Slender Thread

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 414, 30 May 1947, Page 8

Slender Thread

ENTURIES hence John Donne’s chief claim to. fame may possibly be the fact that he applied titles for two high-class 20th Century products, and both inspired by the same meditation. For No Man is an Island is the title and alleged theme of a new series of famous speeches heard over the ZB network on Sunday nights. Actually, we are perhaps guilty of stretching Donne’s original concept of the interdependence of mankind to cover all the impulses of man towards man, and as it is almost impossible to find a famous speech that is not concerned with mankind in some way or another, Orson Welles has a wide field to choose from. He has chosen widely. First, the meditation itself, in Mr. Welles’s best death-bed manner. Then the famous oration of Pericles, "The whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men," in Mr. Welles’s best graveside manner. (Incidentally, I feel that anyone sufficiently ill-advised to suggest to Pericles that-the bell that tolled for a dead Spartan tolled also for Pericles would have had some tolling done for him.) Finally the Gettysburg oration, which, though instinct with ideals of democracy and humanity, still seemed too abstract to fit into Donne’s beautifully concrete image "every man is a piece of a continent, a part of the main." The second series of speeches seemed to straggle even further from the confines of the title, but between speeches a commentator did his best to maintain the now somewhat tenuous relationship, and the "white heat of resentment of injustice" was now considered passport to inclusion in the series. The result was that we listened to Emile Zola’s Defence in the Dreyfus Case, a noble speech by a certain John Brown accused of smuggling slaves in pre-Civil War days (probably the only speech which John Donne would have thoroughly approved), and a somewhat jingoistic oration by Daniel Webster pleading passionately for union of North and South in order that "that gorgeous insignia of the republic" should continue to be treated with respectful awe abroad. Mr. Welles enjoyed himself, but listeners would have appreciated the programme more if it had been presented merely as one of Famous Speeches. The effort of bearing Donne’s ‘sentiments in mind while listening to others discordant with them spoilt the effect of what could have been a very impressive programme.