Here and There

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 3, 18 January 1923, Page 37

Here and There

Italian papers describe the extrordinary success of the Irish singer, Miss Margare Sheridan, in the two most famous theatresthe Scala, at Milan and the San Carlo, at Naples. One writer confesses that on the whole her performance in “Butterfly” is by far the most completely successful achievement of any soprano heard in Naples for a long number of years. The musical correspondent of the Daily Telegraph has seen a contract offering Miss Sheridan an engagement for the next' season at the San Carlo signed by the directors, but allowing the singer to fill in the fee to be paid for her services.

The depth of the sadness in the last days of President Arthur Griffith is revealed poignantly in letters from Mrs. Griffith to a New York friend, just published in the Gaelic American. Mrs. Griffith wrote on September 4, 1922: VI was the only one expecting his death, and every day for the past four months I had to watch him fading away, as quiet in death as in life. Poor boy, he was tortured and worried to the grave by one-time and so-called friends, and for his sake I am happy he’s escaped them all. His poor tired face will haunt me while I live. We had so little happiness together.” On December 15, ten days after the signing of the Treaty, Mrs. Griffith rote; “It has been all worry, trouble, and sickness for all my 11 years, and why make others sad? Even now, when at last peace was in sight, disunion is starting. My poor boy can’t last much longer. To my knowledge it is more than a week since he slept, and now food seems to sicken him. . . God knows I’ve had —months going to bed fully clothed, every knock thinking-another raid, my little girl’s nerves ruined for life, husband in and out of prison, and always the fear of his being killed. No one' but Arthur Griffith would have got those terms from the Government. As he said, ‘lf I had force I’d beat them (L.G., etc.) to the ropes, but he has forty millions to our four-and-a-half. It’s all I could wring out of them. . . Then when he returned, the man he made, do Valera,, turned him down, and behind his back.”

Speaking at a meeting of West Belfast Nationalists, Mr. Joseph Devlin, replying to a resolution regretting his severance from the division, expressed his profound gratitude, not only for their loyalty in the past, but for the unchanging confidence which they had shown in him, and for their welcome that evening, the kindest and most notable he had ever received at the hands of his friends and old constituents. During the 16 years ho had represented them their association had been of an intimate and even affectionate character. During that time he had never lost a friend, and he parted with the representation of the division with feelings of friendship, goodwill, and gratitude to all. He had done his best to serve them, and in every field of activity his work had not been without some good, and he rejoiced that their relationship would continue, bound, as they would? be in the future, by those golden bonds of comradeship which together had made them a source of pow and strength to their people in all the passing years. He was still ready to .serve them. His love for his native city and for the people he represented did not begin in the House of Commons or end there. His interest in their fortunes, his anxiety to help them, his determination to see their wrongs righted and their lost position re-established would continue to inspire him to labor and work in their behalf, but it would be on conditions. If 90,000 Catholics and Nationalists wanted to lie down and- silently submit to disenfranchisement and persecution they could not count upon his continued support,- and indeed he could be of no service to them; but if they made up their .minds to stand up and to fight on rational lines for their right to live and to worship, and to vote as their consciences and their convictions decided, then they had but to command him and he was at their service. On his part, he was willing to co-operate with anyone and with everybody who was willing to work in the new task of civic emancipation in that city. They could do it if they tried, but it could only be done by union and mutual trust among all sections, and in a spirit of harmony and good-will amongst themselves.

America has only one opinion regarding the personal controversy between Mrs. Clare Sheridan and Mr.- Rudyard

Kipling. The lady wrote in the New York World that Mr. Kipling had said offensive and insulting things about the United States and its part in the Great War. Mr. Kipling denied having said these things. Mrs. Sheridan’s retort was to the effect that the poet had lied; and all Americans believe Mrs. Sheridan. Uneasiness amounting to consternation has been caused amongst the paid British propagandists in the States by the incident. The pathway of Sir Robert Horne and other financial negotiators has not been smoothed by the Imperialist bard. But the general tone of the comments in the American papers now to hand is rather contemptuous. As an example, the New York Evening Journal, a very influential organ, says: “There is no use getting excited about Kipling, who hasn’t amounted to anything recently. If he refers to himself when he says the Americans have got the gold and ‘ we have saved our souls,’ it is admitted that the Americans have the better part of it. Americans may have gone in late, but not too late. They went in just after the British Commander-in-Chief had announced that England, with her back to the wall, was fighting- for life. This country prized the gentleman’s back loose from the wall.” English statesmen in their days of trouble have no reason to feel proud of the poet of their country who provoked scathing comment like this in quarters ordinarily friendly to England. The journal winds up with a laughable reference to the man himself: “Apart from that, he is a nice little fellow. When he sat cross-legged on a sofa in the old Manhattan Club in A. T. Stewart’s New York mansion at the corner of. Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue telling funny stories about English coster-mongers, he was extremely amusing.” Had Rudyard K. been content with retailing some of those “funny stories about English coster-mongers” to the enterprising Mrs. Clare Sheridan, his country would have been a distjnct gainer thereby.

The peculiar charm of the late Father Bernard Vaughhan’s character was the absence of the least trace of snobbery. He was as welcome at Buckingham Palace as in the London slums, yet he never boasted but of the latter. An intimate friend of King Edward, favorite preacher of the smart set, he yet remained to the end the idol of the poor and their most constant visitor. He once demonstrated to the present writer how he carried on his nightly missions in the East End. Entering a, blind alley at an hour when all the men were back from work, he called out the residents into the street; his fine voice sounded like a . bell, and at its call, a number of men and women presently ' gathered round the visitor. A table and a chair were brought; the Father took the chair, babies were placed on the table. Then followed an animated conversation on any trivial matter, on babies, on troubles, any odd thing, and as the knot of people swelled into a crowd, Father Vaughan’s voice rose in proportion; he grew excited stepped on to the chair, thence on to the table, and from this eminence, harangued the whole street in the richest cockney, on a text usually picked from the - mouth of one in the crowd. There Father Vaughan was at his best. His oratory was a blend of Italian warmth and French art and refinement, with the quaintness of accent and folklore from a northern slum. It was the freedom he loved, a freedom that repays in eloquent contrasts between the homeliness of an anecdote and the sublimity of an appeal. It was, not a sermon he preached, for there was everything in it, but whatever were the materials he handled, whether he found them in scriptural or slum surroundings, he always shaped and drove them to one end, the dominating passion of the English priest, the love of the dear Lord.

The world has a short way with longings. ' It is not interested in wool-gathering minds. It wants to know what you can do-not what you could have done if only thin™ had been different.