PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3513, 12 July 1921, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday’* Daily Time#.) Nothing done or said on this side of the world will make better or worse the condition of Ireland. None the less, however, must we talk about it, since it interests us. But to talk of the condition of liyland as Mr Lloyd George talks, and Sir Vamar Greenwood, and the majority in the British Parliament, who are 'not all knaves or fools, is to set our local Sinn Eeiners dancing. it is as though you pulled the string of a Jumping Jack wherewith to please the children. Personally I have no pleasure in the galvanic convulsions of a Jumping Jack, nor in pulling the string that produces them. Quite the contrary,—l sympathise with the local Sinn Feiner in his embarrassments. Tell him that if Ireland is a nation, then Wales is a nation, and Scotland is a nation, and the Jews are a nation, the Gypsies no less, and—as Aristophanes has it—even the frogs of the Acherusian marsh. Tell him that when Ireland was “granted” to England and the Plantagenet kings by the Pope <of all people in the world!) Pope Adrian the Fourth of pious memory, the Plantagenets found, when they went there, not a nation but a chaos of barbarian tribes who lived by cutting each other’s throats. Tell him this. Galvanic jerks and jumps are his only possible answer. I sympathise. Also in the wail: Ireland a nation ! Self-Determination 1 Dismal jingle. In no part applicable to Ulster, however, —oh dear no! Selfdetermination is sauce for the goose, not sauce for the gander. Someone sends me copies of a Glasgow montlily publication calling itself “Liberty,” price threepence, in appearance a rag from the gutter, and by its appearance not belied. Anger, hatred, and malice are its principles, England is the target of its slanders, the restoration of the Stuarts and the independence of Scotland are its aims. Nowhere else could you buy so much concentrated malignity for a threepenny-bit, nor anywhere else such an overflowing bushel of lies. The attitude of the British Government towards sedition in this form—call it magnanimity, call it contempt—is both hazardous and perplexing. The publisher of “Liberty” must himself be perplexedwondering why his martyrdom is delayed. “Liberty” forsooth!—under any other £,.vernment the irony of that specious title

would be brought home to him by a diet of bread and water in durance vile. Here are some of “Liberty's” gems: If we were asked to name the outstanding characteristic of the English we should unhesitatingly say Hypocrisy. John Bull is the world's champion. • hypocrite and humbug. Throughout the ages he has been guilty of the most foul and abominable acts, but always he has covered them with the cloak of sanctity and religion. Having, with the aid of most of the other nations and by various means crushed Germany, England proceeds at once to give, the lie to all her pretensions and proclaim herself liar, hypocrite, and humbug. She gets Germany, deserted by her allies and starving as a result of the English blockade, to agree to an armistice on the basis of President Wilson’s fourteen points, chief among which were: “No annexations; no indemnities.” Having got Germany to lay down her arms and equipment on this solemn understanding, thus rendering her incapable of further resistance, England at- once tears up the document, dismembers and annexes German territory, destroys Germany’s transport and agricultural facilities, and crowns all bv imposing a crushing indemnity that threatens to bring chaos and ruin to a onceprosperous nation, and to wipe out civilisation itself in the affected countries. The miscreants who say these things do not themselves believe them. They say them for the pleasure of saying them—the pleasure that any foul-mouthed blackguard may feel in “swearing at large.” SIGNS OF THE TIMES. •When drapers sell at “sale price” All the year round; And ox-beef-butchers cow-beef At less per pound; When cotton-threads are lonely In stuff of silk; And filtered water only Dilutes the milk; When sport has naught of baneful Or bitter in the sequel; When at the tote the* divvies Pan out at top, and equal; When capping frolics run no risk Of Pharisaic strictures; When classical refinement Commends us to the pictures; When the unions trounce the Bolshevist, And Labour goes to church; When not for “economics” Is sense left in the lurch; When never another Irishman In Sinn Fein seeks resource; When St. Joseph’s makes MacGregor Its text-book on divorce; When Presbytery ventures A text from Robert Burns; “Tuk aff your dram,” —and so it's back On Prohibition turns; To drouthy Scots conceding Theft whisky at a pinch; While the Reverend Howard Elliott Takes tea with Father Lynch; When these things in the present The future hold in pawn, Take off your hat and humbly greet The true millennial dawn. A vindication of blank verse, by one who is well exercised in suit and service to the Muses, and knows what he is talking about ; Dear “Givis,” —Every now and then we come across this sort of thing:— “Modern heroism lias a superb nonchalance entirely destructive of the blank verse atmosphere.” That’s Storm Jameson, as of course you know. You will remember how lie girds at Yeats for liis “blank verse maundering*.” Now, what does ho mean precisely? What is blank verso “atmosphere”? If he would say that modern heroism is averse to loud modes of expression, braggadocio, and so forth, is not “expansif,” as our French friends say (which is perhaps best slargily translated as “does not spread itself”) —why then, we are with him; but what has it all to do with blank verse? That has no “atmosphere” in Iliis kind! It is, as every student surely knows, one of the noblest instruments of literary craft, and can be used to express anything at all that is expressible in words, be it sprung of thought or of emotion. It can convey the fieriest or the iciest phrases of human consciousness; it can catch us up to heights of spiritual aspiration, or appal ua with its revelation

of the depths that we may sink to; it can show us delicate pictures; it can argue; it can shake us with great laughters—there is no phase of human thought and feeling which it cannot adequately set forth. Why will our critics confound atmosphere with mode? Here let me nut in a word. Blank verse destitute of rhythm is merely prose measured off into lines by a foot-rule. Some weeks back I gave an example from Robert Bridges. One from Matthew Arnold is given by Fronde in his “Essays on Literature” : The gods are happy; they turn on all sides their shining eyes and see below them earth and men. They see Tiresias sitting staff in hand on the warm grassy Asopus bank, his robe drawn over his old, sightless head, revolving inly the doom of Thebes. They see the Centaurs in the upper glens of Pelion, on the streams where the red-berried ashes fringe the clear brown shallow pools; with streaming flanks and heads reared proudly, sniffing the mountain winds. They see the Scythian on the wide steppe, unharnessing his wheeled house at noon ; he tethers his beast down and makes his meal, mare’s milk and bread baked on the embers; all around the boundless waving grass plains stretch, thick starred with saffron and the yellow hollyhock and flag-leaved isis flowers. Apply the foot-rule, arrange in measured lines, and you have a passage from Matthew Arnold’s poem, the “Strayed Reveller”—a passage which satisfies the schoolboy’s definition of poetry, “Where every line begins with a capital letter.” But it reads equally well as prose, set solkl. My correspondent may now resume, —to finish at his leisure; though hazarding a breach of the unwritten rule that governs this column, Ne quid nimis—Not too much of anything. One of our War penmen, Chas. G. Harper, I remember, had his fling at blank verse also. Let me turn up the passage. Here it is: “A wounded Tommy meandered into view. I thought vividly of the stagedirection in “Macbeth,” “Enter, A Bleeding Soldier,” but he did not hold forth in Shakespearean blank verse. Not at all, he merely said, wiping away with gory hand the trickling blood running into his eyes, that he had “caught it in tire napper.” That is your British Tommy all over, and every time. He will not play the hero to an audience.” and of course we agree in toto, but listen further:—and there is no blank verse about him. The same obsession as we see in Jameson, that blank verse and braggadocio are more or less synonymous! Air Harper seems not to understand that Shakespeare, if he wrote to-day, would make his soldiers talk as soldiers do, blank verse restricting him in no wise. Flo would take a holy joy in “napper” and its familiars, and the soldier “cant” (for it is cant rather than slang) would run smoothly from liis pen, as, of course, you “Civis” are very well aware. Why, it runs even from Air Harper’s pen, though he doesn’t in the least, suspect it. Listen to how he makes his soldiers talk :—- Oh ! ’e’s all right if ’e can talk like that—a perfect Shakespearean (soldier scene) blank verse line. Then but for the one introductory word “Take” we get another, two, in fact, —immediately observe, not far down the page, piekt out at random :—- Take A ceegar? Thanks! Light it for me, ole man; I’ve only got one useful ’and. You'll do! After this amusingly unconscious concession to a law greater than critics’ little notions of correctness, ho adds: —- I am sorry that I cannot give you any fine heroic writing here, but these are things as they happen when the dramatist and the novelist aren’t, looking, and are merely life in the rough. “Fine, heroic, writing”—just so; the “atmosphere” again confused with the mode of laying word to word as music, rhythmically, instead of as in ordinary speech. A wounded man’s speech—be it a physical or a subtler wound from which he suffers —is hardly “ordinary” ; and the marvellous rhythm that sways this cosmos from top to bottom, as every poet knows, tends in such case to show itself. But your genius need not wait extraordinary happenings; he can make ordinary humdrum life a thing of rhythm. If modern blank verse plays make no appeal to us. it is simply that the writers of them have not the power that justifies the use of ihat particular form. Were they great enough, they would sway ns even as Shakespeare did. — I am, etc., Swara. From New Brighton, Christchurch : Dear “Civis,” —In your issue of June 21, writing of the derivation of words such as “jury-rudder,” you mention that tho origin of the term “dog-watch” is equally obscure. To me “Taffrail’s” idea of a dog-watch—one that, is curtailed, —seems as plausible* as the story you quote from the Oxford Dictionary of the origin of “chestnut.”

“Taffrail” was perpetrating a pun; re. specting which lowest form of wit Dr Johnson said, or is said to hav<i that the man who would perpetrate a pun would pick a pocket. The nautical dogwatch is a watch of two hours—a half watch, and so a .curtailed watch, or, since a cur is a dog, a dog (tailed) watch. Fo’c’sle humour, I suppose. As etymology, let him believe it who" can. Noting the use of “dog” as a depreciatory prefix, we are on a more hopeful track,—dog-rose, dog-violet, dog-latin, dog-cheap. In this succession may naturally come dog-watch. From Oamaru : -—- Dear Civis,—Alay I ask your aid to solve a little shopping event which leaves me puzzled? My friend and I go buying apples. In the first shop I buy 20 apples at three for one penny, equals lOd; at the second shop I buy 30 apples at two for one penny, equals Is 3d; making a total of 60 apples for 25d. My friend went into a shop and bought 60 apples at five for two pence, equals 2s. The apples I bought averaged two and a-hnlf for «je penny and my friend’s also averaged two and a-half for one penny; yet he got 60 apples for 2s and my 60 cost me 2s Id. Would you please tell me how I came to lose my penny? Let no one mock at this quest for the fugitive penny. The books of the Bank of New Zealand would be ransacked from end to end if the year’s balance were a pennv out. Auditors and* staff would search for that penny till they found it. But finding the Oamaru penny is not my job ;—let other people have the pleasure. Question remitted to the winter evenings, and to the combined intelligence of the back-blocks. % Civis.