The Wit and Wisdom Of Max O'Rell

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 454, 5 March 1948, Page 19

The Wit and Wisdom Of Max O'Rell

i} Written for "The Listener" |

by

A.

\ IT and. -humour, it has been said, date more than any other form of writing. Some reservations must be made to the statement. Leaving out the old accepted classics in this field, there is Anstey’s Vice Versa, still alive, and Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, which that serious-minded writer never lived down. It continues to be popular, and it is quite likely that our great-grandchildren will be reading it. Maybe it will be the same with the Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody, which more than one good judge has rated as one of the great books of our time. Yet "Mr. Dooley," the American satirist

whom all the world was reading 50 years ago, is forgotten and his books out of print, and even minor classics like Arte- | mus Ward and Max; Adeler are hard to come’ by. I thought of this when the other day I was| browsfhg through a list! of New Zealand centenaries in 1948 and came upon this: "Another celebrity born in 1848. (March 2) was Paul Blouet, a French writer who was known as Max O’Rell, and who settled in England. In the early nineties he visited New Zealand on a lecturing tour." Only people of about my age remember

Max O'Rell, but 50 years or more ago he was as well known as Stephen Leacock was a generation later. This wise and witty Frenchman who went to live in England, taught in English schools, and married an Englishwoman, established himself as for many years the leading interpreter of Britain and the British, at home and oversea. He lacked the subtlety and literary grace of the later André Maurois, but he was lively, observant, penetrating, and at once critical and sympathetic. Such books as Max O’Rell’s John Bull and His Island and John Bull & Co. disappear because, so I take it, the conditions they describe largely change. In some respects late Victorian England seems as far away as the Regency. or Charles II. Similarly "Mr. Dooley’s" observations on current events, so very original and funny at the time, are dated to-day by that very currency. Only 50 years ago, he could raise a laugh by saying that when you played golf you began by asking your opponent if he knew the Prince of Wales. If he didn’t and you did, that counted you one. It’s a far cry from this to Walter Hagen and later champions, and the overwhelming of Britain in this ancient game. On the other hand, human ‘nature on holiday, as in Three Men in a Boat, doesn’t change, and Mr. Pooter, the central figure in The Diary of a Nobody, is one of the world’s fools, Yet there is pleasure and profit to be got from dipping into these forgotten humorists, and there is a lot of fun and

is oe a — eee wisdom in Max O’Rell. Take his little book, Drat the Boys, which tells of his arrival in England, after fighting the Germans and being wounded in the Paris Commune, and how he encountered landladies and took to teaching. There was nothing of the comic French master of tradition in Paul Blouet. It would have been a smart English boy indeed who got the better of this understanding Frenchman. Anticipating Stephen Leacock’s treatment of translation from the Greek,

here is Max O’Rell on schoolboy handling of French: English boys have invented a special kind of English for French translation. It is not the English they use with their classical and other masters (here I think these masters might demur); it is not the English they use at home with their parents, or at school with their comrades; it is a special article kept for the sole benefit of their French masters. The good genus boy will translate "Oui, mon pére"’ by "Yes, my father," as if it were possible for him to forget that he calls his papa "father," and not "my father’ when he addresses him. He very seldom reads over his translation to ascertain that it reads like English; but when he does, and is not particularly satisfied with the result, he lays the blame on the French original. After all, it is not his fault. if there is no sense in the French, and he brings a certain number of English dictionary words placed one after the other, the whole entitled French. Of course he could not call it English, and he dared not call it Nonsense. He calls it French, and relieves his conscience. The finest piece of French prose in existence is undoubtedly the following sentence, taken from Bossuet’s funeral oration on the Great Condé: "Restait cette redoutable infanterie, de l’armée d’Espagne, dont les gros bataillons serrés, semblables & autant de tours, mais a des tours qui sauraient r leurs bréches, demeuraient inébranlables au milieu de tout le reste en déroute, et lancaient des feux de toutes parts." This reads like a chant of Homer, does it not? It reads quite differently in boys’ translations, I assure you, when you come to "towers that would be able to mend their breaches."" This confirms you in your belief that nothing improves by translationexcept a bishop. I wonder if the last sentence was original. If it was, it is enough to merit him immortality. (continued on next page)

Centenary of Max O’Rell

: (continued from previous page) And there is a good deal of interest in what Max O’Rell said about "the’ great colonial branches of the firm of John Bull & Co." Part of the interest _lies in the changes that have taken place since he toured the Empire well over 50 years ago. When he came to New Zealand, it was direct to the South Island from Australia; you could travel to and fro on that route in those days, and for many years after. And if your luck was in, as his was, you called at ‘Milford Sound en route to the Bluff. Max O’Rell liked us. To our superb pepenery he added "a perfect climate, a

fertile soil, a well-spread population, intelligent and industrious, the upper classes of which are amiable, agreeable, intelligent and artistic." Here was "a privileged country where people ought ‘tto be content with their lot. Adieu, New Zealand, most beautiful of lands." Bear in mind that this was written in the early ‘nineties, when New Zealand was still feeling the effects of a great depression. Max O’Rell owed much of his appeal to his broadmindedness. He would praise warmly as well as criticise and he salted his comments with a nice wit. "You are a foreigner, aren’t you?" an American asked him on an Atlantic crossing. "I will be, sir, when I have set foot in your country." ‘Two things he particularly disliked in British com-munities-extreme Puritanism and drunkenness. After a lecture in New ‘Zealand on the Scotch a Presbyterian minister who had sat through it and never smiled, came to his bedroom and asked permission to say a prayer. This given, the minister knelt down and prayed for the salvation of this traveller "through our godly lands." The prayer over, the two shook hands, and Max asked permission to pray in his turn. He then prayed for "A Pharisee who doubts not for one moment, and that ywithout knowing me, that he is better than I." "And now," said the Frenchman, "we are quits. Goodnight."

He did not note drunkenness in New Zealand, but what he saw in Australia disgusted him; not only the heavy and persistent drinking by men, but the acquiescence of the women. He contrasted this with the ‘sensible drinking habits of his own countrymen, If he did not greatly exaggerate conditions in Australia, a considerable improvement must have taken place during the last half century. But Max could appreciate fully many other conditions of colonial life. There is a delightful contrast between the colonising methods of the British and the French. He liked -our New Zealand towns.

"The rapidity with which these towns grow is prodigious. A commercial enterprise is launched. After a few weeks a public house is byilt, a bank opens its doors, @ newspaper is started, and population flows in and groups itself around this nucleus. In a very few years it has become a flourishing town. Not a soldier, not a functionary. This is what strikes a Frenchman, whose country is crippled by bureaucracy, bound down with red tape." He quotes another French traveller as saying that in French colonies the first building is a police station, the second the taxcollector’s, the third the statistics office. Max O’Rell had much to say about the Maoris. Drink and contact with the Whites were weakening the, race, and everywhere except "King’s Country," where they led their natural life, their numbers were rapidly decreasing. This was a common belief of the time, that the Maori was doomed. It is comforting to reflect that there are illustrations in history of the poet’s saying that if hopes may be dupes, fears may be liars. At the end of his life Paul Blouet returned to journalism in Paris, and worked for the Entente Cordiale. Really he had been working for it in another way for many years. He was a not unimportant ambassador between two great nations, and as such, and as a lively but sympathetic commentator on British ways of life, he deserves to be remembered.