NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, 4 October 1917, Page 26

NOTES

Traditional Shams "In my young days," says the old dowager in Wilde's play, "one never met anyone in society who worked for a living. It was not considered the thing." "In America," retorted Hester Worsley, "those are the people we respect most." And another female relic of feudalism remarks: "I hear you have such pleasant people in.society in America. Quite like our own in places, my son wrote to me." "There are cliques in America as elsewhere," said Hester, "but true American society consists simply of all the good women and good men we have in the country." That the stupid and savage old English ideas of caste which made the condition of a worker little better than that of a slave do not obtain in New Zealand is something we must recognise with gratitude. But it is still a long way to the Utopia where only, the good are qualified to belong to society. The attitude of the English upper circles was nothing less than an apostasy from the religion of Him Who toiled in the workshop of Nazareth. ;,..././..■, Two Pictures :-.v.U. The author whom we have just quoted % assigned .■ a very.highj if not the highest, place in English prose to Walter Pater. And of all Pater's sentences there are none more lovely, than his description i of that wonderful picture of Mowna Lisa, or La Gioconda, which was ; some time ago stolen from the Louvre, and lately replaced. ~"We all know the- face," he says, "and the hands of the figure, set? in its -i marble chair, in >* that %f aplastic

circle' of rocks, as in some faint light under sea/ Perhaps of all ancient pictures" time has chilled it " least ... Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. . . She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in the deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her . . . and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands." In another room in the historic Louvre hung a picture by a modern artist who had also Leonardo's gift of imparting to his works an ineffable and delicate charm that only a poet would attempt to analyse. We have all seen copies of Millet's Angelus, that apparently so commonplace picture of two French peasants, standing amid the fields where they had labored all day, with the light of the sunset like a glory about their heads as they incline to recite the Angelus at the sound of the bells of the church whose spire stands out on the distant sky-line. We cannot tell how the effect is produced ; nor can we tell whether we are the more moved to joy or tears in contemplating either the masterpiece of Millet or that of Leonardo, but we recognise that we are face to face with genius. The Church and Education Here is a passage from Andrew Lang which is worth remembering while Howard Elliott darkens the sky of New Zealand: "The earlv schools of Ireland and of the Columban Church are famous. ... The monasteries as a rule had their schools. The monks patronised education both in burghal and monastery seminaries. Song-schools were common, the education of music existed, and choristers at least were necessarily able to read music. The mere neighborhood of an abbey or a cathedral was in itself a liberal education. There were village, parish, or small burgh schools, there were also high schools in the large burghs, and poor boys of merit were well instructed in the monasteries, the monks taking fees only from scholars of wealth and birth." This was the state of things which was abolished by the reforming Huns. "It is now," adds Lang, "almost unnecessary to insist on these facts which were so long obscured by the unhistorical spirit of triumphant Protestantism." . Andrew Lang did not know Messrs. Elliott and North when he took it for granted that people no longer battened on the unhistorical spirit of rampant Protestantism. Nor do we think he would suggest that the mere neighborhood of these gentlemen could in any sense be described as a liberal education. However they have an interest as curiosities. Nobody would believe half the stories of persecution if we had not them to remind us how harmless an ordinary ignoramus is in comparison with a slightly educated bigot. The Diet and the Man Plato would have the man of intelligence moderate and temperate for the sake of the "concord of the soul." An American doctor says the history of man's diet is the history 'of mankind: "It begins with the cave-dweller, gnawing with wolf-like fangs at a joint of raw bear-meat, and ends with the potentate drinking champagne from a golden chalice. It is the history of oppression and tyranny, and of independence and freedom; of political growth and conquest, and of barbarian invasion and desolation; of health and wealth, of poverty and disease." And here is what a poet has to say about the matter: .-:•'' "We may live without poetry, music' and art ; We may live without conscience and live without Heart;'^"V' r ' : ' ;. r < '">''" '" ::•'"' '.: ; ?J v'"-' '■■'.:■'& v "~ : 7 ' We may live without •■ friends; we! may live without '^'"po^^;^^ I ,''-^''"'■■'''?';';;;'.'', ■ ;'*-'.;,.;"''-/'"^ ,,; '.. •° iV But civilised man cannot live without cooks."

An ideal Preacher , _ i: .. '9s Here is an American's comment on the preaching of his pastor which we are sure will be universally echoed throughout New Zealand:—"One reason of our pastor's lasting popularity is his prudent valuation of the capacity of his hearers and a consideration for their human weaknesses. He is not guilty of , over taxing their willingness to listen to him. . He never speaks to an unreasonable length. He always ceases before his audience is sated. He believes more in impressive condensation than in diluted and ineffective amplification. You can observe, when he is about to close, that he has much more to say and is very eager to say it, but he prefers to restrain himself and spare his hearers. I have often heard people complain th/" he finished too soon, but never that he spoke too long." We wonder how many in the congregation would endorse every word of this commendation. And yet the very best praise of a discourse is that it was too short. Tnat too needs interpreting: a sermon an hour long has often been found too short; and many ten-minute sermons have been far too long. Culloden Day We have received a leaflet calling our attention to the fact that, after 171 years, the memory of Culloden is still kept green, and that wreaths are sent every year on the anniversary to be placed on the memorial cairn erected over the fallen Highlanders. Canada, the "United States, and far-away New Zealand, have this year sent tributes to the gallant men who died in that romantic lost cause for which Irishmen shed so much blood. What a worthless lot those Stuarts were! what brave men died for them! and what an inspiration for the singers of the Gael they were ! Some of the sweetest songs that have ever been sung were inspired by the passionate Gaelic devotion for the "Bonnie Prince Charlie" who still wears, in spite of the years, the mantle of a hero in which the imagination of the poets clad him. Romance is not dead in Gaelic souls yet. From this distant land a Forbes and a McDonnell—Scotland and Ireland—wreaths to be placed on the monument of the men who perished on Culloden Field in the "Forty-Five."