OCR Text |
Show I WHO'S NEWS THIS WEEK... By Lemuel F. Parton Kashmir Poetess Recalls Glamorous Days of Nineties XJEW YORK. In Victori-1 Victori-1 an England of the Nine-tics, Nine-tics, Arthur Symonds wrote of the shy, young poetess, Sarojini Naidu, "her eyes are like pools and you seem to fall through them to depths below depths." Her exquisite exquis-ite Kashmir beauty has faded now, but it is she and no other oth-er who starts cables and linotypes lino-types clattering all over the world with the news that Lindbergh blushed. It was her poetic laudation of the colonel at the meeting of the parliament parlia-ment of religions at Calcutta, in which he was compared to Buddha, which flushed the rose tint on the colonel's cheek and made news that sidetracked all other events of the world parliament of religions. That was the headline and the story. It is an interesting citation of comparative compar-ative news values. In London of the eighties and nine-tics, nine-tics, fame was bestowed when Aubrey Aub-rey Beardsley, Burne-Jones and Watts painted the portrait of any new entrant. Thus Lily Langtry was converted from a singularly inept in-ept and fumble-footed actress to a great lady of the stage. Sarojini Naidu was both beautiful and intelligent. intelli-gent. Ignoring veil and caste, the first of her Brahmin line to do so, she entered Girton, at Cambridge. Sir Edmund Gosse discovered her poetry and gave it his august literary lit-erary sanction. The above painters rushed in with their mahl sticks and brushes, and the poets with psaltery and harp Ernest Dowson among them Richard Le Gallienne and Max Beerbohm in their wake. Her poems were recited, sung, chanted at all great salons. Like Lindbergh, then in time's suspense file, she climbed down from her Pegasus to a blare of fame and adulation. Her gorgeous native dress, her beauty, her silken "sari," her exquisite voice, her enchanting en-chanting verse were more familiar to the empire than the growing tension ten-sion of Johannesburg, Algeciras, and Agadir. She went back to India to war on the incoming machine age which was to make the later Lindbergh the Siegfried of its iron niebelung. She put aside her silken gown and wore the coarse "khaddar" of Gandhi's Gan-dhi's early civil disobedience movement. move-ment. She went to jail, two or three years altogether. She married out of her caste, assailed as-sailed the caste system, led crowds through the city streets, gave her property to the nationalist movement. move-ment. In 1925, she became president presi-dent of the Indian national congress. In England they still sing her poems, po-ems, set to music by Liza Lehman and Coleridge Taylor. She is fifty-six years old, the mother of four children, with a slight figure and lined, gentle face, an ally of Annie Besant in the "swaraj" movement in the latter's years. A strange transit of epochs and cultures, this, stirring an astronomical astro-nomical blush over the seven seas. The Burne-Jones salon was Sarojini Saro-jini Naidu's Le Bourget field. It would be interesting to eavesdrop at a heart-to-heart talk between the colonel and the poetess about conformity con-formity and dissent and whether it is better to go to glory or to jail, and whether she is sorry she ever put aside her silken gown. At any rate, in Lindbergh, she hymns chivalry chiv-alry and courage, no matter what she thinks of his epoch. When "New Freedom" Was New. JOSEPH P. TUMULTY never quite caught step in the Roosevelt Roose-velt parade, but there he was, after all these years, on the President's left at the recent "victory dinner," with less hair than he had in the early days of the "new freedom," but with Irish eloquence unimpaired. unim-paired. He reports "Democratic fires burning in the hills and valleys val-leys of America." Lagging far behind, Woodrow Wilson's Wil-son's eight-year secretary never called '-'Wait for baby," like the chap in "What Price Glory," and finally fi-nally came along in his usual dignified digni-fied way. So far as broad party strategics and policies of the last few years are concerned, Mr. Tumulty has been mainly concerned with our recreance and indifference toward the League of Nations. There is no more loyal conservator of straight-line straight-line Wilsonian doctrine in America. Toward the end of Woodrow Wilson's Wil-son's second term, there was much talk of a cabinet post for Mr. Tumulty, Tum-ulty, supposedly the labor post, but he became a Washington lawyer law-yer instead. In August, 1935, he told a senate committee that his two years' fees of $109,700 were for advice and not for lobbying. His Jersey friends tell me that he has made his peace with Frank Hague, Jersey City political boss, that he is becoming mellow and philosophical and that he has no yen for any important place on the Democratic bandwagon. Consolirtnted NVws Features. WNU Service. |