PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18760, 13 January 1923, Page 4

PASSING NOTES.

It is an ironical comment on the indictment framed against Mr Lloyd George that lii > successor stepping into the Lloyd George shoes steps also into the Lloyd George condemnation. 'The pact with France that the one was said to imperil the other lias broken outright, and the Paris press abuses both equally. British policy in the Near East shows no change. If Air Lloyd George bullied the Turks, Mr Bonar Law is concentrating warships at Constantinople. Neither East nor West was the Coalition Cabinet doing anything wrong. Mr Winston Chnrcbi’l, it is true, is a fire-eater, and Lord Birkenhead was originally ‘‘Galloper Smith”; but Lord Balfour is essentially a sobersides; Mr Austen Chamberlain no less. But if anything wrong were to bo done East or West, the Conservatives preferred to do it themselves. Naturally;—they were the stronger party, and it was their turn next. The English do not love Coalitions; —it is an old saying, and means that, trained inveterately in party ways of thinking, the English prefer division to unity. But that is a domestic affair. Internal change may leave our attitude toward things external unchanged ; of that fact outsiders arc getting an illustration. The French could never have supposed that in collecting German bad debts we should back up their policy of putting in tbo _ bailiffs. The Americans, in selfish isolation and high-sniffing moral disannroval. withdraw their troops from the Rhine. The British look on sadly, foreseeing for their sister nation more expense than profit and a heaping up of wrath against the day of wrath.

Signor Mussolino, styled by the newspapers “Italy’s Anti-Communist Dictator,” is a liew man—so new that the world is hardly yet sure about his name. Mussolino is it* or Mussolini? Both forms are found in the London press. He is a new man and a strong man; whether equal to the labours of Hercules we shall know before long. Italy was becoming a Socialist Paradise, in other words an Augean stable. The stable nr farmyard of King Augeas contained 3000 oxen and the accumulated filth of 30 years. Large figures, but a myth doesn’t stick at trifles. Hercules cleared nut this abomination by turning on the waters of a river; and he did it in contract time—one day. Less rapid is the purgation of Italy, but it may ho as thorough.

ROME, January 2. Signor Mussolini is carrying' out his reform programme intensively, and has swept away twenty-one boards and a Commission in connection with the Ministry of Agriculture, comprising 332 officials. He has also dismissed 1000 army officers, abolished 20 educational boards with a large number of superfluous officers. and suppressed the National Unemployment Beard and Labour In sum nee Board. This wdl effe"t, an annual saving of several milliards of lire.- A. and N.Z. Cable. Says the Romo correspondent of the Manchester Guardian; “Nearly all Italian public services have a superabundance of staff, imposed upon past Governments by the Socialist Party, who first advocated the taking over of such services by the State in order to provide remunerative employment to its thousands of adherents. For instance, the State railways employ a staff of something like 150,000, and at least one-third of these are superfluous.’ ” This is evolutionary Socialism, ns proposed by our New Zealand Labour Party—peaceful penetration, so that every third man gets his nose into the public corn crib. The new Dictator, with the King ami all sane Italy at his back, is making violent revolution, but revolution the other way. Will bo able to last?

It is the proper thing and quite and entirely right that in holiday time holiday sport should taue possession of our public prints. If the newspapers report a. cricket match with greater particularity than in war time they reported a battle on the Western front, it is to he presumed that the newspapers know their own business. Every score is telegraphed north and south ; every stroke of the bat; wo thrill at each hit to the boundary; over a fumbled catch wo groan in spirit. When Smith or Jones or Brown or Tonkins reaches a “century ’ it is a triumph j MacLaven’s epoch-making “200, not out, will stand on the New Zealand roll o f fame for ever. Naturally, the batsman values his “century” ; it is the cricketer s diploma of proficiency, his doctor’s degree. Once, on the Carishrnok Ground I saw Armstrong of Australian fame clean howled at’99. It was a tragedy. So near and vet so far! To go out for a duck plight happen to a Grace or a Trimmer. There are such strokes of envious Fortune. But that a past master should he clean howled at 99! —I .drop a veil.' As for column-long reports of test matches and the like, they may yield pleasure even to readers who don’t understand. “There they are!” exclaimed the ladv from America as the scene at Lord’s opened to her vision : “Eton's in at one end Harrow at the other!” Same with golf:

A young man anti maiden vcc.ro playinp- golf— the larlv quite a novice—and liad readied a hole which wni on the top of a little hill. The youth ran nn first to see the lie of the halls. “A sfvmio!” ho shouted, “a dead stymie l ” The voting lady came up with a sniff. “Well, do yon know?” she said, “I thought. I smelled something’ as I was walking up the. hill!” Now, what is a “stymie”? In sequence to this, and in supplement of offie/ial reports, may come an unauthorised communication from behind the scenes at Carishrook : Dear “Civis,”— An episode of the cricket, carnival now in progress might afford you some entertainment. The pur. relating to our notoriously wet. season. which appeared amongst the jokes in the official programme—"lt's a certainty that, it wasn’t (ho cricketers and other sports who voted Dunedin a dry district. They know different”—drew a solemn official protest from Mr Chas. Todd (vice-president of the Otago Cricket Association) and Mr ,1. J. Clark

(president). *Mr Todd also approached the compiler of the programme and requested that the “offending paragraph” bo removed. lie had, lie said, received several complaints from prohibitionists who “objected to the reference to beer in the official programme of an association to which they subscribed.” The compiler meekly pointed out that (his par, in common with others on the same page, was irally a joke. Mr Todd said lie didn't, sen the joke. The compiler hoffc-ed leave to exnlain. and did so. “ Well said Mr Tcdd. “ it’s a bit far fetched, any wav; Td like it left out.” So the par will ho found among the missing when the programme is issued for the Knglish match. Jlmnonr, as rye know, is among the missing parts in (he make up of a Pussyfoot, dust so. A San Francisco cable, this morning, Thursday, reports -“Mr William ‘Pussyfoot’ .Johnson has arrived; ho says: In the New Zealand Prohibitionist

campaign the cards were stacked against me.'’ Mr Johnson, it would seem, is a- poker player. If this stacking of tha cards against him is a humorous variant for the good sense of the. New Zealand people, wc may own the soft impeachment. A correspondent writes discussing the moral value of a belief in heaven and hell; which belief, he rays, has been openly disparaged by a Church dignitary —Canon .Something-or-Other—in Bristol

Cathedral. But subjects for praise or blame in the Bristol Cathedral arc not necessarily subjects for this column. Nevertheless I may present my correspondent with a remark from a, review article in one of the London prints: “Spurgeon's stranglehold on Victorian evangelicalism was due mainly to Ids power of terrorising liis hearers by the sheer exuberance with which he dangled the unrepentant over the bottomless pit. Also with a story from the same review A young ministerial acquaintance of mine, who in his preaching overemphasised the benevolence of Cod and nnder-einpluisi.sed His righteousness, was admonished by an old Northumbrian miner in bis church for omitting the element of fear from his Gospel. “Mr Roberts,” ho said, “you can take

it from mi old man with a long religious experience that a theology without, a hell is not worth a cl —n.” Hut on the whole subject 1 must refer my friend to the Dunedin Presbytery or lr> the Council of Churches. From Oamarn : Dear “Civis,”—Do you ever read the page of poetry culled for his paper by the editor of the Tablet? I always have a fooling after perusing the poems of having been gassed. What do you make of this —a sample : DAYS. AVo arc the marchers, Marching endlessly, Marching tunelessly, Marching raggedly,— Column and column, And column and column. Clad in gray. • • AVe shall never double-step, Never run— But quietly, quietly, Forever, forever. This is the New Poetry, a form of art in which scansion counts for not much and rhyme for nothing at all. I back up the Tablet specimen by another thought good enough for the Times Literary Supplement: AVe were two dogs; You at the end of a string, And I at the end of a string. Ant? as we passed we sniffed at one an-

other. You approved of me, And I approved of you. You wagged your tail, And I wagged my stump. AVo should very gladly have seen more of ono another. But the fates jerked our strings, And you were tugged northward, I south. You padded on, resigned, And forgot mo. But I drag still on my leash And sniff aflcr you,

Desirous further to explore Your personality. On this pattern any Passing Note, any leading article, any auctioneer's advertisement may be made poetry by cutting it into irregular lengths and heading each with a capital letter.

Speaking for one, I find the New’ Poetry an irritation. It leaves a bad taste in the .mouth. Coming to the rescue of my readers, I administer as a corrective an Otago holiday-maker’s sonnet—a proper 14-lino sonnet, true to form: HLUK-GTJSIS, LAKE WAEATIPU. The white road, winding high along tiro hill Above tiro lake, dips at a sudden turn To cross a little vale, where through the fern Tumbles in white cascade a tiny rill. A vale the straight-stemmed, lofty bluegums fill AVith (heir sharp scent, and build across tha burn A sun-shot screen, wherethrough you may discern, Below you, sunlit waters, blue and still.

The slender, dappled stems all down ths glade Thrust dark and shining leaves into the breeze, Green pendants, each a polished daggerblade. There's a hint of bronze and crimson in the trees, Against the hard, bright blue and clean black shade— Colours to fill a thousand canvases. C. J. Sonnets ! —it is luck to have a genuine sonnet. And yet I find that Charles Lamb, who himself wrote sonnets, talks

as though the pun, that lowest form of wit, was to he preferred. Charles Lamb, bo it remembered, bad lunacy in his family, and, albeit a humourist, was sometimes under suspicion as being “dotty.” About puns this is what ho says, writing to Coleridge, his old schoolmate : “A pun is a noble thing per se; it is as perfect as a sonnet, better. ' In which utterance we may diagnose a momentary lapse into imbecility. Pun-

ning, as some fine has sagely said, is “the a—b ah of wit”—infantile. Tom Hood, who, in his own words, ‘‘spat more blood and made more puns than any man,” at Ills best is exasperating:—‘‘ho went and

told tho sexton, and the sexton tolled the bell;” —you laugh, and are, angry with yourself for laughing. Much the same is the effect when Punch—who, like Shakespeare, is a licensed punster—asks, “Is life worth living?” and answers, “That depends on tho liver.” Hero is a sentence from Byron, comparing a play with a cigar: “If it is good, everyone wants a box; if it is bad, no amount of puffing will make it draw.” In three lines three puns, and they of tho highest quality. But bad is tho best. I agree with the judgment attributed rightly or wrongly to Dr Johnson: ‘ ‘The man who would make a pun would pick a pocket.” Civis.

THE OTAGO A. AND P. SOCIETY AND TAHUN A PARK. TO THE EDITOR. Sin, —Some time ago I received a circular from the Otago A. and P. Society, asking whether I was favourable to the sale of the show ground at Tahnna Park. Mr Smaill has ventilated the matter in your columns in a way that should convince anyone that the disposal of the park would he a grievous blunder. I understand that a petition is being signed protesting against tho sale. I wonder what the grand old men who were the fathers of our Winter Show would think of such a proposal. I refer to Mr Thomas Brydono, Mr A. Thomson, Mr James Hnzlett, tho Hon, T. Fergus, and Mr James Duthio, among others. It is a pity that Sir Conan Doyle was not here to communicate with them, for I am sure they would send a protest that would condemn the proposal. Personally, I would prefer to see tho Summer and Winter Shows knocked on tho head at once and for all than to see them die a lingering, unnatural death at either Wingatui or below tidal or sea level. —I am, etc., Colonial-