NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, 13 January 1921, Page 26

NOTES

Books that Endure To foretell that a book will live is a dangerous prophecy. Macaulay made such bad guesses as that some of the best of the Waverley Novels, the poems of Shelley, of Keats, of Byron, of Landor; the novels of Jane Austen; the essays of Lamb, of Hazlitt, and De Quincey; Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Coleridge’s Essays, and notably his Biographic Literana; Newman’s Sermons, and his Essay on the Development of Doctrine; Keble’s Christian Year, and Marryat’s novels, would be consigned to speedy oblivion. Sir Leslie Stephen thinks it would not be easy to make out a list of a hundred. English books that, after a century, are still familiar to the average reader. If the individual plays of Shakespere are counted as books the task would be made fairly easy. But even taking a score of them in does not remove the difficulty. Thus we find in a list suggested by Mr. R. Ellis Roberts many books with which the average reader is decidedly not familiar. Such, we believe, are Grace Abounding, Religio Medici, Leviathan, Hume’s Essays, Analogy of Religion, The Beggar’s Opera, Eero and Leander, Castle Rackrent, Pamela, Comas, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, Anatomy of Melancholy. Three of the foregoing we have never read, and never will read. How many of them has the average British Prime Minister read We are decidedly of the opinion that, except for students, the volumes we have mentioned are consigned to oblivion. Besides these, there are others which, as far as the average reader is concerned, are debatable enough. Take, for instance, Paradise Lost, Amelia, Sentimental Journey, Pepys’s Diary, The Rivals, Wesley’s Journal. How many average readers in New Zealand have read three of them? All things considered, it is more than a difficult thing to name the hundred with which the average reader in any country is familiar: it is impossible to name them if the reader of New Zealand is considered. Why should we anyhow Have not the schools of Sir Robert Stout, and his followers (down to Mr. Parr), made the people so infallible that they are able to dispense with reading How a Poem Lives Mr. Christopher Morley thus describes the growth of a poem to a classic: “It takes time for any poem to grow and ripen and find its place in the language. It will be for those of a hundred or more years hence to say what are the great poems of our present day. If a sonnet has the true vitality in it, it will gather association and richness about it as it traces its slender golden path through the minds of its readers. It settles itself comfortably into the literary -landscape, incorporates itself subtly into the unconscious thought of men, becomes corpuscular in the blood of the language. It comes down to us in the accent of those who have loved and quoted it, invigorated by our subtle sense of the permanent rightness' of its phrasing and our knowledge of the pleasure it has given to thousands of others. The more it is quoted the better it seems. . . . Generally speaking, one law is plain: that it is not until the poet himself and all who knew., him are dead, and his lines speak only with the naked and impersonal appeal of ink, that his value to the race as a permanent pleasure can be justly appreciated. There is one more point that perhaps is. worth making. It is significant of 1 human experience that the race in-

stinctively demands, in most of the poetry that it cares to take along as permanent baggage, a certain honorable sobriety of mood and verse. . . Humanity as a whole likes to make the best of a bad job; it grins somewhat ruefully at the sardonic ; but when it is packing its trunk for the next generation it finds most room for those poets who have somehow contrived to find beauty and not mockery in the inner sanctities of human life and passion.” The Water of Life (From the French) One day King Solomon was complaining about the shortness of life "Of what good is my. wisdom that God gave me since I cannot reap its fruits The greater part of my life has gone in acquiring it; and, now that I begin to profit by "my experience, lo! I am on the brink of the grave. What, then, is human wisdom but a flower that dies ? Long enough it grows before its calix opens, and as soon as it is mature it begins to lose its loveliness ; it fades before enjoying the fruits of its labor.” H was sad he was when he spoke these words. Raising his eyes he saw an angel coming down from Heaven and a vase of sapphire in his hand. Solomon,” said the angel, "I come on behalf of the Eternal Father. He has heard your complaint and charged me to bring to you the Water of Long Life. If you drink it you xvill become immortal and en j°y perpetual youth ; but unless you drink it you will when your time comes take the path that all creatures must follow. The choice is yours: choose.” Having laid the vase at the feet of the King the angel vanished. Solomon was doubtful as to what he ought to do. He gathered together Ins ministers and asked • their advice. They were unanimous-that he ought to choose eternity, but the wisest man of them all was absent: 'the King waited until he came and put the problem before him. “Great King, said the minister, "you will see dying, one after another, your children, your wives, your friends; like a tree from which year by year, month by month, day by day, its beautiful fruits are plucked, you will mourn tor the loss of the things that arc dearest to your heart. What charm is there in an immortality which means an everlasting grief? If the things you love are not like yourself immortal your immortality is only eternal torment.” You are right,” said the King. "My complaint was unreasonable. A wise man condemned to remain eternally in this vale of misery, to bear for ever the fetters of earthly passions, and never to see' ahead of him an end to such a life would be the most wretched of men.” V hen the King came back the water had evaporated and the vase was empty. He knelt down and said : • i Lord, forgive thy servant if he has found fault wdh Thy works; it is in Thee alone that wisdom and intelligence are found; through them Thou hast ordered all things, and the work of Thy hands is our admiration.” * ~ On the wings of faith in immortality and hope of future happiness man learns how to quit' this.life without regrets. To teach men how to die is to teach them | low to live. Old Montaigne never a truer word than that. There is no more severe condemnation of °uu j 6W Zealand secular schools than that they, teach children to live as if they were never to die. We are not here to eat and.drink and be merry. We are here to-do the will of God in all things to, live with a constant view to dying so that we may merit true life afterwards. Isaac carrying the fagot for his own sacrifice on his shoulders up the mountain is ,an ever--las ting symbol of Christian life; the dancing faun with flowers in his hair, stupidity stamped on his brow, sensuality on his dips, and the, pointed ears revealing his animal nature, might be, taken as the symbol of the life that our young, people are':.taught to lead to-day. ,;v *>-*, Hy/y 5