OPPOSITION TO DRINKING SONCS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVII, Issue XXII, 28 November 1896, Page 121

OPPOSITION TO DRINKING SONCS.

With Peacock, write® Agnes Kepplier in the Atlantic for October, the bUtory ot English drinking songs ia practically closed, and it does not seem likely to be re opened in the immediate future. Any approach to the forbidden theme is met by an opposition too atrenuoue and universal to be lightly set aside. We may not love nor value books more than did our great grandfathers, but we have grown to curiously overrate their moral influence, to fancy that the passions of men or women are freed or restrained by snatches of song, or the bits of conversation they read in novels. Accordingly, a rigorous censorship is maintained over the ethics of literature, with the rather melancholy result that we bear of little else. Trivialities have re® and to be trivial in a day of microscopic research, and there is no longer anything not worth consideration. We all remember what happened when Lord Tennyson wrote his * Hands All Round.’ First pledge our Queen, this solemn night. And drink to England, every guest. It is by no means a ribald or rollicking song. On the contrary, there is some thing dutiful, as well as justifiable, in the serious injunction of it? chorus. Hand? all round ! God the traitor a hope confound ! To the (treat cause of freedom drink, my friends. And the great name of England, round and round. let such was the scandal given to the advocates of temperance by this patriotic poem, and so lamentable were the reproaches which ensued that the Saturday Review, playing the unwonted part of peacemaker, ’soothed and sustained the agitated frame ’ of British sensitiveness by reminding her that the laureate had given no hint as to what liquor should be drunk in the cause of freedom, and that he prob ably had it in his mind to toast The great name of England round and round, in milk or mineral waters. The more recent experience of Rudyard Kipling sug gests forcibly the lesson taught our Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, when he sent bis little poem to a * festive and convivial ’ celebration, and had it returned with ‘ some slight changes ’ to suit the sentiments of the committee.