PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3613, 12 June 1923, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday’s Dally Times.) When the farmer from north or south comes up for the Winter Show, and there opens before him the league-long panorama of Dunedin city, he doesn’t exclaim: “Is not this great Babylon that I have built!” He doesn’t, but ne might; and, if he did, it wouldn’t lie in the mouth of any Dunedin man to contradict him. It is precisely the farmer, and no other, that has built this city. And if in the mysterious dispensations of Providence the Otago farmer ceased iO exist, then all our pomp of yesterday were but as Nineveh and Tyro; the inhabitants of Dunedin would be shut up to the pursuit of a precarious livelihood by taking in each other’s washing. Mr Nosworthy, Minister of Agriculture, when officially opening the Winter Show, had these truths dimly in mind: As a matter of fact, 95 per cent, of the actual wealth of the country had to come out of the soil every year. Adding timber and minerals to the wealth, it seemed to him there was very little Jeft over to the credit of any other section of the community. Later, at a convivial meeting of farmers, he repeated himself:—“The plain straight truth was that 95 per cent of the total wealth of New Zealand had to come out of the land.” The wealth of New Zealand always did come out of the land; and out of the land came every city, town, and hamlet that graces its surface. Touching on these aspects of political economy in a crack with an old identity and old friend, Sandy o’ the back-blocks —“doon for the Show, ye ken”—"Look at all this,” I said, with a wave of the hand towards Princes street and the roaring trams and the Cargill Monument, —“it was very different here at one time.” “Ay,” said Sandy; ‘ 'jl mind it; tussocks, an’ flax, an’ toey; an’ swampy for the waur’ ; and the bush cam’ doon to the flat.” “It is you farmers that have made the change," said I; “your money, as soon as you had any money, you put into land away yonder and into what you built upon it —your houses, your cow byres, your bit sheds, and what not. But all the time, though you didn’t know it, you were building this great Babylon. It was the farmers’ money that was put into these shops and offices, into steepled kirks, and banks, and picture shows, and the Burns Statue, and the Anglican Cathedral.” “Gosh!” exclaimed Sandy, interrupting;—“pitting our money intil thae

things!—then we pit it , wrang. But come away ben.” And we went away ben. Conveniently near by was an open door. We are sending Mr Massey back to the windy north, his customary haunt, well fed and well flattered, but not beyond his desert; none the worse for our dining and wining, nor any the poorer for the promises he has made, —he promised no more than he had purposed, ami, it is not in any mendicant deputation to persuade him. Scylla and Charybdis, fatal if you fall into either, are useful sea-marks if you know how to steer. For Mr Massey, mid-channel lies between two opposing “musts” : —he must pay out of the public chest for urgent needs ; he must reduce taxation ;—skimping, liis Scylla; squandering, his Charybdis,—a rock on either hand. In bis Otago visit he has wrecked himself upon neither; — neat steering, “in medio tutissimus ibis” the daily motto. Thus, at the Savoy dinner: The Prime Minister: With the money now available A Voice: We will get our post office. —(Applause and laughter.) The Prime Minister: That is a Dunedin interjection, and I do not find fault with it. If I asked, Will you have'your post office or your new dental school, what would you say? A Voice: We’ll have them all.— (Laughter.) A valiant resolve. Like every other citizen I am for having them all—medical school, dental school, post office. But if we are compelled to choose, and needs moist, —let the post office wait. Rather than spoil the other two we can afford to go shabby a year or two longer. From my local sonneteer:— BLUE,SKIN. This mellow afternoon the tide is high, And look! how all the bay's expanse it fills, Encircled by that arm of rugged hills That thrust their fretted lino against the sky. Out on the cliff to watch the sun we lie, As, framed in feathered manuka, he spills That mirrored splash of light that winks and thrills Along the water as the ripples die. And all the while there drones a distant roar, As ceaseless as Niagara's thundering brawl: See o’er those sands, where Maoris camped of yore, The white crests run along the rollers’ wall, As wave on endless wave invades the \ shore, '■ Upon the sandy bar to curl and fall. Whatever the topic or the sentiment, I surrender at once to a well-turned sonnet. It looks easy, this fourteen-line art form, its octave and sestet, the agreeable unexpectedness of its rhyming; but easy it is not. Shakespeare, it is true, turned out sonnets by the score, Wordsworth by the hundred; but no other English poet lias attained to the same exuberance. As to the title of this local sonnet, rude and raw is “Blueskin,” and I might have changed it to “ Waitati,” smooth and soft. But I didn’t. Better as it is.

Whv is it that whenever a musician of exceptional merit comes our way, violin or piano, he is always a foreigner, his name —if it doesn’t end in “skoff,” ending in “ski?” Is it that we never produce a musical genius of British name and blood? Not that;—if music is in question we have the root of the matter in us; we know what’s what as soon as any foreigner. Whose sentiments are these? The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull aA night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted. These sentiments are ours. The man with music in himself and skilled to show it in domestic and social circles—-

trifling with the violin or strumming agreeably on the piano—may have no wish to join the concert players. Says one of them: “I practise six or seven hours a day; If I miss a day, I know it: if two days, the critics know it; if three, the public knows it.” What a life! Personally, I should prefer to re main a trifler and a strummer.

Of course I am confessing myself a Philistine, just an average British Philistine. Nevertheless I have a feeling for great music and cherish some unfading memories. Looking back, what music and what musicians have given me, the average British Philistine, most pleasure? In oratorio, Handel and Haydn. In church music, Mozart and Rossini (e.g., “Q.uis est homo” and “Quando corpus” in the “Stabat Mater"). In opera, Rossini again and Verdi, in orchestral music, Haydn and Beethoven. (Why don’t our orchestral societies play Haydn’s symphonies? It would be an education to themselves and the public both.) In piano music, Beethoven; —l don’t say Beethoven first and the rest nowhere, but Beethoven first and chiefly. Two examples flash back, the sonata that introduces a funeral march, and the Waldstein Sonata :no tricks, no shrieks, no explosions, all pure music. Then Chopin, of corn’s©; —always interesting, till he tires you. And Chopin, for ail his power and passion, tires you in the end. Latest in this saints’ calendar, that ambiguous figure the Abbe Liszt; —a great musician, but on the concert platform they don’t give you his best; they give you his showiest, trickiest, all-but-impossible-est. Here I permit myself a bit of art criticism by Oliver Wendell Holmes: These two hands made a jump at the keys as if they were a couple of tigers coming down on a flock of black and white sheep, and the piano gave a great howl, as if its tail had been trodden on. Dead step—so still you could hear your hair growing. Then another jump and another howl, as if the piano had two tails and you had trod on both of them at once; and then a grand clatter and scramble and string of jumps, up and down, back and forward, one hand over the other, like a stampede of rats and mice more than like anything I call music. I like to hear a woman sing, and I like to hear a fiddle sing, but these noises they hammer out of their wood and ivory anvils —don’t talk to me, I know the difference between a bullfrog and a woodthmsh. Piece not named. We may set it down as a Liszt “Rhapsody.” Dear “Oivis,” —Your paragraph on Max Beerbohm lias sent me back to certain of liis studies, purchased by no means for their own sake, but because they “graced” a publication which contained much admirable pencil ink. and wash work by the younger artists of its day. Seven are before me as I write. Admitting, as in common honesty I must, artistic skill, economy of line, and so forth, I am none the less of the opinion that the world were just so much the richer for the blotting out of these seven sketches and the memory of them.

We must take this correspondent’s word for it; the sketches not being before us, an independent judgment is impossible. When he goes on to argue that humour should be kindly, I agree with him, and for that reason print in part his letter. Caricature—according to the dictionaries “grotesque representation of person or thing by over emphasis on characteristic traits (‘ caricare’ to load)” —may have its use in. criticism without being malignant. And of this London “Punch” is the supreme and enduring example.

From “Wee Mousie” (in a tender feminine hand)—“Dear Civis : —May 1 offer you two or three new howlers?” Certainly, Madam; bring them in : Algebra was the wife of Euclid. Logarithms, a term used in saw mills. From the Morning Post: “A little girl was being questioned this week on Solomon’s judgment on the ownership of a child. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘he ordered it to be cur, into twins.’ ” An invitation cardmeeting to take leave of a retiring pastor; at the bottom the letters “P.P.C.” “Ah 1” said the recipient, “P.P.C., Pity the Poor Clergy. I must go to that.” Civis.