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The Spike or Victoria University College Review 1932

[introduction]

The arid remoteness which is so repellant a feature of a good deal of aesthetic theorizing is doubtless to be attributed to the fact that many of the philosophers who expound the meaning of beauty have never had an aesthetic emotion. The notion that this deficiency can be remedied by any amount of dialectic skill is a childish blunder. On the other hand those who really do care for beauty are frequently quite content to enjoy their golden moments un-reflectively and feel no very urgent impulse to understand their experiences and to trace them to their origin. These considerations indicate the peculiar interest of Professor Robertson's "spiritual autobiography," this strange contemplative little book in which he writes of the pursuit and discovery of beauty throughout his life. For we have here the record of a man in whom the qualities of the scientist and the artist are curiously intermingled, one who is acutely sensitive to aesthetic impressions and in whom there stirs also the scientific impulse to comprehend and define what it is that moves him most profoundly.

In recent years the psychologists have been emphasizing the dynamic influence of the experiences of childhood on the whole of later development. Professor Robertson's major thesis is that the events of these early years are of deep significance for the aesthetic life. "It is these critical early years, hidden from the world and except in rare instances from ourselves, which largely determine the character of a man, which provide the artist unaware with his richest material. Thus beauty is fashioned and has its being." This idea is crystallized symbolically in the brief "prelude" with which the book begins:—

"I went back to the home of my childhood but found that a factory was built in its place. I went down to the edge of the sea to rest beneath a tree where I sat as a child. The tree was cut down to make way for a new motor road.

I looked out over the water to know if the hills were still golden in the light of the setting sun. From the sands below I heard the voices of the playing children: 'The prince searched for the princess everywhere.'

I went away, knowing the home of my childhood was not destroyed, and the tree, the beautiful ngaio tree, its sap was in my veins."

The story opens with the author's childhood in Auckland, then it shifts to Wellington and from thence to Oxford, to Europe, to Burma, but through it all, and in strange contrast to the kaleidoscopic change of scene, the dominating motives of childhood assert and reassert themselves. There are the stars, the earliest of all memories, which, when they are brighter than their wont, always produce the 'same lovely excitement, which is no mere stir of the senses in contact with the casual treasons of a right . . . but a fierce and well-nigh intolerable ecstacy; there is an almond tree; a harbour of dreams; the presence of a love that may not find fulfilment; the "ironic fate that makes a man a wanderer against his will." In some instances these "early patterns" remained long buried in the dim regions of the unconscious and were brought to conscious awareness only by painstaking self-analysis or by a fortuitous accident. But, whether conscious or unconscious, each pattern repeats itself in modified forms just as in a fugue there are numerous repetitions of the same motif at different levels of the musical gamut.

Subtly woven into the texture of the book there is an account of the literary influences which have contributed to the author's development. Foremost among these is Walter Pater. It was at Oxford that Professor Robertson discovered Pater and surely there are few more vivid evocations of the excitement of a literary discovery than his description of the event. "The chimes of the passing hours eddied through my thoughts and the still autumn night as I read on in wonder, finding my aspirations, so comprehensively expressed my sensations and ideas transmuted into the most inconceivably beautiful sentences. It was as if I had awakened after a long sleep page 16 to meet a new day in some incomprehensible manner different from all the days that preceded it: never had I imagined that my own language, the words that I used so thoughtlessly and heartlessly, could be fashioned into an instrument from which such compassionate notes might be struck." Fittingly enough a whole chapter, "Dreaming Spires," is devoted to a luminous appreciation of Pater's writings. And in summing up his indebtedness to him, Professor Robertson writes: "Too long pre-occupied in my thoughts with what was merely intellectual, as if logic were an end in itself and love but the shadow of a tree cast on a wall, I came now to realize the importance of the heart and the senses, in their just equipoise with the mind."

Of other contributory influences the most important are Croce, Romain Rolland, Freud and Proust. For a time Professor Robertson was powerfully impressed by the superb logical symmetry of Croce's philosophy and especially by his theory of aesthetic. But later he came to see that "art was too complex a function of human life, in its infinite variety of anguish and loveliness, to be thus explained away, "and in retrospect he now looks back upon the philosophy of Croce" with the respect that may still be held for an idol that has fallen by the wayside." A high tribute is paid to Rolland's epic novel "Jean-Christophe," a book which served to give reality to a growing conviction of the organic unity of life and beauty and which, in emphasizing the importance of the early years of an artist on his subsequent development, implied views congruent with his own. The influence of Freud and of Proust is more recent. Freud's theories, in particular his insistence on the primacy of emotion in life, his formulation of the mechanisms of the unconscious and his doctrine of the fundamental polarity of the Life Instincts and the Death Instincts, are invoked as providing valuable psychological support for his own position. Finally there is Proust who could not but be significant since his "A la recherche du temps perdu" is not only, like "Life and Beauty," an attempt to penetrate to the inner meaning of things through a search for times past, but also a meticulously conscientious record of the life of an intellectual artist.

Professor Robertson's prose style awakens echoes, sometimes of Pater and sometimes of Hergesheimer, but it possesses unmistakable individuality of its own. It is rich and colourful yet simple and direct, with an entire absence of preciousness; and its subtle, pulsing rhythm has an "edge" on it which prevents it from ever becoming monotonous. There are passages—one thinks especially of the description of an imaginary voyage in the Pacific in the last chapter—which reach lyric heights which it would be difficult to parallel in the prose of this country. One can only say in conclusion that "Life and Beauty" is a notable and distinguished contribution to New Zealand literature.

A.E.C.