The Welsh Coast Pioneer and Review for North Cambria

THE MAGC OF FAUS-C. Tho current issue of the "Strand Magazine" affords oxcollcnt reading. An interesting article on "1'1,o of lt I is co ?'ll posed of a cyrnposium cf anecdotes by leading artists, showing the wonderful influence of music over the in nd, and stories are told by Mme. Albani, M. Padcrewski, Mme. Kirkby Lunn, Mme. Clara Butt, Mr Ben Davies, ic.6 Mario Had, Mr Mark Hambourg, Mme. Patti. Mischn Eraian, Mies Ada Crtfcslcv. and Miss Fannv Dae os. "lectures by Famous Amateurs" lias all the noveitv for which this magazine is famous; article l? illuctrated w?th r(-)roduct:on (,f pictur,?, 'L' Willia, Thackerav, Charles Dickens, Mendeksohn,* Victor Hugo, Goethe, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Charles Kingsley, John Raskin, Thomas Hardy! and Rudyard Kipling. James Hopper is intensely interesting in "The Destruction of San Francisco." The author's literary life trained him to toll this story. He was an eye-witness of the great catastrophe; as a newspaper reporter his duty took him up and down the shaking, burning city e.ay and night, has eyes ever alert to see the things which =tho world -,vjuld v,,ant to hear.

AN ARTiST'S STRANGE EXPERIENCE. The September number of the "Wide World ot')Or,,s witli "The AL-.d,,ict'oii F,,zL -i I v an -,i-riy c-,Llrlcer'? L-tra.,ige t?Lle of the border. An z?,.nLisilig ai),d ?it-rhly original ,Oxr,?'icr-ce ??et fortli in "To Con?70 and-Back as an A.B." The author is a well- known artist, who decided to undergo the "work- cure by shipping as a sailor. His tribulations are humorously LoJd and illustrated in this c.1,nituI contribution. One of those out-of-the-ordinary artic]el? for vrli;ch t'?lis enterpr' I' in a a z i I c I)a, becc)r?ic 1" "Pcar in t' he A,rct:?c, an C"D"litly nai)Qr I)v a ti?ador v??? :it) izt)crit t(,n (Di (-,lid an,,unL,, -tlie I'Lik' ()s of l?a-fFl!l l?alicl." Ilialit?s that lrrow into walkliwng'- sticks, the strenuous sport- of shark fishing, and a motor-car hunting trip are the subjects of in- teresting articles, whilo upwards of half a dozen other absorbing stones complete an excellent number.

A NEW MAGAZINE FOR SCHOOL. CHILDREN. The first number of tije, own, a new penny illustrated monthly, specially designed for tho boys and girls in National Schools, makes a very excellent show. There are fine stories illustrated by such well-known artists as Gordon Browne; there are the first, chapters of a serial dealing with the ever romantic Redskin; there i a "Talk out of School," on "Being Polite-" there are "Clippings from the Classics;" there are funny pictures and laughable stories-; there is a page of illustrated news of the month; Aunt Margery talks pleasantly with the girls, and there are competitions and prizes for everybody

DEVOTEES OF THE WEED. Considering the large part the doctor plays nowadays in the ordering of our lives, it is not a little disquieting to discover, when any question is probed to the bottom, that the faculty, as a whole, appear to have no very strong convictions. The medical profession has, for more than three centuries, had experience of tobacco smoking, and still has not apparently made up its mind as to the effect of the practice on tho human frame. In the new number of tho "Grand Magazine" two medical men, equally eminent, propound diametrically opposite j. views on t-his subject-

fASt RTffKtg RBSERrffD.} STORIES OF POPULAR SONGS. By J. CUTHBERT HADDEJT. III.—"AULD LANG SYNE. The value of some things is best estimated by imagining what you would do without them. How could you get along without an umbrella ? What would you substitute for the potato ? Supposing the supplies of tobacco, of tea, were to stop suddenly ? Suppose there were no penny post, no sixpenny telegrams ? Well, imagine the Scot bereft of "Auld Lang Sync"! Nay, imagine the whole Eníliih- speaking race so bereft! For it is not Scotsmen alone who join hands at the close of private social ceremonies and other func- tions and shout themselves hoarse to the tune cf "Auld Lang Syne." Burns's famous song has circled the globe. I should not be surprised to hear it in St. Petersburg or in Shanghai. It is indispensable as the light, as woman herself. I say Burns's song. And so it is. But please remember that before Burns's day. several songs had been written with what may be called the "refrain of "Auld Lang Syne." The phrase "Auld Lang Syne" has been a favourite of the Scottish poets and the Scottish people for many centuries. It is so peculiarly their own. You cannot translate it, except by a weak peri phrasis. "Old long since" or "Old long ago" sounds merely ridiculous. "Auld Lang Syne" has found a place in the most recent English dictionaries, and the expression is now nearly as common in England as in Scotland. Burns thought it an "exceedingly expressive" phrase; and even stodgy old Dr. Jamieson, of thu "Scottish Dictionary," could say of it that "to a native of this country it conveys a soothing idea to the mind as recalling the memory of joys that are past." To realise to the full Burns's genius in the matter of working up this "exceedingly expressive" phrase, you have only to look at the earl'(, r attempts of poets in that direction. Here is the model upon which Burns is supposed to have built. I do not know how old it is, but it appeared in a collection of poems published in 1711: "Should old acquaintance be forgot, And never thought upon, The flame of love extinguished, And freely past and gone ? Is thy kind heait now grown eo cold, In that loving breast of thine, That thou canst never once reflect On old long syne ? Allan Ramsay, the poet of The Gentle Shepherd," tried to improve upon this, but without success. Allan's keynote was not good fellowship and old friendship, but the ever- powerful theme of love. Let us sample him "Should auld acquaintance be forgot, Tho' they return with scars ? These are the noble hero's lot, Obtained in glorious wars. Welcome, my Varo, to my breast, Thy arms about me twine, And make me once again as blest As I was lang syne." "My Varo." What nonsense If Burns's master hand had not touched that exceedingly expressive phrase, "Auld Lang Sync" would never have passed from Scots speech into universal usage and immortal song. It was in the December of 1788 that Burns sent the following letter to Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop, the daughter of Sir Thomas Wallace of Craigic, and a descendant of the hero who purchased independence for Scotland. Thus the poet: "Your meeting, which;. ou so well describe, with your old schoolfellow and friend was truly interesting. Out upon the ways of the world They spoil these social offsprings of the heart. Two veterans of the men of the world would have met with little more heart-workings than two old hacks worn out on the roa.d. Apropos, is not the Scots phrase Auid Lang Syne exceedingly expressive ? There is an old song and tune which has often thrilled through my soul. You know I am an enthusiast in old Scota songs. I shall give you the verses." Here follows the immortal song; after which the poet continues, in a strain of admiration which, if not real, is well affected: "Light lie the turf on the breast of tho Heaven-inspired poet who composed this glorious fragment! There is more of the fire of native genius in it than in half-a-dozen of modern English bacchanalians. And again, when sending the song some three years later to George Thomson, the editor of a collection then issuing from the press, he writes "One song more and I have done.—'Auld Lang Syiie. The air is but mediocre, but the following song, the old song of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript, until I took it down from an old man's singing, is enough to recommend tiny air." From p.ll this it will be seen that Burns indirectly repudiates the authorship of "Auld Lang Syne," seeking to pass off the song as a patchwork of traditional fragments. It was all puro deception. No doubt some portions of the lyric were borrowed from the old songs but the poet's editors have not had the slightest hesitation in associating his name with the paternity of the song as it now stands. Towards the close of his career Burns not seldom tried to make his friends believe that verses of his own composition were old rc.sonants of song floating about the country. Two versions of the song were published in Burns's lifdime one in Johnson's "Musical Museum," an Edinburgh collection to which the poet contributed largely: and the other in Thomson's collection already mentioned. One important dnferenee between the two versions lies in the order of tho stanzas. In Johnson the following verse is placed second in Thomson it is placed last: "And surely ye'll be your pint-stowp, And surely I'll be mine And we'J] tak' a cup o' kindness yet For auld lang syne. The Johnson version has been generally accepted, because perhaps it can be more appropriately used as a parting song at social gatherings. When a company unites in singing the song before dispersing it is customary for the singers to join hands in a circle at the words, "Then here's a hand, my trusty friend (the last verse in Johnson), thereafter concluding the song by rapidly and emphatically singing the chorus. To come with the pint-stowp after that would be awkw ard, and so the stanza in which it is either omitted or taken second, as in Johnson's version. All the srune, the song is really, in its essence, a reunion and rot a parting song. Look at the argument; Wa are old friemls who have been long parted we played together as boys by burnside and 011 brae let us shake hands and sit down to asocial evening together." That is my reading. Habit, however, is much stronger than argument, and there is little likelihood of "Auld Lang Syne becoming other than it now is-a parting song of friendship and goodwill. Nothing has so far been said about tho tune. Burns, it will have been noted, re- marked that he wrote the song to a, mediocre eld air. Tha-twastheair printed by John- Eon Thomson declined to use it: he used the air which everybody now sings, and for that service of adaptation he must have everlasting thanks. Where did he get this air ? For the last sixty years or more it has usually teen attributed to William Shield, a composer who was born near Durham in 1748. Shield has really 110 more claim to it than Beethoven has to the tune of "Yankee Doodle." It certainly appeared in Shield's opera of "Rosina" in 1782, but it had been printed as a strathspey dance tune in 17S0 under the title of "The Miller's Daughter," which was itself taken from "The Miller's Wedding," published in a collection of reels in 1759, the year of Burns's birth. No tune was better known or more popular in Scotland during the last half of the eighteenth century. any tune more popular now ? fNext article of tliis series "ROBIN ADAIR 4

"Why was Solomon the wisest man that ever lived ?" asked the teacher. Please, ma'am," replied a little boy, "because he had so many wives to give him advice."

-I TALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ] LITERARY PORTRAITS. ::r.. 1 •. ni By HALDANE MACFALL, Author o "The Mastarfolk," "The Wooingi of Jezebel Pettyfer," tea, III.—RICHARD WTIITEING. A strong, sturdy figure of a man is Richard I Whiteing at a hale sixty years and his breezy belief in the innate dignity and eventual triumph of democracy is as hale as he. To the world at large, Richard Whiteing came to life in 1899 with a novel, "No. 5, John Street but, though he began to exist on the eve of his sixtieth year for most of us, h" was already a personage in upper journalism, and Paris knew him—as he knew F.tris-wond-eous well. Richard Whiteing hopes to see the world as a vast garden for the average man. His shrewd eyes sae through the pettiness of the claims, and the aims, and the habits, and the pretence of a mere privileged class to hold dominion over the state. He shews with genial statement but with dogged insistence, with calm utterance and restrained emotion, yet nevertheless insistently, that the living of life is not for a class—that decency of life and enjoyment of life, and the right to live that life in a healthy, human way, arc the absolute birthright of every human soul. And with biting satire-for he is a master of satire rather than of humour-lie shews the decadency that sets in, and the wholesale misery that results, from any one class shirk- ing its responsibilities of labour, and filching the leisure from another class. For, be you sure of this, whether aristocrat or democrat, red-hot Nihilist or cloistral nun, what one class repudiates in labour, and filches in pleasure, by so much shall another class pay the debt of labour, and be filched of its pleasure. There is world's work to be done; and every man's hand must do it if it shall be done sanely, and healthily in the doing. If an enriched class shirk its duties to the state, and live a life of pleasure, the class below must do its own work and the repudiated work of the class above and the heel of the repudiated tyranny will grind the heaviest on the lowest class of all, the injustice being transmitted in ever-increasing violence. And the Ir ,0-e populouj the stfite the more cruel the harshness, until the labourer shall be worn out with excess of grey toil that knows no joy, and the mighty populace rots like a foetid thing. Bo a large people, robbed of vitality and a healthy day, becomes of less worth than a small people of vigorous life; for that people is tll?3 llli,,tiest that breeds the C'?l strongest average man. And the law justifies itself utterly for the privileged class Becomes bored by its very excess of pleasure, by its tedious having nothing to do-the very thing for which it has striven turns to the ashes of Dead Sea fruit in its mouth. It does not even produce a fine virile upper class, which 'ht .g b,? soue source of comfort out of the m cruel murk. These things Whiteing set down in terms .Lve us "No. 5, Jol-i Street c)r art, and g, the illilli oiia ire's son w,%stiiig his ),cars trying on suits of clothes, dawdling through IL seent,d eliborate day a day sectited and el,t',)or,tted to keep th? pit of boredom from yawn*ng at his feet. pa)-ing large. sunis for polo ?onies to knoc? about a little ball on the gi-ass ?it litrling.litini, suriis that would ke?-,I) a dozen ftlliiilies ID health -and in freedom from the ghastly over-toil that ryins tho race —whilst, hard by, in filthy garret and noisome den, the sweated toiler grows blind and starved and puny and demoralised, in tragic and sordid days that are worse than death. Thus justice dies, and the law becomes the law of the rich; until at last some half- crazed fellow looks at. the fantastic thing he has been calling life, looks up from the bench to which he has been a tied slave, Ehades his half-m:>d eyes with starved, lank fingers, and sees the coach of the rich dawdler go by, sees the bored shirker of toil yawn at his fantastic life; and, poor fool he rises and sets what little peevish will remains to him to the making of a bomb, flings the bomb amongst innocent people, and jigs into eternity at the end of a gallows rope for the whim of his mad tomfoolery. And the dawdler tells on and on. and yawns and yawns. So Richard Whiteing, a big, burly man, thunders for a big, burly, healthy race. That largo peoples shall set small peoples under their heels becomes every day more evident; and that the largo people that breeds the healthy average man must overpower the large people of the less healthy average man goes also without proof; and that a large people who have self-recpect will govern themselves and not be governed by a privileged class is a fact which has perhaps even less need for proof; therefore ft great people must be a democracy. The dangers of democracy Richard Whiteing ace4 with quite clear vision; but the race 'll right all iDist.91 r--s in t' %v I li "Ile the race will save itself, or it must fall. It will fall the sooner if it be not a democracy. it is wiser to trust the people to save themselves as a whole, than to trust a class to save them whose interest and instinct it must always be to live parasitieally on the people. And of a surety this man of large observa- tion of men and peoples is right. He has watched the wondrous development of this England of ours during the last thirty years —I10 has been in 'jlose and intimate touch with the enormous but silent revolution in France. He has seen England increase bv her iiii.?el-ial instliict, logic.vlly blin,], I)ut 1:1 right; lie seen France healin,, herself anl streiiL:tlienin,, her shattered 1) 7 11 ?:"Ve,3 by the revc,I'SC process, b i clean-cut, icgic[,.l tact. And no man shall have seen these things and dread the people. T LL it is tor tillS reason x ueiesi tne word Empire and prefer the word Commonwealth. And that Commonwealths must stand for the eventual mastery of the world who shall deny ? If you wc-uld see these things in pro- portion you must look at man in the large— trace him from the beginning—and what is the talc that the years have to tell us ? Out of the mystic ways, the eager life that existing tliitil, is at the core of ali ,q evolv?ng o stige, found its su,?r" -ge t eniest hal)i- frol-n st!' t--ttion in the wondering ercature that droi)pod fi-oll, i?s ql?ic-like- habits in the tree?q, and, with ungainly straddle on the firm earth, took its upright stand upon tentative hind legs- falterinely, hesitatingly, bodying itself forth as Man—the Thinking Thing. Life's cunning, with increasing cunning, is bccome reason in tins banning thing that thinks. It notes the hand's use, and the value of that wondrous thumb that is on the hand—to grip, to throw, to hold. That thumb that, with the brain's cunning Tor guidance, is to enable the liend to chip tools and weapons from the hint, and give confidence to this na.ked, defenceless, shivering being, and lead him from his lair in the thicket and the cave out into the open strife; that, for his body's welfare and sustenance, with pitfall and with gin, is to put to naught the lion's strength, the wolf's tooth, the wild boar's fury., so that he sliall -,vri-p si-,T-,s of tiles, &])out him -.giinEt tlic- frost's iiippitl, Cold, and use theii, hides to protet 'I fee' is t that hand that is to strike fire from the chill fluit and bring warmth mto the chattering winter, and give rise to the potter's art lire whereby also the earth's J.1etals at last yielded their ductile strength to his enfranchisement; that hand that is to break the dog and horse to man's bidding, and gather together flocks and herds that he mny roam the pastures of the world and, his wander-vcars being done, that is to fashion tho plough whereby he shall settle on tho land and till the ruddy earth and gather in th<i harvest to his body's use that is to invent the distaff and the loom to the weaving of e-otii; that is to knit the fisher'a net; th.'iS is to make the vast, wide world tributary i/J him—the elements and the

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and stream and raging seas, so that the exquisite eye of man shall see the stars a myriad lc-tves beyond the eagle's utmost ken, his p1- if transit make the swiftness of the lope a sluggard's pace, his calculating cage the strength of many horses in the machinery's wheeled intricacies. He increased his strength in the close-knit brotherhood of the clan. He foregathered into villages, uniting his skill and strength, and the trades and crafts arose to the mutual strengthening of the people. Power and increasing fulness of life passed from the wild fellow of the cavern to the wandering tribe —passed from the wandering tribe to the settled village-from them that were in villages to them that foregathered within the stout walls of the populous city—from the city to the state, whose might crumbled the city's walls, grown inadequate against the power of states-passed from the state to the mighty race that is fenced about to her uttermost frontiers solely by the majestic bulwarks ef her daring spirits. Kingship has passed to the Commonweal, and the sceptre is in the hands of the manhooa of the people. And in our inmost hearts w. know this thing to be true, be we Tory ot Whig, Socialist or individualist. We may sneer away ideals as fairytales, but the god- hood in man leads to an ideal, and they wbe fear to walk thereto must fall and be trodden under foot by a master race. [Next Article of o Series "CoNAa DOYLE. "]