SONGS OF INNOCENCE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19828, 30 April 1927, Page 17 (Supplement)

SONGS OF INNOCENCE

ANCIENT AND MODERN TO-DAY’S VULGARITY TO-MORROW’S MIRACLE Mark Warner, having no sorrows but few pleasures, was not in early middle life a happy man. His common sense made him successful enough in his uncle’s business, but he found it, dull; his good sense made him an excellent husband to an admirable and efficient wife, but he found her, also, uninspiring; he had minor hobbies, but for years no absorbing one. He was not a self-educated but he was a self-cul-tured man, and the loneliness of the arriviste marred his self-complacence. His acquaintances in his prosperous suburb knew too little; tho connoisseurs he encountered too much. It was only as his children grew older that he discovered an interest which promised to give him real satisfaction in life. In their musical education ho was supreme, and from tho first he determined that no modern vulgarity should assail their ears. He brought home book after book of Early English, Irish, and Hebridean folk-songs. He studied their histories and traced their literary development in his study, while at tho piano, evening by evening, he set himself to inspire his family with tho traditional music of their race. If his wife laughed to see him in his black coat initiating the children into the mysteries of “Green Grow the Rashes Oh!” and “How Many Miles to Babylon?” or demanded, on evenings dedicated to Seal Croon Songs, some other tune than that of which the old cow died, he cared little. It was reward enough to him to hear his one boy and two girls romp up and downstairs to the tune of “The Hunt is Up,” (temp. Hen. VIII.) or “I had a Little Nut Tree” (temp. Car. I.) or “I had Four Brothers over the Sea” (temp. Ed. IV.) Tn his home was to bo found a well of English music undefiled. He enjoyed his children now, and was raising up to himsdf true friends and sympathisers in tho next generation. So he flattered himself when Fate intervened. A Crash to Earth. It was a compliment that he was chosen to go to India for his firm. The prospect indeed roused his enthusiasm none the less because his wife refused to desert tho children and accompany him. Ho departed with few misgivings, though his children were just entering on their school careers, and enjoyed himself as much as any conscientious traveller, intent on missing no bodily or mental experience, can do so. It was only on his return that he realised what havoc his two years’ Odyssey hud made of his life. As a father, a gentleman, and a Christian he endured the first! evening of his homecoming with magnificent self-restraint, but when at last

the excitement was over, the children in bed, his wife asleep, he crept back to his library, where the revels had taken place, to drink to the dregs the cup of his ruined hopes. At one end of the room was a now loud-speaker. That Mark could tolerate, for culture is at times cast broadly from these upon the world. It was I the object on tho table which aroused his bitterest hatred. Serene and silent now stood tho gramophone, a horrible island surrounded by a hundred islets of records, each of which had proved itself another turn of the thumbscrew to his cultured soul. Round it the children had danced fox-trots singing words of such barbarism as he could not bear to recall. In a dusty forgotten corner stood the piano ami longclosed books of early melody. Culture was dead; the gramophone reigned. It was as he sat there, in the darkness of his Carthage, that a voice reached him from the loud-speaker. Mark took himself seriously, and referred habitually to that which followed as a vision. The commonplace might have called it a nap. tho hypercritical an audition, but everyone has a right to phrase his life in his own way. Nap or vision, it brought to Mark an illumination which changed his outlook on life, and was, probably, even of more value to his wife and children. A Vision of the Future. “So then,” said the fruity voice of a lecturer, “wo come to tho most interesting discovery of our recent excavations in this vicinity. ’The year 3027 will bo memorable in our annals for this find alone. Before you you .see the song-maker of our unknown ancestors, preserved intact as by a miracle with the songs which solaced them in the days before the great barbarian invasion. The music and art of the period were, as wo know, contemptible; here in their folk-songs we find the true heart of the childhood of England in its beauty and simplicity. 1 will ask yon all to listen in reverent silence to some of these inspirations.” The gramophone whirred and buzzed ' and Mark listened with new cars. “Could anything,” asked the lecturer, “speak more clearly of the springtime of the world? ‘The robin! tho red, red robin.’ There you have their love of nature, their pride in their bleak northern winter—listen again! . . . ‘Tea for two and two for tea! How these words breathe of happy domesticity, of , the passion of the early race for home! I Here is another . . . ‘Have you ever seen a straight banana?’ Do wo need aught else to assure us of the mystic yearning for the unseen and unrealisable, the marvellous idealism of our primitive fathers’ Listen to this convivial ditty . . . What simplicity, what clarity in that refrain, ‘For your friends are my friends.’ Let us close with one of, possibly, an earlier period, which embodies in itself all the optimism, the unthinking gaiety of the spring time of the world! To those unstained, unwearied hearts it seemed no doubt as if it would indeed ‘rain no more, no more! ’ ” As the strains died away the loudspeaker remained silent also and Mark sat up in his chair, alone with the storehouse of popular melody for tho future . He was not alone in reality however, for ho was possessed by a now idea. “The vulgar of to-day is tho miraculous of to-morrow; I must work up that idea,” he thought sententiously as he went, comforted, to bed. W. F. P.