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SMAD. An Organ of Student Opinion. 1934. Volume 5. Number 4.

Plunket Medal Lucubration — W S. Brook

page 5

Plunket Medal Lucubration

W S. Brook

Some are born great. Others achieve greatness. Others still have greatness thrust upon them. Of few can it be said that greatness comes in all three ways. A glance into history—if as much as a glance be necessary for the purposes of a Plunket Medal Oration—reveals only one man who can merit the title of Trismegistus—one man who was great by birth, by achievement, and by being thrust upon. That man was W. S. Brook.

Wikitoria Salamanca Brook: Brook saw with Argus eye what was given none else to see. He saw it all. He saw it whole. And what a whole it was!

A sleeping College, red in hue, sprawled upon the cheese-tinted slopes of Salamanca. Sleeping students, redder in hue. crawling in and crawling out like worms in gorgonzola. Sleepless professors, absolutely the-colour-of-blood, whose minds clanked restlessly like chains fashioned to hold the gorgonzola morsel to be gnawed at incessantly and ultimately devoured; but to Wikitoria Salamanca Brook (out of whom no mortal was ever known to get a bite) a miraculously-conceived microcosm, alive with

"Germs of infinity, sparks of divinity.

Fire of Prometheus moulded in clay."

For this marvellous man saw the whole, not as 'others saw it, but mystically, as in a mirror of Shalott. To him, by virtue of his intense spirituality, it was vauchsafed to see visions. He saw them mounting the staircase, clustering about the letter-rack, speeding from cafeteria to common-room, retiring to classroom and library to rest after labour, write letters, discuss the dances in the so-called Gymnasium; and it was his directive genius that kept them from going astray. Less than truth is it to say that he guided the stream of consciousness through the maze of Victoria College; for he was, by the invincibility of his persistent omnipresence, the very stream itself. He flowed through that lotus land of learning with the serene inexorability of his insentient prototype which Tennyson personified. He was more than a Brook—he was a fountain of wisdom—the wisdom that is more to be desired than gold. He was the one and only, the original, Pierian spring. And the students drank deep.

Shall I descend to the commonplaces of Plunket Medal Oratory by saying that he was born in a humble cottage somewhere or other at the early age of less than one? Preferable it is to believe that he sprang from the foam of the sea like Venus, whose beauty he resembled (mutatis mutandis) only to surpass. Or that he sprang fully-armed (including finger and thumb) from the head of Minerva—a mould so profoundly shaken by ecstasy over this triumph of productive skill that it immediately shattered and left to the world a Brook without a peer.

How shall I perorate adequately upon this quintessence of Titanic excellence by whom our adolescent eyes are dazzled, at whose slightest gesture (even the clicking of a finger) we slink abashed into tenebrous quietude. Is it necessary? Is it possible? Thou canst not, nor, indeed, Plunketmedalize upon the appalling perfections of peerless Brook, about whose pure, unclouded brow the violaceous and crepuscular glory of the autumnal sky reverently contracts its circumstances to form a halo.

Will Brook be forgotten, that creature of splendid isolation, who was of us yet not of us—

"Who thought not as those thought there Who stirred the beat and hum " ? Asking this, I looked far into the future and, with Thomas Hardy,

"I saw, in wet unbroken,
Its history out wrought,
Not as the loud had spoken,
But as the mute had thought."

And I said and I say, "O lente, lente, curre! Esto perpetuo, wet—unbroken—Brook !"

If that isn't worth a medal I don't know what is.