William Rolleston

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 147, 17 April 1942, Page 4

William Rolleston

T is one of the paradoxes of the present war that the longer it lasts the less we attempt to escape from it. Until adjustment came we used to feel that we could not endyre reading and thinking about it all the time, and for six months "or a year after it started recipes for escape were a fairly regular feature of most magazines and newspapers. Some recommended music, some light reading, some the cultivation of hobbies, some good works; and it is possible that the chief reason why these prescriptions have disappeared is the fact that most of us are doing good works of some kind to-day whether we chose them or were dragged into them. But if in spite of all this we still wish to escape occasionally, an excellent method is to read the biography of a really engrossing personality. Not long ago, for example, Mr. Downie Stewart’s study of William Rolleston was issued by Whitcombe and Tombs, and it would be difficult to imagine a better use for our minds during the hours when we are not thinking about the war, than turning them on this most remarkable man. And it is of course denigration of William Rolleston to call him merely remarkable. He was one of those men who stop just short of greatness. With a little more humour and a little less independence he would have been one of the outstanding figures in our first century; but he lacked humour in the way in which Gladstone lacked it, and he had the kind of independence that in politics is merely pathetic. He could never trim his sails, or say soothing things, or shut his eyes to folly and corruption whoever exhibited them. So he was a man without a party, a man in fact mistrusted by both parties, a radical among conservatives, a conservative among radicals, for no other reason than because he had two eyes, a full mind, and an almost savage integrity. It was a combination of qualities that doomed him in advance to sadness and disillusionment; and both overtook him. All these things Mr. Stewart brings out very clearly, so that if he has not produced a vivid picture he has given us something more valuable: the man as he really was. And the man was of the breed that we for- get at our peril. The world is in ruins because our morality has failed. If we want to preserve our own corner of it we shall have to be better men than those who are trying to wreck it; and that is just another way of saying that we shall have to be more like William Rolleston.