PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3594, 30 January 1923, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday’s Daily Tf'rne*.) It is not natural to think of Sir Robert Stout in retreat. Why should he give up the chair of the University' Senate? The duties are not exacting ; and if they were, wliat*Wf that?—Sir Robert’s eye is not dim, neither his natural strength abated. Age doth not wither him, nor custom stale. The University Senate is very much pervaded by University professors. A University professor may be a good man for his own job, whilst not at all the man for bigger things. Managing a University is a bigger thing than managing a class room. Lord Palmerston, who in choice of phrases stood not upon nicety, once summed up Germany as the “land of damned professors.” Rare insight, and prophetic! To save our University from being Germanised there needs on the Senate a strong non-professorial element, and in the chair a citizen versed in affairs, vir pietate gravis—if an ornament of the judicial bench, so much the better. Sir Robert Stout filled the bill. If he has good reasons for giving up, they are his secret. He has not disclosed them. And thy New Zealand public is stronglv disposed to believe that there are no good reasons at all. Of professors as professors no disparagement. Far be the thought! A Dunedin professor, Dr G. E. Thompson, aptly reminded the Senate of Sir Robert’s true belongings. On behalf of the Otago members of the Senate he would like to say that ». this province had a certain proprietary interest in the Chancellor. Anyone reading the press of old. Otago would find there many references to Sir Robert’s battles and struggles and victories, and he would also like to remind the Senate that their Chancellor was one of the best of the many good things that Otago, with great generosity, had bestowed on the rest of the dominion. Hear, hear. This witness is true. In the la§t analysis the Chancellor—or ex-Chan-cellor, if so we now must call him—is an Otago man out and out. We nourished and cherished him from his youth up. Any shadowy pre-existence—in the Shetlands, was it? or the 1 Orkneys?—may be forgotten. The one-time Robert Stout would to-day confess the old-time Otago his spiritual home, and the old-time “Civis”—in whom spake week by week the genius loci—his spiritual brother. We twa were David and Jonathan; we twa hae (spiritually) run about the braes and pou’d the gouans fine; we twa hae paidled in the burn frae morning sun till dine; and then gleefully would proceed to beat

each other about the head, all in love, and on such questions as the metaphysical Scot delights in. . When the knighthood came Otago was sympathetically glad, and this was the manner of our rejoicing:— Sir Bob, your elevation We hail with shout, Yet, condescend! —to us poor plebs Continue “Stout,” just “Stout.” And still in wars political Ont-spout each spouter; Than all our foes, than all your own, Continue stouter. But not in wars religious! Our hope devoutest Is there to find you, as of old. Though stout, not stoutest. Happy days;—eheu fugaces ! And seas between us braid hae roared. Duty constraining, Sir Robert lives on the other side of Cook Strait. But his affections are still with the Otago of auld lang syne. Dear “Civis,”—“Comparisons are odious,” —this saying is continually cropping up; you' had it last week. I have never been able to see the sense of it. How are you to know that one thing is better or .worse than another but by comparing them? The wide currency of the saying raises it to a maxim;—there must be truth in it. Things that can be weighed and measured you may compare; but how are you going to compare the imponderables—one great poem with another, —one style of feminine beauty with another? You can’t apply the yard-stick, or weigh in pounds and ounces. Judgment will turn on the taste of the judge; and here comes in another time-worn, maxim: matters of taste are not for argument—de gustibus non disputandum. Where tfiere is no absolute standard to serve as a test, comparisons are odious. 2* Take an example of this phrase from Cervantes, an author far away and a literature not our own. The lady of Hon Quixote’s devotion, “a coarse, ugly, country wench,” his disordered imagination endowed with grace and beauty—“her flowing hair of gold, her forehead the Elysian fields, her eyebrows two celestial arches, her eyes a pair of glorious suns, her cheeks two beds of roses, her lips two coral portals guarding her teeth of Oriental pearl, her neck alabaster, her hands polished ivory, her bosom whiter than the new-fallen snow.” High-born to boot, her peasant name transformed into the aristocratic and romantic “Dulcinea del Tobago.” There is a conversation in which another lady of great beauty is approximated to her level. Whereupon Hon Quixote: “Softly, good Signor Montesinos; comparisons you know are odipus, and therefore let them be spared, T beseech you. The peerless. Dulcinea is what she is, and the lady Donna Belerma is what she is, and there let it rest.” “Pardon me, Signor Don Quixote,” . said Montesinos, “I might have guessed that your worship was the lady Dulcinea’s knight, and ought to have bit my tongue off rather than it should have compared her to anything less than heaven itself.” Whereupon, continues Don Quixote, “This satisfaction being given me by the great Montesinos, my heart recovered from the shock it had sustained on hearing my mistress compared with Belerma.” No reasoning could be sounder than this Quixotism of Quixote himself. And that comparisons are odious, nothing could be plainer. In Scottish Otago Scottish stories, good or bad, for a column of this nature take precedence. I am compelled to a sort of “preference to unionists,” a principle I abhor. Dear “Civis,” —Your “Notes” this week about Scottish thrift and the “Kingdom of Fife” remind me of a story about a “Fifer” which, I think, is not generally known. Kingsbarns is a fair-sized village in Fife, and a travelling musician “struck it” in the course of his wanderings, and thought he would try and collect something to help him on his way. .'Entering the village. he took his tin whistle out of his

pocket and played his best all the way to the other end, but without getting any response in the shape of “bawbees” or applause. Said he to an old man sitting on a stone dyke outside the village : “Man, I hae whustled richt through the toon and I hivna’ gotten a fardin’.” The old man replied: “Imph’m, like eneuch; ye see we dae a’ oor ain whustlin’ here.” The folk o’ Fife are usually referred to by their brither Scots as “Fifers and Whistlers.” P.S. —Dunedin Scots are progressive. The Burns Club here is the first of the many all over the world to have a woman to give the oration at the poet's anniversary. Pity Burns himself could not be there to hear. Is there any Scottish poet who has paid warmer tributes, graceful and ungraceful, to women ? Auld Nature swears the lovely dears Her noblest work she classes, O; Her prentice han’ she tried on man, And then she made the lasses, O. Another thrift story, showing that the canny Scot, usually a biped, /may be sometitnes a quadruped—four legs instead of two. Dear “Civis,” —After reading in one of your happy Notes about a Scotchman who wanted to see a cricket maU;h without paying, a true story came to my mind, showing that not only the Scots, but also their dog friends, are canny. Sandy owned a collie, and was wont to “blow” about his intelligence. A friend was an unbeliever (or pretended to bd), so to prove that the dog understood the English (or Scotch) language, he was given a penny and a line written on a piece of paper, and told to go *m<l get a bun. He returned in about Ve minutes and laid the paper at his master’s feet. J Another penny was entrusted to him, but the same thing happened—the/ dog came back without penny or bun —only the paper. Sandy, disgusted, would not part with more pennies, but his unbelieving friend said he would risk just one. So away went the dog with a penny and the paper the third time. Being followed up, the collie was seen to go into the baker’s and come out with a paper bag well filled. They were astonished, but not so much when thev saw in the baker’s window a legend: “Buns, Id; 4 for 3d.” Saving the first two pennies, bur ng them maybe, the collie awaited an increase of capital that would enable him to buy at four for threepence. Scotland for ever! Happy chance has brought to me, I know not how, a novel by Bottom the Weaver, written not altogether in the ‘Ercles’ vein” of his preference, “a part to tear a cat in, to make all split The raging rocks. And shivering shocks Shall break the locks Of prison gates; And Phibbus’ car Shall shine from far, And make and mar The foolish Fatgs.” —not altogether thus, but qualified by the gentler roaring of a sucking dove and the tones of a lover; a lover being, as he says, “more condoling.” For example, a domestic scene, husband and wife: “Was I duped to ascend the ladder of liberty, the hill of harmony, the tree of triumph, and the rock of regard, and when wildly manifesting my act of ascension, was I to be informed of treading still in the valley of defeat? Speak! Irene ! Wife ! Woman ! Do not sit in silence and allow the blood that now boils in my veins to ooze through cava- j ties of unrestrained passion hnd trickle down to y drench me with its crimson hue !” At times sententious and philosophical, Bottom discourses thus : The silvery touch of fortune is too often gilt with betrayal; the meddling mouth of extravagance swallows every desire, and eats the heart of honesty with pickled pride; the imposury of position is petty, and ends, as it should commence, with stirring strife. Mocking Angel! The trials of a tortured throng are naught when weighed in the balance of future anticipations. The living sometimes learn the touchy tricks of the traitor, the tardy, and the tempted. The dead have evaded the flighty earthly future, and form to swell the retinue of retii-ed rights, the righteous school of the invisible, and the rebellious roar of raging nothing. One more specimen (I find it difficult to tear myself away) ; this time a descrip tive passage. Gently ringing the bell, the door was attended by a strange face. Reverently asking to have an interview with Sir John Dunfern, how the death-like glare fell over The eyes of the disappointed as the footman informed her of his demise! “Madam, if you cast your eyes thence” (here the sturdy footman pointed to the family graveyard lying quite adjacent, and in which the offcast of effrontery had oftentimes trodden) “you can with ease behold the rising symb&l of death which the young nobleman, Sir Hugh Dunfern, has lavishly and ! unscrupulously erected to his fond I memory.” The title -of this work of art is “Irene Iddesleigh,” and Bottom the Weaver is i

“Mrs Amanda M’Kittrick Ros.” Not on sale here, I am afraid; otherwise my advice would be, Buy the book and ruin the doctors. CIVIfL