THE WEEK.

Otago Witness, Issue 2262, 8 July 1897, Page 29

THE WEEK.

" Nunquam iliuil mtura, aliud sapientia dixit." — Juvenal. "Good nature and good sense must erer join." — Porit. The Danedin Parliamentary Union, . in passing by an " overwhelmGood ing majority " Mr Melland's Resolutions, motion that a policy of economy and retrenchment is urgently required in our public affairs, only did what any public meeting anywhere in the colony would do to-morrow if it were asked. In fact, Parliament itself would pass such resolutions by the dozen — and then have plenty of precedents to quote for the operation. There might or might not be a private understanding with the Ministry of the day that the declaration was to be regarded as a pleasant concession to public sentiment and was to mean nothiDgj or,

more likely still, there might be a series of | private understandings to the effect that the J self-denying ordinance in question was to ; apply strictly to other people's districts and I " not to mine, you understand." Bat whether i there was or was not anjthing o£ the kind, j it would come to the same thing in the end. On one pretext or another, the millions i standing to the debit of the people would go on mounting up, and a " progressive " policy — progressive more' in its relation to the public debt than in anj j other sense — would continue to receive the { active support of the House and the silent ' approval of a majority of the constituencies. | Where f?e see a Ministry intent upon submitting its Estimates, to .Parliament at a period in the session when discussion is posiible; when we see a House that will insist upon that being dode if the Ministry does not volunteer to do it ;'■ and when we see a firm and overmastering determination in the constituencies to send to the rightabout both House and Ministry, if so obvious a moral and economical necessity is not complied with — then, and not till then, shall we be impressed by the passing of such motions ; as Mr Melland's by an "overwhelming majority "of any public^ assemblage. There is probably more bypocrie^ current about matters of public debt than about any other department of public affairs, except perhaps j (among professional Liberals) about devotion' to the interests of labour and contempt for : titles and riches and multiplicity of profitable public offices. Byron might safely have amended his well-known couplet about earning a right to commit particular 'sins by exceptional vigour in condemning others' sins J that at the time we don't happen to want to ! commit at all. He might have pointed cut j that a good many people seek safety by the more direct method of denouncing with virtuous horror the very enormities they are at the time in the act of committing or just about to commit. In fact, it might have been some such incident as that of the Parliamentary Union resolution (and not, as he pretended, a more shocking one) that in- { spired him with the sarcasm concerning that very human young person who " whisp'ring she wculd ne'er consent — consented." The Savage Olub is an institution we have been wont to view from afar, Savages as the Peri viewed the at Flay. gate of Paradise, with much vaguely felt reverence and occasionally a consuming desire to enter in — a privilege till now cruelly denied us. A weird and creepy fascination all its own now seems to attach to a number of ordinary peraons who, assembling together for the purpose of passing an evening in an atmosphere of literature and multifarious tobaccos, -delight in bestowing upon each other the ferocious appellation of " Savages,"' after the manner of the fathers of the original institution, founded exactly 40 years ago. We do not remember that until last week any. of the doubtless numerous and excellent essays addressed to " brother Savages " by learned members ever saw the light. If w« were to say that the insight into the proceedings of the club which vi c have obtained by a perusal of Brother Gilray's paper on " Victorian Literature " has modified to quite a comfortable degree the eagerness of our desire to share its privileges, the remark might sound unkind ; and yet there is the instinctive feeling, plainly enough to be felt, and perhaps indeed enjoyed as a permanent respite from the unsatisfied longings already alluded to. No . doubt Professor Gilray's essay is in its way an admirable one. Tendered to the compilers of a universal encyclopaedia in three volumes, or, still better, to the editors of Haydn's Dictionary of Datee, it might have been eagerly snapped up as covering the whole ground desired — and what more could those responsible for such compilations demand ? Considered as a contribution to the hilarity of a social evening in Eecord Week, we are troubled by paiofnl doubts as to its efficiency. But then we were not there, and are obviously writing in the dark. Professor Gilray, for instance, must be of quite a different opinion, otherwise be would not have apokgised at the outset for the " imperfection " — that is, the inadequate comprehensiveness — of his review. " No one," said the professor modestly, "can ba more conscious than I am how imperfect such a review must be." Nevertheless, it might do good. "It may gratify a legitimate curiosity " (the brother Savages may have forgotten some of their dates), "and it may suggest lines of reading to some cf the younger members of | our club, and help to make them proud of belonging to a race that has given to the world bo many imperishable literary works " . — that ip, of couise, works that would have ' been, for them, perishable if the professor bad not come to the rescue with the preserva- ; tive operaticn of his essay. It has not had ' precisely the effect described upon us, but j that may be due to inveterate unregenerative- ' ness in the subjects rather than want of ! efficacy in the agent. What we have just j i quoted is followed by a table of names and j | dates of about half a column long, which we i will pass, and proceed to give an idea of the | main body of the paper. j < " Some miscellaneous facts of interest in \ literary history " follow the : A Few tabular list of names, &c, ' Examples. jnst mentioned. One of the qualities at least attributed by the author to these facts is amply justified. They are very miscellaneous. They comprise among other things particulars ! about Madame d'Arblay, the Free Libraries j Act, the opening of the State Paper Office to the public (we wonder if the public was as ravenous for the perusal of Blue Books then as it is now), the foundation of the Early English Text Society, eotqe remarks of " Principal Donaldson of St. Andrews," more English societies (10 of them— dates, founders, and specialties duly catalogued), and similar epochs in the Victorian era. Then the newspaper press is dealt with in a paragraph bristling with figure?, ranging from a modest 12 to a matter of 32 millions — its development being " enormaus," oertain circulations also " enormous," their improvement " immense," and their quality " the finest in the world." Newspapers, we are further told, have much enlarged their scope in the last 60 years, and now publish not j only news, articles, and speeches, but actu- , ally reviews of books— a characteristic we

| confess we were not aware was purely Vic- 1 j torian. Then comes periodical writing (mii crease as before — " immense "), novels (in ! regard to which all judgment i 3 challenge- | able, the professor's not excepted), and some I other departments of literary work. We like Mr Gilray's section on novels the least of ail I his criticisms, but it would take too long to say why. We daresay his summary of the leading characteristics of some of the Victorian divines would pass muster much more readily j with experts, among whom we only hope j that the professor's brother Savages may be ' correctly classed. On the other hand, the ! professor's philosophic disquisition on the " development of the historic sense " in relation to heredity, relativity, and so on, is misty in the extreme, and so far as we understand it (which is not very far) of somewhat doubtful value. On Victoriaa poetry we go nearly all the way with Mr Gilray ; and his reference to Professor Huxley as a writer is graceful and well sustained. Some oddities may be noticed as coming from a professor of the English language. In an elaborate comparison between the speaking voices of ; Gladstone, Bright, and Spurgeon (the appositeness of which, by the way, in an essay on literature is not very apparent), Mr Gilray says: "To this day I feel puzzled as to which of the threo I is the richest and most powerful," as though ' he were still hearing the voices of the two | who are now addressing the other world, it any. "No influence has been so' unique as his." Implying degrees of uniqueness is a new use of language. '4 One of the most pleasing notes of Victorian literature i» the extent to which," &c, gives an unacouatomed versatility to notes ; and several other such novelties might be picked out by the captious. It is not, however, for such qualities as these, but for the deadly absence of " go," that we should have thought the paper unsuited to the civilised Savages to whom it was addressed. Where it is merely opinionative, Mr Gilray's opinions may, for all we know, be bettor than ours (which are mostly different) ; but the melancholy, dragging dulness of the essay is quite unmistakable. The one little incident of a girl named Fanny confiding to a friend that the grim Dr Johnson had " actually kissed her " is the one ghost of a gleam of sunshine that one gets in the whole laborious and doubtless most conscientious compilation from beginning to end. It remains to be seen what rank the diacfryery in • photographic A science which has lately Photographic been announced from WanRevolution, ganui will take in the greater world to which itß description is now speeding. The fact that it has been energetically taken up by a professional firm of the highest eminence in this country is sufficient at ones to arrest the interest of all ; and the results at present attained are described as really remarkable and unquestionably novel. Inventors, like prophets (the old double-edged difficulty about the true construction of the text alluded to must not be quoted against us here), are apt to receive scant honour in their own country, especially if that conntry is youDg and small, and more especially still if the invention in question happens to belong in any degree to the domain of art. We .can only hope that Mr Martin, the inventor of " bas-relief photography," may prove a brilliant exception to the rule. If the claims made for him are not grossly exaggerated, he has taken a etep towards ultimately applying to the sculptor's art; the modifications which the msroti bf photographic discovery has already impresaed upon these of the designer, the j chartist, and the illustrator. It is perhaps a ! little unfortunate for Mr Martin that the ! learned leaders of photographic progress j in Europe have quite lately been j a good deal **• riled" by the outcome of ] certain tremendous claims made by alleged inventors of " colour photography," in which claims some of them, were, up to a certain point, strongly inclined to believe. The ( latest and most comprehensive claimant pub- j lished bis process (duly patented) the other ! day. In brief, it was found to consist of a ! formula (the most portentous we ever heard i of) which may be briefly summarised thus : i Take the entire contents of a chemist's shop, mix it with a grccer's and oilman's, get it melted at the mint with an assortment of all I the known metals and subsequently dissolved j in a compound of all the acids yet invented, J boil and free z a it, subject it to distillation, evaporate and crystallise it, pour into it a careful mixture of all the aniline and nonaniline dyes from Syrian purpla to the latest shade of magenta, repeat, dip your photograph, and await results (one of which, is j may just be mentioned in passing, turned out . to be a green moustache). After a loaej and i , eager suspense a little of this kind cf thing j I goes a long way, and, as we have said, Mr ■ Martin may be unlucky enough to find the j chiefs of his profession in Europe in a non- j J receptive kind of mood. But that will not I ! matter if he has struck upon a really good i thing. We hope he has, for bis own sake ! and for that of the reputation of New j Zaaland. J Ropata was about the lasf of the great [ Maoris. There will never be any more great ! ones, because the principal element in Maori : greatness — that which is in artistic language j called the sense of contrast — will never again be present. Neither will the picturesquenesß, of which the setting of Eopata's figure had so great a share. We still have Kemp, or Kepa, as he should be called ;. but he has . ceased to be a spectacle in the old sense, and I contents himself by occasionally earning the ' title in a new. The M*ori greatness of the new era is the greatcebs of Te Whiti and Tobu, who don't take the field, but sit draped in inadequate and highly-perfumed robes in their dwellings at Farihaka, uttering oracular gibberish about the potato being cooked, and, it is to be feared, glariDg at each other from their respective squatting grounds as rival prophets always do. These Maori leaders spent the most brilliant period of their eminence in being personally conducted round the colony by the minions of the hated pakeha (with a view to . impressing them with the magnificence and luxury in which we all live), and they have not been heard from since, save at rare intervals when a premier has passed that way and looked in upon them for a friendly chat about nothing in particular at the public expense. Ropata has seen all such end-of-the-centurj Maori-

dom through, and was a great man and ft grand soldier before it began. His methods, U3 may be gathered from his brief biography, were occasionally somewhat eastern, but ho was always ready to take as well as give, and he faced bullets as most men face hailstones. He has gone to his rest at a good old age, preceded but a little by the grandest of his race — old Bewi Maniapoto — and if there be still a Maori quarter in the abode of the Atuas he is sure of the 'welcome due to a gallant warrior who did his simple duty here on earth.

Very minute, if not indeed microscopic, examination is requisite, together withjuuch familiarity with " libels " and other abstruse ecclesiastical forms, if one is to follow the squabble between Mr Byley and the presbytery as far as the contending parties would appear to desire. The doubtful point is whether it is really necessary to oblige these gentlemen so far in order to arrive at the true aspect of a not very important difference. The facts are that the presbytery, after Mr By ley's trial and acquittal, decided to inquire into the advisability of declaring that gentleman to be no longer a minister of the church. Mr Ryley decided (whether proptev or merely post does not matter) to concur in •a declaration to that effect being made, and an agreement wai» fixed up accordingly at a personal interview between the presbytery and himself. The presbytery caused the declaration to be published, but not the consent. This was clearly wrong. Mr Finlayson, who defends it, does so\in a wholly unconvincing manner, and writes like a man with a weak oase — which he Is. It is quite beyond the question to dwell, as he doo», on what the presbytery might have done had Mr Eyley not consented. We should not think of suppressing in our own court reports, for instance, the fact of any particular judgment being "by consent " ; nor, if we did, should we defend our aofc by pointing out what the issue might have been had the case been defended. The degree to which Mr Byley was injured by the default of the presbytery is quite another matter. He regards himself as being seriously prejudiced by it, which he certainly was not. His mistake is the natural sequence of his other and greater misconception to the effect that the verdict at his trial proved him to be a blameless and persecuted martyr, whereas to most people it merely meant that he was lucky.

The colony has never grown anyone quite like Captain William Jackson Barry — the " Jack Barry " of the irreverent — who is once again to the fore, and who wants everyone to buy a book he has written about his experieccea. The captain's orbit is of the comotary order. He appears from the depths of space at unpredicted periods, shines with great brilliance and generally with a new tale of unrivalled splendour for a brief spaoe, flying at a dazzling rate all the time, and disappears again into the remoter spheres as completely as though he had never existed — until nexb time. Spectroscopic analysis applied to the captain's brilliant emanations during his periods of incandescence would probably determine their leading characteristics as' rosy, with perhaps more than a tinge of blue. It would, fail, if we may share the gallant author's evident opinion, to detect any trace of green, but would discover abundant evidence oE abnormal activity in the region known to science as the " ultra-red." We are not going to describe Captain Jackson Barry's new book, because to those who used to treat bia name as a household word the temptation ta purchase wilLbe, in itself, irresistible, whiles fcbos.e who' (if '"lives there a man with soul so dead ") do not know who and what the new author is may be regarded as unworthy cf being further enlightened iti any way whatever. Moreover, unless age has not much changed our old friend, he will doJhis own trumpeting much more effectually than we could do it for him. —

Sir Michael Hicks-Beach ha 3 astutely turned the present London boom in colonials to account by dwelling in a speech on the disproportionate contribution made by the colonies to the expanse" of the British navy. Sir Michael had a good case, but he seems to have' overdone it. He complained that Great Britain spent £22,000,000 on her cavy, aud t,hat the colonies only contributed a ," few thousandp," and he left it to be inferred- that we should pay for the navy in proportion to population. This would be obviously absurd. The maintenance of the safety of Great. Britain itself is of enormou&ly greater imporTanco than the protection cf any part ,o£ Greater Britain, and the first function of the navy is, and inuet always be, to guard the integrity of the British soil. A jaid on >N ew Zealand would be of quite infinitesimal importance, as regards the prestige of the Empire, compared with the presence of an enemy for even 24 hours on the shores of Britain. No doubt the present contribution of the colonies is email, even in relation to the very imperfect measure of protection afforded by the cruisers od the Australasian station. Bab such as it is, it was fixed by the Imperial Government, and we believo might be rectified if the request were made in a frank and Imperial spirit, though Sir Michael's expression of " confidence " reads to us as if what he really meant to say was that he had very little. Perhaps he would have even lees if he were in the way of reading Colonel Pcle-Penton's address to the Napier Artillery Volunteers this week. The commandant had totsll this evidently capable corps that their guns were useless and their drill obsolete, and that as the Government would not give them any real guns he must request them to either give up the whole thing or take to real rifles instead of meek cannons. There is not much of the Imperial jubilee ring about this ; though, of coarse, that is not the gallant Colonel's fault. -

The Bruce County Council recently sued Me A. Lee Smith for the recovery of £20, which 16 was alleged he had agreed to pay the council to assist them in the formation of a road near hia property. On the case coming on for hearing at Milton, counsel for the defendant contended that a letter signed by hia client which it was sought to put in to prove plaintiffs' case was inadmissible, as it was nob stamped. The magistrate upheld this contention, and plaintiffs' counsel elected to take a nonsuit rather than pay the £5 penalty and proceed with the case. The matter was discussed at yesterday's meeting of the council, and it was resolved to take further action for the recovery of tha

(noney ; Cr Macpherson remarking, daring the Course af the discussion, that he would pay £1 out of his' own pocket to send the correspondence relating to the matter to every county council and chamber of commerce in New Zealand. It was stated by Mr D. Reid, at & meeting of the Tokomairiro Farmers' Club, that a gentleman, who held that the first aim should be to attract the women and children to the winter show in Duiiedin, co as to increase the door money, thought that the bays of different counties were the vary best means to this end, and therefore promised to give £25 for the best bay. Mr Reid immediately applied for 40fv of space next year on behalf ot" the Bruce County, and got it. The work of the Native Land Court, which met at Ofcorohanga on Wednesday, is of special importance. The court has to determine the interests of the Crown in about 150 blocks in fcbe King Country, out of which 200,000 to 300,000 acres will be thrown open. The Native title of the Rangitotohuliua Block will alno be investigated. The court at Wasganai is engaged upon some (-mailer blocks When the business before thece. courts is finished the Native title, so far as the Fapatipu land or that which is held according to Native usages and customs is concerned, will have been practically extinguished over all the lands in the North Island. Duriog a discussion which took place at the meeting of the Bruce County Council on Tuesday with regard to a circular which had been received from the Otamatea County Couucil, asking the co-operation of the other councils in petitioning Parliament to throw the entire coßt of charitable aid on the consolidated revenue, Cr Smith said last 3*ear his own contribution | for charitable aid was £70, over aud above what ; ■waa given to swaggera who called a!; his ] place. He could not see why those who had property of any description should not pay a fair share of the cost of charitable aid. After a general expression of opinion on the part or councillors, in agreement with the circular from the Otamatea County Council, it was resolved that each councillor take steps to get a petition signed in his own riding, and that the petitions be forwarded to Parliament as had been requested. The North Island Railway Appeal Board met on the 30th to hear an appeal by Inspector Craven againsb his reduction in rank and oE salary through the recent railway accident near Kaitoke, on the Wellington-Masterton line. The board dismi.»sed the appeal, but al the same time, having regard to his long service and excellent record, the board trusts that his claims to the favourable consideration of the department may be entertained at some future time. We are requested to state that a prompt snd cheerful response has been made to the appeal of Mr Duncan Wright (of the City Mission) for i additional Bibles for the Sta'e schools. The following donations are acknowledged with thanks :— Hod. R. Oliver, £2 10s ; a friend, 20.3. The 500 Bibles asked for have all been procured and paid, for, so that interested friends may now stay their hands. A cablegram was despatched last week to Mr Seddon asking him to convey congratulations from the Reefton miners to her Majesty the Queen, and next day a cablegram came 1 to hand in reply from the Premier stating that the Secretary of State for the Colonies had bsen pleased to present the miners' congratulations to her Majesty. %