PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3403, 4 June 1919, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(Stod* Saturday 1 s Daily Tub#d.l

Asked by General Richardson this question : "Is one a better man when lie conies back than when he went away?" a gathering of returned soldiers, 400. in number or thereabouts, hung lire for a moment, then, as they say in Parliament, the answer was in the negative-. There were cries of " No." "I have heard that answer before," continued the speaker, "and I believe that in a month's time most of you will answer the question differently. In 12 months' time when you have settled down you will seo things in a different light, and I believe that your experiences are gointr to make you better men and better citizens." —(Hear, hear, and applause.) With that applause let me chime in. The. soldier that comes back is more of a man than the recruit that marched away; and he has the makings of a better man. He has been out into the great world; he has seen men and cities; he has walked in the valley of the shadow of death. Discipline has left its indelible mark; his " airs_ in walk an' gait" reveal it. Authority, subordination, co-operation, are ideas not strange to him. Parochial narrowness has gone for ever. The consistency of the soldiers' vote on prohibition is evidence good of that. He has no sentimental weakness for the miscalled "' conscientious objector" —"military defaulter" is the fitter term in his thinking; and he holds that the military defaulter ought to be shot. One by one the troopships come; —New Zealand had never before so welcome so wholesome an immigration. It is New Zealand's first and last duty to reinstate the returning soldiers in vital citizenship.

The attempt to fly across the Atlantic on a two-seated contraption made up in principle of the motor cycle and the kite was a brave venture, a sporting venture to boot. There was a £IO,OOO prize in view ; there was America to beat in point of priority. There was the risk to life. In a machine of this type let the engine but stop, clown must come the whole thing plumb—a bird with broken wing. Intrinsically the trouble may be of no higher rank than a tyre puncture; but you can't get out in mid-air to mend machinery. On land and on sea defects are reparable; up in the clouds an engine breakdown means death. In attempting a supremely perilous thing, a thing that had never been done before, Hawker and Grieves appeal

to the sportsman in us. Every man of British birth is more or less a sport; it runs in the blood. Their story is not quite that of Daedalus and Icarus, father and son, who made themselves wings and fastened them on with wax, that they might fly from Crete across the yEgean. Daedalus reaches the further shore, but Icarus is ruined by engine trouble. • He flies too near the sun, the-wax melts, the wings drop off, he falls into the sea and is drowned. Hawker and Grieves fall into the sea, but are rescued by a ship miraculously there for the purpose. First and last, however, they have furnished raw material for a great excitement.

When they reach in London the climax of their adventure I confess to thrills and throbs; the blood stirs, the nerves prick. Hawker is an Australian, and Australians in troops and battalions from France and Flanders were there to claim him. With piercing coo-ees and the slogan " Australia Will Be There!" they commandeered the railway station, the London streets, and the London police;—nothing could stand against them. " Hawker!" —they shouted —"we must have him." And they certainly got him. Kings and emperors may have sighed for such a reception, say the cables; if so they sighed in vain. The Australian coo-ee is a recognition signal; Hawker heard it and resigned himself, — his countrymen were there to do him honour. There is a story of an old Sydney couple visiting London and losing each other in Fleet street. They did the natural thing " Coo-ee" long and shrill went up, to the amazement of the hurrying wayfarers and the scandal of the police. Madame Melba, when on foreign tour, appearing at the Paris Opera, say, is not seldom greeted by a friendly coo-ee from an Australian in pit or boxes; in acknowledgment the Australian gets from the prima donna a turn of the head, a smile, and a nod. The coo-ee is Australasian, not Australian merely; New Zealanders may claim their share in it.

The dancing frenzy to Avhich the London papers testify is a sign of the time. In the manner of children who come out of school with hop, skip, and jump, twirling, racing, swinging their book wallets, does London come out of the war. Storm and stress being suddenly ended, the overstrained nerves explode in fun and frolic. Even Berlin after the armistice had a joy frenzy of sorts; —the beaten legions were crowned with flowers, the rationed restaurants were thronged, the dance saloons went jigging night and day. Later, as revolution developed, street firing added itself to other agreeable excitements. An American press correspondent writes:

While machine guns clattered and men fought to and fro, ten minutes'

walk distant, here in the Fricdrich

strasso crowds were strolling up and down unconcernedly. All afternoon and evening I went about Berlin dazed at this contrast. Fighting in the Leipzigerplatz; crowds shopping in and out of the big department stores in the Loipzigerstrasse. Fightisjg around the Reichstag building; crowds flocking unconcerned to the Lessing Theatre, and the Deutschcs Theatre, and theKammerspielhaus, directly across the river, to see plays by Shakespea.ro, Strindberg. Ibsen, Hauptmann, Wedekind, and Tolstoy. Pei-hapsrevolutions are always like this. But it seemed strange to me.

Later again, in honour of peace terms better than they hoped, immeasurably better than they would have imposed had the boot been on the other leg, the Germans decreed a Week of Mourning,— pure histrionics, gloomy, yet withal of a pleasurable gloom. Amateur theatricals usually give pleasure to the performers, if to no one else.

But the Londoners dance ; —never before amongst British people was such a vogue of dancing. There may have been something like it at Vienna, when, a century back, a dilatory Peace Congress was clearing up after Waterloo and the Long War :—" Lo Congres ne marche gas, '

said one of its members, " il danse."vThe seductive waltz, young and in its native home, had bewitched great and small. Invading England, the waltz was greeted by Byron as the last word in sensuous indecency, a department of things in which Byron was no mean judge. And the dictionary definitions of to-day would seem to bear' him, out: —"Waltz, a dance in which partners progress gyrating round each other in embrace." Byron's Hymn to the Waltz is not precisely reading for the young person, but I may venture on lines :

Observant travellers of >every . time! Ye quartos published upon every clime! O say, shall dull Romaika's heavy round, Fandango's wriggles, or Bolero's bound; Can Egypt's Almas—tantalising group— Columbia's caperers to the warlike whoop— Can aught from cold Kamschatka to Cape Horn With Waltz compare, or after Waltz bo borne ?

The answer to which question is—the tango, the fox trot, the bunny hug, and—latest but not last—the jazz. In Byron's view waltzing was the limit; beyond it nothing would be borne. But the public conscience can bear a lot when it tries.

The jazz, according to one authority, is a cross between the bunny hug and the fox trot; according to another it is " nothing more or less than a modified form of the time-honoured ' scissors ' in the tango." These be mysteries. Nor are wo "helped much by the ravings of ecstatic votaries: " 0 the revelry of the roll, the rollick and the 101 lof it, the agile forward leap with the backward sway and swing, the side glide too, with splayed feet, and the bandy bend. . . ."

I know that in most things I am as , other men, constrained, commonplace, conventional. But in the jazz I am original. I rise above myself, out of myself, I am all over it. My steps are my own steps, my slides my own slides, my glides and shank quivers, hec-1 taps, side slews, floor footings—there are of my own curious devising. My myriad im.ions will not be constrained to set steps, My jazz is the jazz everybody is crazy about. j It is THE jazz. Evolved and still evolving, symbol of limb liberty. My feet wanton in convolutions, my legs tJ3 and untie; they are involved one with the other, and are compromised each by the other. . . . This is the madness in the teaching of which, according to "Clubman" in the Pall Mall Gazette, dancing masters are making small fortunes. And here also,_ in this remote corner, the all-compelling question presently will be, "Do you jazz?"

Dear " Civis." —I enclose one of the funniest advertisements I've over seen (Daily Times, 10th May). Note the emphasis in the second part, " Also A MAN," in block capitals. It is from an Otago up-country township, dated "Council Chambers," and signed by So-and-so, " Borough Clerk" : WANTED, A DAYMAN, who will be willing to undertake the duties of Nightman and Lamplighter in case of an emergency. Wages, lis per day. Also, A MAN to fill the position of Nightman, Lamplighter, Caretaker of Cemetery, Poundkeeper, Motor Car Inspector, Caretaker of Hall, Ranger, and General Utility. A man with some taste for ornamental gardening would be preferred. Thus do we pass from the obscenities to the amenities. Add that the Nightman would also be expected to play the harmonium in church and wait at table. We then may drop into poetry and picture, in Hamlet's phrase, A combination and a form indeed Where every god doth seem to set his seal To give the 'world assurance of a MAN. " What do you make of this mixture of piety and profanity?" asks a correspondent, handing me a newspaper paragraph : His many admirers will rejoice to hear that Professor Saintsbury, the Grand Old Man of Literary Criticism, escaped from his recent accident with nothing worse than bruises. As he explained the accident to a friend (says the Morning Post), the motor cut hia legs from, under him, and he was carried along, sprawling on the bonnet and objurgating the chauffeur. When the car finally stopped, the man said very calmly: "You ought to thank God, sir," whereupon the Professor replied: "So I do; but I damn you!" This is not profanity; it is nearer to a prayer. George Saintsbury is Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in Edinburgh University, and knows to a hair's turn the value, objurgatory and imprecatory, of the big big D. Civis. -