PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3003, 4 October 1911, Page 11

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Daily Times.)

: 0n Reciprocity and the American courting of Canada the English press affected a curious aloofness. Putting a good face upon it—making the best bf what seemed a bad business. Reciprocity was reciprocity; why think it anything more?. And if it should turn out to be anything more, Canada was mistress, in her own house. Nobody would so much as lift a monitory finger,-still less a minatory fist ;—-nobody had the right. That was the tone, and it did them credit.- "Are we downhearted ?—No 1" Journals of the high and dry Freetrade and anti-preference persuasion, such as the Spectator and the Westminster Gazette, went one better. The abolition of a fiscal frontier was a triumph for Freetrade; and if this triumph should cost us Canada, what matter? Perish the colonies rather than a principle! Robespierre had said it before them. There was a good deal of worthy pride in all this, a good deal of difficult make-believe. And now, as things have turned but, the relief is immense, though this fact will no more than the opposite be proclaimed from the housetops. The British" habit of reserve takes care of that. There may be LittleEnglanders who desire the dismemberment ef the Empire. But even they.will chuckle a little over the snubbing of spread-eagle annexationists., Not even to the ears of Mr Keir Hardie and the Irish Nationalists should it come amiss that the man. who .baulked Canadian secession —a man long dead and forgotten —was the man that wrote •' Rule, Britannia." .- ■' _ . "

Personally I find it comforting that the Canadian political party • swept out of office at the polls was the " Liberal" party. In politics " Liberal" is a ques-tion-begging name. It assumes a point in dispute. Any Sunday we may hear.read in church that "the liberal man devisßth liberal things, and by liberal things shall he stand." It is perfectly odious that this word 'of compliment should go to Sir Joseph Ward and his servile following. They forsooth axe the "Liberals !" I am a better Liberal myself,— I. who repudiate and defy them. A correspondent sends me a-letter written to the Australian Pastoralists' Review by an Aucklander signing himself—on the "lucus a non lucendo" principle—- " Liberty."

Sib,— I am fast losing interest in die future of thi3 country by reason of its simply devilish legislation'. . Arbitration Court awards have already enchained nine-tenths of our industries, and' ■it only requires that of .farming to "be throttled, and then the whole thing will collapse under the fearful burden we carry. And that finale is coming. The other day 80 householders were cited for committing'the offence of selling the surplus produce of their gardens; yes, that is made a crime now. There is an award which compels nurseirymth and . gardeners to pay 12s a day to their men, and consequently if I don't pay my odd man 12s a day, and he should harrow or clean my orchard, and I were to sell any of its fruit. I would be committing a crime, and be liable to punishment. Things are thus rapidly approaching such a state that I don't know how anyone who loves to be free can live in New Zealand.

It is "Liberal" legislation that extorts this cry of pain. And the notion obtains that " Liberalism " here and elsewhere has a lien on the future. Never any more shall there be anything but "Liberalism" world without end. The Canadian elections opportunely shatter that illusion. What the party that won calls itself I don't quite know; but certainly it was the self-styled " Liberal " party that lost. And the fact is of good omen.

" The main difference between Professor Salmond and other people who intelligently inquire into this question [prohibition] is the maintenance of an open mind." Precisely! that is the whole difference. And this inspired utterance, where do I find it? In a prohibitionist manifesto, "official answer, No. 4" to Dr Salmond's anti-prohibition pamphlet and articles. Unwittingly the scribes and Pharisees of prohibition have described their own case. Their " intelligent" in-

quiring H.into this question" is with mind already made up. Hence they discover that the University professor of logic ia unable to reason, and that a venerabk minister of religion who has always lived amongst us without reproach ia the apologist of vice and crime. In particular, the Rev. Mr Williams, writing from Oamaru, haa made these discoveries. Inquiring with the same degree of intelligence he will discover the iame things, of St. *>aul. So tar from desiring general prohibition, St. Paul did not even prohibit intoxicating dunks in private houses where he had full authority. The aum of what he had to say on the subject was "Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess.' He even stopped short of recommending voluntary abstinences The maxims "Touch not, taste not, handle not " he says, " have a. show pf. wisdom in will-worship, and humility, and severity to the body, but are not of any value against the indulgence of the flesh." Really, Mr Williams, where do you keep your Bible.' And in what forgotten hole and corner have you hidden away your "open mind"?

The man that hath no music in himself. Nor is not moved "by concord of sweet sounds, , Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; also for musical competitions. The Rev. Sydney Smith, of irreverend memory, may have been such a man. Though he held a stall in the choir of St. Paul's, had taken" lessons on" the piano, and at times could be induced to sing an afterdinner song, he was unable to appreciate oratorio. Except on its humorous side. Handel's "Israel in Egypt," he thought, Teached the ridiculous-sublime—-" five hundred people fiddling like madmen about the Israelites in the Red Sea; could anything. be more absurd ?" The possibility of a second Red Sea orchestra trying to out-fiddle the first never occurred to Sydney Smith, or he would have Tevelled in the humour of it, recognising a, case to which the classic theorem "What can sound worse than a pig under a gate? Two pigs under a gate"— did not apply. Introduce competition, comparison, marking for merit, and at once you have interest, excitement, all the fun of the fair. Herein lies the 'fascination of sport. Anything will serve, provided there is competition—the jumping of frogs, the fighting of cocks or of cockchafers, racing by land or sea or in the sky, every kind of athletic isame. An international cricket contest will fix the attention of -two hemispheres; only a handful of people see the actual play. It is the competitive scoring that your eye seeks out first when you open your morning paper. At the Dunedin Competitions it is a thrilling business when Mr Paine listens to 72 successive repetitions of "Li-tile Boy Blue," miraculously assigns the marks, k . awards the prize; also when Professor Ives with the same accuracy discriminates between two-score singers who in turn pipe before him "The Beautiful Land of Nod." But it is not in elocution thak the interest lies, nor in music. If Messrs Paine and Ivea announced a competitive sprint along Princes street between the Post Office and the Octagon, up the hill and down asjain, more people, would flock to see them run than now @o to see them judge.

Oddly enough, it is not as sport, fun, wholesome frrvolifcy, that these Ballarat competitions are commended to us. We are asked to accept them for their dead seriousness. They are a contribution to art and to education in ark I try to believe it. Faith would be easier if scaleplaying competitions found a place, and five-finger exercise competitions. There is room for education at these levels,., for competing and marking and prize-giving, without offence to the Muse. But when a Beethoven "Op." is set for competition, a sonata, No. 53, the Waldstain, I am left gasping. If a great pianist comes our way, he will usually play the Waldstein —Paderewski played it to us—and he will play it with a .reverence almost religious. The Waldstein sonata is one of the sacred vthings of musical art. Thi3 being so, and matter of common knowledge, the Competitions Committee took the sonata in hand, cutting it in two as if with a broad-axe, —dividing it where, musically, no division is possible. It is as though they had cut off an elocution piece in the middle of a word; or ended the melody of the National Anthem—- " God sa-ave the —" —blank ! Merely that and nothing more! In this condition the sonata lk delivered into the hands of nine able-bodied young-lady piano-players that they may contend for a prize over the mangled body of it. Nine times do they-play it. We might be assisting at an incantation by the Weird Sisters : Thrico to thine, and thrice to mine, And thrice again, to make up nine.

" Damnable iteration" ! —for precisely such an occasion might the phrase have been coined. Beethoven himself couldn't play a ninefold Waldstein without maddening everybody with ears to hear and clearing the room.

Professor Ives, a just judge, and' a much-enduring man to boot, talked lugubriously of points missed by his tuneful nine, of sesthetic suggestions not taken. " Bow many of them made use of the pause in that passage so full of tragic suggestion and deep mysteries where four crochets ending in a minim are twice repeated?" How many of them?—that is, How few? It was a passage "full of suggestive mysterious effects." Did they know what it meant? My impression is that after his ninefold martyrdom the Professor himself didn't know what it meant; he only remembered that once he knew. The barbarism of ending the piooe on the dominant, some of them, greatly daring, avoided, duly resolving the chord. But 'twas not so nominated in the bond; wherefore the more timorous chopped off at the committee's chop-

ping place, leaving the ear hungering for the tonic. Anent which the Professor had a little story:. A certain doctor in Oxford had an articled pupil who had to play from 11 till 12. The doctor, as a result of high living, was upstairs with the gout. The pupil was downstairs practising on his piano when the clock struck. 12. The boy got up just as he had .reached an undissolved rhord. The effect of this was so great that« the poor doctor had to go down to the piano. The last player to-day ieft off at the G, and the chord is still undissolved. "Unresolved" the Professor must have said, not "undissolved." But on so comic a subject why shouldn't the linotype have its little joke like the rest ? " Argo," writing last week on the great Sweet Pea Competition instituted by the Daily Mail, —prize £IOOO, number of entries, 38,000—-seemed to say that each competitor paid an entrance -fee of ss. In which case the Daily Mail would have made a handsome profit. But; no; entrance fee there was none; the newspaper reaped its harvest in other ways. What I meant to bring out in my letter was that, with 38,000 competitors, the chances of taking first prize were somewhat akin to a gamble, and I likened it to spending 5s in the chance of winning a prize in Tattersall's. I left you to point the,obvious moral of the benefit spent in healthful exercise and energy by the 38,000 as compared with the transference to Tasmania of New Zealand working 1 men's capital. " At the same time, I consider the Sweet Pea has been somewhat degraded," he adds. Quite so. An elevating tendency is greatly to seek in competitions generally. Then, next: Thank you for the note re daffodil, though my " Skeat" gives me no help as to its meaning in etymology. In New Zealand I believe that Lawrence is the home' of the daffodil, and that on the hillside of the town they "have such a sight as might have inspired Wordsworth to write the appreciation from which I quoted. Curious if Gaboriel's Gully, hard by, should in the * whirligig of time prove a profitable field for the cultivation of ,the golden flower! Here, in Dunediiv the nearest approach we can get to "the ten thousand saw lat a glance" is. from the gallery of the Garrison Hall on the day of the Spring Show. "I gazed and gazed> but little thought What wealth to me the show had brought!" The etymology of Greek " asphodelos " need not trouble us. Liddell and Scott themselves are in the dark. But under English "asphodel" Skeat says: "The word has been oddly corrupted into ' daffodil ' and even into ' daffadowndilly.' " He gives a' corresponding account under the word "daffodil." Murray, of the "Oxford," -agrees. So the daffodil is the asphodel, and- when we read of the fields of asphodel we know what they looked like. Civia.