PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3017, 10 January 1912, Page 11

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Duly Times.) The Premier’s faithful newspaper claque, be the same more or lees, may complain justly that this obstinate fit of the sulks is doing them an ill turn. He must have made up his mind to something, if only to the fact that he hasn’t made up his mind. Then why does he refuse them tip or wink? How are they to know on what lines to justify him ? If only, for instance, they could be sure that his hanging on and saying nothing is mere reluctance to go, they might comfort and corroborate him out of the classics, adducing the gentleman at Tyburn, chief performer, who Oft fitted the halter, oft traversed the cart, And oft said Good-bye, yet seemed loth to depart. If, on the contrary, his determination is to sit tight, they could encourage him to sit tight. If Parliament is to be called early, they could affirm that he has never had any other thought than to call it early. Put if Parliament is not to be called before June, they could immediately set about showing that to call Parliament before June would be unnecessary, improper, unconstitutional. As it is, they can do nothing but look foolish. Left to grope in the dark like mere Oppositionists, some of the more faithful have evolved the weird suggestion that the Premier will secure has personal safety by throwing three of his colleagues to the wolves. Others, of the lees faithful, hint darkly that if the truth were spoken and the interests of the Great Liberal Party honestly considered, it is the Premier himself that should be thrown to tho wolves. Superfluous lags tho veteran on tho stage. say they, in accents ominous. It is a painful situation ; —ended, possibly, before these lines are tread. For the Premier cannot have resolved to join tho monks of La Trappe and henceforth never more speak word. But at the moment tho faith of the faithful is being cruelly tried. New Year greetings, heartfelt on both sides, have passed between Britain and Germany, but in sentiments not identical. Lord Haldane, Mr Harcourt, Mr M'Kenna, and Mr Pease (the Quaker), conscious of a superior fleet and other strategic advantages, talk of peace and good will. The German press fresh from diplomatic snubbings perforce accepted, breathes bitterness and spite. Berlin, January 1. Most of the New Year articles in tho German newspapers assume tho hostility of England towards the Fatherland, while many declare that she is preparing for war. Tho Cologne Gazette declares that Anglo-German, relations cannot remain as they are at present. Germany has done everything in her power to avoid a world’s war, which is still threatening. Tho next move lies with England. The only “move” of any value would be of the kind proposed by Dean Swift as a remedy for the woes of Ireland. Tho dislhressful country, he said, should be towed out into the Atlantic and scuttled for twenty-four hours. Germany has built a war fleet for which she has no honest use; the Kaiser claims an oceanic admiralty to which ho has no valid title. Geographically, the British Isles interpose a barrier fixed and eternal. There they lie, right in the path. Only by leave and license of the British, conceding a passageway through the Strait of Dover in the south and round the Shetlands in the north, can any German ship reach the ocean at all. Need wo wonder that when a German of tho “ mailed fist ” way of thinking looks at the map he feels himself under blockade, .“hemmed in,” as he says, —throttled, suffocated? Let him draw in the horns of his ambition, or there will be war. Here let me quote a sentence or two from an American observer, Mr Price Collier, in his “ England and the English.” Should England go to war now with Germany she would probably win and would badly damage her most serious and most irritating rival, and give her shipping, her industries, and her com-

merce a new lease of life. Her premier securities, which have declined in value enormously in the last 10 years, would go up, and there would bo a wave of enterprise and revived hope throughout the Empire. That may happen, and if it is to happen, the sooner the bettor for England. Last week being holiday time and a season vowed to frivolity, my esteemed colleague who divides with me the duty of brightening up Saturday’s paper —he on one page. I on another —entertained as with some titbits from writers of the modern English Satanic school. They are journalists, novelists, dramatists, poetasters, immoral moralists, what not.' — lawless vagabonds ranging the outfields of literature, but aliens to Helicon and the Castalian spring. Head of his class is Oscar Wilde, whose beginning was at Oxford, where he took a double-first, and whose ending was at the Old Bailey, where he took a sentence of two years’ imprisonment with hard labour, —the moral of hi.s career that, however smart yo be, it is ill failing out with the Ten Commandments. After him may be named Mr H. G. Wells, lately denounced by tli© Spectator for putting forth “ a poisonous book.” To Mr Wells belongs the curious distinction of having been “discovered” by Mr W. E. Henley, himself an unpleasant discovery, seen to best advantage (and bad is the best) when asserting in the teeth of ‘‘ whatever igods may be ” an “ unconquerable soul,” and at his worst in such incoherent wickedness as this : Youth—if you find it’s youth Too late? , Truth —and the back of truth? Straight. Bo it love or liquor, What’s the odds. So it slide you quicker To the gods? “Let us be drunk !” says he, “ and for a while forget, live without reason”; Lot us break out and taste the morning prime— Let us be drunk ! Irony, may we hope? With very slight grounds, 1 fancy.

Wherever Oscar Wilde, W. E. Henley, and H. G. Wells may be supposed to foregather and hold se-ssion comes perching the unclean spirit of Baudelaire, whose loathsome extravagances not even his native Paris could tolerate, nor the Paris police; eo that Baudelaire, when most Baudelairean, hence fittest to be the patron saint of Oscar Wilde and Co., had to get himself printed, if printed at all, beyond the frontier in Belgium. Of the same unwholesome guild are Maeterlinck and Nietzsche; —ask me not how or why. The atmosphere grows oppressive ; I want a breath of fresh air. Let it be conceded of this pestilent crew that they are all artists in words; but it is with an art that either nauseates or irritates, sometimes both. As in the laboured paradoxes of Oscar Wilde : •

Punctuality is tho thief of time. The only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes. A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it. To do nothing at all is tho most difficult thing in tho world, tho most difficult and tho most intellectual. Industry is the root of all ugliness. 'The condition of perfection is idleness. Love art for its own sake, and then all things that you need will be added unto you. There Ls nothing here but idiotic nonsense edged with impiety. It would be when exasperated by this sort of thing and by his pose of effeminacy that Wilde’s undergraduate contemporaries at Oxford (healthy young barbarians!) wrecked his rooms and ducked him in the Cherwell. Review notices of a just-published biography—” Harry Drew,” otherwise the Rev. Harry Drew, Mr Gladstone’s clerical son-in-law, —have two deliciously characteristic stories of General Gordon. 1 appropriate them at once. Gordon is not forgotten amongst us, nor going to be; but he is very inadequately understood, if these stories present him. The Rhodes mentioned is not Cecil Rhodes, but his brother —Colonel Rhodes. Story I.—Gordon, dining at Sir Evelyn Wood’s the night before ho left Cairo for Khartoum, when bidding farewell, taking Ladv Wood's hand, he noticed a beautiful bangle: “What a lovely bracelet ! Do oblige me by soiling it and giving tho money to tho poor of Cairo !” Story 2.—Rhodes, saying good-bye to

him on the steps of Shepherd’s Hotel, Cairo, expressed a hope and prayer that alk would ho well with him. Ho replied : “ Oh ! I’m all right, my boy. Look here, Rhodes—do you say your prayers?” “Yes, sir.” “Will you pray for mo?” Saying this, Cordon whipped out a little pocket-book and wrote down Rhodes’s name at the end of a list of names of those for whom ho should specially pray. “ Pray for mo, Rhodes; I shall pray for you throe times a day.” That was tho last ho saw of Gordon. Gordon, then, was a religious crank, shall we say ? He certainly had some queer notions on Bible subjects, believing, for one thing, that the site of the Garden of Eden was in the Seychelles Islands. And Lord Cromer, who usually does him less than justice, wrote to Lord Granville at the Foreign Oilice ; “It is as well that Gordon should be under my orders, but a man who habitually consults the Prophet Isaiah when h-: is in a difficulty is not apt to obey tho orders of any one.” All the same, Gordon was no Pharisee, not in the least narrow, his lumiamtarianism and his military service going easily together. And 1 don’t think, I really don't think, that Gordon could ever have become a prohibitionist. It was an election meeting in the Oamarn electorate, and question time was on : ' Would the candidate, if elected, move

in the direction of measures being taken to deal with the “Ne Tomcro” matter ? The Candidate: “While I am pretty well conversant with the Mokau question, the details of the acquisition of the ether estate named have nor come to my knowledge; but if the Government have been guilty of anything questionable in the ‘ Me Tomcro ’ estate, I would certainly have something to say about it.”— (Loud and prolonged applause.) Pie took “ Ne Terr.-ere ” for some obscure place in the North Island. And why not.' “ There is that beautiful native name ‘ Eureka,’ ” said the early Melbourne legislator, arguing on grounds of taste for the retention of aboriginal place-names. A Victorian wasn’t bound to know that “Eureka” is Greek; neither is a New Zealander forbidden to think that “Ne Temere ” may be Maori. Anyhow, a politician on ecclesiastical subjects is to be lightly judged when ecclesiastics make so sorry a show of themselves. Ox all the “ No Popery !” cries in my time, and I have heard a few, this about “Ne Temere ” is the shabbiest, hoi lowest, least intelligent. Every Protestant communion limits marriage by a table of prohibited degrees beginning usually “A man may not marry his grandmother.” Anglicans and Presbyterians have been emphatic that a man may not marry his wife’s sister. “ Neither may he marry an alien in religion,” adds the Pope. And the Pope’s rule is an excellent rule. Had it been followed always we should have been spared the Ahab and Jezebel mesalliance, not to mention King Solomon’s scandalous foreign harem. Rule out on any terms the “mixed marriage,” and you will have more of peace in the world and less of unhappiness.

Talking of Australian place-names, I observe that Mr O’Malley, Minister for Home Affairs, is of opinion that the Federal capital to bo built in the wilderness should be called “ Shakespeare.” Nearly 1000 names for the city have been suggested to the department, but Mr O’Malley stands by his choice. ‘‘ Shakespeare,” he recently informed Parliament, “ id the intellectual ocean of the world, from which and into which flow mental rivers of the Universe.” By this we perceive that Mr O’Malley is a poet. Combining easily the function of a prophet, ho predicted that the Federal capital “ would become the intellectual centre of the Commonwealth.” ‘‘And the paradise of the carpet-bagger,”—he should have added, but didn’t. Owing its existence to the suicidal rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, this gratuitous creation is to be a hundred miles from everywhere; hence nobody will be able to live there who doesn’t live by politics. There is another point. Mr O’Malley neglected to mention amongst the advantages of his ‘‘intellectual centre” that the district round about is eminently adapted for hograising ; consequently, should the progress of literary criticism require it, the transition will be easy from “ Shakespeare ” to “Bacon.” Civis.