ANTIQUITY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20496, 22 February 1930, Page 1 (Supplement)

ANTIQUITY.

IN OLD LANDS AND NEW.

BT A. WOLSELEY RUSSELL.

When I was very small—some time be-

fore the war—l can remember living in a Hertfordshire farm-house three hundred years old, a plain old brick place, with creepers and roses and a perfect lawn. There was something mellow about all of it, from Cow Lane to the labourers in

their little stone cottages by the entrance. Old Snowden, with his red hair and red Tirpitz whiskers; and Rodger—but I can't remember him; and young Ridge (it took us years to find that his real name was Reg)—young, Ridge in khaki in the kitchen garden playing his great trumpet for us, just before he went away; the

haymaking, and taking a wasp's nest in the orchard: it was mellow just because

it was rural England. The Lea Earm had no historic associa-

tions as far as we knew. True, someone once scratched an inscription with a diamond on one of tha window-panes. As nearly as I can remember, it ran like tliis—

On re i'lrrj do? of Jim a 171.) Mr. Leyland ridintt in Cassiobury Park did meet with a fall and tjreak his ie;j.

But no one connected the scribble with Prince Charlie, nor even with Queen Elizabeth —strangely enough she and her gentlemen seem to be responsible for most of the scratched window-panes in old English houses. Antiquity Without History.

'The place had antiquity without history —a common enough state in the older lands. In the matter of mere age there must be thousands of mora venerable farm-houses in the Old World, with many in the Americas. As for beauty, it had no pretensions that way, yet had achieved two kinds. It had been built on traditional lines, for a purpose and not an appearance, and therefore had achieved the satisfying harmony of all things which have been designed for generations, toward utility without thought of artistry. A saddle, a ship, a railway

engine, a plough, an axe ; an iron kettle, an aeroplane—all these are things which have achieved harmony through being designed for utility. Beauty in everyday things owes more to the engineer and the utilitarian than to the artist. The surest way to gain it is to leave the designing of an article to the factory for a few generations; it is slower, but in the meantime the faeilely harmonious designs of an artistic theorist will have been discarded.

The house's other kind of beauty was that abstract secondary quality acquired through mellowness and usage apart from mere form. It is the only excuse for many " antiques.'' An old stool or a

chair may belong to an early stage in the process of utility-designing, and so be crude and clumsy; yet centuries of useage may earn It an honoured place by our fireside. Li New Zealand. Such, then, is antiquity , in the old lands. In New Zealand it has a different quality. There are the ancient ancestral possessions of Maoris, their age only calculated from a tradition of the-generations who have possessed thern, and these stand equal with any of our pakdha heirlooms. But there is also a pakeha antiquity here. It is little more than a century old, yet as strong as any in Europe. It would be hard, for instance, to find a house in England a hundred and eleven years uld which is nut only definitely historic but which has also the mellowness of the antique. There would be a few places where great men had been born or died—a borrowed fame at. best; I can think of no other.

And here? I started writing this article in the oldest house in New Zealand, the mission house at Kerikeri. It was built in 1819 and if ever a house deserves tiie name " historic " this does. Within it one has a feeling akin to that 011 seeing, say. the worn steps by A'Becket's shrine in Canterbury Cathedral. But it has a freshness and vividness only possible in such a country as New Zealand. The grandchildren of these history-makers still live in the house—only two generations removed! It is history without the cobwebs, antiquity of the day-before-yesterday; and yet none the less history or antiquity for that. The Historic Bay. There are many other places around the Bay of Islands where one can get this feeling: the flagstaff hill at Russell, immortalised by the gallant, impetuous, chivalrous, melancholy Hone Heke; Wairnate, (be scene of recent centenary celebrations; Paihia, another of the earliest mission station ; Te Puna, near where Marsden's Cross stands, marking his first landing; and not least, Waitangi, where

Governor liobson and Archdeacon Henry Williams—both naval captains, for Williams had served with Nelson—signed the treaty wilh the Maori chiefs, which was as important fo the pakeha as to the Maori. (It may not be generally known that the original fable on which the treaty was signed is in the possession of an old farmer down the Kerikeri Inlet, who recently refused £350 for it from a descendant of the Archdeacon's!)

In the earliest dav3 the Bay of Islands was New Zealand, its history the history of New Zealand. The relics of those days have a genuine antiquity, partly because they were more remote from present conditions than Queen Anne's England from King George's; and partly also because after file first twenty years history ebbed away completely from the Bay; there was no continuity as in the great cities.

But whatever the difference in their qualities, the Lea Farm and the house at Ksrikeri have suffered similarly now; it is the fate of many antiquities. The last time I saw the farm a vast embankment for a. new arterial road was being made, running straight as a die, within fifty yards of my old house—l expect it. is a tea bouse now. And at Kerikeri a, glaring petrol-pump stands opposite the gate of the missionaries' old homestead.