Contents

EDITORIAL •• *

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON T. S. ELIOT—R.S 5

Woodcut—B. T. Smith • • 16

. . . AND OUR FATHERS THAT BEGAT US—Ross 17

INERTIA—Ross .. 20

HOUSING SCHEME FOR THE LOWER ORDERS—N. W. Johnson .. .. 21

KIPLING T H E POET—L. Wood 24

"GOTTERDAMMERUNG FINALE" 30

Drawing—Keith Wilson .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 31

T H E MARXIST INFLUENCE IN MODERN LITERATURE—J. C. Reid .. 32

AND WHAT OF ITT—L. Cornwall 38

TO O.E.B.—A TRIBUTE—G. R. Enting 39

Bookplate—B. T. Smith • • 40

LETTERS AND THE SPIRIT—E.J.K 41

REVERIE—Monica Coatcs • • 45

ENGINE DREAM—Ross • .. • • 46

SONG OF THE WORN OUT MEN—D. Minogue 46

Pencil Sketches•—E. A. Horsman 48 & 49

TRANSMIGRATION—caliban . . 50

FAIN—R.S. 51

SIGHT-SEEING BUS—D. Minogue .. .. •• 52

ROUNDEL—Miles 52

THE CREST OF THE WAVE—D. Minogue •• .. 53

STUDENT'S EXECUTIVE 54

GRADUATES OF T H E YEAR • • .. .. 55

IN MEMORY OF PROFESSOR MAXWELL WALKER 61

ALUMNI •• •• 64

ROUNDEL—Miles •• 65

APOTHEOSIS OF WILLIAM JONES—C.J 66

RESULTS OF COMPETITIONS 68

EDI TORI AI

The University the Centennial

and the War

OUR country has marked off its first hundred years by entering, along with the other nations of the British Commonwealth,

the second world war. At first sight it seems rather a tragic way to celebrate our birthday. Our young men are leaving their country's shores to fight for England in the armed forces which she is opposing to Fascism, and the conditions of warfare are such as to indicate that many of them may not return. For a second time in twenty years, we are forced to strain every nerve to thwart the plans of German rulers for world domination.

The world is fighting its battles over again. It may seem trite that the struggle for liberty has begun once more, but that is the plain truth. And it has reached a pitch more acute than was ever before known in history. When Bonaparte was knocking at the door of England and hoping mightily for control of the channel for two hours, things were bad enough for freedom in Eurcpe. But then at least men knew that England did have her moat, and that it was efficacious. There was no dreadful terror from the air. There were no long range guns.

Now is the testing time for all the constituents that have gone to make the British Commonwealth. That magnificent structure, whatever its detractors may say of it, has proved once again that the salient point in its construction, the basic metal in the alloy, is unity—the unity that comes from individual entities who proceed according to their own sweet will.

Just as an alloy metal for one of our fighter aircraft can be tested only under the stresses of actual practice, in racking power dives and shuddering vertical climbs, so the alloy of the Empire finds

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adequate trial only in the stress of a conflict that tests every weak-ness, searches out every flaw. The Mother Country is beleaguered now, her existence threatened as never before. Yet each of her children is loyal, and each is bearing its share of the burden.

The capacity for loyalty springs f rom one foundation—Freedom. Constrained, our loyalty would disappear. In very truth, we must be free or die; and if we fail in loyalty now we shall assuredly die.

I low does the University come in, then, in this grim centennial celebration?

In this way: by keeping alive the spirit of critical inquiry which refuses to accept ready made ideas; and by keeping alive also that tradition of free thought and utterance which is the cornerstone of our British social system. To win victory at the price of these things would be worse than no victory at all.

The first hundred years ends with this freedom our most cher-ished possession. To surrender it means the loss of more than one hundred years. Here in this college we have this privilege of living during momentous times and assisting in momentous happenings. Some of us may go away to give direct help and wage war on land and sea and in the air, for England. Theirs is a great offering, for they hazard all they have. But those who remain will help to do their share by refusing to relapse into mental coma, by refusing to succumb to propaganda, by thinking honestly and clearly, and by keeping alive the spirit of free thought and free life which means that we have not been conquered by the easy way of using our enemy's methods of obtaining unity of thought.

So will centennial year, critical though it be in our nation's story, find the University playing its most worthy and most useful par t in the life of our people.

Some Observations on T. S. Eliot

THE commonest charge brought against T. S. Eliot, as a poet, is tha t of obscurity; he himself accepts this, but with a justifi-

cation. In 1921 he wrote :— "Poets in our civilisation, as it exists at present, must be diffi-

cult. Our civilisation comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning."

He says the same thing mere vividly in a later poem, "Burnt Nor ton" :

"Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still."

However, the obscurity is in the mind of the reader, not of the poet. Poetry has much in common with the dog that runs on in front of its master and then waits t3 be caught up wi th ; sometimes it even comes back to meet its master. At present poetry is a long way ahead.

No modern poet is really difficult; reading Eliot, for instance, is very like developing a film: at first it is meaningless, but a f te r being subjected to several processes you see the design becoming clearer and clearer; eventually every little detail stands out and is significant. The analogy can be taken a step fu r the r : you may do your own developing or have it done professionally.

There is another way of explaining his complexity: it is because his work is a justification of Pater 's statement that "all art con-stantly aspires towards the condition of music." He fulfils Pater ' s own interpretat ion of this, namely that "it is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and fo rm" and that "art is always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a mat ter of pure perception" for "ar t addresses not pure sense, still less pure intellect but the ' imagina-tive reason'." In most of Eliot's poetry it is the sound and form which are most significant —- what it means logically trails after . Pater 's explanation, however, can be carried fur ther , for, owing to this same "perfect identification of mat ter and form," a predominant feature of music is an interlaying of effects which is clearly detectable in Eliot.

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So skilful is he in this that it sometimes seems as if many voices were speaking at once, at other times it is as if several poems had been dove-tailed into one. The poems where it is seen at its simplest are "Cape Ann" and "Coriolan." In the former he starts with one kind of bird but by the end of the poem there is a complete chorus:

"O quick quick quick, quick hear the song-sparrow, Swamp-sparrow, fox-sparrow, vesper-sparrow At dawn and dusk. Follow the dance Of the goldfinch at noon. Leave to chance The Blackburnian warbler, the shy one. Hail With shrill whistle the note of the quail, the bob-white Dodging by bay-bush. Follow the flight Of the walker, the water-thrush. Follow the feet Of the dancing arrow, the purple martin. Greet In silence the bullbat. All are delectable. Sweet sweet sweet But resign this land at the end, resign it To its true owner, the tough one, the sea-gull. The palaver is finished."

He uses this technique far more subtly in poems like "A Game of Chess" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Pru f rock" ; in these it is not so much voices he orchestrates, but thought, mood and tone. At other times this interlayering is interesting rather than good poetry, for we see an actual emotional scaffolding which the poet has neglected to fill in.

Sometimes he debases his interlayering technique; this is when he becomes sodden with a realisation of fut i l i ty which cheapens his verse, as, for example, in "The Fine Sermon."

"At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at tea-time, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins."

In this there is also something of his jabbing quality which is ^een at its best in the last few lines of "Rhapsody on a Windy Night ."

"The lamp said, 'Four o'clock, Here is the number on the door. Memory! You have the key, The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair. Mount. The bed is open; the tooth brush hangs on the wall,

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Tut your shoes at the door, steep, prepare for life.' The last twist of the knife:'

And the end of "The Hollow Men" : "This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper."

A final example comes f rom the last of his "Preludes": "I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots."

Closely related to his interlayering technique is the fact that his poems are seldom descriptions of narrat ives but emotional experi-ences (sometimes, it is true, not unlike an emotional switch-back lai lway). This is because, when confronted by anything, he is in-capable of describing or explaining it, S3 he tears it open. By doing this he gives us wisps and ragged edges and it often requires all our agility to find the pat tern. In this method he is like Aristotle who, to quote C. S. Lewis, "often begins his argument with what he calls an Isagoge, a collection of instances which is not . . . intended to prove a general principle but merely to open our eyes to it ." But there is this difference between the two writers: Aristotle uses the isagoge as an introduction, whereas Eliot makes it the whole substance of his poetic statement. His simplest example occurs in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" :

"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter, Slips out its tongue And devours a morsel of rancid butter. So the hand of the child, automatic, Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the

quay. I could see nothing behind that child's eye. I have seen eyes in the street Trying to peer through lighted shutters, And a crab one afternoon in a pool, An old crab with barnacles o?i his back, Gripped the end of a stick which I held him."

The chief impression one gets f rom reading T. S. Eliot is tha t 7

of a weaving of currents into a restless pat tern of many opposites: sordidness and romance, fut i l i ty and value, action and suffering, the trivial and the magnificent, what is here and what is distant, thinking and action, the vacant man and the wise man, youth and age, tragedy ad fevered gaiety, time and timelessness, the spirit and the body, the personal and the impersonal. None of these elements will stay still and every time they move they disturb something else. The major theme, which can be traced from his earliest works to his latest, is reality and illusion; his mind is like a sea advancing sometimes against illusion, sometimes against reality, only to be repulsed. In "The Rock" he notices that men are always escaping life but makes no comment :

"Why should men love the Churchf Why should the-v love her laws?

She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget

She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts. They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to

be good. But the man that is will shadow The man that pretends to be."

The last two lines of this passage and the following: "Life you may evade, but Death you shall not"

are his strongest comments. At the end of the play he has lest all resentment:

" . . . . We are glad when the day ends, When the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain. We are children quickly tired . . . We tire of distraction or concentration, we sleep

and are glad to sleep."

In "Murder in the Cathedra l" he accepts the fact that "human kind cannot bear very much real i ty"; only at the beginning of the play has his acceptance a tinge of bit terness:

" . . . man passes From unreality to unreality

From deception to deception From grandeur to grandeur, to final illusion.'

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When he thinks of the women of Canterbury being forced to face reality he pities them who for seven years :

"have lived quietly

living and partly living."

Bu<; now they cry out : "0 Thomas our Lord, leave us, and leave us

be in our humble and tarnished frame of existence, leave us; do not ask us

To stand to the doom on the house, the doom on the archbishop, the doom on the world

do you realise what you ask, do you realise what it means

To the small folk drawn into the pattern of fate, the small folk who live among small things,

The strain on the brain of the small folk, who stand to the doom on the house, the doom of their lord, the doom of the world."

l ie has an active sympathy towards this human weakness when he describes our fear of death as of a void:

"Where those who were men can no longer turn the mind To distracting delusion escape into dream, pretence, Where the soul is no longer deceived, for them are no objects,

no tones, No colours, no forms to distract, to divert the soul From seeing itself foully united forever."

Towards the end of the play he has completely come to terms wi1h the s i tuat ion;for the only time in all his works it ceases to fret or depress him. Thcmas, shortly before his death, addresses the women of Cante rbury :

"You shall forget these things, toiling in the household, You shall remember them drowsing by the fire, Then age and forgetfulness sweeten memory Only like a dream that has often been told A nd often been changed in the telling. They will seem unreal. Human kind cannot bear very much reality."

The last speech of the third priest also has realisation but the note of tr iumph is spoiled by smugness:

"In the small circle of pain within the skull You still shall tramp and tread one endless round

Of thought, to justify your action to yourselves, o

Weaving a fiction winch unravels as you weave, Pacing forever in the hell of make-believe Which never is belief: this is your fate on earth And we must think no further of you."

It is a very different at t i tude in "Family Reunion" in which Harry speaks harshly and hysterically to his family :

. you have gone through life in sleep Never woken to the nightmare. I tell you life would be

unendurable If you were wide awake."

"First of all you isolate the single event As something so dreadful that it couldn't have happened, Because you could not bear it."

The chorus sadly echoes him: "And we should cease to be sure of what is real or unreal

Hold tight, hold tight, we must insist that the world is what we have always taken it to be."

"The instinct to return to the point of departure And start again as if nothing had happened (Isn't that all folly?)"

Indeed one of the major themes of this play concerns the reaction of an aristocratic family when confronted with one of its members being either a murderer or insane or both.

His poems, too, show how his mind hovers round man's escapism. In "Ash Wednesday" he writes:

"Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood"; and in "Animula" he speaks of " the imperatives of 'is and seems'," " the pain of living and the drug of dreams," and "fearing the warm reality." When he is writing " M a r i n a " he gives in to the desire to accept illusion:

"This form, this face, this life Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me Resign my life for this life."

In "The Waste Land" reality at times pierces through his own sense of unreali ty:

"Unreal City Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many."

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He seems to see reality in two ways; for to him men are both "lost violent souls" and "only the hollow men, the stuffed men." These stuffed men are hollow because they are stuffed with illusion; which makes illusion a reality and confronts the poet (and the reader) with "some overwhelming question." He has reached self-realisation when he writes "Ash Wednesday" in which he says:

"And I pray that I may forget These matters that with myself I too much discuss Too much explain."

Because Eliot is incapable of seeing any situation as a flat surface, he becomes obsessed with paradoxes: these form almost the whole structure of the Chris tmas sermon in "Murder in the Cathe-dral" ; and again and again he writes lines like the following:

"Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still."

To complicate matters fur ther a given moment for him is always: "Where past and future are gathered."

In examining his general a t t i tude towards man, we are especially conscious of how rarely he is able to isolate one part icular aspect— everything for him is an iceberg which has only its smaller par t above the water, or the moon which may show a bright face to the world but is dark behind; and even its brightness waxes and wanes. So he looks a*: man and writes:

"O weariness of men who turn from GOD To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action, To acts and inventions and daring enterprises, To schemes of human greatness thoroughly discredited, Binding the earth and the water to your service, Exploiting the seas and developing the mountains, Dividing the stars into common and preferred, Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator, Engaged in working out a rational morality, Engaged in printing as many books as possible, Plotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles, Turning from vacancy to fevered enthusiasm For nation or race or what you call humanity."

At times, but never for long, he is simply depressed as in many of Harry 's speeches in "Family Reunion":

" . . . many creatures moving Without direction, for no direction Leads anywhere but round and round in that vapour—

1 1

Without purpose and without principle and conduct In flickering intervals of light and darkness."

"Animula" is equally gloomy: "The heavy burden of the growing soul

Perplexes and offends more, day by day; Week by week, offends and complexes more With the imperatives of 'is and seems' And may and may not, desire and control."

The alternating choruses of the Workmen and the Unemployed in "The Rock" give the concave and convex—purpose and purpose-lessness But later in the same play the mocd changes to a more stable opt imism:

"Then it seemed as if men must proceed from light to light, in the light of the world,

Through the Passion and Sacrifice saved in spite of their negative being;

Bestial as always before, carnal, self-seeking as always before, selfish and purblind as ever before,

Yet always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming their march on the way that was lit by the light;

Often halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet following no other way."

In this same play he gives a picture of man rare in his writ ing: a few good men

Many who were evil, A nd most who were neither.

Our age is an age of moderate virtue And of moderate vice."

Of course his shift ing pessimism and optimism is equally dis-cernible in his t reatment of subjects other than the nature of man. His mood ranges f rom the deepest gloom to the dogged, if not always convincing, optimism in the choruses of "The Rock": _

If the Temple is to be cast down We must first build the Temple."

"And we thank Thee that darkness reminds us of light." However, he keeps relapsing into sincerity. He has the typical

a t t i tude of the modern poet to cities. "Though you have shelters and institutions, Precarious lodgings while the rent is paid,

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Subsiding basements where the rat breeds Or sanitary dwellings with numbered doors Or a house a little better than your neighbour's; When the Stranger says: 'What is the meaning of this city? Do you huddle close together because you love each other?' What will you answer? 'We all dwell together To make money from each other'? or 'This is a community'?"

"Family Reunion" at times verges on an hysterical vision cf futil ity. Although some of the characters try to b^ normal and cheerful, Eliot in his portrayal of them seems merely to be drawing on the memory of more optimistic moods. It is in the chorus and Harry 's character that we find the dramat is t ' s own depressed state of mind. It is Harry who says:

"We're all of us ill in one way or another We call it health when we find no symptom Of illness. Health is a relative term."

And the chorus: "There is nothing to do about anything.

And now it is time for the news We must listen to the weather report And the international catastrophes."

"Ash Wednesday" and "A Song for Simeon" have the same melancholy:

"Where shall the word be found, where will the word Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence Not on the sea or on the islands, not O11 the mainland, in the desert or the rain land, For those who walk in darkness Both in the day time and in the night time The right time and the right place are not here No place of grace for those who avoid the face No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and

deny the voice."

where shall live my children's children When the time of sorrow is come? They will take to the goat's path, and the fox's home, Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords."

In this passage from "Burnt Nor ton" he characteristically turns his mood inside ou t :

"Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis Stray dozen, bend to us; tendril and spray

Clutch and cling? Chill Fingers of yew be curled Down on us?"

In "Murder in the Cathedra l" we find a happier vision, when he writes about the archbishop's dea th :

"For the church is stronger for this action Triumphant in adversity."

Moreover he joins the chorus in saying: "And the world must be cleansed in the winter or we shall

have only A sour spring, a parched summer, an empty harvest."

His most consistent optimism lies in his belief that, though the world may be going backwards, it is only, in the words of Sir Philip Sidney, "as a Ramme which goes back to return with greater force."

. does the whole world stray in High-powered cars on a by-pass way?"

"What sign of the spring of the year? Only the death of the old."

The following lines are a good comment on another aspect of his opt imism:

"Our ga{e is submarine, our eyes look upward And see the light that fractures through unquiet water. We see the light but see not where it comes."

At times there is a certain fatal ism in his works but I am not sure how fundamental it is. Take, for example, this passage in "A Song for Simeon":

"They shall praise thee and suffer in every generation"; or more important ly in "Burnt Nor ton" :

"Or say that the end precedes the beginning, And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end."

Fatalism is certainly present, but it is only part of another essential: Eliot in his search for values again and again finds only the " turning wheel" to bind together and make an eternal whole of the "odds and ends" which make up life. One of the priests from "Murder in the Cathedra l" expresses this :

"For good or ill let the wheel turn." And Thomas a Beckett reinforces it in the speech on acting and

suffering which ends: 14

. for the pattern is the action And the suffering that the wheel may turn and still Be forever still."

Later he makes a fur ther comment : " . . . only

The fool fixed in his folly, may think He can turn the wheel on which he turns."

Harry ( "The Family Reunion") as usual is hysterical about this:

"It was only reversing the senseless direction For a momentary rest on the burning wheel."

Eliot also had a gloomy obsession with the same perpetual revolution in "The Rock"; he reflects that " the cycles of Heaven in Twenty centuries" have achieved rather evil than good. Later, how-ever, in a line in "Burnt Nor ton" he achieves a supreme quietness in expression of this thought :

"With slow rotation suggesting per?nanence." Eliot has his most typical mood expressed in a line which de-

mands comparison with one each from Keats and Shakespeare. Eliot says:

"We are the hollow men." Keats:

"My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains My sense."

And Shakespeare: "Lord what fools these mortals be."

Keats is preoccupied with his own part icular gr ief—the death of his brother—interwoven with a more impersonal, but still part icu-lar grief, for the passing of beauty; Eliot has lost all consciousness of his own identity but is essentially one of the "hollow men" ; while Shakespeare smiles with deep sympathy because, although he is one of "these mortals ," he is standing on a higher point of ground.

Heminge and Condell wrote in their preface to the first edition ( f Shakespeare:

"Reade him therefore; and again and again. And if then you do not like him surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him."

This passage, with emphasis on the word "danger," could also apply to the works of T. S. Eliot.

— R.S.

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. . . and our Fathers that beo-at us

Ti 11 b ai te rnocn i stood on three spots which carried my mind

back nearly a hundred years. One was high on a bluff over-looking the Waikato River. The earthworks of an old mili tary re-doubt were visible, even the great stones which formed a pa thway on the inside of the walls, fcr sentries to march on as ihey kept guard. The other two places were churches. One was a small building with nearly a dozen bullet holes. It stood on the lip of a great basin, where cattle fed amid soft green grass. It looked quite a common-place little building until you came cloce to it and saw the scattered bullet holes—as big as a farthing, made by tha heavy leaden slugs of the old Snider Carbines. The other church was situated on a little knoll, with a stream curving round at the foot. It was a large building, rather imposing for a country church, and it had a tall steeple. But something else about it seemed to mark it off f rom ihe crdinary little church of a farming coi rmuni 'y . ! couldn't quite pick what it was till 1 saw that at regular intervals the walls were pierced by loopholes.

These three places made me see more clearly than any history book could what kind of men our forefathers were.

Back of the loopholed church was a pret ty clump of native bush. In the midst of 1 he rich pasture it made a charming picture in the afternoon sun. But it brought forcibly to my mind the fact that not a hundred years ago the whole countryside was covered with thick fores t—just as thick, just as full of progress-hindering fern and manuka, just as dark and impenetrable, as the f ragment still left standing on this twentieth-century dairy farm. Into the fastnesses of this forest our ancestors came with axe and spade and musket.

Their first task was to clear a place to s tand—to give them-selves room to live. They hewed cut a square in the forest, and then they built them a church, with rough hewn timber and shingle roof. But the church was for more than devotional purposes. It was the citadel of every settler fcr miles around.

For here they were, in the midst of the dense bush, with no communication lines, and no protection except their muscles and what those muscles could build. They didn't know what to expect. I hey knew there were natives, but were uncertain whether ihey were

friendly or hostile. So at the first hint of danger they gathered their women and their children, shut them up in the church, and stood guard behind their rough palisade.

Many and many a time word came that a raiding par ty of 17

Maoris were on their way. News of a homestead burned and a family tomahawked would bring the settlers flying together like a flock of startled birds. Into the church the families would crowd, with food-stuffs and bedding, and the menfolk would overhaul the palisade and make ready their arms.

It was in circumstances such as these that endurance and bull-dog courage were absolute necessities. Into the little bullet-holed church that I saw, fifty or sixty farming people had once crowded in. The men were changing over the type of palisade from horizontal

logs to vertical ones sunk in the soil. The work was only half com-plete when three hundred Maoris, a war par ty on their way north, at tacked the church.

The first intimation the working par ty received of the presence of the enemy was a volley from the bush. They downed tools i nd were behind the palisade like a flash. Puffs of smoke from the green forest all round told them the size of the enemy force. Here and there a brown body showed in the fern. The black rifles behind the par t ly built stockade cracked at intervals, picking targets with deadly aim. There were seventeen men there, to defend the church. One or two were regular troops, of the famous 65th. One of these, a sergeant, took charge, lie counselled the defenders never to fire a volley, but to keep up a continuous fire, making every bullet tell.

Grimly the defenders watched and waited for a movement in the fern that would denote a Maori. Then a rifle would boom, and its owner would quickly reload. Through the bright hot afternoon the fight went on, bullets thudding into the t imbers of the stockade and the church, and whistling through the leaves of the trees, puffs of white smoke floating slowly up, shouts f rom the Maoris echoing through the bush and away out over the great basin on the lip of which the church stood.

Relief came. But not before several of the defenders had been killed, and ammunition all but exhausted. The Maoris withdrew. The action was over.

Times without number this story was repeated. Yet men cleared ;he forest, little by little, and built them homes; they scratched the soil and made it produce; they begot children, and worked to feed them; and all the time they knew that the next day might see their home a heap of ashes, and themselves no more.

To check the raiding tribes in their advances north, the military authorities flung a chain of redoubts f rom the Waikato River to the Firth of Thames. 1 saw the remains of one this afternoon.

Perched high on a bluff by a bend of the Waikato, commanding 18

a view for miles up and down, a series of bumps and depressions in the ground were all that indicated the former existence of such a structure. It was rectangular, with an earth wall about four feet high, surmounted probably by a palisade, and protected on the out-side by a deep ditch, which ran right round it. In opposite corners two watch towers must have been situated, for square excrescences on the earthworks indicated this. The blockhouses inside were con-nected by stone paths, and paths also ran around the walls, showing now as a row of rounded boulders pushing through the grass.

It was not hard to visualise the scene from this spot in former days. Idle gunboats would be patrolling the river, while river steamers

with paddles threshing took supplies and tools into the interior by the main line of communication of those times. All round, the hills crowded each other under their green mantle of bush, silent and unchanging. A scout would slip out of the heavy gate of the redoubt, on patrol. The sentry's heavy boots thudded on the stone pa th ; and the forest brooded silently.

Now the power lines cross the river at this point—a mighty span of hall a mile, with the heavy copper cables seeming to drop sheer down to the surface of the water, to a little island that lies in the centre of the river. The hills are green with pasture. No gunboats prowl on the watch. All that remain to tell the tale of stirring times are a few earthworks and a few graves.

Yet I like to think of the men who built these works and manned them, of the strong arms and strong hearts that pushed forward up the river, and cleared and built and founded our goodly heritage of fertile soil and green pastures.- I hey were great men. Their deeds are not forgotten, and shall not be forgotten, I hope, while New Zealand exists.

— ROSS

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Inertia

DRA W the blinds in the shuitered room, Blot out the darkness, turn on light and warmth,

Bring artificial soothing, relief from day's troubles, Relapse into unthinking soft coma. Life is hard to us, why should we think of it, It will crush us if it can, and we know it. But we dare not think. We will go on, and work A nd come home And amuse ourselves A nd marry And beget children And spend our whole life doing things. When we are old perhaps we will think. But more than likely we will go on. Doing things, Deluding ourselves, Pretending that we are busy. So round and round we go, Make money (We don't know for what). Journey to work A nd back home again. Have our same small unpleasant pleasures Day after day, Unchanging. All the time vaguely longing Wistfully craving, Desiring, Something to make us whole, Something to give us back the warmth of the sun

and the green of the grass A nd the colours and the warmth that we have lost.

— ROSS

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Housing Scheme f o r the Lower Orders

I WAS standing at the bar of the Central Hotel when there came shuffling towards me an old man wearing an alcoholic grin and

carrying shoe-laces. He tried to sell me a pair of laces with the remark that a spare pair always came in handy. I agreed but ex-plained that 1 had been on a jag the previous Wednesday and had awakened on Thursday with a collection of fourteen pairs, a religious >ract, the top half of a lady's bathing costume which I must have won in a raffle, and a recipe for corn whisky, writ ten on a menu card.

The old man sympathized, abandoned his pretence of working for a living and asked if I came f rom Varsity. He had evidently seen a text-book which was under my arm. I admitted it and he went on: "I used to be a cleaner there about fifteen years ago. Yes, it 's easily that time. It was when James Ogue Raydee was a professor there. You've heard of him I suppose?"

At the time I said I knew nothing of him but it has lately occurred to me that the hero of a College song is named J immy O'Grady. Evidently the professor is the original of this character In the course of the years the name has obviously been corrupted until it has assumed quite an Irish aspect. The study of this gradual process would be an interesting and valuable subject for some Eng-lish student or other. But this is digression. If I hadn' t noticed this I might have run on in a discussion on how the student would begin. No doubt he would start with the suggestion that the sound of Ogue Raydee might bring to mind a more familiar name. He might discuss the hypothesis that students would easily give an Irish name to a man who would row round the harbour in all weather rather than sit in a park with a girl. This is digression also.

"What chair did Raydee hold?" I asked. "Ogue Raydee," said the old chap, "was Professor of Ruritanics.

I don't think you have that now." I told him that it had been abolished during the slump when

politicians were trying to save money and votes also. There was besides little demand for Bachelors of Ruritanics and people com-plained that most of them went abroad.

"Too right," sighed the sometime cleaner. "Raydee was wasted here. Didn't you ever hear of his great experiment?"

"What was this?" I asked, as he seemed to expect such a question. "Well, Ruritanics has some biology in it which was always

what Ogue or Jimmy, as we usually called him, took an interest in. 21

He'd got hold of some of these trap-door spiders—you've heard of them, I suppose—and reckoned he could train and breed them to use sliding-doors instead of trap-doors. Efficiency he called it. He was always a great one for efficiency like that . I never saw much in it myself but I suppose tha t ' s what professors are for.

"He had about fifty of these spiders living in a little plot of ground by the science building. Then he got some architects to make holes with sliding-doors near the ordinary ones. Some spiders tried them out and the Professor encouraged them with big flies."

Here I ordered two more drinks and there was a pause. But if did not last long.

"As I was saying," continued Bill, as the barman called him, "the spiders tried out the new holes, but they were used mostly for spooning and I often found skeletons in them on my rounds of a morning. But J immy knew his job. He fed up the likely ones and starved the others till he had a dozen or so living permanently in the new holes and using the sliding-doors like old hands.

"When it was known that he was successful all the papers came out with the story. They all agreed he should have 'Sir' added to his name or get a bigger screw. The Council said it marked the time for a general revision of salaries. Raydee told me himself, 'I, don't care tuppence for decorations, Bill,' but the Government knighted him all the same.

"Everything seemed rosy then. Raydee had to wait for an offer from some fa t American university. He was considering several offers and had already booked his passage when trouble started.

"He had hoped tha t the spiders would breed from a small colony to the point where they could take the place of ordinary trap-door spiders. He used to hang round the spot of ground where the spiders were, with his gown trailing in the dust and his long red nose stuck close to the sliding-doors as if nothing else mattered. About two in the afternoon 1 came along one day and saw him trying to fix a door that had jammed.

" ' T h e y ' v e had too easy a time of it, Bill,' he said; They don't bother to mend their own doors. They won't even catch their own food. The barman up at the Arms wanted to ring the police when he saw me trying to t rap flies in my beer for them the other day.'

" I t may seem funny to you," said Bill, "but he treated those spiders just like human beings. A couple of days later he came to me with tears in his eyes—and tha t ' s the honest t ru th—and told me that the bir th-rate was falling. These were his very words: 'A week ago

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the rate was 200 per cent. Yesterday it was 50 per cent. Think what that means, Bill. It was the one thing to upset my calculations. '

"The news socn got arcund and everyone had a shot at guessing the reason for the fall. The professor himself thought tha t the sudden social rise of the spiders had made them think too little of the main business of life." Bill stopped to look at his glass and I ordered some more.

He continued, "But the bir th-rate still fell. J immy tried starv-ing the bachelors and giving a fly-bonus to the others, but it only-resulted in what he called 'marriages de convenience.'

"In about three months the spider colony was dead and the American universities had withdrawn their offers. The whole thing then gradually blew over. Raydee wrote a book about it, of course, and made enough to retire on. Wha t about buying a couple of pair of laces?"

"You win," I said, without rancour. — K. W. JOHNSON

Kipling the Poet I F L I N G is suffering at present f r cm the fact that we are either too close to him or not close enough. We are too close

to see him in relation to his age and regard with unbiassed mind ihe problems which affect him, and too far away to feel the currents of thought and emotion which influenced him. Almost all writers have suffered a similar eclipse immediately af ter their death. More-over, time has not yet sifted Kipling's verse. His reader must take the bad with the good. No poet, however great, produces work of a uniformly high standard. The reader of Wordsworth might well be discouraged if he had to start with "The Excursion."

The most serious charge brought against Kipling is that of "jingoism." Actually nothing could be more unjust . Kipling has a deep and sincere love for his country, which never degenerates into cant. I Ie has no time fcr hysterical flag-waving. A great deal of so-called "patr iot ic" poetry is, undoubtedly, an appeal to one of the easiest emotions to arouse—our love for our people and country—an appeal made simply because the poet lacks the power to arouse a new emotion and must take a ready made one. It is, however, unfair to condemn all patriotic poetry on these grounds. In actual fact, almost all great poets have been patriotic.

The poem generally quoted to support the charge of jingoism against Kipling is "The Absent Minded Beggar." Eirst it should be remembered that this poem was written for the express purpose of raising money to aid the dependents of men on active service, and in this it ful ly succeeded. In the circumstances it does not really mat ter whether it is poetry or jangle. Wha t was wanted was some-thing which would appeal to the general public—a catch-word if you like—and this Kipling gave. Moreover, in the first two lines Kipling destroys the very charge that the poem is used to support :

"When you've shouted 'Rule Britannia,' when you've sung 'God Save the Queen,'

When you've finished 'killing Kruger with your mouth'."

What is this but a denial of cheap emotion in a national crisis—-of jingoism in fact.

Kipling can and does denounce England bitterly when he be-lieves her in the wrong. Take for example the poem "Ulster," written in 1912, when it seemed that Ulster was going to be forced against her will into union with Southern Ireland by the Home Rule Bill. 1 will quote the first verse:

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" The dark eleventh hour Draws on and sees us sold

To every evil power We fought against of old.

Rebellion, rapine, hate, Oppression, wrong and greed,

Are loosed to rule our fate By England's act and deed."

A Kipling that none of his detractors seem to have discovered is the Kipling that pours fierce scorn on his country's faults, on national complacency and political chicanery.

The charge of jingoism came, I think, in the first place f rom the supporters of internationalism, who saw in Kipling a threat to their splendid but unpractical ideal. It was gradually accepted, mostly without thought, and in many cases without having read more than two or three poems, by a generation which is as a whole lather afraid of being considered jingoistic itself. Kipling's patr iot ic verse is a simple and sincere s tatement of the belief that in our language and history we have a great heritage worthy of any sacri-fice. "The White Man's Burden," whether or not it is poetry, shows clearly that he saw in a colonial empire not a source of profit but a great responsibility, l ie felt tha t its justification lay not in the power to hold it, but in the countless men who work unceasingly and without reward in far corners of the earth to bring peace and some measure of civilization to primitive peoples. Nor is Kipling a militarist. He supports the army not because he believes in war but because he sees that armed strength is at times the only thing that will preserve liberty. He hated the cruelty and fut i l i ty of war, but if it was necessary, he would see it carried out vigorously. This is clearly illustrated in the poem "For All We Have and Are", written in 1914.

After all, even if we do not agree with Kipling's political view this should not influence our judgment of his verse to too great an extent. No one in their sense would demand that an admirer of Shelley should accept his moral and political ideals. It must be remembered that Kipling lived through a time of world unrest and crisis. If his opinions are at times expressed too emphatically for the taste of some readers, this should be taken into account.

Kipling's poetry divides naturally into two classes—light poems, often written in the language of the soldier, and the more serious verse. Perhaps the thing that strikes one first of both classes is the simplicity of language. Kipling uses the language of the people

as Wordsworth preached but did not practise—and uses it success-fully. His imagery is concrete and he draws it f rom the simple things he sees around him as perhaps no other poet, with the exception of Burns, has done since Shakespeare.

The first class of poems contain many that may be enjoyed at two distinct levels. On the surface they are light-hearted and amusing verse tales of life in India. Underneath is a good ideal of wisdom and an insight into human nature, both white and brown. Kipling laughs at the follies of his fellows but it is kindly laughter, for he both understands and loves them.

Take as an example of Kipling's soldier verse, the poem "Bobs" (Lord Roberts) . It is slangy and ungrammatical . Its rhythm is almost a jangle. Judged by an abstract standard, it is simply not poetry. But it is alive and even more to the point, it expresses as more orthodox verse could not, the army's feelings for one of the most beloved of commanders. Also, incidentally, it gives an accurate c.nd realistic picture of the man.

One thing that many critics appear to overlook is the fact that Kipling has a sense of humour. A great many poems were never intended to be taken seriously. They are simply amusing incidents. He had a quiet eye for the humorous, whether in fact, as in "Muni-cipal," or in theorv, as in his account of Darwin in "The Legends of Evil."

Critics must have found Kipling a very unsat isfactory subject. He is so sublimely unperturbed by disapproval. He expresses his opinion of much pseudo-intellectual criticism in "The Commander of the Workshops." I think it is his humour that makes him so impervious to ridicule. At the back of many of his serious poems, even, is a glint of amusement which seems to say "I know some people are going to laugh at this, but I don't mind. The t ruth which lies behind it will outlast their mirth even if my poem doesn't ." Such a man could never become "jingoistic."

I always feel that those who grow most heated in their con-demnation of Kipling have either never read him or are sadly lacking in humour. Warwick Deeping in "No New Uns" gives a splendid example of this false criticism. In at tacking the pet ty official and middle class complacency he refers to such a man as "brought up on Waterloo, Balaclava and Kipling." Had he searched a little fur ther he would have found that Kipling himself ridicules the same type.

The second class of poems—the serious verse—includes poems on widely differing subjects and in many different verse forms. One is struck by his versatility. His rhyme scheme is generally fairly

2(>

simple though it varies considerably in different poems. He uses the long line with the rhythm of speech, he uses various short-lined stanza forms and he uses the ballad. On the whole, I think the short line is his most successful form. The simplicity and directness of his language, give a fresh, clear quality to his verse. It is compact and clear cut. His use of the ballad is part icularly successful as in the "Lament of the Border Cat t le Thie f" or "Ta r r an t Moss." Kipling uses very few adjectives and never unnecessary ones. He has, however, a great gif t for the telling phrase. His use of sound for pictorial effect, too, is skilful as in such a line as this, describing a ship:

"Her sides were clogged with the la?y weed that spawns in the Eastern seas."

in "The Dove of Dacca," which is very different from his usual style, he achieves a haunting melody reminiscent of Swinburne at his best. His descriptive powers are vivid, in a few lines he can achieve the atmosphere he desires. Take the lovely poem on "Chartres Windows":

"Colour fulfills where music has no power. By each man's light the ungrudging glass betrays

All men's surrender, each man's holiest hour And all the lit confusion of our days—

Pur fled with iron, traced in dusk and fire, Challenging ordered time who at the last, Shall bring it, groped and leaded and wedged fast, To the cold stone that curbs or crowns desire.

"Yet on the pavement that all feet have trod— Even as the Spirit, in her deeps and heights,

Turns only, and that voiceless to her God— There falls no tincture from those anguished lights. And Heaven's one light, behind them, striking through

Blazons what each man dreamed no other knew."

Kipling's utter simplicity is seen at its best in his expression of deep emotion. The more poignant the emotion the more crystal clear the verse becomes, as in the following verses f rom "The Light that Failed":

"The lark will make her hymn to God, The partridge call her brood,

While I forget the heath I trod, The fields wherein I stood.

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"lis dule to know not night from morn, But greater dule to know

I can but hear the hunter's horn That once I used to blow."

A good example also occurs in the poem "A Recantation," writ ten in 1917, in which the hint of personal emotion compressed into one line gives meaning and depth to the whole poem. It is writ ten to a music hall singer whom he formerly despised but has now come to admire:

"For I remember how Never more rampant rose the Hall

At thy audacious line Than -when the news came in from Gaul

Thy son had—followed mine."

The effect of these lines is intensified by the lack of tension in the preceding verses. They quicken the whole poem into life and i-ive it meaning.

Kipling possessed to a very marked degree the ability to see both sides of a question—to view other people's beliefs from the inside as it were. The poems written during the Boer War are per-haps the best example of this—such poems as "The Settler," and above all, "General Jouber t ," of whom he says:

"With those that bred, with those that loosed the strife He had no part whose hands were clear of gain,

But subtle, strong and stubborn gave his life To a lost cause, and knew the gift was vain."

Tha t Kipling can write so of an enemy in time of war, is significant. Kipling's religious beliefs as shown in his poems, are worth

study. His is the wide fai th that holds to the central core of thought and disregards the non-essentials that divide sect f rom sect and even religion from religion. It has at times an eastern tinge, for it must be remembered that Kipling was born in India and spent many years of his life there. He understands the Indian point of view as only such a man could. In some poems he speaks in terms of Moham-medanism; in at least one, "The Answer," he speaks of both Allah :ind God and combines the Moslem idea of fa ta l i ty with Christian belief. Nevertheless, in whatever terms he may speak, his basic belief appears to be in a God of infinite mercy, and a world in which somehow, it is ordained that the best shall ultimately tr iumph.

Kipling has, I believe, more in common with modern poets than either his admirers or his detractors will admit. The simplicity of

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expression and clear-cut qual ify of the verse, the freedom from crnate phraseology, the tendency to use speech rhythms rather than purely verse rhythms, the often brutal abruptness of expression, are all to be found in some aspects of the finest modern poetry. The "Epi taphs of the W a r " perhaps offer more example of this modern spirit than any other group of poems, e.g., "A Drif ter off Taren tum," "Unknown Female Corpse," "Salonikan Grave." He lacks the tor-lured intensity of some of the younger post-war poets. His view of life is simpler, perhaps broader.

That Kipling was a man of considerable vision cannot, I think, be disputed. Read the poem "Justice," written October, 1918. It begins:

"Across a world where all men grieve And grieving strive the more,

The great days range like tides and leave Our dead on every shore.

Heavy the load we undergo And our own hands prepare

If we have parley with the foe, The load our sons must bear."

Our statesmen tell us now what a poet told us twenty years ago. But Kipling had vision in a more ideal sense—a vision of a world in which justice and humani ty had free play, and the weak could live without fear. And he believed rightly or wrongly that the only way to achieve this was through an England strong enough to champion the virtues for which she stands.

Personally the more I read, the more I gain the impression of a tolerant, kindly wisdom—a practical wisdom—and of a man pro-foundly sane amid the blatant imperialism and materialism of the end of the 19th century, a man with a unity and breadth of vision that is lacking in manv present-day writers.

— L. WOOD

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Gotterdammerung Finale Drawing by

KEITH WILSON

IN the inspiring concluding scene of the Twilight of the Gods (Gotterdammerung), Brunnhilde has leaped into the funeral pyre

of the slain Siegfried. The castle of Walhalla, paid for with stolen Rhinegold treasure, is burning with its gods and heroes. The Rhine has overflowed its banks and the three Rhine maidens come to reclaim the King of the Nibelungs. The tottering majes ty of the Walhalla motif, the floating song of the maidens, the curse of Alberich, die out beneath the pure and exalted strains of Wagner 's greatest motif, the Redemption of the World by Love. It has been said that there is nothing approaching, in sublime grandeur, the closing scene of Wagner 's tetralogy in the entire range of operatic music.

The Marxist Influence in Modern Literature O R E sharply opposed than the heresies of early Christendom are the "philosophies" that divide the modern w^rld. In a

waste strewn with broken idols, man seeks to-day a fai th which will give integration to society and the individual, a system, which, by synthesizing the whole of life, will provide a sound basis for spiritual action. To many modern thinkers, Christ ianity and Marxism are the only two philosophies which make satisfactory a t tempts to fill this need. Jacques Mari tain in his True Humanism sums up the thought of Christian philosophers when he states that the only alter-native to total i tarianism is a truly Christian society, not a society making a place for Christ ianity, but a society drawing its vitality and its inspiration f rom it. Such, too, is Mr. T. S. Eliot's theme in his recent "Idea of a Christ ian Society."

On the other hand, we have the Marxist solution, which would, by an overthrowing of the existing social and economic system, in-augurate the classless society and thus open up the gates of plenty and content to the distressed millions of the world. Marxism does not, however, stop at economic and historical principles, but offers in dialectical materialism a philosophy which, it adherents claim, will also provide for the integration of the whole man. It is as a result of the comprehensiveness of the Communist conception of life that Marxist influences must be taken into account in any discussion of the arts to-day, especially as Marxists at tach such importance to the place of the arts in their scheme for a new world. In view of the fact, too, that there is a bias in favour of the Communist aesthetic in so many contemporary literary periodicals, and in many popular critical works, even in those which disavow Communist economics, it might not be without profit to examine the effects of Marxism on the criticism and the practice of literature.

Apart f rom illustrating the comprehensive nature of Marxism, the Communist artistic theories show a reaction against the tendency to make poetry a substi tute for religion, as in the works of Dr. I. A. Richards and Middleton Murry. "If we grant that all is myth, poetry, as the myth-making which most brings the whole soul of man into activity, and as working with words 'parts and germinations of the plant, ' and through them in ' the medium.by which spirits communi-cate with each other, ' becomes the necessary channel for the re-constitution of order." Thus Dr. Richards, expanding Coleridge, in Coleridge on the Imagination. As Mr. Rostrevor Hamilton justly remarks in Poetry and Contemplation, "Poet ry must take the

place of religion, supply the spiritual needs of man, and build up the new age! This is a vastly arrogant claim . . . . To assert that science and religion are myths, and nothing else, implies a base-less world about which argument is useless." These pretentious, woolly philosophies constitute a nostalgic a t tempt to find an all-healing nostrum in the absence of a common moral and religious code. Consequently, by its emphasis upon the function of art as an aspect of community life, and not as the basis of community life, Marxism provides an antidote to the sentimentali ty of Richards and M u rrv.

It is not surprising that several of the younger English writers should have a leaning towards Marxism, even if, like Stephen Spender, they suffer torments of conscience for it, or if, as in the case of W. H. Auden, it is little more than a thumbing of the nose at the bourgeoisie of which they remain spiritually members. As artists, they are perhaps more consciously in need of integration than the average man, and are aware also of the historical fact that ages dominated by a common outlook are more conducive to good writing than ages of conflicting philosophies. As Mar t in Turnell puts it, "Writers turn to Marxism in the hope that the initial act of fai th in its tenets will provide a solution to their aesthetic problems and a framework in which they can express their personal vision instead of being compelled to waste their talents working out a fresh philosophy" (Poetry and Crisis).

It cannot be denied that , despite extravagances, wishful think-ing and prejudices, Marxist critics have thrown new light on im-portant pr blems and restored emphasis to aspects of l i terature which have been ignored for some time past. One may overlook the naive assessments of Ralph Fox, the fulsome adulation of insignificant Russian versifiers of Bukharin, and the tangled tipsy aesthetics of Christopher Caudwell for the sake of the chief factor of value in the Communist v iewpoint—the insistepce upon the social aspect of art.

In practice, this emphasis is carried to absurd lengths as when, in Russia, poetry is made the slave of the State, and poets are reduced to the status of "nodders," yes-men and unpaid repetitive laureates, when Gorki exhorts the Soviet Writers ' Congress in 1934 to choose Labour as the principal hero of their books, when W. H. Auden forces himself to write his inept Spain because the Com-munists were actively concerned with the Civil War. These things are, however, a pugnacious assertion of the emphasis which lies at ihe bottom of Marxist l i terary theory, the emphasis on the fact that

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the only healthy li terature is that which expresses the life and spirit of the community as a corporate whole. It is this health that we have in Chaucer with his spontaneous joy in "the visible, sweating universe," his harmony and his stability, his rejoicing in something possessed; in Dante, with his wholeness, his confidence; and even in Villon.

Before the Renaissance, the power behind culture was religion and it was the cultural factor of Christ iani ty which had assimilated and welded the diverse elements in the surrounding world. The medieval man lived in a stable, clearly-defined universe. The poet was a member of a community united by fai th and he had a fund of subject-matter in common with his fellows—the visible world of sense-experience and the invisible world of fai th. The poet was bound to society by common beliefs, a common cosmology and a common experience, and thus li terature was an expression of the community as a unit. It was the period of doubt inaugurated by the Renaissance which destroyed this stable att i tude, at least for a large par t of Europe. Yet contact between the artist and the people did not die with the Renaissance; l i terature became narrower, less com-prehensive, but until the last 200 years it did not reflect the breaking-up of the social organism. In Pope, and in Fielding, fcr example, we find an outlook based upon a close connection with society, an out-look, which was, in Mart in TurnelFs words, "common to all classes ; nd which indeed, transcended class distinctions."

But as disintegration spread throughout society, the gap between the artist and the community grew wider and wider. Modern litera-ure has become intensely subjective, reflecting both the Renaissance retreat inwards, and the Romantic urge to be a legislator of the world. The individualist tendency, with its detailed analysis, its egocentric a t t i tude towards society, has driven something fundamen-tal out of literature. Many modern writers are like surgeons carefully dissecting the body in an endeavour to locate the soul. A comparison of Proust with Fielding, of Eliot with Dante, of James Joyce with Chaucer shows how human nature is stunted and distorted in the moderns.

"The whole structure of social organism enforced the solidarity behind Chaucer and Fielding, and once this solidarity was lost, it was impossible to recover it by the methods they employed."—D. A. Traversi in The Marxist Critic.

Modern art is the art of disillusion, and reflects the crisis through which its principal practitioners, the bourgeoisie, are passing. It has

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all the signs of senility, and of living on a spiritual overdraf t . On the other hand, "proletarian a r t " seems to exist chiefly in the imagina-tions of Left ist critics. The Marxist 's approach to this problem of disintegration and division is expressed in terms of the class-war and revolution:

"Literature is concerned with change, and the chang-ing world is concerned with revolution, and with all the stages of revolutionary action." — Storm jameson in Fact," July, 1937.

"Poetic creation and its product, poetry, is a definite type of social activity and . . . the objective and active significance of poetry is to master and transmit experi-ence and to trail? character. Comrades, you must dare."— Bukharin to the Soviet Writers, 1934.

"Art is more than a reflection of the social reality. It is at the same time, and even primarily, a revolutionary agent for the t ransformat ion of that reality." — F. D. Klingender in Revolutionary Art.

The emphasis upon the cardinal Marxist realities of the class-war and the "Conflict" seen here and in Alick West, Egdell Rickword and others shows that the Communist would offer as a solution to the literary crisis, the blending of bourgeoisie and proletariat by revo-lution and the creation of the classless society. Thus civilization will be remade, and in the new unity of humani ty a basis for a stable art will be found. In the meantime, until the Great Rosy Dawn breaks, the true artist is he who places his services completely at the service of the Revolution. Thus, whatever Marxism may-claim about its restoration of the dignity of art and literature, in reality it debases artistic expression by put t ing it at the service of the "Struggle." In depriving art of that freedom which is essential to all artistic production, and in making art the slave of a narrow ideology, Marxism is at tacking the foundations of art.

In, and for, itself, art is not important to the Marxist . The cult of "ar t for art 's sake" is anathema to him, and the spiritual experience which all great art affords is irrelevant. Flis criterion is to what degree a specific work assists the coming of the classless society. What helps it is good art, what hampers it is bad.

Stephen Spender, more sensitive to the stifling atmosphere of dialectical materialism than his fellows, is at pains to apologize (Fact, 1937) for those Communist poets who assume that poetry is simply a branch of propaganda. "We get notorious examples of it (poetry) being put to this use, such as the poem by the Soviet

poet laureate, denouncing as sons of bitches the generals sentenced to death in a famous t r ia l !" Yet it is difficult to see what else could be the result, if the "politicization of poetry" is carried to its logical extreme. Although Spender deplores the ty ranny of Marxism in the arts, yet he regards it as a new source of life in poetry. Thus his :-oul yearns for the impossible—a Marxist mystic! " I t is possible ;ha t Communism will produce a St. John of the Cross. His task will be to experience imaginatively and to re-create the vast t racts of life documented with great genius and patient research by Marx in Das Kapital." There is a deep significance in the use of the phrase "his task." To the Marxist , even the soul of the mystic belongs to the state, and will be given its special job by the Literary Commissar!

It is not surprising, then, to find how little of value Marxism has produced in literature. Those works of Auden, Day-Lewis and others which succeed, do so in spite of their superficial Communism, not because of it. It is indeed possible to demonstrate, as D. A. Traversi has done in Arena, July, 1937, that as the acceptance of Marxism becomes more complete, the poetry degenerates. The ortho-dox Communists blame the flabbiness of Auden's Marxist work on to his incomplete surrender to Marx, as when John Allen says, "He is the author of the dissatisfied bourgeosie"; but in reality what-ever of poetry remains comes from the very fact that Auden cannot fling himself completely in the Marxist current.

Side by side with the decline of art in Russia, now that the revolutionary ardour has spent itself, there is a significant tightening up of the "l i terary line," an a t tempt to squeeze native inspiration into ideological coffins. The Marxists seem oblivious to the fact that art depends for its vitali ty on having freedom to express itself through existing society, and that art is stifled when the artist is forced to por t ray a society which has proved to be still-born.

The official Marxist aesthetic is Socialist Realism, a materialist philosophy, comprising an a t tempt to find a common basis for art in the reality of the visible world alone. It scorns introspection, and thus would reject most modern subjective works, and the "litera-ture of the soul" including the religious poetry of Donne, Crashaw, Hopkins and Eliot. As a philosophy of literature, Socialist Realism is lamentably inadequate. While it has perhaps served a valuable historical function as an antidote to excessive subjectivism, its in-sistence that there is no reality other than the thing materially perceived means the impoverishment of all art. In the ult imate analysis, Social ist Realism is little more than the old Natural ism

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gingered up with a drop of revolutionary spirit. It is difficult to see how poetic experience, the idea of beauty as "what 'he ^maginatu n seizes as t ru th ," the spiritual factors in p ,e:ry, and the spontaneity of creative art, can be squared with Socialist Realism. The Marxist literary philosophy denies the unforeseeable nature of creative activity of which Francis Thompson sings in Sister Songs.

The poet is not lord Of the next syllable may come With the returning pendulum; And what he plans to-day in song, To-morrow sings it in another tongue.

There are many who would agree with Mr. Rostrevcr Hamilton when he says "The contemplative experience of poetry . . . has a special stability, unity and clarity. It is a world apart , in which we may rest. It is complete in itself, and is unlike religious con-templation, which creates the need for action. If only for that reason, it can never satisfy all our spiritual needs. Its rank, without any such claim, is sufficiently exalted" (Poetry and Contemplation). But orthodox Marxist art must, despite Spender's disclaimers, be propaganda, for a poet who believes that the only reality is material reality, and that the class-war is the chief social reality, must direct his poetic energies towards fur ther ing the claims of the supposedly emergent classless society. Since society must be "changed" in Marx's way, all art which is in the spirit cf existing society, or expresses an ethos contrary to the Marxist one, must be suppressed. Thus, although the Marxist has re-affirmed (like St. Thomas Aquinas centuries before) the importance of the reality of the external world, he refuses to recognize any other reality, and gives to externality a narrow ideological interpretation which, in action, must lead to the "withering away" of all art.

The Marxist approach to art is really an at tack on true art. As in Plato's ideal republic, there is no place for poets in the Marxist Paradise.

Many Leftist critics, sincere in their emphasis on the value of poetry, seem unable to see that the logical application of Marxism to literature would kill all artistic enterprise. It neglects so much, it fails to see that social and economic changes are conditioned by something outside them, and that the problems of man and society cannot be solved by a simple economic readjustment . Socialist Realism is not a development which will solve modern literary prob-lems. What we need to-day is a spiritual revolution which will produce the social revolution, and which will therebv provide the

37

necessary integration for literature, - society and .the individual. The new order must begin, and not end, with a change in man. The modern compromise, as Father D'Arcy says, is "the choice of moon-shine for sunlight."

The crisis through which literature, in common with the rest of life, is passing, will not be resolved by Marxism. T. S. Eliot puts his finger on the root cause of the inadequacy of Marxism in his essay, Literature and Religion. "The whole of modern litera-ture is simply unaware of, simply cannot understand, the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life, of something which I assume to be our pr imary concern." Marxism, while on the surface some-thing apart f rom the modern mind, is really a facet of it. It seems that only in an acknowledgment of the primacy of the spiritual and the acceptanceof a belief which gives place to the materialand the spiritual, the reality of the natural world, and the reality of the supernatural world, that literature, as well as life, will find a solid basis and a perspective.

— J. C. RE ID

And what of it ?

A MAD storm buffets the world: it whips And lashes the drawn bloodless faces of men:

in fury it tears at their panting hearts: It calls the mantling blood to flushing cheeks: Coasts death and destruction before our eyes. Defies us to hurl it defiance again, Shrieks at you, and at me, at the men of the world. Young blood racing calls its reply,

"We'll farP it, and the spirit of youth zs" strong. Who dares cow us and bludgeon us now?"

The columns of tired grey ghosts look sadly down, And watch the blading storms of war sweep past. "'They fight the self-same fight we fought. They tread The soil we trod: like us they give their lives."

Then again the shadowy bugle sounds: A nd over the sodden battlefields And fighting their battles again, march The shadowy forms of twenty rears ago.

3$

"Back to back, my sons." Each shot Of a heated rifle finds a mark. Over the coughing bark of tanks, And over the dull mutter of marching men, The chattering Bren and the bombers howl, "Steady, my sons, now we're with you. The grey ghosts of the past fight side by side With you. In the frozen dawn we march To the echo, your stamping feet beat out." Down sunken lanes in churned-up mud The shadowy guns roll past and forms That, swearing, strain at the ropes, yet shout, "Stand fast, my sons, you've more Than your planes and guns and glittering bayonet steel: Here are we to bring to the cause of the past The vigour of ages past and the life of the dead: There's a world that wants us all to-day. With the khaki columns of flesh and blood Echoes the resolute march of of the shades Of Mons and Ypres, of the Somme and the Marne. So, steady, my sons, at your shoulder with you Are the dreams, the visions, and hopes that were ours, Which are yours now, to wed with the life of this world.

— I. CORNWALL

To O. E. B. — A Tribute

E) EA RING aloft the brightly burning flame I) Of truth, amid the glocm of war and strife,

Fearlessly, pressing onward in His name, Who hath the words of everlasting life. Thankful that he has been his Master's choice To face this present age, and that he can Proclaim in market-place with ringing voice The truth of God, the sacred right of man. Travelling a1 cue when fellow pilgrims fail Daunted, and turning seek a smoother track, Bearing the burdens of the weak and frail, Held by the conquering faith that turns not back, Treading the path the saints and martyrs trod, A suffering servant of a suffering God.

— G. R. ENTING 30

b o o k p l a i t s m i t h

4(!

Letters and the Spirit

IN the heyday of romantic historians when Prescott was describing the Spanish conquests with imaginative brilliance and Motley was

stirring the heart with sympathy for the Dutch, J. R. Green wrote "A Short History of the English People." As li terature it was a nice piece of work and as history very good fiction. But it had one singular defect—it did not mention the people. It may be, of course, that he thought the people unmentionable, as some of his contemporaries certainly did. In any event he did not mention them. And the fact remains that he professed to be writing about them when in fact he was writing about anything and everything else. Like the modern politician he makes his bow to democratic senti-ment—and then proceeds to discuss more important things.

The same might be said of the series of essays issued by Auck-land Univerity College on the occasion of the New Zealand Cen-tenary. "1840 and Af te r" purports to be a survey of the century f i cm which this country received its social impress. But though the survey is admirable enough, there is very little which links it to New Zealand. The link, like Victorian sex appeal, is left to the imagination. It might with benefit have been more clearly estab-lished. A more definite connection, a more explicit s tatement of the effect of social forces on New Zealand might have been of great value. The statement of the influences current at the foundat ion of New Zealand might have been coupled with various aspects of its social development so that we might make an evaluation of the progress, if any, so far achieved.

In some essays, of course, this was not possible. It is difficult, for example, to relate Science and Philosophy to a country which exports scientists and gets its philosophy from the Rationalist Asso-ciation. Nor is it easy to discuss art in a community whose sense of form is mainly a tipster 's guide. There are, however, aspects of New Zealand life which are worthy of consideration. It would have been interesting, for example, to relate the study of English litera-ture to New Zealand writers, to determine the influences at work and the prospects of development. By classical s tandards we have pro-duced no giants, but neither, perhaps, has England, unless obscurity is the pinnacle of art. But we have produced one or two whose works are worthy of note and they might, perhaps, be given their meed of praise. Katherine Mansfield is a name which springs easily to mind since she has already been canonised by the critics. And in an age which accepts authori ty in every sphere except the moral we must assume the literary critics are always right. The public

41

do so in any event as the critics know full well, which explains why book-reviewing is now a racket. Be that as it may, Katherine Mans-field is a figure of some repute and at present we have others whose work is not to be despised. Among these are A. R. D. Fairburn and Eileen Duggan.

Eileen Duggan is a stranger to most New Zealanders, her work having been published mainly in Australia and America. Her output is not great, her poems filling two small volumes, but, few though they are, they are excellent of their kind. It is true that Miss Duggan has not yet achieved that degree of unintelligibility which constitutes genius. But she has that rare sense of words in expressing profound fai th and feeling which, fused with thought, makes really great poetry. There is no flood of energy in her work, no bursts of creative power. But there is a sure sense of beauty and a sustained strength of feeling and firmness of fai th which imparts unusual power to her verse. It has, indeed, the delicate strength of a cobweb, finely spun and adapted to its need. Walter de la Mare has said that reading her verse "we are in the presence of a positive little universe." The judgment is true. Miss Duggan has Blake's facul ty of seeing "a world in a grain of sand and Heaven In a wild flower." She has an extraordinary sense of beauty in common things, an insight into the eternal fused with time. It may be said of her that she is a trifle remote from life and that experience defers to imaginative power. It may be so. But at the same time she has a really sound sense of social values. "Peasantry ," for example, shows a sense of the timeless things in life, of the primal powers which Campbell describes in "The Serf," and which Fairburn bespeaks in his poem "Dominion" : a sense of the enduring good of natural things and the ways of life which remain from the beginning of time.

A. R. D. Fairburn is an interesting contrast with Eileen Duggan. 1 le has a rich mind, great powers of expression, wit, a sense of beauty and a passion for t ruth. But like many another hangover f rom the Liberal tradit ion he holds moral principles divorced from a religious fa i th and a sense of values rooted in a void. Hence he tends to give a religious significance to art and uses poetry to affirm his spiritual need. Strangely enough, he seems to seek in the world what he knows the world cannot give and scourges man for fail ing to achieve. "Dominion," for example, shows a fr ightful awareness of social decay, of the shoddy and tawdry parading as the social good. But the sense of the artificial in life robs existence even of tragedy, and men are no longer great but pe t ty and mean. Even their lusts are perverted. Man is no longer a fallen

42

angel but a denatured beast. 1 his pre-occupation with the corrupt in society tends to destroy his sense of beauty and leaves a desola-tion of the soul. Like Dostoievsky, Fairburn has an extraordinary sense of sin and loathes the world for its corruption. He is not the first to have felt that strong emotion. It is the experience not only of sinners but of saints. But where the saint despises mankind 's corruption, Fairburn seems to detest corrupt mankind And that comes near despising the human race. There is a supreme irony in this for Fairburn upholds the Humanist tradition. Humani ty has proved an idol with body of clay.

The point which might have been developed in the essay on Literature and Society lies in the source f rom which these writers drew their strength. Both have drawn much f rom the well of English in general, but each owes something in part icular to certain poets. Miss Duggan is in the line of succession f rom Hopkins and Francis Thompson. Fairburn has more in common with Eliot and Joyce. Both, however, have that element of universality which is the essential of great art. But where Miss Duggan draws from a well of fai th which has never ceased to inspire, Fairburn tends, in his own phrase, to "feed on corruption, drawing vigour f rom death." The latter may be much the greater thinker. It can hardly be doubted who has the healthier mind.

It is frequently said that the poet should reflect his age, and that he is great in the degree in which he reveals its essential spirit. The question turns on the nature of the essential spirit. If some of our poets are to be believed it is nothing but the stench of cor-ruption, the reek of cancerous wounds which cannot be healed. Realism has come to mean absorption in the obscene, and Blooms-bury produces much which is nothing but analysis of muck. The intellectual emasculates who produce this poetic slime are strongly opposed by more virile and healthy minds. Roy Campbell satirises them with delightful vigour in The Georgiad and Flowering Rifle.

Campbell, incidentally, is a living denial of the assumption that pessimism is the essential poetic mood of our time. He is as fully aware of social corruption as any Marxian Mahatma, and equally detests the decadence which exists. But while assailing this with tremendous vigour, he still sees the beauty in life. His social criticism is scathing in the extreme and he slashes mercilessly with a Drydenesque pen. But even when engaged in savage satire he cannot escape the beautiful . Fierce denunciation breaks suddenly into spiritual exaltation which flows in a delightful lyrical strain.

Campbell has nothing in common with the modern poetic mood. In fact he regards it with profound contempt. In the "Broken

41

Record" he writes: "I am often taken to task for ' seeming to be unaware of a contemporary mood, and for not expressing the 'doubts ' and 'hesitations' of our time. But I do not share this contemporary mood though I understand it, and I have treated it objectively in The Georgiad. I was not brought up to believe that the world was under some obligation to treat me well, so I have not been let down or disillusioned. I have few 'doubts ' or 'hesitations' because I am religious. Like other poets of the past, 1 am more interested in my friends, neighbours and enemies than in newspapers and vast distant groups. My reactions come from personal contacts and not group urges . . . . 1 believe that the artist, concerned as he is with spiritual values, is not subservient to his period, but on the contrary very independent of it. In the past there has never been a great innovator who had not thrust his roots deep into the past as he ihrust his branches into the fu ture ."

It is this consciousness of the past, reinforced by fai th and experience which gives the poet intellectual power. Unless a man has a sense of continuity of life, a sense of being at one with time and creation his artistic power is weakened at its source. No clumsy dialectic, no worship of social abstractions can ever fulfil man's in-most, vital need. Great art is always the product of religious men.

Tradi t ion is an excellent thing if we can only see the spirit which informs it and not merely copy its manifestat ions in time. History is not merely a succession of wars but a drama of the human spirit, in t r iumphs and failures, in greatness and decay. It is the story of humani ty in all its vast and varied aspects, in which the spirit of man alternates between the mean and the great. As such it is a never-ending source of strength to those who can sense life's splendour as the human caravan moves on its way.

This lack of a strong tradit ion greatly handicaps New Zealand. Our roots are not deep enough in the land we call our own. Hence our appeal is to a past which for us is insufficiently living, to a phoney tradition associated with "Home." This is not to say that England has nothing to give in the world of the spirit, but that expression of that spirit is something which we make our own. Tru th to art is t ru th to nature, and t ruth to nature is t ruth to the living. Truth to nature, then, is t ruth to our living home. The difficulty is, of course, tha t we decline both art and nature, and at the rate we are going we will soon be declining home. One mortgage, one radio, one car, one child is the beau ideal of the major i ty—the ethic of comfort in a suburbia of the mind. We are prolific in butter and cheese and wool and cures for body odour—and barren in human

44

life and human thought. Spiritual seM-abortionism is the trade of our intellectuals and physical self-abortionism that of our mothers. Even romance has the reek of the chemist's shop.

The early pioneers had their faul ts but they also had their virtues and they certainly had no craven fear of life. The will to do was there, and the hope of high achievement in a land of beauty. If we have belied that promise, then the faul t is ours. Where they approached life with vigour and zest, we approach it with calcula-tion. We drink it like vinegar, they tasted its savour like wine. The spiritual content, as always, determines the nature of human endeavour'—in art, in life, in letters, in all products of the mind.

E . J . K .

Reverie

T HI: glaring sun has faded, darkness falls, The grey of evening deepens into night.

The pleasures of to-day that once seemed bright, Thought, soothed by drowsy silence now recalls. The remembered sense of strenuous effort mars The tranquil hour. Slowly, soul alight The fancy wonders at the depth of night. What mystery moves along those winking starsf Beyond the universe, past all men's ken? Does life like ours move past eternity? Humility o'erwhelms me—fear—but then A flower blooms in cosmic harmony— The beauty of my purpose now is plain— I form a part of all eternity.

- m o n i c a c o a t e s

45

Engine Dream

W E are butting our headlong way through darkness complete, Lighted carriages strung like swift flying sparks;

Great locomotive shoves thundering pistons along And we sit, and are borne.

The black locomotive of life is bearing us on, Hurling its shining bulk through the sounding night: Outside the windows is darkness, with jagged steep rocks.

All we can do is be borne. On and on: though we wish to be still, to be safe in a haven, The heavy black engine is driving relentlessly on. What can we do? Can we pull the communication cord? Step the whole journey with sickening shuddering stop?

No: better be borne. Better be borne, and sit in our little bright carriage, Luxurious pullman or bare third class with hard seats. Watch the still watching night, and hear the unfaltering pattern Of the bogies that straddle the track and are bearing us on. On till, tempo relaxing, and engine beat finally slowing, We glide in a smooth bright dream with white steam hissing, Into the shining width of the glittering station— In to the shining width of the glittering station—

Our destination.

— r o s s

Song of the Worn Out Men E see These cabbage trees

Who stand so starkly calm Reminding us of patient old Black men.

We hear, As we go past The gnarled bent negro men At night, the hidden cricket's botes In tune.

Unseen Among dark blades Of grass, musicians make, Worn out men with earth bound feet lift, lift And dance.

O hark! The music swells From negroes singing low, A rustling silver harmony Of tongues

The stars. The moon, the earth All rush . . . . all sway and swing With violins and husky chants Light blend.

This house Which swallows men Its bright hypnotic eyes lilectric lights which wink and leer. Attracts . . . .

A lid we Must enter in To reconstruct our dreams Or taste good food and peer blear-eyed At books . . . .

Pass by The negroes, poor White trash! Stamp up the street! Shut out the rhythm! Bang the door! Clump! Clump!

— D. MINOGUE

47

I:. A. HORSMAN

f* 8

E. A. HORSMAN

49

t ransmigration oh many times my weary mind does splendid consolation find in musing how the cosmos rolls through transmigration of our souls to all whose hearts in sorrow bend this tonic i can recommend the soothing balm of thinking thus that in the hippotamus caged in the {oo we surely trace the placid soul of auntie grace that in the neighbours scraggy goat we glimpse with catches in our throat the limpid eyes of uncle bill who didnt put us in his will oh think what vistas open when by keeping caged a cranky hen we can converse with grandpas ghost and have our uncles on our toast need i describe the wondrous thrill to think that every time i kill a flea i slay perhaps the shell ivhere nero rests en route to hell the fly that in my coffee croaks king charlies merry spirit cloaks and when my garden spade upturns a slug there platos ego bums twould turn me from a life of crime to think that bugs with balls of slime that through the mud forever roll each hides a politicians soul and that a vulture screens the id of lenin very thinly hid how smoothly fate has worked its plan there is a nest for every man within some lower creatures frame and each must end

the very same clown poet peasant shepherd king will learn that death retains its sting when as they pass their spirits glide into some pig or panther hide but gloom my satisfaction kills to other fates my spirit thrills but when im gone must i alas assume the raiment of an ass.

— caliban

Rain T MADE it rain: X From the anger in my heart I stripped protective veils from off the sky, I wrenched the violent rain And made it pour in heavy rhythm.

I cannot separate My anger from the rain, Outside my window they together fall, Form and substance Of a part of me.

— R.S.

51

Sight-seeing Bus MT. VICTORIA, WELLINGTON.

GORSE gold Spattered Lulls

Curving breasts Round Wellington Drenched with sun while chants From men and women Sing your death Song to the sea . . . Strong and sloze Patient hills Men's bold arms hold Dream of wind-rippled bays And the green Loam below , . . Lone hills long hills Lovely hills Round Wellington Men are scarring Your sun-bron{ed breasts Bruising Carving you with knives . . . But no twisting tattoo kills Your strength, 0 beautiful hills.

— D. MINOGUE

Roundel

Y OUR glistening hair is black, and speckled with light; It curls over ears and lies in a thick warm snare

Where I poor victim am caught, and tamed at the sight Of your glistening hair.

Like a warm sweet midnight wave, it falls, and is fair; Like a deep quiet woodland pool, it shines, and is bright;

In it blue and gold shimmer and glitter and quickly flare. I am filled with the wonder of wondrous luminous night,

As I crouch, my face in hiding away in a lair Of liquid jet, of quiet darkness and light,

Your glistening hair.

The Crest of the Wave

BURN white, 0 creaming perfect breasts Of mid-night! 0 glad bright waves ripped

From black depths! White waves, golden-tipped, Star-painted, foaming, flaming crests.

Our passion is the burning sea . . . Like wings of brave storm-tossed sea birds Your thoughts, your love, your lips, your words Beat, beat, and brush the heart of me.

Though dawn brings bitter, ageless cold Scorn not our sharp, salt ecstacy— 'Though traitor sun betrays the sea And cracks and peels the painted gold.

0 dearest heart, day's high sun wrests 'The splendour from our glad love ripped From black depths . . . white waves, golden tipped, Have drenched our souls in joyous crests.

- D. MINOGUE

A. U. C. Students' Executive 1939-1940

I R O N T l< O W

A. D. GIF KINS, B.Sc. M. W. SPEIGHT, M.A. (S*c.) ANNETTE EVERY, B.A. (Vke-Pres.) D. T. CLOUSTON, B.A. (Pres.) P. W. DAY, M.A. (Vice-Pres .) LOIS STANTON, B.A,

A. P. POSTLEWAITE, A.P.A.N.Z, (Business Mgr.)

b a c k d o \ v

R. P. NEWBOLD, B.Sc. G. G. TURBOTT DOROTHY FOWLER, B.A.

F. J. NEWHOOK, B.Sc. FAITH JOHNSON H. T. PRENDERGAST, M.Sc. G, B. RE ID

54

Graduates of the Year

Ailsa Margaret- Blakey She knew the precise mo me tit when

MASTERS OF ARTS

Ah illicit CITWIIS the classic bent and what the cultured word?

—Rudyard Kipling.

psychological to say nothing.

—Oscar IVilde

Heather June Dunning Riches I hold in light esteem And Love I laugh to scorn

—Emilie Bronte

Paul Woodford Day but toujours gai is my motto kid.

—Don Marquis

Beatrix Ellen Annie Robertson History is bunk.

—Henry Ford

Richard Rex Clark How charming is divine philosophy, Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools sup-

pose, Hut musical as is . I polio's hit:.

—Milton

John Hammond Donaldson It's zciser being good than bad. It's safer being nurek than fierce.

—Robert Rrozvuing

Stanley Mercer Nelson No solemn sanctimonious face I pull Nor think I'm pious when I'm only

bilious. —Hood

John Cowie Reid Look! HOZL' he laughs and stretch s out

his arms .-Mid opens wide his blue eyes upon thine. To hail his father . . .

—Byron

Murray Wi l l iam Speight Obz'ioiisly an Englishman, but a chap rather out of the common.

—J. B. Priestley

John Walter Murray A little philosophy inclineth men's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bring-etli men's minds about to religion.

—Bacon

Margaret Alexandra Roberts Oh do not read history, for that I knozi' must be false.

—Robert Walpole

Alexander Gordon Davidson ' In a certain sense all men are historians.

—Carlyle

Vaarie Stewart McBride MY triu• lore hath my heart, ami I haz'E his.

•—Sidney

BACHELORS OF ARTS

Isk of the learn d the zeay.' The I earn'd arc blind. A'ope.

Gwendolyn Florence Elspeth Amess My education was so sound that I know hardly anything.

—Anon.

Elizabeth Jean Anderson A cast of thought upon her face.

-Scott

Winifred June Barter Her glossy hair zeas cluster d o'er a broz Bright with intelligence.

—Byron

Anna May Dulce Bauman llcaz'. n is in thy soul!

-.Iddisou

Jean Maud Bullen Thou living ray of intellectual fire.

—Falconer

Dorothy Gertrude Fowler . I perfect zvoman nobly planned To warn, to comfort, and command.

—Wordsworth 56

June Mary Grevatt The damsel deftly shod lias dutifully trod i'ntil now.

—Locker-Lavipson

Nina Hannah Hogan Ireland never was contented.

—W. S. Landor

Sylvia Bramston Hooper So far no modern has inzvntcd an in-telligence test to equal matrimony.

—Alton.

Florence Olga Hunter Home is the sailor, home from sea 'And the hunter home from the hill.

- R. I.. Stevenson

Margaret Joan Maclaur in 71.ou large brained zeomau!

—/:. B. Brazening

Olive Mattie Mays Hozv near to f/ood is what is fair!

—Jonson

Catherine Dunn White White is black, and black is white.

—Popular Song

Dorothea Jean Morrell There was a dark lady of Rye Whose motto was "never say dye," Put thanks to the parrots. She taught to say "Carrots!" Her tresses turned red in reply.

—Punch

Natalie McLeod Her stature tall—I hate a dumpy zvoman.

—Byron

Margaret Amelia McMurray I love z-ast libraries: yet there is a doubt If one be better zvith them or without.

•—Saxe

Lois Helen Purnell Oh Helen fair, beyond compare.

Phyllis Effie Short Phyllis is my only joy.

—Scott

-Scdlev

Mollis Alison Smith —at sermons I Forget the text when Molly's by.

—Anon.

Lois Rhoda Stanton 'There is a garden in her face Where roses and zvhite lilies blow.

—Campion

Christine Sheila Stewart Why that neck of marble zvhiteness. Why that hair of sunny brightness.

Form of perfect mould. —Hehcr

Grace Muriel Thornton Delightful task! To rear the tender

Thought To teach the young Idea hozv to shoot.

—'Thomson

Winifred Maud Tombs All that fairc is, is by nature good.

—Spenser

Beverley Mary Williamson A szveet attractive kind of grace.

—Roydon

Barbara Linley Wood With the smile that zvas child like and bland.

—Bret IIarte

Valerie Corliss Wyatt The maid who modestly conceals Her beauties, while she hides, reveals.

—Moore

David Thomas Clouston I'm a z'lilture for culture.

—illaxie Rosenbloom

Lindsay Stewart Dixon It requires a surgical operation to get a joke zvcll into a Scotch understanding.

•—Sydney Smith

Denis Gully Denis the menace of Venice.

—Popular Song

Bernard Wil l iam Hare

The zvictim o' connubiality.

On the ball! —Dickens

Ross Orton Harold Kind reader! Take your choice to cry

or laugh; Henc Harold lies — but zvherc's his

epitaph? —Byron

Eric David Hill . . . a word here of the Hills.

-Mase field

Maurice Victor Hutchison My mind to me a kingdom is.

—Dyer

Will iam Robert Laws What narrow innocence it is for one to be good only according to the Laws!

—Seneca 57

Murray Alfred Marbeck He is gentil that doth gen til dedis.

—Chancer Herbert Vaughan Mountfort

The luxury of learning is not to he compared with the luxury of teaching.

—Hitchcock Alexander George McRae

Give vie a man zvith a good allowance of nose—when I zvant any head work done I choose a man—provided his •edu-cation has been suitable—with a long nose.

—Napoleon

Milan Roy Scansie Full of zvise saws and modern instances.

—Shakespeare

Colston Robert Sprackett No coward soul is mine No trembler in the world's storm troubled

sphere / sec Heavens glories shine.

•—Emilie Bronte

John Allison Whefan Szvect are the slumbers of the virtuous man!

—Addison

MASTERS OF SCIENCE Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.

Kenneth Dudley George A hero is George.

—Traditional Song Robert Harold Stokes

Much learning doth make thee mad. —Acts XXVI, 24

Jan Willem de Stigter Tell ivhat hour o' the day The clock dofli strike by Algebra.

—Butler Neville George Stephenson

He had a face like a benediction. —Cervantes

Edwin Richard Collins What is the end of study? Let me know.

—Shakespeare

—I'namuno

James Evans Brundell He's tough, ma'm—tough is J.B.; tough, and de-vilish sly.

—Dickens Harry Lewis Clarke

Ah, pensive scholar, zvliat is fame? —Holmes

Laurie Henry Millener Strange to the zvorld. he zvore a bashful

look 'The Fields his study, nature zvas his

book. —Bloomfield

Charles Holmes Vincent A great and glorious thing it is To learn . . . .

—find yard Kipling

BACHELORS OF SCIENCE Science is the topography of ignorance.

Margaret Alison Chambers Charlie is my darling.

—Popular Song Joan Marjorie Dingley

If to her share some female errors fall. Look on her face, and you'll forqet 'em

all. —Pope

Elizabeth Loveday Donald The glass of fashion and the mould of

form The obserz'cd of all observers.

•—Shakespeare 58

-Holmes

June St. Hilaire Hillary Words sweet as honey from her lips distill'd.

—II omer

Vivienne Joan Howie For she is such a smart little craft, Such a neat little, szvect little craft, Such a bright little 'Fight little Slight little Light little Trim little, slim little craft.

—Gilbert

Jean Mary Wilson Her taste exact For faultless fact Amounts to a disease. —Gilbert

James Boyer Brown Such a blush In the midst of Brown zvas bom Like red poppies grown zvith corn

—Hood John Joseph Carroll

I am not an early riser. The self respect which other men enjoy in rising early, I feel due to me for waking up at all.

—William Gcrhardi Charles Alexander Fleming

My new strazv hat that's trimly lined zvith green

Let Peggy zvcar. —Gay

Bi'ly Noel Harden He had kept The zvhitcncss of his soul.

—Byron Cedrfc Herbert Harsall

Knozv then, unnumber'd spirits round thee fly,

The light militia of the lower sky. —Pope

John Wesicote Lyttleton Whose little body housed a mighty mind.

—Homer

Ronald Wil l iam Moir The sports of children satisfy the child.

—Goldsmith

Robert Pickering Newbofd Well, I have no philosophy of life beyond "Follow your nose." That is a pretty

sage maxim. —Lord Rid dell

Francis John Newhook A man of hope and forzvard looking mind.

—Wordsworth

Hector Douglas Orchiston The conformation of his mind zvas such that zvhatever zvas little seemed to him great, zvhatever zvas great seemed to him little.

—Macaulcy

Maurice Davis Sutherland My heart's in the highlands, my heart is not here.

—Burns

MASTERS OF LAWS What thousands, Lazv, thy handizvork deplore. Thou hangest many, but thou starvest more.

—W. S. Landor John Ernest Moodie

Of all those arts in zvliich the wise excel Nature's chief masterpiece is writing zvell.

—Sheffield

Leslie Sparksman Greendale And zvild-scattcrcd cozvslips bedeck I he green dale.

•—Burns

BACHELORS OF LAWS Solicitors are excellent business men as betzveen solicitor and client, but have, as a rule, about as much practical business knowledge (other than legal) as the average nun.

—Clough WiUmms-Ellisi Joan Winifred Mary Hewitson

See where she comes, appareU'd like the Spring.

—Shakespeare

Thomas Hugh Ian Fleming Nothing is lazv that is not reason.

—Powell

Greville Lloyd Hesketh An affable and courteous gentleman.

—Shakespeare

Albert Ewen Otto Of ez'crything that's excellent It has no kind of fault or flazv, And I, mv Lords, embody the lazv."

—Gilbert

Frank Moray Wilson A verray parfit gentil k night e.

—Chaucer

Charles Pierrepont Hutchinson Wake soldier zvake, thy war horse zvaits To bear thee to the battle back.

—Hcrz'cy

MASTERS OF COMMERCE .•in evil gain equals a loss.

Alfred Percy Fogerty My strength is as the strength of ten Because my heart is pure.

—Tennyson Howard Wilson King

. lye, every inch a king. •—Shakespeare

Will iam Noel Mackie As merry as the day is long.

—Shakespeare

-Svrr.s

Will iam Armitage Brooker He is complete in feature and in mind, With all good grace to grace a gentle-man.

—Shakespeare

Cedric Charles Wil l iam Gover O for a Bookc and a shady nookc.

- Old Song

BACHELORS OF The credit system, which means that the rich man to Cod-knozvs-zvho.

James Houston Aitken A soul of pozver, a well of lojty thought.

—II uitter Stephen Leo Corbett

lie was so good he would pour rose wuter on a toad.

•—J err old London Wil l iam Gartside Culpan

Marriage and hanging go hy destiny; matches are made in heaven.

—Burton Charles Gordon Dearinq . . . . my gentle hearted Charles.

—Coleridge Milton Grosvsnor Mabee

To he or not to he. —Shakespeare

Newton Wil l iam McCormick Much may he made of a Scotchman, if he he caught young.

—Dr. Johnson John Fergus Young Schischka

Tull biggc he was of hrawne and eke of hones.

—Chaucer

COMMERCE man owes his duty to Cod, and the poor4

—Michael Arlen

Bruce Henderson Smith The Smiths never had any arms, and have invariably sealed their letters zvith their thumbs.

•—Sydney Smith John Samuel Stacey

/ feel like a Bull Moose. — Theodore Roosevelt

Ivan James Takle Oh! Hozv many torments lie in the small circle of a zvcddiiuj ring.

—C olley Cibber Roderick Counsellor Whittome

He was a man of letters among men of the world, and a man of the zvorld among men of letters. —Macaulay

Brian Rex Mason He sazv life steadily, and saw it zvhole.

—Arnold Clyde Percival Wil l iam Vautier

/ trimmed my lamp, consumed the mid-night oil. —Kcnstone

Francis Richard Wright He was one of a lean body and z'isaqe.

—Puller

BACHELOR OF MUSIC Music is the universal language of mankind. —Longfellozv.

Lois Letitia Walls I'm saddest when / sing. —Bayly

BACHELORS OF ARCHITECTURE .III, to build, to build! That is the noblest of all the arts.

—Longfellow Alfred Ronald Ian Garry demons Landseer Green

A glass is good, and a lass is good, and Where is our usual manager of mirth.' a pipe to smoke in cold weather. What revels are in hand?

—O' Kecf c —Shakespeare 60

P r o f e s s o r Maxwell Walker

THE college was shocked and grieved to learn of the death of Professor Maxwell Walker, senior member of the staff. His

long association with the college made him a par t of the establish-ment that will be very sadly missed. In t ruth, A.U.C. will not be the same place without his genial presence. He had been connected with the University and all its doings for so long that it will seem to many students inconceivable that there should continue to be a college and no Professor Walker.

In him we have sustained a very grievous loss. The service given by Professor Walker was at all times generous, sympathetic, and wholly helpful. But it was not only the actual services he rendered to the college that made his loss such a great one. It is

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also his unswerving and unflagging scholarship and his uncompromis-ing conviction that loyalty in its every form was the ne plus ultra of his department , that will make his absence seem a real material loss.

For Professor Walker stood for an ideal that unfortunately in modern times, in these days of quick results and streamlined courses, seems to be increasingly unpopular. Tha t idea was honesty of effort in every form, repugnance for showy or slipshod methods of learning that neglected the deep core of humanity for tinsel results. No student could study under Professor Walker and fail to be in-fluenced by this spirit of honest endeavour. It was so implicit in his teaching that "cramming" or "fluking" methods never came off with him. He insisted that whatever happened the work must be covered; and while results might be important , he refused to bow down to them and make them all in all.

Tha t results, however, could be obtained by his methods, is demonstrated by the continued successes obtained by his department. If a candidate passed terms under Professor Walker, the degree test presented no terrors, and degree passes were always in the vicinity of 100 per cent, of terms passes. Senior Scholarships also were fre-quent in coming to A.U.C., the record of course being nine in nine successive years.

But apart f rom results A.U.C. has every reason to be proud of the modern languages department which Professor Walker built up. It has been an object lesson in harmony and happy co-ordina-tion for many years. Relations between staff and students, and between members of the staff themselves were never anything but of the most cordial.

Professor Walker began his education at the Newton West pr imary school, and continued it at the Mercury Bay school. He proceeded to Auckland Grammar and was an excellent football and cricket player at this period. The next step in his career was the winning of a University scholarship which brought him to A.U.C. Here he was brilliantly successful, and passed his M.A. degree in 1905. He commenced lecturing here shortly afterwards, af ter a period of teaching at the Marist Brothers' school, and then went to France to study. He stayed at the Sorbonne for some time, fur ther-ing his French studies, and returned in 1908 to take up the newlv created chair of Modern Languages.

From that time to this many thousands of students have passed through his hands, and not one will remember him except with the deepest respect and grati tude.

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The Professor had tha t happy faculty of setting students at their ease, and of giving friendly and sympathet ic advice which it is the privilege of few people to possess. He was not afra id to fail a student, but he preferred to inspire him to redouble his efforts so that he reached the required standard. Time and again his process was successful, and many a student will remember that kindly shove administered by the Professor that meant the difference be-tween success and failure at the next examinations.

Not only in the academic world was the Professor a popular and esteemed figure, however. In another community he was a species of uncrowned king. For as a bowler, he had no equal in New Zealand. From 1917 onward his list of successes in New Zea-land Bowling Championships was almost monotonously regular. In singles, pairs, and fours alike he won Dominion premiership on many different occasions. His successes in other tournaments were too numerous to a t tempt to mention.

Besides being an excellent bowler, the Professor was also an accomplished raconteur and after-dinner speaker. This is a kind of art which is nowadays unfor tunate ly on the decline. But Professor Walker knew as few other men do, how to hold an audience, whether with a dramat ic recital, or an address scintillating with wit.

His striking qualities of personality are summed up in amusing fashion in the famous cartoon by "Bio" of the "Observer," on the occasion of the efforts made by the Senate to lower the pass s tandard in Entrance French. Professor Walker 's refusal to lower the stand-ard to let greater numbers through led to his temporary suspension from the Board of Examiners. In " B i o ' s " cartoon, the Chancellor of the Senate is represented as measuring two bowls and exclaiming "Walker one down!" Professor Walker, however, is impassively replying, "Show me the measure."

There will arise a race of students at A.U.C. to whom Professor Walker may be only a vague name. But as long as our college re-mains, so long will tha t name be associated with honesty of purpose, thoroughness of endeavour, scrupulous justice, and sympathet ic fair-ness; for it is the name not only of a great educationalist, but also of a sportsman, a scholar, and a gentleman.

— p a y i)

Alumni A IT T ( f ^ S T U D E N T S are roaming the world in large

^LJ o ^ ^ o numbers, at present, the war possibly helping many who would otherwise stay at hi)me to set out for foreign lands and see something of other countries. The complete list of men in the fighting forces would be too long to print. Offhand, with the First Echelon in Egypt we hear regular reports of Doug. Ball, Van Modder, Alan Pyat t , and Charles Flutchinson. The dust, sand, and 1 lies do not seem to trouble these lads unduly.

The Air Force has many more men from A.U.C. Jack Moodie, Eric Grant , Bob Gyllies, Bob Crozier, Merv. McNeil, " T u b b y " Edwards, Ken Lee, all wear the Air Force Blue.

From England comes the news that Lawrence Hogben has a commission in the Navy, teaching maths, to Naval Cadets. Derek Lewis, and his bride Margaret Shaw, had to leave Jersey in a hurry, and lost many of their wedding presents. They are said to be on their way out again. Alan Wylie is back to his home town, lecturing in Physics. "Skip" Wat t is in the Colonial Service, in darkest Africa. So is Gordon Skipper. Gordon had to evacuate his quarters in Kenya recently when Italian bombers made things hot for him. Dave Milliken, another Colonial Service man, was on leave back home recently.

One ran into Sidney Charles Bartholomew Gascoigne at the foot-hail one day. He has just returned from a successful two years at Bristol University.

From India comes news of W. Maurice Brown, a pilot in the Indian Air Force. J. Chapman-Smith is also in India again after a series of hair raising exploits in Asia and Malaya.

Maurice McHugh returned f rom England and straightway went back across the seas to Egypt in the First Echelon. Charlie Brenstrum is teaching at New Plymouth Boys' High.

Helen McCormick is a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force in England, and doing sterling work. We noticed Helen Coates 's marriage to a recent Canadian Rhodes Scholar.

Eric Halstead, now married, is with the Third Echelon. Paul Holmes teaches at Auckland Grammar .

These are only a few of the many students whose doings come to our ears, and whose activities we follow with a great deal of interest.

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Roundel

U NDER the green of the spring of the year IYarm winds murmur, and small throats sing;

Glad plants venture a timorous spear, Under the green of the spring.

Grey boughs are shooting their glad new gear, Canopy fit for a churl or a king

To sing fair words in his fair love's ear.

No need anywhere now to fear Bitter chill, or the misty ring

Of the creeping rains; warm life is here, Under the green of the spring.

— M I L E S

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The Apotheosis of William Jones WILLIAM JONES lies dreaming,

In a Paradise of silence, in an incense-filled Nirvana, In the street-lamp softly gleaming In a ha{e of beer he sprawls there, like the skin of a banana. He is lord of Greece and Lyre, He is great and all obey him, Damsels plucking on the lyre, Soothing panegyrics play him. 66

Little slaves in flimsy dresses Fly to do his slightest pleasure, A nd with heads of silken tresses He may toy and play at leisure, He is lord of Greece and Tyre, As he lolls there in the mire.

William Jones lies dreaming In a glorious negation, in a bath of liquid butter, With his purple face a-beaming, With his clothes awry and dirty, in the wet and slimy gutter. Gone are bosses, working hours, He is Bacchus, Aphrodite, With a crown of scarlet flowers, And a costume like a nightie, Faded lack of money, illness, Weeks he's spent within the cooler, In his land of peace and stillness, He is sovereign lord and ruler. Gone are bosses, working hours, All the world before him cowers.

William Jones lies dreaming In a flood of perfumed twilight, with a million sprites to guide

In a land with pleasures teeming, In an everlasting smoke-oh, with his empties tossed beside him. While he snores there, tanked completely, All the nations humbly bow, Hailing William Jones so meetly, English, Russian, French and Chow. With a single voice, they've crowned him, "He is God," they all have said. See! the beery mist around him, Forms a halo o'er his head. As he snores there, tanked completely, Angel choirs praise him sweetly.

him.

- CJ-

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Results of Competitions Unfor tunate ly the judging of the literary contributions to

Kiwi was not completed by the time the paper came out. The art, however, was judged as follows, by R. O. Gross, Esq.

1st: E. A. HORSMAN, Pencil Sketch (p. 48) 2nd: B. T. SMITH, Woodcut (p. 16)

Mr. Gross said tha t sincerity was obvious in all the contribu-tions and that his task had been a difficult one.

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