ILLUSIONS THAT HAVE LASTED

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 933, 28 March 1930, Page 14

ILLUSIONS THAT HAVE LASTED

Tennyson And Others

IWrittta for The Son.] TI*IS isle is full of noises,'" said Caliban upon Setebos. To-day

■we might consider that Prospero was, to quote an abominable idiom, “putting it over” to his savage and deformed slave. The twanging instruments might have had their habitat at Milan. Prospero would naturally wish to establish wireless communication with the town whence ho had been banished. Be that as it may, it is certain that the isle was full of noises, or, to be more exact, the hill suburb, upon a certain close and lowering afternoon in spring. Tramway gangs vied with motor horns, while overhead the wires screamed, and all about one was the wonted plethora of tunes, potted and fresh, from the various houses. If one chanced to be something of a savage oneself, it might be difficult to distinguish between the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, relayed or re-

corded, or otherwise regalvanised, and t he local orchestral society at practice in a local hall. Then out of that complexity of sounds a single phrase defined itself. It was as if one were conscious of an insistent presence. The window of a State school stood open, and the children in one of the class-rooms were being instructed in the rudiments of Barnby’s “Sweet and

JLow.” There are, doubtless, those to ■whom, Barnby's “Sweet and Low” appears sweet to the point of diabetes, and as low as the Evangelical party. One can only record how that one phrase, repeated and nauseandum by a class of tired children (for it was the fag end of the school year) emerged from that crowd of hostile or indifferent noises, as might the lineaments of a friend whom one loved and trusted. There are some who will be ready to blame Barnby for “Sweet and Low.” Others will lay the onus upon Tennyson. These will include the professed admirers of Father Ronald Knox. Mr Beverly Nicholls is responsible for the statement that in the opinion of Father Knox the worst two lines in English poetry are to be found in “Maud.” It is odd that the lines should have been misquoted —let us hope by Mr Beverley Nicholls and not by their censor. Shine out little bead, sunnied over with curls To the flowers, and be their sun. is not such a bad confection. In any case they do not occur in "The Princess,” wherein “Sweet and Low” is embowered. The persons who point out that the day of Tennyson’s belittlement is passing, are becoming as tiresome, almost, as the detractors themselves. If Tennyson be a trafficker in illusions he managed to sustain himself and his age extraordinarily well upon illusion. The illusion from which the clever young Georgian suffers is the illusion that Mr Jones has in some way vitiated the “Idylls of the King” by calling his suburban residence "Avalon.” The young Georgian, like the rest of us, is acquisitive in the matter of names. There are persons who took a certain proprietory pride in the names Christopher and Robin before Mr A. A. Milne took out his patent. . . . Both by sound and Implication they are intrinsically pleasing words. . . . Unfortunately they have become associated with accretions of gush and gramophone. The man who resents Mr Jones’s calling his villa Avalon has the matter of a persecution in him. So let us not assist at the arraignment of Mr Jones, but clear our mind of him. and approach the word "Avalon” In a calm and judicial spirit. It Is one of those Intrinsically becoming words of which I once heard Mr Walter de la Mare make a list. I could never agree with his placing ‘ angina” on the roll of honour, but even a poet may have a blind spot somewhere on his retinae. ... I once heard Miss Edith Sitwell take part in a debate with Alfred Noyes on the subject of Tennyson. Sir Edmund Gosse took the chair, and in the end he declared that the debate had been no debate, as the contestants had been in accord. Sir Edmund, however, forgot to indicate on which side of the Tennysonian fence they stood, and the audience, which consisted, in the main, of persons who. like myself, were anxious to read the right books, to praise the right music, to belittle the right vogue, were forced back upon our own savage and primitive Instincts. . . . After all there are one or two discoveries that one makes for oneself, In the face of all the saints and sages, all the critics and the quidnuncs. ... So one comes to the conclusion that first illusions, like first loves, are the best. In olden times it seemed that "Sweet and Low” was the work, not of Alfred Tennyson and Joseph Barnby. but of two spirits Inhabiting some stronghold cf permanence and decorum. Later one learned that Tennyson was a fractious aristocrat, who was rude to Oscar Browning, and made pipe lights of the margin to the book in which he wrote "In Memoriam,” and that Joseph Barnby was a Yorkshireman. who conductetd the Albert Hall Orchestra. One also makes the discovery that Barnby was not the only composer to set “Sweet and Low” t° though hi* setting would

seem as inevitable as a law of nature. . . . Stanford composed a cycle of all the songs from “The Princess.” When lie came to “Sweet and Low” It must have been as difficult for him, as It was for Sommerville, when the latter composed a setting for “Come Into the Garden, Maud” in the face of Balfe. It is interesting to read in the biography of Sir Arthur Sullivan, brought out by his nephew, that an attempt was made to bring Sir Arthur and the Laureate together in a magnum opus, but nothing came of it. Sir Arthur Sullivan certainly set “Princess Ida” to music, but Gilbert was under thrall to no Avalon or Vivien Place. Tennyson’s humour was cloistral rather than theatrical. . . I do not know what the children would make of it, those children, for instance, who sang that familiar phrase thrice over, like the wise thrush the other afternoon. Did it come to any of them, I wonder, as a “voice calling fancy as a friend to the green wood in the gay summer time,” or was It just another old tune like the “Wedding of the Painted Doll”? Will they some day come upon the lyric in its ample setting of words, and w r ill they persevere with “The Princess” to the end. It may be they will revert to that one lyric, and it will induce a reverie in which the fragrance of hawthorn, and the distant click of golf clubs will have a part; and they will wonder, perhaps, why they were in such haste for the end of the hour to be registered. For it may have been that they were stayed in spirit, as we were once, by the music of silver sails coming out of the West. . . . Perhaps those children may have numbered among them one who will have the boldness to testify at some future day, when the name of Tennyson has passed under another cloud. . . . Perhaps by the grace of that very afternoon he will w-itlistand the Ronald Knox of his day. By that time we, no doubt, will have rendered up the last illusion, which may, or may not be concerned with Tennyson. . C. R. ALLEN. I j