SPEED.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 225, 22 September 1928, Page 10 (Supplement)

SPEED.

THE MOTOR CAR'S PACE.

TOLD IN PROSE AND POETRY.

"A WORLD OF NEW HAVINGS."

The invention of the motor car must certainly take rank amongst the greatest triumphs of modern civilisation. It has annihilated space; it has brought happiness to thousands of people; it has transformed the face of the country. Here surely is a theme for the poets.

In the Poets. And, indeed, the motor car is not without its laureate. So long ago as 1903 the late W. E. Henley hailed its advent in his "Song of Speed": Speed— Speed, and a world of new havings: Red-rushing splendours ' Of Dawn, the disturbing Long-drawn, tumultuous Passions of sunset; And, these twain between, The desperate, great anarchies, The matchless serenltndes, The magical, ravishing, Changing, transforming Trances of Daylight. In a vein somewhat more sophisticated Mr. Gilbert Frankan describes a ride in a motor car through the Southern suburbs :■ — Had you a soul that night, stout car who bore Your craey master past the dark-yew hedges ? Were they alive, your sensate tyres that shore Their flattened tail along the grassy edges, . That veered and checked and swerved their headlong travel, And forced the square-treads bite the shifting gravel? ... Xour guardian chassis shunned the Van-! guard's frisk: Loyal and true, you held the slippery Skated the dread curve of the Obelisk; Hurled up New Cross Hill; and brought him back To where Big Ben's illuminated disc Shone fourfold welcomeness against the black; Found him his flat; and rested from your labours, . , Amidst the gossip of your garage neighbours. There is an excellent description, too, of a motor car ride through the darkness of early morning in "Marriage of Harlequin," the recently-published novel of Mr. Frankau's daughter, Pamela. Through Italy With Huxley. Those industrious and entertaining collaborators, C. N. and A. M. Williamson, may be claimed, however, as the pioneers of the motor novel. One recalls in particular "The Motor Chaperon" and "Set in Silver," the latter of which, under the guise of fiction, is a joyous record of a motoring tour in England. Readers of Mr. Aldoue Huxley's novel "Those Barren Leaves," will remember the chapter which describes, with a wealth of detail, a motor ride in Italy. The following passage reveals the author at his best:— They drove past the house on the water, where Byron had bored himself through an eternity of months, out of the town. After Pontedesa the road became more desolate. Through a wilderness of bare, unfertile hills, between whose yellowing grasses showed a white and ghastly soil, they mounted towards Volterva. The landscape took on something of an infernal aspect; a prospect of parched hills and waterless gulleys, like the undulations of a petrified ocean, expanded interminably round them. And on the crest of the highest wave, the capital of this strange hell, stood Volterva —three towers against the sky, a dome, a line of impregnable walls, and outside the walls, still outside but advancing ineluctably year by year towards them, the ravening gulf that eats its way into the flank of the hill, devouring the works of civilisation after civilisation, the tombs of the Etruscans, Roman villas, abbeys and mediaeval fortresses, renaissance churches and the houses of yesterday. Men in the Car. Another celebrant of the motor car in fiction is Mr. Dornford Yates. There can hardly be any novel of his in which a car does not figure almost as a character. "Jonah and Co." contains an amusing episode in which Barry Playdell, while driving through Abbeville, felt unable to turn to the right. "The trouble is," he explained, as we plunged into a maze of back streets, "I've only got two hands and feet. To have got round that corner, I should have had to take out tie clutch, go into third, release the brake, put out a hand, accelerate, sound the clarion, and put the wheel over simultaneously. Now, with seven limbs I could have done it. With eight, I could also have scratched myself—an operation, I may say, which j can be no longer postponed." He drew ! up before a charcuterie'and mopped his face. In "A Ride on a Comet" —one of the many delightful essays in that delightful book, "Gifts of Fortune," Mr. H. M. Tomlinson- is less concerned with the things seen from a car than with the emotions of the man inside it. The very title is an indication of the author's point of view. Once we alighted on earth, just brushing it in a swoop on the upslope of a hill, and then rolled up gassily in a great light. It was then that instead of flying luminous streaks, I could see stones and clods, rooted trees and hedges growing where they stood, and they all looked like hand-painted scenery of limelight. We reached the hill-top, the imile beside me gave a demoniac hoot, rod we.shot into space like a projectile, 'ailing sheer to the nether stars. My lair rose on end in the upward rush of *ind. I had had about enough of it. It we hit another body in the sky larger han ourselves. .... Cars and Crime. Finally, it remains to be noted that the motor car has proved a veritable ?odsend to the writer of detective stories. Crime is to-day a much more expeditious affair than it was in the time of Einile Gaboriau, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle must have often regretted that Sherlock Holmes lived in a preniotor period. 'The car is as vital- a necessity to the "mystery" novelist as ™L 1? ? nema P To <iucer. Indeed, there can be few novels of this class which fail to make mention of some car alternately panting and purring outside a mysterious house. «umhub a