NOTES OF THE DAY.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1214, 24 August 1911, Page 4

NOTES OF THE DAY.

A picture robbery of enormous importance is reported to-day: Leonardo's great work Nona' Lisa has disappeared from the Louvre. This is an event in which literature is hardly less concerned than art and the police, for no picture ever painted has been the motif for so much noble and imaginative writing as this wonderful portrait of Lisa del Gioconda. It was the result of four years' brooding by the mysterious, beauty-haunted nature of Leonardo, And has been accounted one\)f the greatest pictures in the world. "Most students of art and all lovers of literature arc familiar with that magical passage which AValter Pater devoted to "La Gioconda"—as the work is most often called—in his essay on -Leonardo':

"The presence that thus rose so strangely beside tho waters is expressive of what ia the ways, of a thousand years men had come to desire. II«rs is the head upon which all 'the ends of tho world are corue,' and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought ont from withm upon the flesh, tho. deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Sco it for a ■moment beside one of those white, Greek goddesses or beautiful iromea of antiquity, and how would they bo troubled by this beauty, into which" the soul with all its maladies has passed! All ths thoughts niKl experience of the world hnve etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive to outward form, tho animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the rcverio of the middlo ego with its spiritual ambifion and imaginative Joves, the return of the Pagan world, tho sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which sho sits; liko tho vampire, sho has been dead many times, nnd learned the secrets of tho grave: and has been a div.-r in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; ami trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; nnd, ns Loda, wns the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; 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 tho eyelids and tho hands."

The .strangest'thing about the theft of any truly great old painting—and especially strange it is here—is the frame of. mind that cannot, feel that the coveted magic and beauty is lost or almost wholly lost with the ripening of covetousness and robbery. It is like tearing the heart from a rose. Imagine La Gioeonda on a private wall!

I The member for Wanganui, Mr. ■ Hogan, as we have had frequent occasion to note during the past three years, is most usefully crude. Usefully, because he so often gives away the real_ motives that govern the Ministerialist rank and file.- On AVedncsday of last week he again justified our opinion of his utility in this respect by his observations upon Mr. Herpmax's motion for the publication of all the correspondence relating to the Coronation invitations. Mn. Hogan agreed that the information asked for was necessary, so necessary, indeed, that he was "going to insist, as far as possible, on having it when the Prime Minister returns." But would he support the motion? Not a bit of it. Why! Let him explain for himself (Hansard, vol. 15$, page 479). A member interjected: "If you carry the motion now he [tho Prime Minister] can give tho correspondence when he comes back" : —

Mr.' Hogan—Yes. that is all very well from tho Opposition point of view; but I would liko to Jell tho honourable gentleman that if his party would not go on the public platform and say this information was given because tlio Opposition carried this motion then wo could go Iα a division straight away.

But as it was, despite his frank admission that the information was necessary he was not going to support the motion. "I am going to insist as far as possible on having it when the Prime Minister'returns." Here we have it, then, plumyj and plain, that to Mr. Hogan it is far more important to oppose Mr. Herdman than to assist in getting at tho truth. Of course Mil. Hogan is unusually crude, but his way of looking at things is the way of the great majority of'the Wardist party.

At the Mokau Inquiry yesterday a heated passagc-at-anns occurred between the Chairman of the Committee, Mi;. W. T. Mr. Joshua J ones. The climax was vouched when Mr, Jomjs, resenting ft remark hx the Chairman, seized his

hat and left the room, pausing on his way, however, to charge tho Chairman with being the agent of certain parties in England at one time concerned with the Mokau Block. Our purpose in referring to the incident is merely to explain that it is recorded in out report of the proceedings, despite tho rcmicst of Mii. -Jenxixgs that it should be omitted, because it was a statement made on oath, and because it appears to us to be relevant to the proceedings, whether or not the Chairman is, or has been, associated in any way with any of the parties to the sale or purchase of the land. Mn. Jennings had his opportunity of contradicting the statement made and did so, and his contradiction is duly published.