1840 AND ALL THAT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 38, 15 March 1940, Page 15

1840 AND ALL THAT

1840 AND AFTER. A Volume ot Essays from Auckland University | College. Whitcombe and Tombs. pp. 242, 5/This volume of essays by professors or lecturers of Auckland University College is in some respects the most ambitious of all the projects, literary or historical, undertaken in honour of the Centennial. The idea of the volume is simply that as New Zealand is so directly derivative from England it would help our understanding of our own country to study English society, thought, science, and whatnot from 1840 to the present day. Thus each of the essayists in this symposium treats a department of English life from 1840 onwards. Unfortunately not all of the contributors take the trouble to refer to the effect of English developments on ‘New Zealand, an elementary omission that robs some brilliant work of much of its value and significance. If one were spiteful, one would compare this excellent volume to an_ end-of-the-year school concert-the orations, the recitations, the French play, and the debating competition all unite to convince the bewildered parent that these are indeed learned men to whom he has entrusted his young. But it is distinctly easier to point out the defects of this heroic volume than to share one’s appreciation of its virtues. Professor Sewell, who edits it and writes an able introduction, cracks a pretty epigram in the course of his pugnacious pages, though he makes one despair of any real advance in the understanding of literature by reverting to the "every great writer must have a message" school of thought, when he expects of literature the "search for a faith to live by," and remarks shamefacedly that "most of us read Dickens with enormous delight for purely imaginative reasons." Professor Knight’s interesting and balanced study of architecture is a good account of the fortunes of that art in New Zealand, Professor Belshaw and Mr. Rodwell are stimulating, though sometimes a trifle elliptical, on Economic Theory. Professor Rutherford puts Wakefield gently into his place, writing about Colonies, without serious denigration of that extraordinary character. Professor Stone on: Law, and Forder on Science and Philosophy, deal competently with moral ideas often lost in the forest of the technicalities of their subjects. Dr. Anschutz on John Stewart Mill reminds us that the great thinkers of any age are twisted, like truth, to suit its convenience. Professor Fitt on Education and Mr. Melville on Journalism do bridge the gap between England and New Zealand to allow us to see something of ourselves as well as the England we, not always reluctantly, sprang from. Dr. Robb gives. us glimpses of Medicine from the days of the bodysnatchers to Social Security, throwing in an urbane anecdote about an operation on George IV. which earned somebody a baronetcy. Indeed, one is on the whole. willing to endorse Mr. Cocker,

who coyly hints in his Foreword that the authors have assisted in advancing Lord Acton’s conception of history as "not a burden upon the memory, but an illumination of the soul."