PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19760, 10 April 1926, Page 6

PASSING NOTES.

It was Easter Monday and .a high day at the Exhibition when there issued from St. Joseph’s Cathedral an ecclesiastical procession—7oo strong, say the papers—and solemnly paced the Dunedin streets, an army with banners. It was a Jubilee procession of the Christian Brothers. In Roman Catholic countries similar manifestations are common. Once, at Barcelona, standing in a bareheaded crowd of thousands, I witnessed the Corpus Christi procession, a stupendous affair, in some years punctuated by Anarchist bombs. In Presbyterian Dunedin we know nothing of Anarchist bombs; —it is with a wistful curiosity, rather, that we look on the unwonted spectacle of a Roman Catholic procession. For the Roman Catholics are a peculiar people, and their ways are not our ways. These Christian Brothers who were jubilating on Easter Monday, something more than laymen and something less than clergy, are a brotherhood of school teachers that work without pay —all for love and nothing for reward. That is very peculiar. For the maintaining of their schools they draw nothing from the public purse; we do not allow them, reserving that privilege for ourselves; and so they have the amiable peculiarity of paying exclusively for their own children and partly for ours. On Good Friday, after shutting up shop and office like the rest of us because it is the anniversary of the Crucifixion, they do not give the day to junketing and jousting, nor spend it on the golf-links, nor arrange a dance for the evening. Quite a peculiar people, their uncomfortable virtues distress us. Except during the monitory visitations of the Rev. Howard Elliot we prefer to forget that R.C.’s exist. There was nothing wrong with the Inter-University, or Inter-Collegiate, Debate vouchsafed us this week but the place. The place was within University precincts —the Allen Hall. Staged in the Exhibition Festival Hall this academical boxing-match would have provided the public with an entertainment to “ beat the band.” The bandmaster and his Highlanders would have been the first to confess it. A debate the entertainment was called, and eight debaters there were, one down t’other come on; but the real interest lay in a duel kept ur> with rare spirit between platform and floor. Thus, from the platform— Earnest speaker: “We want—” The floor: “ Beer! ” The Chair: “Order, please.” The floor; “ Two beers! ” There were three judges, a politician, a parson, and a lawyer; their business — to put wool in their ears, look sagacious, and (in retirement) to toss up for the winner. Without a toss-up they might have given it to the floor; but they didn’t. One doesn’t see why. London cable of April 5: A piquant announcement is that G. Bernard Shaw, Socialist playwright, has lent £30,000 to the Easington Rural District Council at 5i per cent, for housing purposes. The piquancy of the epithet “piquant” derives from the fact that Mr Shaw is “a Socialist playwright.” Anyhow, he is a successful playwright, and also —as his friend William Archer, dramatic critic of The Times, used to tell him—an agreeable jack-pudding, in both capacities labouring in his vocation to some purpose, jl no Gio.uut) lent for housing the houseless cannot be all; there must be more behind; and, considering that the object is benevolence, 5i per cent, is a comfortable rate of interest. None the less is Mr Shaw a good Socialist. Listen to his exposition of doctrine, writing to the Spectator: I am asked if Socialism means that 1 will draw the same income as a programme seller. Certainly it dees. Why should I have less? At present, when I am working on a play, neither I nor the programme seller gets anything for it. When I cease working, and the programme seller begins, I get from one hundred and fifty to several hundred times as much as the programme seller, our human needs being practically the same. This is obviously an insane arrangement: anyone deliberately proposing it as an intentional and ordered distribution of income would be sent to an asylum. “ How much should I have, and how much the programme seller?” he asks; -—“ what exact proportion of income should we aim at as between us? I say fifty-fifty.” For the difference between what he says and what he does go back to the “ piquant ” item at the head of this note. Would the programme seller ever make £30,000 by the programme selling in which Mr Shaw employs him? Not in 30,000 years. Houses for the houseless; —in Scotland alone there is need of many thousands. Yet when the Government, stepping in, attempts to supply this need, the building trades threaten a strike. See this week’s ‘Letter to Overseas Scots, from North of Tweed.” The London Times of February 17 quotes from “ instructions issued by the General Secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers.” You must watch any attempt at dilution; you should keep a keen control on overtime; adopt a militant policy against all forms of piece work; be watchful ami limit apprentices; remember the power you now occupy is conditioned by the scarcity of your labour. Whereupon a London editor: “That, surely, is a terrible saying. It was written’ when people were perishing for want of houses. And as for its economic wisdom, compare it with its exact converse in every particular—the policy which is producing unparalleled wealth in America.” With a view to knocking some common sense into the British workman’s head the Daily Mail is paying tlie expenses of a party of British working men who will visit America to study the causes of industrial prosperity there, —a fitter, a turner, a machine man, a boiler maker, a moulder and a pattern maker. They will find that the way to higher wages and cheaper goods is by labour-saving machinery and higher production; whereas in the imbecile belief of the British working man the way to higher wages and cheaper goods is by lower production and “ going slow.” Here js story that will interest Pussy foot. Coming from me, it may serve as a belated peace-offering. It is a story of the poet Swinburne told by his good angel and better-self, Theodore Watts-Dunton, with whom in brotherly partnership he lived under one roof for years. Late one evening the poet rang the bell and demanded brandy. He was told (here was none in the house. Swinburne wanted to send out for it. “It’s too late for that, Algernon,” I said “It’s time for ua both to go to bed.” “I won't go to bed till I’ve had some brandy,” shouted Swinburne, “and if the girl can't go I’ll fetch it myself”—and he walked (o the door. “Swinburne,” 1 said, “if yon go out to-night you’ll liud your portmanteau packed and on the doorstep when vou come back, and you'll never enter this house again.” Here W'e have Pussyfoot in action, commondnb’.y in action ; —with a Pussyfoot, that limited his tyrannies to the domestic hearth I should have no quarrel. WattsDunton continues; Algernon can look the great gentleman when he pleases. At, that moment all his breeding came out: in his back, and I was almost ashamed, but he turned round and came ami sat down by the fire. What Algernon did when loose and at Urge the"next day and after is not in the story.

The English poets, I am afraid, are cn the whole not friendly to Pussyfoot. I say nothing of Robert Burns; there i; no peed to say anything; but take J* bn Keats; 0 for a draught of vintage that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth. Tastiii" of Flora anil the country green, Daucc, and I’revencul song, and sunburnt mirth! 0 for a honker full of the warm south Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded hubbies winking at the brim, And purple stained mouth; That I might drink and leave the world unseen. . . . Quite as outspoken as Calvcrley s innocent apostrophe to Tobacco, with which it deserves to be bracketed: Thou who. when fears attack. Didst ttiCDi avaunt, and Black Care, at the horseman’s back Perching, unscatest; Sweet, when the morn is gray; Sweet, when they've cleared away Lunch; and at close of day Possibly sweetest.” Passing by other poets of our time, Tennyson included —who could be touchy and even rude if the port wine his host gave him smacked of the cork —let us ascend to Shakespeare. Pussyfoot is entitled to the lament ‘‘that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains,” —which I echo with all my heart. But, alas, there is much on the other side. Come thou monarch o! the vine, Plumpy Bacchus with pink cyne! In thv vats our cares he drowned, With thy grapes our hair bo crowned; Cup us till Urn world go round I Falstaff, —one thing for which Shakespeare loves Falstaff, lavishing upon him a wealth of sympathetic humour, is his capacity for unlimited sack. Wherever else m Kiv’lish literature Pussyfoot may 'ook for shelter, he will not find it among the poets. For Lowland Scots:—Memories of indigenous humour by an “ Old Identity.” Dear “ Givis,” —The okl stories in last week’s ‘‘Passing Notes are good reading; one of them reminds me of an incident at a Burns dinner not far from Kilmarnock. The Chairman was saying grace, an orthodox one (not the Selkirk grace) when a man at the other end of the table said, “ Speak up, Tammie man! We dinna hear ye,” The Chairman looked up and glour d at him. saying, “ I’m no speak in' tac you, Wullie,” and then finished the grace. Defective hearing has its compensations sometimes. I am thinking of a shepherd who took sheep from near the Pentlands to Falkirk Tryst. He was some days on the journey, and on the way home he was told the byre had been partly burned. He asked about the cow, and was told the “ coo ” was a’ riclit, hut- his wife had got a knock on the head from a falling rafter, and had lost her hearing. He just said, “That’s nae great loss; there’s little said aboot oor place worth hearing.” Givis.