"In A Sturdy English Tradition"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 805, 24 December 1954, Page 11

"In A Sturdy English Tradition"

not as rich in tradition as it would like to suppose. That will come, because it has been so rich in personalities, Professor Frederick Sinclaire, whose death occurred on December 6, was one of them. He succeeded two notable men, Professors Macmillan Brown and Arnold Wall, in the chair of English. Professor Sinclaire arrived from Melbourne (though Auckland-born) with the reputation of an iconoclast. It was in the troubled days of the depression, and he quickly made it clear to us bewildered neophytes that literature was not something that could be academically filed and docketed. It was the very stuff of life. In literature and in life he took sides passionately, often to the dismay of his more tussocky colleagues. He spoke his mind, and stirred Canterbury as no one had done since Professor Shelley. You were for or against Sinclaire. The "fors" found him generous in wit and wisdom, full of sturdy rightness (even righteousness), and somehow as strangely English as Bunyan. The "againsts" would say he was a cantankerous ranter, no great scholar, a pacifist and not quite a gentleman. But he was the lustiest pacifist I ever met, and he must have been a gentleman from the quickness of his temper. He had a passionate admiration for those opposites, Shaw and Chesterton..He had a contempt for Anglo-Saxon and the barbaric northern tongues; he loved Homer and Virgil and Dante, and he sang Handel at the least opportunity. He had reverence for Milton and detestation for Pope. In one lecture when several students were chattering he said, "Ladies and gentlemen, to interrupt when I am talking is understandable, to interrupt when I am reading from Milton is inexcusable. That will be all for today." And he stormed out. His lecture on Pope once began, "I know only one good thing about Pope-he was kind to his mother." And went on to thwack Pope so hard that I for one was imin COLLEGE is

pelled to find out more about Pope (in his favour, if possible) than was neces-. sary for the curriculum. He was accused, of course, of giving a "biased" instead of an "impartial" view of literature. In New Zealand letters he will take his place among our few great essayists. To that difficult form he brought a style of nice distinction, a wit that could be pungent or slyly paradoxical. You can see Chesterton there, and Swift, and the plain beauty of the Authorised Version. He enlivened the pages of the flamboyantly bitter Tomorrow and the solid columns of the Press. He published two collections, Lend Me Your Ears and A Time to Laugh, which are his anathemata to good writing. The years mellowed him. He came to admire many old enemies, and, remarkably, they came to admire him. But nothing could temper his hatred of humbug. As a preacher and a man of fire he was in a sturdy English tradition. He professed life as well as literature.

D.

G.