PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3334, 6 February 1918, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Daily Timea.J Poker-playing as a game Has no vogue in Germany. Seven meals in the day, washed down—as Mr Gerard notes—by perhaps thirty large glasses of Munich beer, are riot propitious to intellectual amusements. Poker lis for the whisky countries. But in German diplomatic and military circles its principles are understood. " Our American national game, poker, has given us abroad an unfair reputation," says Mr Gerard. "We are always supposed to be bluffing." A book was published in Germany about the President called "President Bluff." And the German notion of bluff is accurately that of the Oxford Dictionary : To bluff: To impose upon an opponent as to the value of one's hand of cards, by betting heavily upon it, speaking or gesticulating or otherwise acting in such a way as to make believe that it is stronger than it is, so as to induce him to "throw up" his cards and loso his stake, rather than run the risk of betting against the bluffer. • N. York Weekly Sun: "He went his whole soul,,heart, and pocket on three ace 3, and wa3 bluffed by his opponent with a pair of trays." At the present moment it is a question whether on all fronts Germany is not bluffing. Military criticism proper belongs elsewhere; but I can draw an inference as well as another. Look at the position on the Italian front. As far back as November, German and Austrian armies had the Italians on the run.—before them Venice and' the plains of Italy. But they were held up and are still held up at the insignificant stream of the Piave. Assuredly their will was and is to cross. As they are still on the wrong side, it is a very simple inference that they are unable to cross. And if on the Italian front the Central Powers are " all in," what means German bluster and fluster on the Western front? It means that we are being bluffed, —bluffed in the vain hope that we shall throw up a hand of aces when there is nothing against it but a worthless pair of trays.

" Thou art so near, and yet so far," wag the torture of Tantalus. With the domes and belltowers of Venice glittering on the horizon but unattainable, this has been

the torture of the Hun. When we are told that Germany is on ' the verge of revolution and "la culbute generals,'_ we may with reason be slow of belief. Strikes and food riots, yes; we have much the same thing among ourselves. But revolution and the general overturn, no, —till we have better assurance of the fact. All newspapers have been quoting Mr Gerard on the " Rat" system, by which, as he says,. " the Government keeps a far tighter hold on the intellectual part of its population than if tihey "were threatened with torture and the stake." When talking of the '' rat'' system you may rhyme the word with "cat" if .you like; the German says " raht," but we are not bound to talk German. "Rat," meaning councillor, is a title of honour given to any man who has attained a decent standing in his trade or calling. Thus you may have a commerce rat, a justice rat (lawyer), a. sanitary rat (doctor), a building rat, and so on." Then there are grades of rattery. Beginning as a plain " rat,' a man may become successively a "secret rat," a "court secret rat," and a "really and truly court secret rat."

To cap all, as the wife carries the husband's title, you arrive at this—that the wife of a sucoessful builder is known as Mrs Really ami Truly Secret Court Building Rat. Incredible, but true. Becked out with these* and other distinctions scattered broadcast, German society is like a children's party at the dessert stage when coloured paper caps are served round, and one youngster becomes a zany, another a Turk, another a chief cook, or what not. Bound to the autocracy and military domination by these childish gauds and trappings, the Germans will make no revolution. So thinks Mr Gerard, who knows them well. But this is not to deny the possibility that at the present hour Germany ha's come to the end of her resources, and that the talk of an overwhelming offensive on the Western'front is bluff. Patience, however, —not prophecy. Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; of no prophecies is this truer than of war prophecies. We have but. to wait a little longer and we shall know.

According to Dr Anderson in the University Senate, a man who does not understand " the system of the telephone," together with other electric mysteries, "is not an educated man." A simple rule, easily applied, and it puts quite a lot of us out of pain ;-—many thanks! Searching for "an educated man" on the staff of this newspaper Dr Anderson would need the lantern of Diogenes; and then he wouldn't find him. Nor° on the University ' Senate either. What Dr Anderson and his.fellow pundits know about the system of the telephone is pretty much what the undergraduate knew about the system of the pump. " Explain the principle of the common pump," said his examination paper. Answer: " Let A B C be the common pump; A is the handle, B the spout. You work A up and down and the water comes out at B. Q..E.D." Similarly with the telephone: You turn a handle at one end of the wire and get a response from the other,—or fail to get it, as the switchboard maidens may determine. That is the system of the telephone as understood in this office. But why _ these things are so, and what electricity is, we do not know—Madam How and Lady Why refusing to be interrogated. Nor could Dr Anderson tell us. Not though backed by a college of electrical engineers. I conclude quite easily that Dr Anderson, judged by his own rule, is " not an educated man.".

Notwithstanding, however, and nevertheless, his doctrine is plain,—it were idle to pretend otherwise; a doctrine vehemently repudiated in this column,—that there can be no education without science, or what ho calls science. Literature and art, the poets and the dramatists, are of the outer darkness. Shakespeare was not an educated man, nor Dante, nor Virgil,

nor Horace, nor Cicero. The boasted Greeks —Plato, Aristotle, and the rest, including The blind old man of Solo's rocky isle, to whom a credulous posterity attributed the Iliad and the Odyssey—all alike wallowed in ignorance. No one of them would haye known how to use the telephone, much less explain it. To be quite fair, however, let me take an example j from oar own times, J" Greek, , and th<» humaniue--. ui> ;';■''-'";**"' - "'-'■.''-j/'.)}' \ intel'cjtu-tl training, ..''■".-.'-'"•' j iiiuu'i . :-.o : v "\j- '••-.-f.":""-j">..'•' '"' • ,Tl "?'^ i -2't; J "the magiiii! zv.i }.-.; :.\ : ,-:->:;_-i<. ■.:<.■. " ' octogenarian ~ Jclir< 'iliisi, politician, ex-Miiiist4^ ; oi. "1 !■ •.-... .'"rown—has just published", virtually an autobiography. A reviewer of this book depicts the author's recreations and avocations when in full tide. We see the literary craftsman pre* paring himseli for his work by constant reading, note-taking, and learning by heart. He ranges over all literature, but especially the Greek and Latin masters, and on a- vacant afternoon seriously sits down' to read Sallust's Jugurtha or Cicero's De Oratore. He learns fifty lines of Lucretiuo in half an hour, and hopes to do better next time. Nulla -dies sine linea. _ His commonplace books are daily enriched with some new treasure. He has marked preferences and some rather stubborn prejudices. He finds "Measure for Measure " to bo the most modern and one of the most interesting of Shakespeare's plays. He packs a whole world of criticism into the epi- m thete which he chooses for hie special devotions, as when he speaks of the " tense, defiant, concentrated, scorriful. fervid, daring, and majestic verse of. Lucretius." And yet, alas, this intellectual veteran is '' not an educated man." To-day, for all his eighty years, he understands the mystery of the telephone just as little as Dr Anderson himself, or any other bigwig of a University Senate that cuts out Latin from education in the interest of " science."

" We air a great people, and we must be cracked up," says Mr Jefferson Brick or some other typical American of the Nicholas Nickleby time, dear to caricature, a time long past and gone. American greatness is no theme for joking, nowadays. But it is still open to an American lecturer to crack up an American humorist. Mark Twain, as seen by -Professor Trueblood of Michigan University, Professor of Oratory therein, is to be accounted " one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of our (American) authors." That may be. But, further, he is " fit to rank with Cervantes and Dickens as the three great world humorists." Well, I dare say he made as many poor jokes as either of them. Mark Twain when good is very good.; when not good he is horrid. Humour is of course a matter of taste. The pit and the boxes don't always laugh at the same thing. In Mark Twain what to one man is trivial .and childish may set another man rocking. Pass for that, however, and take the point for which I am writing this note. So perverse was Mark Twain ? s taste in literature, so tricky hie palate, that the classics of American and British fiction were an offence unto him. Patience with Feriimore Cooper had he none. Jane Austen" and her " ivory miniatures " set him raging. In burlesque exaggeration he wondered that Jane Austen's contemporaries " allowed her to die a natural death." ' Then Walter Scott, —but for this tragedy a separate paragraph. Mark Twain's indictment of Scott is drawn out, interrogatively, in twelve counts, no less. As I write mainly for Scottish people who some day will erect a Scott statue to flank or face Robbie Burns in the Octagon, I may as well find room for the whole blasphemy: -*- 1 Aro. there in Sir Walter's novels 'passages done in good English—Eng-. lish which is neither slovenly nor involved? 2. Aro there passages whose English is not poor and thin and commonplace, but is of a quality above that? 3. Aro there passages which burn with real fire—not punk, fox-fire, make believe? 4. Has he heroes and heroines who are not cads and cade-Lies? 5. Has ho personages whose acts and talk correspond with their characters as described by him ? 6. Has he heroes and heroines whom the reader admires—admires and knows why? 7. Has he <unny characters . that are funny, and humorous passages that are humorous? 8. Does he ever claim the reader's interest, and make him reluctant to lay the book down? 9. Are there pages where ho ceasea from posing, ceases from admiring tho placid flood and flow of his own dilutions, ceases from being artificial, and is for a time, long or short, recognisably sincere and in earnest? 10. Did ho know how to write English, and didn't do it because he didn't want to? 11. Did ho' use the right word only

when he couldn’t think of any other one, or did he run so much to wrong because he didn’t know the right one-' when he saw it? 12. Cam'you read him and keep your respect for _ him? Of course, a pereon could in his day—an era of sentimentality and sloppy romantics—but land ! can a body do it to-day? there is no one of us, Scottish or English, who will dissent from the verdict thai ths greatest of American, authors - here writes himself down an ass. From North Canterbury : Dear “ Givis,” —I am pleased to see that the neighbourhood of your column is still a haunt of the versifiers. Thirty years ago, between the seaward and > inland Kaikouras, I found “ The Poet at the Breakfast Table” In the cook- i house. At shearing time when cook’s mate at the home station I discovered “Lamb’s Tales” and, elsewhere, “Byron’s Poems.” While remembering Tennyson’s lines— Seldom comes the poet hero, And the critics rarer still, I would presume on the schooling then began to say that the author of “Pedlar’s Pack ” is a poet in the making. Ho has not yet learned the meaning of Meredith’s lines— Our passion is too full in flood — Our wisdom speaks from failing blood. Fearless he throws out the challenge to Apollo; like “Marsyas” ho is master of the flute. The critics may flay him living and lament him dead. In time he may break away from Edwin Arnold and the like and learn that the eternal earth and sea and sky and the human heart and soul are waiting expression here in our southern islands. His strength of personal feeling is often finely expressed. May go without comment ‘as a speck men, not unintelligent of bush criticism, -Civia.