THE SKETCHER

Otago Witness, Issue 3713, 12 May 1925, Page 65

THE SKETCHER

LITERATURE AS THE STABILISER OF LANGUAGE.

“It is a mistake to regard literature as the mere phonograph of speech. It is a thing in itself. It is the aristocracy of language, the element by which language is stabilised, polished and enriched,” writes Margaret L. Woods, in the Fortnightly Review. “Like other aristocracies it ends badly if it does not from time to time reinforce its blood with new and popular elements. ‘Back to Nature’ is rightly enough a recurrent cry; though it never really means going back to Nature; only on to a new form of art. “If twentieth century poets arc condemned to use no other vocabulary than that of twentieth century conversation they will be, in a literary sense, men of very straitened means. Our speech-lan-guage is a great deal poorer than was that of men born a hundred years ago. The educated man of that generation had a much better and more copious vocabulary than his counterpart to-day; the countryman spoke one or other of those fine and correct forms of English which the lialfeducated Cockuey has the impudence to sneer at as ‘dialect.’

“It can hardly be without cause that educationists and men of letters on both sides of the Atlantic have been seized with the same anxiety about the future of the English language—a noble language, enriched with the spoil of ages, tempered and supplied to our use by many and great masters, and one destined, like Latin in the past, to be a means of communication for the entire world. Americans complain that the slang of which they were once proud lias now grown to be a mere misuse ano deformation of speech. “And when a newspaper reaches me from the Far West I see that it is so This detestable stuff is now pouring over our schools and universities, to th« further injury of the English tongualready suffering from the increasing vocal indolence of our race and the spread of Cockney, with its impure vowels and half-sucked consonants. “As yet we still have a certain standard of literary English, we still pie serve the resources of our language in the written word. Are we to ‘scrap’ this fin: organ, this instrument of many pieces, and confine ourselves to the one scrannel pipe of modern conversational English A SAFETY VALVE. Jokes play an important part in human affairs, and slowly but surely amusement is coming to be recognised as an indispensable factor in the physical and mental health of a nation (writes Constance Talmadge). . Wise counsels on man’s diversions have not always prevailed in the ranks of our ' Tillers, oome of them, it is said, once objected to bear-baiting, ‘ 1 not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave joy to the spectators.” On the other hand, the place of laughter in life was at one time officially recognised, and All Fool’s Day was set a P ar f for its indulgence. Although some high personages frowned on the day, there were not wanting apologists who used all sorts of arguments in its defence. After all, what is laughter? Psychologists define the cause of laughter as a complex of love, sex, and a lot of other tilings. As I am not a psychologist I won’t attempt to dispute the definition. Whatever the cause, laughter itself seems to me to be an excellent safety valve for people inclined to treat life as a bore. Tragedy and comedy, like Kipling's “ Julia * O’Grady and the Colonel’s Lady,” are brothers under the skin. Strange as it may seem, the production of laughter -is largely mechanical. Many causes of laughter, particularly in films, are developments or variations of games we played in childhood, such as hide-and-seek and Jack-in-the-box. Although the chase in pictures has been worn almost threadbare, it- offers so many opportunities for laughter that a movie comedy without it is almost incomplete. The action in a chase is always fast, and a comedy that goes with a swing seems to exert almost an hypnotic influence on the audience. What a sensation if some day we opened the newspaper and read: “ A Bill to prevent laughter will be introduced early next session ”! Why, even if it became an Act, there would be so many defaulters that the magistrates would liavc no peace. “THE WORLD AND HER HAT.” Who speaks of emancipation? asks Kathleen in the Daily Chronicle. No sooner does woman emerge from one kind of elavery than she is pitched headlong into another. I say “headlong” deliberately. Just as she appeared to have snapped the last chain that bound her to samplers, croquet, antimacassars, and all the dark horrors attendant upon votclessness, she is f itched headlong into the clutches of the Universal Hat! * There is only one hat in the world at the moment. Hence its appearance in the singular at tho head of this article. From cast to west, in farthest Walthamstow and darkest Ealing, there is onlv one hat—the hat that is cloche. Manifestations of this universal hat may vary in detail, but they are all built rigorously upon the grim cloche principle.

The main characteristic of the cloche hat is that it is practically brimless. The reason of this is that it is extremely difficult to wear a practically brimless hat without an acute sensation of looking one’s worst. That is why it was introduced. We were getting too soft and flabby, with our brims and our droops and our general self-indul-gences. We needed discipline. We needed to be stung to a sense of reality. We got caught up in tho hard materialistic spirit of the age. We got caught up in the hard materialistic outline of the cloche.

This year the Universal Hat is more briinless than ever. Last year we were permitted a small brim, a faint sweet memory, the tender grace of a brim that is dead. But this year, no ! We have put that mere sentimentality behind us. We have stiffened ourselves yet further. Sometimes, it is true, if you look very hard, you may find the remains of that which was once a brm, attached to the man body of the hat. But this is only another example of the survival of a decayed organ in a system where it no longer functions.

But, you will say, are there not some women wliom the Universal Hat really suits? Ah! But what women? Refined, complex, patient, intelligent women like you and me? No! Elemental women, Dolly women, shallow women; women who play bridge every day from two till midnight ; women who lie about on divans and read silly books and puff cigarettes; women who won’t put their own babies to bed; women who deceive their nice, kind, elderly husbands; these are the women the brimless hat becomes.

Useless to a&k meekly for a hat with some more brim, please. You are told haughtily that brims, as such, no longer occur in Nature. If you cannot adapt your head to the Universal Hat-well, what would you? You must go without, that’s all.

Are the women of remoter lands, too, undergoing this martyrdom to which feminine Europe is subjected? Are the ladies of the Carolinas, Lower Borneo, and the Solomon Islands being forced into crowns for which they have no liking? Is the mercy of the brim refused to the favourite queen of the Cannibal monarch of New Wapping? Personally, I think it high time we women banded together and, breaking our chains with one magnificent gesture, demanded the restoration of that free choice of hat that made life sweet in the spacious lays of old. THE NOBLEST BRIDGE IN THE WORLD. (By Clifford Hoaken, in the Daily Mail.) One million pounds, the estimated cost of the reconstruction of Waterloo Bridge, is almost double the amount the bridge cost to build. That sum was £565,000, but, with the approaches and the making of the new road to the Obelisk in the borough, the total sum was £1,050,000. This money was provided by a private company, which looked for its dividends to the tolls charged for crossing the bridge. The bridge was begun in 1811, when it was known as the Strand Bridge. It was opened to foot passengers, who then paid 3d for the privilege of crossing it, a few years later. But its official opening was not until June 13, 1817, the second anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. its name. The Prince Regent performed the ceremony in the presence of the great Duke of Wellington and. his staff. London is very rightly proud of its Waterloo Bridge, but it took a foreigner’s praise to make it appreciate it thoroughly, [t was Canova, the great Italian sculptor, who eulogised the bridge so wholeheartedly and woke up Ivondon to the fact that Rennie had built it a very glorious structure. Canova called Waterloo Bridge “the noblest bridge in the world,” and said that it was worth coming from Rome to London iust to see it. Dupin, the illustrious French engineer, echoed these praises, and pronounced the bridge worthy of a Cresar. Then London began to take notice, as it were, of its new possession. Waterloo Bridge was sold bv the company that built it to the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1877. The price paid was £475,000, and a year later the bridge was made toll-free. Previous that the toll had varied from Id for foot passengers to, “for every coach, berlin, landau, vis-a-vis, chariot, calash, and pleasure carriage, and for every hearse, litter, or other such carriage, having four or three wheels, drawn by six horses or other beasts ... Is 6d.” And the tariff included “For every score of calves, hogs, sheep, or lambs, per score . . . 4d.” THE TERROR IN THE CARDEN. (By A. G. Thornton, in the Daily Chronicle.) “They’re very good in the garden, sir,” said the man at the door when he sold us a tortoise to take the place of our first, recently deceased. This man, I can say without hesitation, was a liar. Or, at least, ho did not express himself clearly. Tortoises are good in the garden—to themselves. From the ordinary human gardener’s point of view, there i’b one place which is eminently not suitable for tortoises, and that is the garden.

I mean to .say is nothing a tortoise will stop at. Nothing. When we put ours on the lawn he was universally popular. We thought it very amusing when he stopped at a daisy and smelt it. When he began to eat it we roamed. That was the first day. When I came home that evening and had a few words with our dog Mick re the bent look of my No. 1 row of infant peas, Mick said No, he didn’t do it. He is usually a very truthful dog, so I accepted his explanation. Then I bent down to examine the nature of the damage. I drew back startled. Every other pea stalk in the row had been snapped! It was when I had reached my angriest point that I suddenly saw that snake in the grass, that boa constrictor in the peas, the tortoise. He was buried among my beans, toying with a succulent leaf and looking over at me happily. “This is the life,” he murmured, in drowsy contentment.

The thing was so barefaced that for a moment I could only gasp; the effrontery of it paralysed all movement. That a glorified snail, a mere dull-witted mollusc, should foist himself on a respectable suburban household, take lettuce from it (or them), and then walk calmly over its (or their) tender pealets without so much as by your leave —that is, leaves . . . 1 The thing was preposterous.. “You utter brute!” I cried hoarsely, and seized the tortoise boldly bv his roof. I strode savagely with him up the garden, ignoring the backward movement of his front right claw as it said, peevishly, ‘Don’t do it, old man; don’t ao it, because I don’t like it, so don't do it.”

That tortoise made the quickest journey he had ever made in his life, and he came to earth with a sickening thud in the flower bed.

Recovering somewhat, he looked out at the weather. “You’re not yourself, old man,” he said, and withdrew into himself. I went to weep over my peas. When I returned I found my wife gesticulating violently from an upper window. Something seemed to be up—or down. It was down, as a matter of fact. The tortoise. Oh, yes: he was thoughtfully eating the biggest of the pansies.

I am not naturally unkind to tortoises. On the contrary, I rather admire them as a deep-thinking, strong, silent type of insect. So I gave him a sporting chance. Before starting on my work in the garden, I would put him on a back mark, say at the beginning of the side entrance. By steady walking I calculated he would take half an hour to get down tne garden path, when I could put him back at the side gate, and we could begin all over again. But you wouldn’t believe the sinfulness of that tortoise. Did he take the direct route for the peas, steering by dead reckoning? Not he. Every time I looked back he would stop and pretend to be interested in a young dandelion in the path or a twig. Then, when I wasn’t looking, he would sprint round by the shrubbery and be eating his second bean before I found him. If he had been a decent eater I should not have minded so much. But he was such a gourmet. He would only take the tenderest leaves and shoots: the best was always not quite good enough for him. And, then, having eaten the best, he would walk over and lie down in the next best as one who would say: “Pretty poor lot of stuff round here; you want more basic slag, old man.” I have thought of ouietly murdering him, but how does one kill a tortoise! Once again, it only shows you how useful encyclopaedias are for telling you everything that doesn’t matter and passing over everything that does. Tortoises, says the encyclopaedia, are usually a plain, dull-brownish colour, have short, clawed feet, and are slow in their movements. You see? Not a word about peas or pansies. THE “UNDERSTANDING” WOMAN. (By Ward Muir, in the Daily Mail.) Do women understand men? Many women flatter themselves that they do. You find that these are the women, as r. rule, who have the poorest opinion of men. They consider that men are silly creatures, easily led astray, vain, selfish, mean, and tickle. All this is true of plenty of men, heaven knows. But every now’ and then we come across a man to whom few, if any, of theso derogatory adjectives apply. And when a woman who “ understands ” men is brought into contact with a really nic*, simple, modest, straight-as-a-die man, she is all at sea. Her “understanding” ; s a failure, because she is reading into h's character a host of subtleties which are not there.

There is nothing funnier than to see :.n incorrigibly “understanding” woman try ing to plot and plan to influence some innocent male for wdiose persuasion ro plotting or planning is in the slightest degree necessary. The kind of woman of whom I am thinking will lay traps to make this man do what she wishes him to do, will take endless trouble over tier traps’ contriving, will flatter herself or. her deep cleverness—when all that was really needed was for her just to ask »hc man straight out to do what she wished. He would have done it at once. For there is no earthly reason why he should not do it.

The queer tiling—at least it seems que jr from tho male point of view—is that the “ understanding ” woman is often as comically wrong about the character of her husband as about the character of men who are comparative strangers io her. After years of marriage slie w.il still intrigue to get her husband’s permission for some much-desired change in the household arrangements, when, if the merely put the proposition before him in a sentence, he would instantly agree. Does a woman like that " understand ”

men—if she has failed to understand tl*e man with whom she lias been, and perhaps still is, in love; the man with whom she has been more intimate than any other human soul?

DANCER IN DYED FURS. <By A Physician, in the Daily Mail.) It is by no means uncommon for doctors to be consulted by women who have bought and worn coats with dyed fur collars; and the reason for then’ doing so is that they have found that after wearing these coats an acute inflammation of the skin, or dermatitis, has been eel up, not only in the neck but frequently also in the face.

This same form of dermatitis has been noticed after the application of some h;hr dyes, and the cause is the same whether the human hair be dyed or a dyed fur be worn next to the skin.

The basis of these dyes is a substane known as paraphenylene-diamine, which while it gives a perfect and last colour to fur and hair, also deposits on the fur and hair a poisonous irritant. Hence the dermatitis.

In the process of dyeing chemical reactions continue after tho fur or hair has attained the desired colour, and a substance known as “ Bandrowski’s base ’ is formed, and this adheres to the fur or hair.

It is to this substance that all the trouble which follows has been ascribed. Abroad, the poisonous and irritant effects of this by-product which result from the use of paraphenylene-diamine has been recognised. So much so that m Saxony and other parts of Germany the use of paraphenylene-diamine has »>een prohibited as a hair dye, as it has also in Paris, while in the United Stiites importation has been prohibited. In England, however, the use of this dye is permitted without any restrictions. The tins most frequently dyed are ra j bit-skins; and it would seem that these skins are prepared, dyed, and dressed abroad, usually in Germany and Belgium, and then imported into this country. 1:; addition to paraphenylene-diamine, another substance known as metaphenyleaediamine is used, and this also is deleterious. Surely the time has arrived when the public should be protected against jij*uries resulting from the wearing of theso furs? This protection may take the form of prohibiting altogether the importation of dyed furs or by insisting that tbe dyers—that is, the trade —remove all the poisonous substances from these furs before they are imported. FAIRIES AND FOLK. LORE OF DJINNS AND GOBLINS. (By Gerald Gould in the Daily Chronicle.) They are the bright relics of a cloudy faith; those friends of our childhood, the little ived Riding Hoods and Cinderellas, Tom Thumbs and Bluebeards and Rumpelstilskers, are in origin ghosts or gods or spirits in whom primitive man, our savage ancestor, believed; and they come down to us, therefore, rieh with the traditional hopes and fears of the human raceMr MacLeod Yearsley, in “The Folk Lore of Fairy Tale” (Watts), has brought together an amazing amount of material about these legendary figures: he modestly disclaims originality, but he has read so much, thought so much, and explained so much, that he may De taken for a faithful as well as a fascinating guide. He begins with the classification of fairies, good and bad. Our ancestors supposed that natural objects had spirits of their own; hence the spirits and elves and hobgoblins of rural credulity, as well as the dryads, naiads, and nereids of mythology. Fairyland overlaps with the place of the dead: it is sometimes beneath the earth, sometimes in—or on—a mountain, sometimes beyond the skies or under the sea.

Fairy tales are found spread broadcast —presumably by tne migration of peoples over the continents of antiquity. The same story, or a story with strikingly similar characteristics, will crop uo in the remotest places and among the most dissimilar communities. The religious taboo, which among savages sets apart certain objects, places, or names as too sacred to be handled, witnesssed or pronounced, appears on the one hand in the ugly tale of Bluebeard’s Chamber, and on the other in tho exquisite love-idyll of Cupid and Psyche. Several of the monstrous legends which wear an epic or a tragic dignity in the literature of ancient Greece are traceable to the same cannibal customs as inspire the “Fee-fi-fo-fum” of the nursery. Grown•upe who take children, in the coming Christmas season, to see the pantomime of Cinderella, will be able to guess at a. resemblance between that story- and the condemnation and vindication of Cordelia, youngest daughter of King Lear. (The children themselves will be thinking of something more immediate.) And, indeed, this pursuit of comparisons may easily take us 100 far. Anthropology is the most tempting of the sciences—except psychology; in both of them it is so easy to prove too much. And the subject bristles with controversies, just l>ecause it hubbies with opportunities. Tliero are hotly differing theories on the relation of magic to religion, and Andrew Lang referred derisively to those who taught that primitive religious rites were designed to encourage the fertility of crops, as “the Covent Gurden school of mythologists.” But one can enjoy stories, and theories, without balancing them against others. We may be sure that what makes a story live, and spread, and take on a thousand local shapes and colours, is some real and deep correspondence that it hr® with the heart and mind of nwn; and ao we read Mr Yearsley’s fascinating volume ■with tho sure conviction that what wo aro reading is true in spirit, even where it is vague In history.

The children, as usual, are right; they know what they are about when they clamour for tho old stories, and the modern idea of protecting the nursery from the contamination of legend has against it ail tho authority of the ages and the instincts. THE SHRINKING MEND. I do not believe (writes Stella Benson in the Daily Chrosicle) that travel broadens the mind after all. It seems to me that the further away from the Strand you go the more your mind shrinks. Often tho Empire-builder, home at last from vast spaces, has a mind that b:*s shrunk to a mere button. An excellent working button, of course, but small and bony. This button it is that sticks in the cogs of progress and puts the wheels out of -gear. Perhaps progress is tho wrong word. Change would bo better. The use of progress instead of change crowns novelty with a kind of halo, and suggests that there is necessarily virtue in everything new. This is an easy thought, but not always a true one. Actually there ntnst be some new ideas that are bound to fail, and some old ideas that ought to survive. There must be something in Diehardism, though it is sad that in the Diehard’s view it is always the other fellow who ought to die. “If I had my way I’d prop ’em all against a wall and shoot ’em! . . .” This, the Diehard’s creed, is heard, I maintain, in the far corners of the earth mueh more often than in the Strand. If you hear it in the Strand it is usually said by a homecomer, a colonel of the Indian Army, an Australian sheep expert, a Canadian lumberman, a New Zealand hospital sister, an escaped remittance man from the Argentine, a militant missionary from Africa. There is something, no doubt, in the idea of propping opponents against walls, but whatever that something is, it certainly does not point to breadth of mind. Broad minds know little about walls. They have free pasture for hops. And hope, I believe, like charity, begins at Home—in the Strand. All the hopes to be found in the Strand, if placed end to end, as the statisticians say. might reach g-s far as heaven. But they would not reach as far as Singapore. When I crossed seas and visited empirebuilders and economic pioneers in their own vast spaces, it seemed to me that old heads were always fitted on to young shoulders—shoulders that ought to have been too busy squaring up to adventures ever to allow the heads to acquire that elderly habit of wagging When I say vast spaces, of course I mean Bubbling Well-road, Shanghai, or the Peak Club, Hongkong, or the Army and Navy Stores, Calcutta. Travel has a way of shrinking the vast spaces, too. But even when there is a little space to spare—on the trackless sea, for instance, or among the prairies of America—that space echoes with voices saying: “ I simply don’t know what the world’s coming to . . . .” or “ Say. listen, who won the Great War, anyway?” or “Just look at these modem dances—downright immoral . . they ought to be stopped.” In India and China there are really no young people. There are persons between 18 and 40 years old who are there either to get rich or else to do their duty, or else to marry other persons. But there are scarcely any young minds. The fox-trot may or may not be as beautiful and as refined as the minuet, but surely somebody in every drawing room all the world over ought to be willing to lose his temper in the effort to prove that it is. Temper must be lost in the cause of to-morrow—not only in the cause of yesterday. Loss of temper is a small sacrifice to keep the world alive. Every bar in the Far East is full of old-voung men, with or without beards, saving, in unison with Edward Lear’s unwilling ornithold£ist, “It is just as I feared . . .” The jiolitical, moral, and social comments on and solutions of modern problems that appear in the correspondence columns of the English newspapers in China would have seemed stuffy to the late Queen Anne. Rash admirers of Mr Bertrand Russell tour the Orient in constant danger from lynching. . . . I suppose the truth is that pioneers and ar-awav people live so much on change that they hunger for stability as a man fed on sweets might long* for bread. England, they insist, must remain England stiff, ,qud they pray to their gods to keep alive till they come home to the England they remember.