SOLDIER AND SCHOLAR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 41, 5 April 1940, Page 15

SOLDIER AND SCHOLAR

HUGH STEWART: 1884-1934. Some Memories of His Friends and Colleagues. Edited and arranged by Ernest Weekley. John Murray. EADERS whe knew him will R vividly recall Hugh Stewart, Professor of Classics at Canterbury College before the Great War and after it; during the war a soldier who rose to high command and to the highest reputation in it; then the historian of the New Zealand Division in France, 1916-1919; later, briefly, Professor of Latin at Leeds; finally, Principal of University College, Nottingham. Some who are listening may have met him again, happily, when he spent a holiday in New Zealand, towards the end of 1934; they, especially, will remember the sudden, the almost terrible news of his death at sea on the way back to England. Dr. Johnson said of Burke that, if you were to meet him as a stranger, say while sheltering ‘with him for five minutes in a storm, you would leave him, thinking, " This is a remarkable man." It might have been said about Hugh Stewart; and time and experience could only deepen such a swift impression, and extend it. Men of very different types and interests answer for that: Professor Weekley’s gathering of witnesses brings it out. A great classical scholar tells us where Stewart ranked in his own subject. We have all heard of the great A. E. Housman, his impregnable armour of learning, his bitter-sharp sword in controversy. We learn here that Stewart could, and did, meet him on his own chosen ground and overthrow him. We have Arnold Wall’s account of Hugh Stewart as a mountaineer-exceedingly hardy, courageous, and resolute, full of zest, defying risks, defying his own handicaps of short sight and bad head for high places. Professor Wall’s are the most quickening of these pages, I think; those in which the image of the man flashes up oftenest, bringing the very look of him and the sound of his voice. We have the tributes of Major-General Temperley and Sir Alexander Godley to Stewart’s quality as a soldier; and we have the tribute of his batman, Mr. R. E. Agassiz, of Christchurch-the sort that Stewart would have valued as much, or more, and would have most heartily enjoyed. How characteristic this is: "One could always get a little praise from the Colonel, but we always expected a ‘kick’ at the finish, One day in France the Battalion was being inspected by the Colonel before the inspection next day by the General. He came to one man... "Your name is Reeves, isn’t it?" Yee, Sr. "The men call you ‘Shorty,’ don’t they?" "Yes, Sir." "You play a good game of football, Shorty, and you are a good soldier." "Thank you, sir." The Colonel was passing on to the next man: "By the way, Shorty, don’t forget to clean your boots before coming on parade to-morrow."

That was the way he would run over your Latin prose-first the encourage= ment, then the knock! And finally, there is the praise of those to whom Hugh Stewart was known mainly as a splendid and strenuous administrator in the academic field. He died at 50. This small book is only a sketch-and I have only sketched it-of a career crammed with achievement, but nobody could have known Hugh Stewart without feeling the conviction, now, that this record, for all its abundance and attainment, is still the record of a life cut short years before its height. Everyone who knew him is a witness who can make his own supplement to Professor Weekley’s book. My own would be this: If I had never known Hugh Stewart, I should have been a world away from realising what a teacher can achieve, in quality or amount -or what, at least, he can aim at. Stewart worked marvels, in covering ground, in thoroughness, in waking up and calling out unsuspected energy and eagerness, in distributing his- own inexhaustible fund of fresh delight in ancient studies. This is the point in which I think the book doesn’t quite do him justice; yet teaching was the work to which he was first and last devoted, as a teacher himself and as an organiser of teaching. Professor Wall yore that he "jollied his classes along’: so he did. But this picture of a rough-and-ready driver is far from complete and far from worthy. Someone else in the book, with another bearing, says that he had an exceptional ability to deal with minute points "without losing the full perspective." Transfer that to teaching, and it supplies pretty well what is wanting in the description of Stewart "-jollying his classes along." I can see him nowI can hear him first- rushing out of his study below, pounding up the crooked stairs, bursting into the room headfirst, with a sort of dazzle of bright glasses and bright hair. Slam go his books on the rostrum shelf, and he’s off! We have a very fine book on Roman literature: J. W. MacKail’s. (I can hear Stewart summoning up "Old MacKail" and "Old Postgate" with a sort of reverential gusto.) But I. swear that Hugh Stewart’s talks and translations, intended only to supplement and illustrate MacKail, were just as substantial and as eloquent. . . Or we are translating, at sight, witty account of his journey to Brundisium, and we come to the passage where the poet is troubled by-forgive two words of Latin-the "mali culices," literally, the "bad gnats." And so one of us literally and lifelessly translated it: "the bad gnats." "The bad gnats?>-Oh no, Miss Walker, oh no! The damned gnats, the cursed gnats!" --with bouncing energy and relish. Jollying us along: yes, but there, as always, sharpening us to the accuracy, bringing fact and spirit together, without which there isn’t any understanding, any appreciation. I musn’t go on, but it is hard to stop; there has been only one Hugh Stewart. (Abridged from a talk at 2YA by Jj. H. E. Schroder.)