PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3755, 2 March 1926, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday’s Otago Daily Times). Not for tlie purpose of visiting the Exhibition is the University Senate here, nor for the kindlier purpose of making sport for the Philistines—a duty it assigns to the students on capping day. An honourable institution, indispensable, and in high esteem, at the same time a homeless vagrant, having a name but not a local habitation, the Senate moves from town to town, its philosophy, if we concede it a philosophy, that of the Peripatetics, to whom Aristotle lectured in “ peripatoi,” places wherein to walk about but not to sit down. Philosophy apart, the Senate when in Scottish Dunedin, with the Burns Club hard by, may accept a Scottish greeting —“Hero awa’, there awa’ wandering Willie. ,, Of course the Senate has business, and its business is best known to itself. Publicity doesn’t help. Indeed the Senate is the viatim of publicity. When a discussion on points of order fills a column of the Daily Times, we find the proceedings deeply interesting because they are of no interest whatever; and perceiving that- the Senate is without a sense of humour, we say with Corporal Nym, “ and there’s the humour of it ”; —paradoxes which, if I could present them at the table of the Senate, would at once be referred to a committee for consideration and report.

The Senate has an appetite for paradoxes and thrives on them. It is a paradox that examinations will be less of a curse—“ curse ”is the professorial word—if they are doubled, at any rate for matriculation. It is a paradox that an additional examination—two tests instead of one —will relieve the strain on matriculation candidates. It is a paradox that matriculation is not a test for intelligence, but only for knowledge,— “ there is a big difference.” It is a paradox that diagnosis of a candidate by “a half-hour intelligence test” tells you more than the “ the 15-hour examination demanded by matriculation.” It is a paradox that a professor of psychology may not have the intelligence, of a child. Yet perhaps not such a paradox as it looks. Listen to a senator who had put the thing to experiment:— I tried a test for intelligence on a professor of psychology once, and told him if lie could not answer it he had not the intelligence of a child. He went into the theories of psychology, but I asked him for an answer, and he gave it up, thereby confessing he had not-the intelligence of a child. So much for paradoxes. Quite of another kind is the remark: “If this motion is carried ” —a motion to cap tests for knowledge by tests for intelligence, and carried it was—‘‘it will lend to show that tliis intelligence test is necessary for members of the Senate.” Nothing paradoxical in that. Nor is it in the least a paradox that again and again the Senate’s chief exponent of common sense finds himself “in the right with two or three.” It is not easy for a great nation to make itself ridiculous. America seems to have achieved that distinction, and America is undoubtedly a great nation. At Ellis Island, America’s doorstep, a divorced woman is held up and refused admittance because she is a divorced woman. For a fortnight or more this has been the position, and all the world sniggering. For as it chances, and it is a mere accident, the divorced woman held up on America’s doorstep was already a notoriety, the Countess of Cathcart, known to all the world by the resounding scandal of her divorces. “ She wur a bad un, she,” says reflectively the Northern Farmer in Tennyson, harking back to a shady episode in his own past and a liglit-o’-love known to his loss. So this vagrant countess, — she wur a had un, she, on her own side of the Atlantic, and a bad un she might he on the other; but the spectacle of Uncle Sam on his doorstep to catechise newcomers out of the Ten Commandments, with special emphasis on the Seventh, is too much for human gravity. For in America there are more divorced men and women to the square mile than anywhere else on this footstool; and if you can’t get a divorce quick enough in one State you have only to flit into the next, where there is “divorce while you wait.” This week’s cables tell of “ proceedings that will enable the

Government to extricate itself more or less gracefully from a situation ■ too embarrassing to be longer endured.” Exactly. We shall not hear of Lady Cathcart as a guest at White House, but there will be nothing to prevent her starring it in the New York smart set.

Dear “ Civis,” —Can you give me the author and publication in which the following fragment appears? Scans rather like Kipling: '‘When your cabin portholes are dark and green Because of the seas outside. When the ship goes wop with a wriggle between, And the cook falls into the soup tureen.” Kipling?—no; I shake 1117 head. The humour of the last line is the humour of a Christmas pantomime, and Kipling verse does not drop to that level. There are critics who disparage Kipling. It is a cant. There are poetasters, writing lines that will not scan, who disparage Tennyson. Envy, shall we say? Byron’s attack on Wordsworth and the Lake Poets was sheer malice. Wordsworth’s offence— A drowsy frowsy poem called The Excursion, Writ id a manner which is my aversion. In this Byron was echoing Jeffrey’s petulant “ This will never do,” an honest criticism though utterly mistaken. Mrs Carlyle, after reading Keats, laid it down that “ almost any young man with a sweet tooth might be expected to write such things,”—Jane Welsh Carlyle, who ought to have known better. Her education on that side had been neglected.

To-day, Kipling is belittled because “ though he gives much to the reader he gives little to the man,” whatever that may mean; because his verse has no spiritual appeal; and again because “he writes with the eye that appreciates all that the eye can see, but of the heart he knows nothing.” Fiddlestick! In confutation, on the point of spiritual appeal and knowledge of the heart, I cite a single verse, a verse that happens to come into mv head:— By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ eastward to the sea, There’s a Burma girl a-settin', and *1 know she thinks o’ me; For the is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say: “Come you back, vou British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!” Come you back to Mandalay, Where the old Flotilla lay. Can’t you ’ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay? On the road to Mandalay, Where the flyin’ fishes play, An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay! How and in what way the dawn comes up like thunder I do not know ; nor can any one tell me. But this I know, that on the last two lines genius has set its iinmistakcable sign-manual. “Well, your Exhibition is right enough,” said the Aucklander; “but you have to apologise for your weather.” “Apologise!” exclaimed the Dunedin man, “wo never apologise. There is nothing wrong with the Dunedin weather.” “No?—hasn’t it been raining overy other day, and some times twice a dav?” “And how much better off would ypu have been in Auokland? you moro inches of rain in the year than Dunedin, and more rainy days? Wellington the same. Look at the Government tables; they wore published the other day.” “Anyhow it’s warmer Auckland.” “Small blame to you for“ that I You can’t help it. Aren’t you hundreds and hundreds of miles nearer the Lino? Dunedin is warm enough for British people, and wo’re nevor better off. in body or mind than when it’s blowing from the sou’-west, as Stout told us long ago.”

An illuminating little wrangle. The climate of Dunedin is quite a good climate as climates go—that is, as tested by comparative statistics. There is no one of the great pleasure capitals of Europe that wouldn’t exchange with us. In Paris you may hit on a temperature that freezes the Seine; in Madrid a fiery heat, driv ing the mounted sentry at the King’s palace gate to shelter under a gigantic parasol erected to give him shade; and then, from the Sierra, airs that wouldn’t blow out a candle yet can put out a life, as the local saying is. In Vienna, in the fashionable shopping quarter, ladies keep the pavement when snow is falling, and don’t seem to mind it. Umbrellas?—no; furs for the most part, and very well they look. Comparisons are odious, especially weather- comparisons between town and town. Yet one could wish to see, stuck up somewhere in the Exhibition, con spicuous and challenging, the Government record of rainfall and temperatures in New Zealand, north and south. Some of our northern visitors would open their eyes.

According to the London correspondent of the Daily Times, a credible authority, the Bishop of St. Albans, Dr Furse, in addressing a New Year’s Pastoral to his clergy drops into poetry. Give me a good digestion. Lord, And also something to digest. Thus he begins. Meandering on the same level through other petitions he arrives at this: Give me a sense of humour, Lord; Give me the grace to see a joke. To get some happiness in life, And pass it on to other folk. And so ends. “Grace to see a joke’’;— let it pass for a joke that I bring in here the report of a Church Congress, or a sentence from it. One speaker having asserted the need of clergy “ that were gentlemen,” was contradicted by another: “ What the church needed was not gentlemen but inspired cads like the Apostles.” Shocking!—not less shocking than the episcopal rhymes. The St. Albans clergy were to pray for “a good digestion.” To digest tlieir bishop’s pastoral they vould need what Horace, who stuck at nothing, calls the “ ilia dura messorum.” Translation may be left to the University Senate.

As we are on bishops, the following item of gossip from Lord Coleridge may come in: Bishop Stubbs, the historian, was “translated” from the diocese of Chester to that of Oxford, largely, it was thought, to enable him to have easy access to the Bodleian Library for the prosecution of his studies. A friend meeting him in the library after the change of dioceses, congratulated him on finding him there. “Hush !” said the Bishop, “I am hiding from jny clergy !” Bishop Furse may have .occasion to hide from clergy infuriated by indigestion But there is no Bodleian at St. Albans. Civis.