NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 14, 12 April 1923, Page 30

NOTES

"Guy Thorne" Mr. Ranger Gull, who died suddenly recently, wrote under the pen-name of Guy Thorne, and is well known to readers of modern fiction. Some years ago he made a great hit with When it was Dork, of which half a million copies were sold in a short time. He has written several other good novels, and had the art of telling a good story in good English. In a novel called When the Wicked Man he tells the story of his own spiritual journey which led him to Rome. No doubt he does not rank as a novelist of the first class, but as English fiction stands nowadays he is above the average, and you can always be sure of an entertaining and even exciting book when you invest in one of his novels.

Father Vaughan Stories

The Fortnightly Review, in its issue for March 1, gives us a collection of Father Bernard Vaughan’s bans mots which is worth reproducing;

The late Father Bernard Vaughan, S.J., was noted for his apt and terse sayings. There was, for-instance, the retort he made when asked at a dinner party what he would do if Henry VIII., of whom a portrait hung on the walls, were to step down out of his frame; “I should ask the ladies to leave the room.” There were other familiar words—words that he transmuted into mots: “I believe in the God who created Mr. Wells, and not in the God whom Mr. Wells has created” “I object to the sea-front, go-with-the-times girl, the girl with even less in her than on her” ; “If you want to build character, do not hop© to build on whipped cream under a coronet— must be formed and modelled like a block of marble under the chisel and hammer of suffering.” Of the falling birth-rate he said : “We are a nation travelling to the cemetery” ; women who “ought to be trundling baby-carriages are flying about the country in motor-cars”; there are “more petted dogs than petted children in London.”

Matthew Arnold Matthew Arnold has received much notice in the English press, recently regarding the centenary of his birth. If we forget. Arnold's Liberalism and his bias towards a sort" of free-thinking from which others of his family were not exempt—and this, no doubt, will be forgotten in a very little time—we must remember him as a most enlightened critic and as a cultured man of letters, and last but not least as a poet whose great worth is not as generally known as it ought to be. His hatred of what he called Philistinism, or, in other words, all that sort of English middle-class arrogant conceit and smug, ignorance which is.connoted by arrant John Bullism, is abundantly revealed in his literary essays which were like a stimulant on the minds of readers of a generation ago. Even still, although, it is said by many that he was rather overrated a critic,

there are no more helpful and suggestive pages for the student of literature than , those found" in c the two volumes of Esays in Criticism. As becomes all who are of Celtic blood we must pay him our tribute of praise for what he did for the Irish people at a time when the pictures of Punch supplied the average John Bull with his Irish history. Arnold told his countrymen some plain truths about what they owed to the Celtic genius when he said in his study of Celtic literature that apart from a debt to the Latins the English owed all that was .graceful and beautiful in their prose and poetry to their despised and oppressed neighbors, and that whatever was left was German or Saxon stolidity. Which was a bold thing for him to say in the days when Englishmen used to talk so lovingly of their German cousins and to ridicule the “decadent” Latins and the “ignorant” Irish. Other times now—et nos mu tarn nr in illis\

His Poetry " English literature," says Lord Morley, "has three elegiac poems of the first order, Lycidas, Adonais, and Thrysus, and Swinburne, no mean critic, gives the last of these the second place. At least it is a very fine third. In narrative poetry Sohrah and Bit stum belongs to the very first order, in pathos, color, solemnity of march, tenderness . . . Tristram and the Forsaken Merman do not fall behind in their power and beauty. Arnold was delighted to tell us of a message from Tennyson, bidding him write no more of such prose things as .Literature and Dogma, but to give us something like Thrysus, The Scholar Gypsy, and The Forsaken Merman-. In the same spirit George Eliot told a friend that of all modern poetry Arnold's was that which kept constantly growing on her. One of the slender volumes of his verse has made a cherished companion of mine on many a journey." From our student years we have loved Arnold's poetry, and it is good to read such high raise from such a critic as Lord Morley. Our memory goes back to cloudless summer days when we read for the first time, under the shadow of immemorial olives, amid the ruins of old villas that looked forth upon the glorious sunsets behind the high walls of Rome, the poems that had in some way in them an echo of the classic perfection and restraint of diction beloved of him who in far-off days came out from the city to his villa on the Sabine Hills. One stanza now in support of Lord Morley's praise:

One lesson, nature, let me learn of thee, One lesson which in every wind is blown, One lesson of two duties kept at one, Though the loud world proclaim their enmity :—•

Of toil unsevered from tranquillity! Of labor that in lasting fruit outgrows Far noisier schemes, accomplished in repose, Too great for haste, too high for rivalry !

Yes, while! on earth a thousand discords ring, Man’s fitful uproar mingling with his toil, Still do thy sleepless ministers move on,

Their glorious tasks in silence perfecting; Still working, blaming still our vain turmoil, Laborers that shall not fail when man is gone.

Oldest Cardinal Dead The death was announced from Rome early in February of Cardinal Frisco, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Naples. His Eminence, who was created a Cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. in 1896, is believed to have been, in point of years, the oldest member of the Sacred College, his birth dating back to the year 1836. The Cardinal's death leaves Cardinal Vincent Yannutelli, who is the Dean of the Sacred College, now the oldest Cardinal, he also having been born in 1836, three months after the. date of Cardinal Prisco's birth. Cardinal Logue, now one of the oldest members of the Sacred College, was born in 1840, and created a Cardinal in 1893. , s " - - '