COMMENTS BY THE WAY.

Otago Witness, Issue 2497, 22 January 1902, Page 71

COMMENTS BY THE WAY.

I am told that an Oxford don whom we all know and admire, lecturing on Hedonism, put this problem to his class : "If I have a sovereign to spend, shall I extract a greater amouut of pleasure from it by buying 20 pocket volumes of Shakespeare or 20 bottles of champagne?" Whereupon the undergraduates roared, " Try the Shakespeare, sir," justly deeming that even the works of ,the overrated dramatist would be more enjoyable than champagne at 12s a dozen.

Myself a student of human nature, I have made a life-long practice of ascertaining men's notions of the highest pleasure. I once heaid a bishop affirm in the pulpit that the greatest enjoyment in life was to ride a good horse over a big country. Another bishop — even Gilbert Burnet — has told us that " the pleasures of sense he did coon nauseate " ; that Le found " intrigues of State and the conduct of affairs ' hardly more satisfactory, and came to place all his happiness in virtue. Contianwise, a member of the pi cent Cabinet, who thoroughly enjoys '" intrigues of State and the conduct of dffans,'' once assuic-d me that most of the so-called pleasures of life proved to be fallacious oi uineal. but that v good dinner wa« the one certain and indisputable joy If I remember alight, even that austere votaress of the higher life, Miss fMartmeau, experienced a rapture when the gense of ta-4e was for a moment vouchsafed to her, and found her in the act of eating .i mutton chop. 13it.\e gaudium It iii pathetic to think that she mver tasted strawberries and creim. A newly ordained innate, fresh from Oxford, playing football

against a team of working men, was heard to exclaim, amid the breathlessness and sweat and turmoil of a scrum, " This is heaven ! '' A venerable peer, who in many respects resembled Lord Steyne, once told me that the only really pleasant things in life were eating, drinking, and hoarding money ; but for eating and drinking, he added wistfully, you require youth, whereas hoarding becomes pleasantei every year you live. The great Lord Hertford, whom his detractors called the wicked Lord Hertford, placed the keenest enjoyment of life in winning money from a man who felt it f R-e-venge, as we all know, is a dinh which' can be eaten cold, and it is to certa.n palates the most delicious of all sapore. But the«e are the evil joys of the mind, and I am thinking rather of purely innocent delights. Among these I am persuaded that a very high place must be assigned to the pleasure of being talked about. To be famous is a supreme joy, and even to be notorious is preferable to being unknown. When the juvenile and aspiring Disraeli wished to advertise his precocious genius, he published a pamphlet about himself called " What is He?" and people began to ask a question which would certainly not have occurred to them if the subject had not himself propounded it. That was a calculated egotism, directed to a practical end, and as such is at least intelligible. But we have among us at the present day politicians no longer juvenile, no longer dependent on advertisement, who still occupy their whole energies in getting themselves talked about and written about. They subscribe to Mr Romeike, and, in the depths of their rural domains, peruse his bundles of cuttings with feverish anxiety. For them the personal paragraph and the open letter, the interview and the biography, have unspeakable charms. " Lest we be forgotten " is the unrhythmical burden of their ceaseless song ; and the mompr.fc that public interest in themselves and their doings and their belongings begins to flag, they quicken it into life again by mysterious " pars " and inspired leaderettes and notes addressed to non-existent correspondents. They write letters to explain why they cannot make speeches, and make speeches to explain why they have written letters.

And they have their reward. They are talked about. And a morbid self-conscious-ness is hourly titillated by the chatter of the social mob.