PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3145, 24 June 1914, Page 11

PASSING NOTES.

(Fra a Sicur.liv'i >.U/ i’ian Mr H. G. Wells, at one time a schoolmaster, at ail times a preachy person, is still explaining to the British people what poor creatures they are in comparison with the foreigner. Occasionally, in a “novel of revolt,"’ he is busy uprooting the marriage institution and decrying the humdrum sanctities of the British home. But Mr Wells is happiest playing the pedagogue, lecturing us de haut ert bas, ferule in hand. The British name, it seems, is a synonym for slackness, in art, literature, education, industry, there is nothing done within the British Isles that is not better done in France. Those who like this sort of thing may buy his latest book; for my own part I recall the North Country saying; “It’s an ill bird that fyles its own nest.” France is our next neighbour and, just now, our very dear friend ; but from assimilation to French ways of thinking and French modes of life may heaven save us. In France the deathrate exceeds the birth-rate; from France come “syndicalism” and “sabotage,”' name and thing; there have been half a dozen French Governments in as many months, and the latest, possibly itself only a_ thing of the hour, is headed by an “anti-cleri-cal” so virulently “anti” as to boast of what he had done—could, should, or would do—to “put out” for the French people “the lights, of heaven.” The French may,.not be ripe for a drubbing, and I should be sorry to see them get it; but they are much m want of a master. A Napoleon once more—either of the braggadochio type, or of the mystery-man type. They were happy in their French way under both. “It is anticipated that the Suffragettes wilToease from violence, believing that the maximum effect will be obtained by their period of wild activity if it be followed by a calm.” (London June 17). After the hot fit, the cold; it is high time. But no one can understand the Suffragette frenzy, its inspiration, development, natural history, who ignores two facts, one of them much less important than the other. The less important fact is that on the woman suffrage question Parliament has played an ignoble part, its ways the ways of the Heathen Chinee. Eight times has a Bill giving votes to women passed its second reading in the House of Commons, majorities ranging from 35 in 1807 to 167 in 1910, and eight times has the Bill thus approved been done to death by the men who had voted for it. An eightfold betrayal! shriek the women, and their exasperation is nothing to wonder at. But there is a fact of greater consequence than the shiftiness of Parliament. Unlike any other in the history of politics, the Suffragette dispute is a war between the sexes. The war is about a something, a nothing—the vote. Let all the women who demand it be one woman—the wife; let all the men who refuse it be one man —the husband; shut them up together to fight it out, and you have the situation. A wife shut up without appeal to a bus band who, as she imagines, brutally oppresses her will say or do anything; desperation is born of her weakness — she may throw the house out of window. But after hysterics, exhaustion. Or, if you will, a period of calm —diplomatic calm. June the 18th, 1915, twelve months hence, will be the Waterloo Centenary, as on this 18th of June we are bound to remind ourselves. It is curious how little suspicious the Europe of 1814 was that a Waterloo waited it. Defeated, deprived, dethroned, Napoleon was “ down and out,” as the modern phrase is. He had been exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba, not ever to come back, no, never! In this belief the allied sovereigns of Russia and Prussia with their chief men of war, their Bluchers and Platoffs, a brilliant train, had come to London and were celebrating the triumphant close of a long, long struggle, little thinking that within a twelvemonth they would be summoned to renew it. In the Creevey Memoirs a letter belonging to this same ■week—June 14-21—a hundred years ago gives a glimpse of what went on, the visitors “ sick to death of the way they are followed about,” “the King of Prussia sulky as a bear,” the Emperor of Russia

figurine as a. dandy at balls; our own Prince Regent, George IY that was to be, at the height or depth of unpopularity, and for good cause. Prinny (the Prince) is exactly in the state one could wish; he lives only by protection of hie visitors. If he is caught alone, nothing can equal the execrations of the people who recognise him. All agree that Prinny will die or go mad. • He is worn out with fuss, fatigue, and rage. lie came to Lady Salisbury on Sunday from his own dinner drunk. He already abuses the Emperor (of Russia) lustily, and his (the Emperor’s) waltzing with Lady Jersey last night at Lady Cholmondeley’s would not mend his temper, and, in truth, he only stayed five minuted, and went off as sulky, as a boar.

Unknowing, they were all _ alike on the brink of a precipice. Little heeding, either; for • in high circles they were clearly a loose-living lot. Yet there are people who deplore the good old days departed, and insist that the world is getting worse.

. Oamaru, June 13. Dear “Givis,”—ls it within your province to answer questions in natural history? My query is prompted by a remark in Mr G. W. Russell’s Dunedin address on the action of Ministers in scouring the country instead of attending to their duties in Wellington: “But now they .were fleeing from one end of the country to the other like a flock of ducks from Noah’s Ark, looking for some solid ground on which to place their feet.” Were not the ducks Noah had cooped up in the Ark web-footed? or have ducks only developed aquatic habits since the Deluge? Quack. There would be nothing wrong with Noah’s ducks; if ‘he had any, doubtless they were ducks that could swim. It is only the hapless Russell floundering with his tropes and figures. And his figures literal are as treacherous as his figures figurative. Mr C. E. Statham the other night gave an example. Mr Russell had stated that Mr Massey owned 1000 acres of land 20 miles from Auckland which was worth £4O an acre, and that he was getting a railway to the place. Mr Massey had contradicted that by saying that it was aboct 300 acres, and it was within half a mile of the Main Trunk line. Challenged as to his own territorial possessions, Mr Russell at one Otago meetingconfessed CO,OOO acres, at a later meeting 64,000, which area, as I remarked last week, is exactly a hundred square miles—the honest acquisition of a land reformer under 21 years of “Liberalism”! There are sovereign states in Germany not much bigger than the Russell principality in New Zealand, and the independent kingdom of Monaco in Southern Europe is very much less. As to those diluvian ducks that couldn’t swim, Mr Russell must have been brooding over a satiric fling of Mr G. M. Thomson’s: Lately, when travelling in the south, he saw half a dozen ducks paddling in two or three inches of water —a mere puddle in the roadway. They were making believe that it was a. fine largo pool, and that they were doing very well. “The flying squadron” [Messrs Russell, Atraore, Isitt, and oo.], added Mr Thomson, amidst laughter, “were like those ducks —all quack, with a good deal of dirty water flying about.”

“Show me a large landowner,” said Mr Wilford, “and I will show you a Masseyite.”—(Applause.) This is truly delightful. For, seated by him on the platform, present there for the purpose of lending the speaker moral support, was Mr G. W. Russell! The courage of these selfstyled “Liberals” passes belief. Courage is it? —the word 1 was going to use may be left to the reader. At home with his audience of Christchurch Red Feds, exstrikers, and other disgruntled labour folk, dilating on the enormity of big landholders standing a-s. Reform candidates, Mr Wilford may have 'tipped the reporters a confidential wink, while Russell smole a smile. In Parliament Mr Wilford playsthe light comedian, cap and bells hig customary wear. Since he has got so far south as Christchurch he may perhaps be induced to come on to Otago. Picture entertainments are cheap, but cheaper is the comic “Liberal.” He hires his own hall, he pays for his own gas, or supplies it. By a motor car firm using the columns. of the Westminster Gazette the sonnet given below is attributed to Dr Bridges, Poet Laureate. A cruel thrust! For there are people who will rub their eyes and think twice before deciding that the lines are not authentic —one more illustration by Dr Bridges of the “Art of Sinking in Poetry.” They are a parody on a passage in his “Growth of Love” (stanza 57). In autumn moonlight, when the white air wan Is fragrant in the wake of summer hence, ’Tis sweet to travel swift, and muse thereon. In motor car’s most soothing indolence When the proud spirit lulled by breathless speed To fond pretence of immortality Convinced there cannot bo the slightest need To fear that what is not can ever be. And like the road where years are born and spent, The tired man is full of happy yearning; The rushing air drives far away lament With flowers and sunshine of spring’s sure returning. —Then in a crashing accident all hopes are hid. And dreams arc shattered by a fearsome skid. Poets Laureate there were before Dr Bridges who might have sonneteered a motor ride, giving to the sestett its climax in “a fearsome skid.” Tennyson’s “that good man, the clergyman,” in the May Queen, brought him ridicule; and similar opprobrium fell on Wordsworth. There are things you may not say in serious poetry, there are words you may not

use. “Priest,” yes; “clergyman,” no. “Soldier',” yes; “policeman,” no. When your hero has, done his day’s work, has fought and striven, laboured and suffered, you may not dignify with blank verse nis domestic unbending at the close, showing how he sat at table — Regaled with sausages and mashed potatoes; But, inadvertent, using too much mustard. Felt moved to sneeze—(“Atchoo !’ ) dropped knife and fork — (“Atchoo !”)—made _ hurried search — (“Atchoo!” again)— For pocket-handkerchief, and blew his nose. These lines are not by Dr Bridges; I don’t even say that they might have been. “ Would you like to know what is a dinner ‘fit for an emperor’?” asks a correspondent. Not greatly. A dinner that can be digested is the dinner of interest to me. Emperors too —a class of persons with whom I have only a bowing acquaintance—are probably in much the same plight. By the time a man gets to be emperor he has no longer the- digestion. of a schoolboy, still less what Horace inelegantly calls the “ tough guts of a reaper ” —(0 dura messorum ilia !). _ The Duke of Wellington’s customary dinner when campaigning in the Peninsula was a beef-steak pudding;—so I read the other day, and duly noted it. Every tiniest fact about tiro Duke of Wellington is interesting. We owe dinner at half-past 7 to the Duke of Wellington. The Duke “ when on his campaigns got into the habit of not sitting down to table till the day’s fighting was done, and, whenever that might be, generally to a beefsteak pudding as a dish that did not spoil by keeping.” On his return home he apparently brought this custom vvi(h him; and his officers brought the pudding, together with potatoes au nature!, to the United Service, whence it spread to other clubs. It is interesting also to • know that Felix, the Duke’s chef, was lent for a while to the Union Club, and there improved on his master’s pudding by the heaven-sent inspiration of adding oysters and mushrooms. The Duke in his Peninsular days was doubtless of a hardy digestion. But let us hear about the dinner “ fit for an emperor ” : The typical British dinner, if you dine well, and arc dining solus (“ Lucullus dines with Lucullus,” you remember), runs thus: “ A good soup, a small turbot, a neck of venison, duckling with green peas, or chicken with asparagus, and an apricot tart.” Quite simple, yet in the belief of the London clubs a dinner “ fit for an emperor.” Of course, not to be rivalled, in New Zealand. I don’t see that.* “ A good soup,”— there are plenty of good soups; what is the matter with Scotch broth? At the other end of the menu “ an apricot tart,” —what is to hinder? We can produce any kind of fruit tart, and apple dumplings as well. For the “small turbot to follow the soup substitute a plump flounder; for “neck of venison” neck of mutton; “ duckling with green peas, or chicicen with asparagus ” you can have; or—if you prefer it, and you may, as being distinctively New Zealand, racy of the roil, so to speak—a stewed rabbit with onion sauce. Let us not disparage our own resources. Civts.