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New Zealand Tablet, 31 May 1917, Page 30

NOTES

Entente Difficulties Alfonse was a waiter in the Cafe Suisse in Rheims ; and of an ambitiousness! But he gave up the attempt to learn English as waste of time. “Why then? one comes and says, ‘ here is to you’—that is to me myself —and drinks it himself. While I am yet astonished there comes a second. I say, ‘How do you, sare? ’ He say, ‘ Dam hongry and fed up!’ Behold for'yourself it is of an impossibility that language to learn.” And even if Tommy is not a linguist he ought to know better than to persist in calling the cab-drivers cockons for cockers. French drivers have a gift of language, and to call them pigs is an invitation to them to exhibit.

Poet Saints Nelsons have increased the indebtedness of lovers of literature by adding to their collection some Spanish classics. In the Autologin tie los Mejores Poe fas, ?5 pages are devoted to the poems of two Spanish saints, Theresa and John of the Cross. St. Francis de Sales has left at least one book —La Vie Devote —which plates him among the French classics. And Leo the Great has a high place among the best Latin prose writers. St. Francis of Assisi can hardly be called a classiq, but some of his hymns find a place in every anthology of Italian poetry.

A Striking Ad. An advertisement of a recent sale ran thus'; “The choice collection of bric-a-brac offered for sale is so unusual that it may be said to be such that each piece in it will cause a sensation among people of artistic sense. Immediately on entering the room the visitor’s eye will be struck by a carved walking stick of great weight and beauty, followed by a solid bronze'statue of an Indian god.” We are left wondering what will strike the eye of the auctioneer after that.

R. B. Sheridan * , We are so prone to think of Sheridan as a wit that his merit as a man of letters is often overlooked. Yet Lord Byron once said of him that he had written the best comedy, the brightest farce, and made the greatest speech ever heard in the House of Commons. The speech was the famous indictment of Warren Hastings, delivered if we mistake not in Westminster Hall, the scene of many of the great State trials of English history. We mention by way of illustration of his lightning quickness in debate his reply to Dundas: “The right honorable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts”; and his rising to a point of order when a longwinded orator stopped to take a glass of water. Everybody wondered what the, point could be. “What is it?” said the Speaker. “I think, sir,” said Sheridan, “that it is out of order for a windmill to go by water.” Once a Member clinched his argument with a long Greek quotation. Sheridan, rising ■ to reply, said that if the passage had been completed it would have applied the other way, then delivering oratorically what he con-

veyed was the rest of the quotation. Fox, who plumed himself on his Greek, afterwards went to Sheridan, saying, “How came you to be so ready with that quotation ? It was as you said, but I did not see it before you spoke.” The words Sheridan had quoted were as much Maori or .Chinese as they were Greek.

Puritanism The life of Matthew Arnold was a flaming protest against the shams of Philistinism in English literature, and indeed the Victorian age of English was par excellence the age of artificiality and hypocrisy in letters and art. Chesterton thinks it is tenable that the prudery of the age worked finally for impurity rather than purity. Any policy of making the outside of the cup clean and more or less neglecting the inside will have this result. “In nine cases out of ten the coarse word is the word that condemns evil, and the refined word the word that excuses it. A common evasion for instance substitutes for a word that brands self-sale as the essential sin, a word that weakly suggests that it is no more wicked than walking down the street.” A man coming to this country will find instances of words which in England are the common coin of speech and literature _ being here regarded as absolutely improper. In America the thing is carried to absurd lengths, and a stranger is in danger of shocking prudes by speaking English at all. It is hardly tenable that in spite of our prudery either here or in America are we in any way better or more moral than the people of Great Britain. The Italians and French are practically ignorant of the saving refinements which we owe to the cultured Cromwellians, and the Italians are certainly one of the most moral peoples in Europe. We may . say that the same does not apply to the French; but there is much truth in a remark of “Marmaduke’s ” —“ the French are immodest, the English immoral.” Old prejudices and stereotyped views make it an impossibility for us to go back to Biblical simplicity of speech, or indeed to Shakespearean. But let us not make the mistake of thinking that our smug primness in that respect is by any means an attribute of godliness.

Decadents For a little while the movement of those who came to be called the Decadents had a vogue in English literature, and, although the sane and healthy commonsense of the public always laughed at the posturing of the leaders, not a few followed them. The prophet of this extraordinary phase was Oscar Wilde—not the Wilde who wrote the “Ballad , of Reading Jail” when the sword of sorrow had ploughed deep into the bedrock of his being, but the Wilde wearing a green carnation, dressed fantastically, and declaiming his studied paradoxes in a crowded salon. Sham, pretence, and unreality were the notes of the school and its background was exotic and unmanly sentimentality. Wilde’s genius kept the movement alive in his day ; but as his successors had not a spark of genius people soon wearied of their ludicrous nonsense. It is strange that Wilde’s mother, the writer of some terribly real bits of tragic Irish poetry, used to tell her son, in the days when he was still her son, of the mysterious power of sorrow to chasten and to illumine. And when sorrow and disgrace did come upon him in those days in Reading * ' 'em

Jail, Wilde, with the Greek version of St. John open before him, at last had a real apprehension, of the truth of his mother’s words, finding sorrow a revelation in the light of which all the shams were for ever dissipated, and the . eternal stars, became visible at last. It was then he wrote the one poem which is worth remembering. There is a deep note of sincerity and an entire absence of falsetto in all the lines of “The Ballad of Reading Jail.”