to out self-respect. It is true that we gave a civic reception to the South African footballers; but there is nothing in that. Civic receptions are cheap. If the Maori Healer came here ho would probably get a civic reception ; Dempsey, who knocked out Carpentier, certainly would. There is record of a Dunedin mayor in the olden time who gave a civic reception to a pair of professional sprinters. Of course wo would receive with every courtesy visitors from South Africa whose names suggest their kinship with the South African Dutch who fought us so well in the years gone by;—let us hope they are no followers of the would-be rebel, General Hejrtzog! It was mainly in honour of the South Africans that wo gave ourselves a halfholiday. Wool is down and money is tight, but not so tight that we couldn’t take a half-holiday off to sec our football amateurs beaten by a team of football experts. Beaten they were, and it was quite to their credit. A win against opponents working together with machinelike accuracy, thanks to long association, would have been less to their credit. There is such a thing as playing a game too well. The Australian cricketers in England play their game too well, pursuing a career of triumph with scandalous consistency,—scandalous because it argues misdirection. Perfection in any form of sport means imperfection in things of greater moment. As in cricket, so in football—whilst the game is on, football should be played as though football' were the chief end of man; the game over, the player is no longer a footballer ; he resumes, the habiliments of civilised human life and is once more a citizen. The difference between expert and amataur is the difference—not always remembered—between vocation and avocation. Sport as a vocation is best let alone.

Nearly allied to sport are amusements fenerally, —in particular, music and the ranaa. lam afraid to say the a|me principle applies,—that in the concert room and on the stage we should dispense with the expert and be content with the amateur. A Gilbert and Sullivan revival is promised us; the thing will be done well, and may Ibe there to see! Experts only! But Gilbert and Sullivan opera has been done in Dunedin bv amateurs ; I am not going to say that it was done well; but we got lots of ,fun out of it. So also the serious drama. T recall an amateur performance of “Hamlet” on the Dunedin stage;—the Ghost had an Irish accent, and Hamlet, in preparation for his great soliloquy, was thought to have refreshed himself with beer. Talk of amusement! —what more could we want? To great singers and great actors the world attaches an exaggerated value. Caruso, merely a great singer, is more honoured in his death than warrior, priest, or statesman. All Naples turned out to bury him, which is more than Nanles would do for pope or king. An Italian singer of long ago had equal distinction, as Horace notes in lines the bare look of which has scared many a schoolboy— Ambnbaiarum collegia, pharmacopolae, Mendici, mimae, balatrones, hoc genus omne Maeatum ao sollicitum est cantoris morto Tigclli. No reader of mine need be scared; —there is always a “crib” to fall back upon! Crib or no crib, the meaning is that all the rabble of Rome, its mummers and its mimes, wore in mourning for the death of Tigellius the singer. And doubtless they all went to his funeral. We are assisting by anticipation at the obsequies of Caruso.

A discourse by a Baptist minister on card playing (Daily Times of Tuesday) displays a commendable non-acquaintance with the subject. How should a Baptist minister know anything about card playing ? It would be highly improper. Drawing from a bottomless well of ignorance, the reverend gentleman said that card playing had to do with “admission into society.” From the card table in “society” dishonesty and cheating were inseparable. “The sly wink, the suggestive nod, tho negation of the head,” Nods and bocks and wreathed smiles, in short, supplemented by “tho accidental disclosure of a card,” were the methods by which persons of “no refined scruples ’ contrived to “promote their interests in the game.” Sixpenny points the preacher did not mention, nor betting; perhaps being aware that yon might bet upon anything, even upon the length of a sermon. But he did mention that “the card table produced jealousy, contentions, and envy, and led to alienations, bickerings, and strife.” Its popularity in face of these patent evils he left unexplained. Some one should introduce him to Charles Lamb and “Mrs Battle’s Opinion on Whist.” It would be interesting to see a Baptist minister won to that lady’s enthusiasm for “a clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of tho game.”

Spite ot an occasional recrudescence of Puritanism (“recrudescence" is an uglv word, and I apologise)—spite (I woulcl say) of this or that pulpit tirade against card playing, dancing, and the like, we may still hold that “the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.’’ There is no going back to the Quarterly hast, nor to the agitation against “human hymns and organs," nor to a Sabbatarianism more than Jewish. The London Times reviews a book entitled “A Hundred Years in the Highlands,” bv Mackenzie of Inverewe. At the Free Church yearly communion, “after the service the minister and his wife used to entertain the heritors and elders at an excellent dinner, providing plenty of port and sherry, but warning them not to drink water unless liberally diluted with whisky : for the water, drawn on Saturday, would bo unpalatably flat.’’ But why drawn on Saturday ? It would have been an unpardonable sin 1 o go to the spring on the Sabbath for a jug of fresh water. Any one guilty of so doing would render himself liable to Church discipline and censure from the Kirk Session. Among the backsliders “fenced” from the yearly communion were “frequenters of concerts and dances." So was it in the days of our fathers, oral any rate of our grandfathers. We seem to have travelled far since then. And vet —and yet—if Presbyteries and Kirk Sessions bad their way, port and sherry would be emptied into the drains, and of whisky to dilute our drinking water, fresh or flat, there would be ne'er a drop. •‘Brother Rastus, do you think you am improving?" asked the negro pastor severely, in a chicken-stealing case. “Yaas,” answered Brother Rastus, “I think I bin done improving,—in spots.” Writing from “down under”—by which understand South Otago—a Scottish woman enters a passionate protest against the League of Nations as she understands it:— Sir, —They will be going to make ns a nation of shopkeepers right enough. What shall wo do wilh “Scots Wha Hac”? We won't bo allowed to teach (*-o children “A Hundred Pipers.” “Men of Harlech,” or any of those old tunes that made the Scots “bonnie fodders.” But no! they'll never take the fighting spirit out of the Scot. Then she drops into poetry; And ho told us whore to seek him— In the thickest of the slain. . . . And a smile was on his visage, For within his dying car Peeled the joyful note of triumph And the clansmen's clamorous cheer. So, amid flie battle's thunder, Shot and shell, and scorching flame, In the glory of his man heed Passed tho spirit of the Orcamn. “You may bet your boots”—she continues—“that if the League of Nations is going to menace, the Empire the Scots will not bo iu it." I make no bets, but T readily believe. Some energetic remarks that follow are to the effect that the Dunedin Presbytery and Professor Pringle had better believe it too. England can keep her dearest jewel bright And see her sous like to their sires renown’d, "Whose Shokespeare is with deathless Homer crowned, Her freedom, tho world; hope, throned in the Light. —Prom sonnet by Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate.

In Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” the shooting of the mystic Albatross brings a weird penalty: Instead of tho cross, the Albatross About my nock was hung, says the Mariher. Days grew into weeks before this necklet, by now a pestilence, ceased to adorn him. At length, somehow, the murderer of the bird underwent a change of heart; the hideous tribe of water-snakes that dogged his curse-ridden ship seemed to him a thing of beauty; unawares lie even blessed them; That self-same moment I could pray, And from my neck so free Tbs Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea. Perhaps if I could discern beauty in Iho bridges lines at the head of this note, and in the last of them discover sense and metre, a similar deliverance might be mine. Last week, after lengthy discussions, I announced a closure; —of Robert Bridges and his sonnet wo had reached quantum suff. But no; —my precincts are still haunted by that detestable line— Her freedom, tho world; hope, throned in tho light. T. Thomson, who is sworn in its defence, will find comfort in a letter given below signed “Student,” under which modest alias a very competent authority conceals himself. 1 regret to note that T. Thomson has a grievance:—in speaking of him as tho writer of “an anti-Givis screed” I descended to “personalities.” T. Thomson is a person, and I am a person, though sometimes doubting whether I am not an institution; —any exchange of speech between us will necessarily be charged with our respective personalities. If there is offence to his personality in the words “anti-Civis screed” I will try next time to think of some other;—and meantime humbly pray that my personality may never "have anything worse to answer for.

Dear Civis, —I hope you have not really closed the interesting discussion upon Bridges’s sonnet. Even if the suggested reading of “world-hope”—with or without a hyphen—be an error, I think you have forgotten an important point, and Air Thomson also, in spito of his recognition of the archaic leanings of our author. Tho laureate writes his participles in “ed” with an apostrophe when he desires them to read as _ monosyllables. Take, for instance, “Eros and Psyche”: in the first six stanzas we find “recover’d, unmatch’d, wax’d, uncontrol’d, unspill’d, silver’d, enchain’d,” as also “aocomplisht,” which form achieves the same end as “accomplish'd” would. The inference is plain that in the sonnet under discussion “throned” is a dissyllable. Accepting tho amended reading which makes “world” an epithet, we shall find that the line swings finely. No expert reader of blank verse, stressing tho four words “freedom,” “world,” “throned” (first syllable), and “light” will fail to make music, of it, any more than ho will of the first lino of “Paradise Lost,” with its three stresses on “Man’s,” “first,” and “fruit”; it is only the inexpert that expect sense, stress, and verse lilt to bo everlastingly concurrent, not perceiving that the charm of verse pure and simple, as distinguished from song, consists precisely in tho continual meeting and parting of these physical and mental emphases in delicate “pas de deux.” I am always sorry to find myself in _ disagreement with, you on literary points, and I trust that you will acquit me of aught but a desire to help in a good cause when such occasions come. —l am, etc., Student. Odds and ends, chiefly from the Backblocks : Cable in country newspaper: Perth, July 22. Reserved judgment was given in a case in which John Simopolis claimed £25 from Henry Scruth, hotelkeeper, the former claiming that he had found a moose in a beer bottle. Defendant stated that it was a physical impossibility. The moose is a beast with horns, halfbrother to the buffalo. The physical impossibility of finding a moose in a beer bottle would be relieved somewhat if the name of the man who found it, “John Simopolis” could possibly be Scottish. But the one impossibility is as impossible as the other. —Next, country mayor, enlarging on the popularity of the Springboks: “Already the ladies are calling their babies after them.” Voice from the crowd: “What!—already?” The local paper turns this neatly: “Portion of the Mayor’s remarks was drowned in the roars of laughter which greeted an unconscious joke regarding the Springboks’ popularity.” —Last (for this time): °From North Otago: “If you want to lose your appetite the luncheonette at Muttonbury’s is tho shortest way.” Ominous, or at best ambiguous. Like—“ Try our Safety Razor—new patent. You will never use another.” Civis.—