About Bores—But Not Boring

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 440, 28 November 1947, Page 8

About Bores—But Not Boring

ROFESSOR T. D. ADAMS, in his weekly readings from 4YA, recently gave listeners some extracts from the essays of Richard Steel and Joseph Addison. When I tuned to this programme, I found the speaker in the middle of a session of the Trumpet Club, in which the conversation of a small group of average bores is depicted with such a suggestion of continual repetition that the listener, like the author, could not help regarding the occasion as a good substitute for a pre-bedtime nap. The programme finished with the evergreen and always appealing description of Sir Roger de Coverley and his famous dictum-‘"there was much to be said on both sides." The straightforward prose of these extracts has been held up to young writers many a time as an excellent model, and I should like to recommend it to certain writers on music whose tendency to rhapsodise is apt to get the better of their love of lucidity. A splendid test of any writer’s skill is how he stands up to being read aloud, and Professor Adams ably demonstrated in these readings the abiding quality of good clear prose. A neat ending to the programme was the performance of "Sir Roger de Coverley" (the tune in--spired, we are told, by our hero’s greatgrandfather); and the fact that this tune is still heard with pleasure indicates that music, like prose, best endures when it is most lucid and simple, with a style so unaffected as to conceal the art which contrived it.