PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3102, 27 August 1913, Page 11

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday"a i> aly I'imjj.i Politely but firmly, Sir Edward Grey as the mouthpiece of United Europe demands the evacuation of Adrianople. “By the beard of the Prophet, No!" replies the Turk; —“Here 1 am and here I stay.” Adrianople has come back to him by divine intervention ; and as a good Calvinist—his single point of orthodoxy—ho recognises the miracle. It is kismet, fate, the will of Heaven. W herefore, digging himself in, mounting guns, replenishing magazines, he announces that ho is 25U,000 stiong and ready to stand siege. Of course he is humourist enough to see that in this posture of affairs United Europe looks particularly foolish. Short of war, there is no way of putting the squeeze on him ; —praise to Mahomet and the twelve Imaurus. The squeeze diplomatic is a proved V- _f utility, the squeeze financial inapplicable; he is not asking the Bourses for a loan. There remains only war, and of war the Turk is prepared to take his chance; h© was always a cheerful fighter. But who is to make war? Russia, from the Asiatic side! Admittedly that would be awkward; but the chances are that the other kindly Christian Powers will lay a restraining hand on Russia. And so in the upshot, as things look, getting Adrianople back from the Turk will be the problem of getting butter out of a dog’s throat. Allah is great.

“ A few notes on the recent by-election at Grey,” supplied by a West Coast contributor, would, if I published them, prove interesting to many people, to myself perhaps most of all, for I might at once proceed to make my last will and testament. You may call tho West Coast Red a ‘’Jacobin,” as I have done, borrowing the name from certain Paris Reds who long since went to their own place (mostly by wav of the guillotine), and he doesn’t mind it. If it pleases you, it doesn’t hurt him, says he, —fire away! Or you may call him, as my correspondent does, a Fenian, and no harm done, 'idle Irish malcontents known by that name invented it for themselves and gloried in it. But when you begin to reckon how large a proportion of these West Coast Jacobins or Fenians are Pats and Tims and Micks, hinting an hereditary relation to the Roman Catholic Church and a political complicity with Roman Catholic priests, you are moving amongst live wires and may look out for shocks. Race hatreds are bad, church hatreds are worse. Both played a part in the Grey election and both contributed to the scandalous result. Let as much as this be said, naming no names ; further I decline to go. My correspondent’s view of tho situation is doubtless right as right can be, and we shall do well to keep our weather eye lifting. Wo shall also do well to leave the odium theologicum to the other side. For our patriotic “Peace Society,” a few nuts whereon to try its infant teeth ; —from “ Germany and the Germans,” by Price Collier (a 'sturdy American democrat) — The German army protects the German people not only from external foes but from internal diseases. It is the greatest school of hygiene in the world, on account of its sound teaching, the devotion, skill, and industry oi its officers, the number of its pupils, and its widely distributed lessons and influence. It is tho best allround democratic University in the world; it is a necessary antidote to tho physical lethargy of the German race; and the poverty of ti ic great bulk of the officers keeps the love! oi social expenditure on a sensible scale; it offers a brilliant example, in a material age, of men scorning ease for the service of the countrv; it keepo the peace in Burojie. I can vouch for it that there are fewer personal jealousies or quarrels in the mess-room or below docks of a warship, or in a soldiers’ camp or barracks than in many church or Sundayschool assemblies, in many club smok-ing-rooms, in many ladies’ sewing or reading circles. Mr Collier has had a course of the training himself, and if it could be had in America he would give any son of his the same. Moreover, ho hints that in certain contingencies the peacemongers whose

propaganda of cowardice and selfishness afflicts his own country should be hanged. I wouldn’t answer for the public temper here —in certain contingencies.

Deae “ Givis.” —From the very able manner in which you have refuted your correspondent’s statement - namely, "Ladies were not mentioned in the Bible” —I think you give us a very strong point in favour of “ Bible in public schools.” It would not take a great stretch of imagination to see young Givis ” getting part of his Bible knowledge at the public school, when his mind was young and retentive. Seeing that - your knowledge of the Bible serves you so well in argument and business, to say nothing of morals, should you not more strenuously help those who arc striving to get tho Bible into the public schools? This from “ Clodhopper,’’ somewhere down South. A Bible-in-schools argument to my personal address follows, capped by a flattering appeal: ‘‘From henceforth let your mighty pen advocate the teachings of -the Bible in schools that posterity may have the advantage of its teaching as you yourself have had.” I don’t know that my mighty pen advocates anything. The business of this column is not construction but criticism, chiefly criticism from the point of view of humour.

If there’s a hole in a’ your coats, I rede yc tent it;

A chiel’s aming ye takin’ notes, And faith he’ll prent it. It is for the hole in people’s coats that I am for ever looking. In a spirit of love, as Mr Chadband would say, ‘‘My dear sir, allow me to mention that you are distinctly out at elbows, and that a gaping crevasse has just opened across vour back.” For solicitude in this kind the prohibitionists owe me much; and the Bible-in-echools disputants may yet owe me something. At present I chiefly note the ludicrous perplexity of the politicians. If only they knew which way the cat is going to jump.

A correspondent asks me what I think about the new poet laureate. I don’t think about him at all. Nobody thinks about him. His name was no sooner announced than forgotten. “Mr Robert Bridges has been appointed poet l?.ureate.” “Bridges’? —says the British citizen, looking up from his newspaper—“who’s Bridges?” And “Who’s Who” has to tell him. That fact alone is fatal. A poet who has neverreached the people is not the poet for the laurel. What may be learned about Poet Bridges is soon told. He has written “ solid plays in verse, full of science and skill,” says Mr William Archer, the veteran dramatic critic. He is an authority on prosody, a pedantic stickler for pure English, and withal a spelling reformer, advocating in a recent letter to The Times phonetic spelling as a cure for loose and slovenly pronunciation —“choose the sound and let the spelling, go.” The Westminster Gazette (June 21)-offers a prize of two guineas to anyone putting certain verses of his into “Latin lyrics,” a form of expression for which, not improbably, they are well fitted ; here is the first of them: Then what charm company Can give, know I, —if wine Go round, or threats combine To set dumb music free. This would be poor prose and is poorer poetry —the thought trivial, the rhymes inaudible, the inversion “know 1” ugly, the “ combining ” of “ throats ” strained arid harsh. And all in four short lines! MiBridges has doubtless written worthier stuff, and it is known to the elect; but no plebiscite would have made him poet laureate.

On any popular vote the honour must have gone to Kipling. I am myself a Kiplingite, avowed and unashamed. Nobody in this generation has written better poetry than Kipling, no other singer has so clearly caught the ear of the nation. Kipling is reckless of dignity,—even as Shakespeare is, neither more nor less; but that very recklessness is delightsome. When it pleases the Kipling muse to be a vagabond huzzy, sportive and skittish, it equally pleases me to roam and romp in her disreputable company. .And she has a very wide range of roaming and romping. “When ’Omcr smote ’is blooming lyre” is not too far back, nor the millennium too far ahead. When Earth’s last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried, When tho oldest colours have faded, and tho youngest critic has died, We shall rrc-t, and, faith, we shall need it—lie down for an aon or two, Till tho Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew ! And those that wore good shall be happy: they shall sit in a golden chair; They shall eplach at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comets’ hair; They shall find real saints to draw from —Magdalene, Peter, and Paul; They shall work for an ago at. a sitting and never bo tired at all! And only the Master shall praise us, and only tho Master shall blame; And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame. But each for the joy of the working, and each, in h : s separate star. Shall draw the Thing as ho sees it for the God of Things as They Are! In fact though not in title Kipling has been the poet laureate for years past. To him it always fell to cap the occasion, summing up the sentiment of a national event and expressing for the British people tlie word of the hour. The “ Recessional ” marked the Queen’s Jubilee, 1897; the “ Absent-minded Beggar ” and other pieces connoted the Boer War; a noble elegy paid tribute to King Edward at his death; and apropos of the visit of the French President Kipling put forth the other day a poem entitled “France.” Less aptly, though apropos of Home Rule, he put forth some months back a sort of Battle Psalm for tho Ulstermen. That alone, if there was nothing else, would settle his hash with Dir Asquith.

Last week, one of those midnight acci-

dents possible in the best-regulated newspaper office when Lady Misrule pays a surprise visit cut me off in the middle of a paragraph, and, as the reporters say, I was “left speaking.” A correspondent, byname “Erasmus,” had informed me that a paper had been read before the Classical Association of the Sheffield Universityadvocating the resumption of Latin in diplomacy, in scientific treatises, and even for colloquial use. I had just expressed the pious wish that I might live to see it, when, 10, the axe fell. And here is the amputated part: Dealing- with the supposed difficulty of modern terms, the essayist said that sentences respecting railway traffic, telegraphy, football, etc., could easily bo rendered into Latin.

Yes; even in Otago, as was seen the other week, we can Latinise cricket and football. Colloquial Latin is another thing. Probably in the time of Erasmus himself, when every diplomatist, every divine, every monk and shaveling priest, talked Latin, the Latin they talked was “doggy.” On similar terms I myself might colloquialise; examples are not wanting ; Trcs fratros stolidi Boatum took at Niagri; Stormus rose, windus craf, Magnum frothum surgehat, Et boatum ovorturnebat, Et omnes drowndiderunt Qui swimmero non potuerunt. Last for this week is “Perplexed,” who cannot accept a remark of mine that the pronouns “he,” “him,” “his,” “her,” when unemphatic, carry no aspirate. The h can be sounded, he says, and for his own part he always does sound it. Very well; —let him read aloud this line: Holding her hand ho hinted his hope. Four words are accented—the two verbs and the two nouns, and in them you hear the h. But not in the pronouns, unless indeed the line is read in the manner of a mincing school marrn or a niminy-piminy ladies’-maid. Civis.