Good Friday

In a country with such pronounced and longstanding religious credentials—despite the rock-solid separation of church and state—Good Friday is scarcely a blip on the radar screen of America.

Gone are the days, if ever they existed here, when everything was shut, and Good Friday was the ne plus ultra of public holidays, as it used to be at home in Australia.

After the austere, stupendously dignified and moving liturgy at Christ Church, New Haven, commencing at noon last Friday—at the climax of which the choir sang the haunting Improperia (Reproaches) in the beautiful setting by Tomás Luis de Victoria—I stopped off at Gourmet Heaven, the convenience store, to pick up a bottle of milk.

Looking at my watch I realized that the ninth hour was fast approaching, and therefore felt somewhat shamefaced to be caught entering a shop. No doubt I am the last person left in New England who still feels such strong qualms, no doubt “inculturated,” as we say here in the United States.

Quaint sentiments, certainly, but when I approached the cash register—ruminating upon the strange supernatural phenomena that are listed in the synoptics (the curtain of the Temple torn in two from top to bottom [all three agree on this, but for Mark it is the only one such observation {15:38}]; the sudden descent into darkness [Lk 23:44–45, a total eclipse of the sun?]; the shaking of the earth, the splitting of rocks, and the evacuation of numerous resuscitated corpses from their tombs, all of which electrify Matthew’s account [27:51–53])—thankfully I achieved re-entry without losing too many heat-proof tiles.

Because, spelled out on the customer side of the cash register screen, scrolling horizontally in sour green lights, was the following playfully animated message: “WELCOME TO G. HEAVEN—Have a good day!!!”

It is the mark of the truly paranoid that they perceive messages flowing inwards from the surrounding world and conclude that these are specifically meant for them personally, but in this case the total irony was almost too much for me.

I hurried home, made a cup of tea, and finished reading all about Edna Walling’s landscape gardens.

Easter Sunday

It is an anomalous aspect of the Easter miracle that in our troubled era it has generated works of art of scarcely conceivable hideousness (above)—mostly concocted as “faith aids,” and generally missing all but the crudest aspects of the pertinent Gospel narratives.

Yesterday a good friend and colleague of mine reminded me of one of the most striking and memorable features of the “morning of the third day” discoveries in John’s account, which relies for its startling vividness upon the fact that “the beloved disciple” himself evidently beat Peter to the empty tomb in a sprint, though it is Peter who actually enters it first. What they see there is described with such meticulousness and specificity that within the broad parameters of John’s highly sophisticated structural edifice it deserves much scrutiny.

According to the New International Version of the Bible, an exceedingly popular Protestant translation produced by biblical scholars in America in the 1960s:

Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus' head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen (20:6–7).

Folded—a particular action of somewhat calm and methodical character. Something about this did not ring true, so I went to King James. There, the same passage is translated:

Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie, And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.

Wrapped, carrying the hint of a more cursory gesture—discarding something unwanted. The Revised Standard Version (English) of 1928 gives it still differently again:

Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb; he saw the linen cloths lying, and the napkin, which had been on his head, not lying with the linen cloths but rolled up in a place by itself.

Rolled, wrapped, folded. Time to check the Greek:

ερχεται ουν σιμων πετρος ακολουθων αυτω και εισηλθεν εις το μνημειον / και θεωρει τα οθονια κειμενακαι το σουδαριον ο ην επι της κεφαλης αυτου ου μετα των οθονιων κειμενον αλλα χωρις εντετυλιγμενον εις ενα τοπον.

Jerome’s fifth-century Vulgate rendered these two verses as

venit ergo Simon Petrus sequens eum et introivit in monumentum et videt linteamina posita et sudarium quod fuerat super caput eius non cum linteaminibus positum sed separatim involutum in unum locum.

Now it is in the Greek text of these verses in John that we find the most breathtaking measure of poetical intentionality, because the relevant participle of the ancient verb κειμαι means (variously) stretched out, lain down to rest, in repose, lying sick or wounded, lying dead—often unburied (as of human corpses specifically) and, as in English (somewhat eerily) laying down, in the sense of mounting an argument, or laying down the law. In other words the Greek seems to encompass a profound complexity of meaning as regards the placement ( if that is the right word) of the head cloth, napkin, or, in fact, the σουδαριον/sudarium (in essence the same word, evidently a technical term in the repertoire of near eastern undertakers in Roman-occupied Palestine). More than this, however, as my wise friend and colleague now points out, laying aside the cloth which now, in a sense, lies “dead,” recalls the earlier moment in John (10:17-18) where Jesus talks about having the power to lay down his own life, and the power to take it up again.

Now, it seems to me that the Vulgate does a very ingenious thing by translating κειμενον as positum (–us) (from pono) simply “put” or “laid,” but linking this basic term to εντετυλιγμενον by choosing involutum (involutus, –a, –um), which means literally hidden, obscured, or veiled. Thus Jerome emphasises the crepuscular setting, and a certain psychic distance opens up between shroud and sudarium. Yet coming from the verb involvo, –uere, –ui, –utum, the curiously fugitive sense of involutum also carries the sense of moving in a circle, being wrapped or rolled, coiled, curled, or wound up. In other words, if plain old positum suggests that this was not one of Jerome’s Mozart days, certainly his choice of involutum brings us back to the full and urgent subtlety of the Greek—a small stroke of genius echoing from the ancient Mediterranean world with the clarity of a little bell of perfect pitch.

Therefore I feel King James and the R.S.V. got it as right as it is possible for our deeply clumsy language to get it at all, and whoever lately proffered “folded” as an adequate substitute in the New International Version was either applying to the Greek and Latin verbs maybe a greater unconscious awareness of the methods of the industrial laundry than was justified, or else had no idea what he was doing—just as whoever dreamed up that insulting, yellow-brick road vision of the risen Christ hovering some distance away from the empty tomb, utterly failed to grasp the whole point of the Resurrection. 

The main thing, of course, is not how the head-cloth was left behind, but that it was deliberately deposited somewhere else: Here is the risen lord, moving from A. to B., doing something with his hands, then emerging bodily into the light of dawn to commence His fifty days in the world. It is the far, far more beautiful, satisfying, indeed mystical image.

Dan's arm

τελειότητα, n. f. = perfection.

Being a dark horse, Dan has cleverly led me astray this week. Not knowing any better, I went straight to Liddell and Scott in search of an accurate and, hopefully, enlightening definition of τελειότητα, the Greek noun neatly tattooed on his forearm (above).

As an up-to-date young man with contemporary tastes, naturally I should have known that Dan would opt for the modern Greek, and not ancient. My mistake.

However, in this instance the long and winding road that leads from the Classical world to Dan’s forearm is worth setting out in some detail, in case he should from time to time need to answer urgent queries from persons wishing to becoming more intimately acquainted with it.

Our saga begins in Attica, the region around ancient Athens, where by the fifth century B.C. the adjective τέλειος or, more commonly, τέλεος meant complete, perfect or entire, and, more specifically in relation to animal victims of religious sacrifice or burnt offering: fully-grown, and/or without spot or blemish. We see how already this is strangely relevant.

The primitive and very ancient root τέλειος already appears in Homer (possibly around the eighth century B.C.), but τέλεος took firmer shape in primitive Greek, that is the “Doric” language, segued into the Attic dialect (around the early sixth century B.C.), and subsequently makes numerous walk-on appearances in the very hieratic, formal language of the fifth-century B.C. tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

From this the feminine noun τελειότης, τελειότητος, and τελειότητη sprang into being as an abstract philosophical term (these different forms of the word depend on whether it is being used as the subject, object, etc., of the ancient Greek phrase or sentence).

That term crops up cheerfully in the works of Aristotle (the Physics, 207a:21, and the Nicomachean Ethics, 1153b:16) and in Plato, specifically in the late dialogue Philebus (67a) in which Socrates speculates on the nature of the relationship between pleasure and knowledge, in my view the perfect combination.

Τελειότης, –ητος, –η also crops up in the so-called Definitions (412b), which possibly may not have been written by Plato at all—better to say ostensibly Plato, or even Pseudo-Plato. Regardless of that, in the mental universe of Aristotle and Plato, τελειότης, –ητος, –η certainly meant completeness, wholeness, or, for want of a better term, perfection, especially, it seems, in relation to persons.

With surprising resilience this handy word survived the ensuing centuries and made a soft landing in the Septuagint, that is, the oldest known Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (3rd–1st century B.C., most probably written out by Greek-speaking Egyptian scholars at Alexandria). There it is, sitting nicely in their version of what we know as the Book of Judges, 9:16.

Τελειότης, –ητος, –η also makes it into plenty of other later sources, including Democritus Epigrammaticus (187), the Greek-speaking Roman physician Galen (1:315), and, apparently only ever once in the plural, in a book by a person called Chrysippus Stoicus (3:61), for whom, in the third century B.C., it was all right to imagine that there could be various “perfections,” and not one only. Who knew?

Crucially, perhaps, τελειότης, –ητος, –η insinuates itself into St Paul’s Letter to the Colossians—the Apostle was nobody’s fool. On the other hand Paul may not be the author of Colossians either, but let us not get too bogged down with trivia.

In Colossians the term is deployed with great subtlety in relation to the various Christian virtues, viz.: έπί πάσιν δέ τούτοις τήν άγάπην, ό έστιν σύνδεσμος τής τελειότητος (“And above all these put on love [i.e. like a garment], which binds everything together in perfect harmony”; Col. 3:14, apparently alluding to Christ’s seemless garment in John’s account of the Passion). The Greek word order here, incidentally, lays particular emphasis—like Dan’s forearm—on the nature of that harmony, which, Paul insists, is perfect.

Now by the time Paul was writing in it, the ancient Greek language was in a sad state of decline, thanks to those greedy war-mongering busybodies of the ancient world the Latin-speaking Romans. According to Fascicle VI in Volume VII of the elegant multi-volume Thesaurus Graecae Linguae (edited between 1848 and 1854, long before computers were even thought of, by those miracle-working German scholars Heinrich Stephan, Karl Hase, and the Dindorfs, Wilhelm and Ludwig,—I don’t feel at all comfortable leaving home without it—the Romans habitually translated τέλειος/τέλεος into Latin as Perfectus, Integer, Concinnatus, and Solidus, and τελειότης, –ητος, –η as Perfectio or Integras. Predictably they also flipped τέλειος/τέλεος gender-wise into the heartier masculine form perfectus, –ūs, and applied it to building materials (Vitruvius, 1, 2, 6). Again, this seems curiously germane as regards Dan’s arm.

However, where we see flashes of brilliant interpretative light is in the abstract Latin noun which by sleight of hand the Romans turned τελειότης, –ητος, –η into the refreshingly, delightfully feminine perfectio, –ōnis, whence by a circuitous route it burrowed its laborious way into modern English, via the Dark Ages, the Romance Languages, and, incidentally, hardworking homosexuals like myself.

The vast Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, which commenced publication in Germany in 1894 and will satisfactorily later this year (with luck) reach the end of the letter “P,” is, as dictionaries go, the Rome to Stephan, Hase, and the Dindorfs’ Greece. The comparatively recent TLL article on the Latin word perfectio, –ōnis covers four columns of dense 5-point type spreading over three enormous pages, carefully documenting two principal species of meaning (absolvendo and consummendo, but let’s not go there); four groups of sub-definition; eight narrower senses, which may be further divided into nine even more specific shades of meaning. I do not propose to go into any of these here, but my point is that it is no wonder the word came into English essentially in its unaltered Latin form, having, as it were, used the linguistic equivalent of strong-arm tactics, not to say a battering ram.

Now, although the knowledge of ancient and New Testament Greek (very different birds) both somehow managed to survive the Dark Ages in Europe, matters never fully recovered. New Testament Greek survived in the Byzantine east, but as a liturgical and literary language only, and not a commonly spoken one. In other words, the language took a massively sustained nose dive, lasting for approximately eighteen hundred years, so that by the time a modern Greek identity emerged from under the yolk of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the noble τέλειος/τέλεος and τελειότης, –ητος, –η had somewhat crashed and burned into the—how can I put it?—frankly crude form of τελειότητα.

“Perfection” as an abstract concept (pagan or Christian) was by then more likely to be applied to your average subsistence goatherd (buxom, certainly, but with unwanted facial and body hair issues—Greek women occasionally ran into the same problem—; your better class of donkey, or, indeed, a high-end lamb souvlaki.

Fortunately, however, we have seen since those dark days, especially through the twentieth century, a flowering of modern Greek culture, in the poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy for example, so that I am glad to say that one may now wear τελειότητα with pride, expressing as it does an ideal, an aspiration, a standard against which to measure oneself, one’s conduct and achievements that is no less admirable than when Socrates and Plato tossed it around at symposia in fourth-century Athens.

Good to know that Dan carries all of this around on his forearm.

Tennis?

I suspect I am becoming a fully paid-up, card-carrying bore, but sometimes I feel I could write an entire book about a single image—actually some people regularly do just that. In this case, there are for me personal as well as professional resonances.

The subject of this exquisite photograph is the break for tea during a summer tennis party at Government House in Melbourne. The photographer was the Honourable Victor Albert Nelson Hood (1862−1929), the sixth and youngest son of Lord and Lady Bridport.

Hood lived in Australia for twenty years, serving as private secretary to successive governors of South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia, and New South Wales. He was in 1911 briefly Chamberlain to the Earl of Dudley, although it was not during that brief period that he took this photograph. Hood pursued the expensive and time-consuming hobby of photography, and his splendid albums, which are today in the collection of the State Library of Victoria, provide a unique porthole into the comfortable world of the ruling élite of an especially far-flung outpost of the British Empire during the Edwardian period.

Wherever he went, Victor Nelson Hood took his camera and tripod: to weekend house-parties at Mount Macedon, Mount Barker, and the Western District; on hunting or shooting parties and yachting days; on fishing and camping expeditions; his travels to New Guinea, and New Zealand; the voyages to and from Britain, and side-trips to his family estate, the Castello di Maniace at Bronte in Sicily.

More often, however, Hood simply recorded with the panoramic wide-angled apparatus (to which he was evidently addicted) aspects of daily life at the various Government Houses in which he served.

The dramatis personae here are (from left to right) Captain Haskett-Smith, aide-de-camp to the Governor-General, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson (1914 to 1920); Major Beauchamp Kerr-Pearse, Munro-Ferguson's Private Secretary (October 1915 to February 1916, and thereafter Military Secretary); Mr. Bickersteth; Doris, the wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Downes of the Australian Army Medical Corps; Lieutenant-Colonel H. W. Dangar, Acting Chief of Ordnance; Lady Doris Gwendoline Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, the eldest of the three daughters of the second Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, and Miss Eve Robertson. The cast of characters narrows down the date, somewhat soberingly, to no earlier than October 1915, and no later than the end of the Great War.

The door at the far end of the verandah leads to a small ante-room which adjoined the Governor’s study, as it still does. Captain Haskett-Smith seems to be holding his own camera, and leans against the window-sill of a charming small sitting-room which, eighty years later, Naomi Miller and I used as an office when together we worked as aides to Davis McCaughey, certainly the most beautiful, tranquil, and comfortable I shall ever occupy. It was my first job after I left college.

As for the war-time unrealities of the gorgeous tea table; details of costume—tennis attire, white shoes, and flannel trousers; the refreshing jugs of lemonade on the wicker stand at the top of the steps to the right, and the general atmosphere of good-humored languor—look at plump Lady Doris by the folding screen!—there is indeed much to be said, as there is about the folding screen itself, that indispensable item of Victorian and Edwardian furniture which vanished almost as suddenly as servants did. While the folding screen enjoyed a brief respite due to the contrivances of early cinema, evidently it was doomed: A good proportion of the land-fill of large mid-twentieth-century cities must consist mostly of folding screens.

N.B.

For several years—incredible as it may seem—a tiny, somewhat Pooterish, but nevertheless intriguing question has been rattling around in my head for which I could find no answer, until now.

It never seemed important enough to justify expending any serious amount of time and energy on fiddly research, but since I have regularly asked colleagues (as casually as possible, because, let’s face it, you don’t want to seem too bonkers) and have consistently drawn a blank, I have become more and more determined to get to the bottom of the matter.

In a brief article for that superlative organ the La Trobe Journal (editor: John Arnold of Monash, a brick), I have edited and put in its context a remarkable letter of introduction that has since 1854 slumbered peacefully in the Public Record Office of Victoria. It was written in favor of Andrew and Georgiana McCrae by the Dowager Duchess of Gordon to Lord Hotham (the cousin of the Governor Sir Charles Hotham).

At the head of the Duchess’s monogrammed notepaper Her Grace scribbled the address and date: “Huntly Lodge [in Aberdeenshire, above] / N.B. / April 14. 1854”.

“N.B.”

No, not “Northampton and Bath,” nor (of course) “New Brunswick,” nor “nota bene,” nor indeed “Naphthyl Butyrate,” nor (God help us) “narrowband” (a hilarious suggestion from one of our young Yale graduate students who, but for this extraordinary lapse—after all, he or she knew that I was talking about an item of handwritten correspondence dated 1854—seems fairly bright in every other respect).

Finally, yesterday, with the effortlessness of the deeply learned, my distinguished senior colleague Emeritus Professor David Bindman of University College London and Harvard instantly came up with the answer: “North Britain.”

The old terms “North Briton” and “North Britain,” meaning “Scot” and “Scotland” respectively, came into vogue after the Act of Union (1707) but were thoroughly revived in the Regency period thanks to Sir Walter Scott, notwithstanding all that tartan, caber-tossing, and gloomy Scottish scenery in the Waverley novels—the bloodthirsty clashes of warring clans.

The use of “N.B.” in personal correspondence up to the mid-nineteenth century was largely confined to Scots of the Duchess of Gordon’s class and generation who were inclined to see Scottish national identity as bound harmoniously to the concept of a greater Britain, and not fiercely autonomous, nor indeed proudly anti-English.

It was especially useful when addressing northern English gentlemen such as Lord Hotham whose traditional tendency was to be deeply suspicious of anything and anybody north of the border. The closer to Scotland they lived, the more suspicious they often were, and, though not a borderer, Lord Hotham certainly was a Yorkshireman.

This quaint usage seems to have died out soon after Sir Rowland Hill’s Post Office tactfully pointed out that “N.B.” was too easily confused with “[London] N8.”

However, the story does not end there.

In an astonishing convergence of separate articles of correspondence, as different as it is possible for any two letters to be, I now find that as recently as 1926, our great-grandfather, J. W. Trumble, that well-respected Australian country solicitor and senior statesman of test cricket, wrote a somewhat leaden (and, it must be admitted, tedious) critique of the then parlous state of test wickets on both sides of the globe. He was just then on a golfing holiday in Scotland, and his letter to the editor of The Times newspaper, which was published on July 30 (p. 15), gives the following address: “Ugadale Arms Hotel, Machrihanish, Campbeltown, N.B.”

A Pleasing Form; a firm, yet cautious Mind

My antiquarian brother Hamish has this day alerted me to a stunning fact of which I was previously unaware, namely that our kinsman Sir William Trumbull, D.C.L., was the subject of a charming epitaph by an ambitious young literary friend and neighbor, none other than Alexander Pope. In fact, Pope dedicated “Spring, the First Pastoral, or Damon” to Sir William, and by way of explanation the accompanying footnote in the Poetical Works sheds some valuable rays of light:

Our author’s friendship with this gentleman [Trumbull] commenced at very unequal years; he [Pope] was under sixteen, but Sir William above sixty [hmmm] and had lately resigned his employment of Secretary of State to King William [III]. Sir William Trumball [sic] whom Macaulay (chap. xxi) characterizes as “a learned civilian and an experienced diplomatist, of moderate opinions and of temper cautious to timidity” was appointed Secretary of State in 1691 and resigned in 1697 to make way for a more zealous partisan. He died at his native place of East Hamstead near Binfield, and Pope honoured his memory by an epitaph. Trumball was the first to recognize the merits of the Essay on Criticism, and to induce its author to publish it; he also eulogized the Rape of the Lock and encouraged the translation of the Iliad. Of Trumball it is related that being in 1687 appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Porte, he performed the journey on foot, thus outdoing by anticipation the German poet’s Promenade to Syracuse [Spaziergang nach Syrakus by Johann Gottfried Seume].

Somewhat expediently Pope borrowed the first six lines of Sir William’s epitaph from another epitaph he wrote for John, first Baron Caryll of Durford (1625-1711), “afterwards Secretary of State to the exiled James II; the remainder of the same epitaph on Caryll being inserted in the Epistle to Jervas— Athenaeum, July 15, 1854.” One’s confidence in the poet’s wholehearted sincerity in respect of his old Trumble friend and patron is therefore slightly shaken, but, as brother Hamish rightly puts it: “Waste not want not.”

On Sir William Trumbal
One of the Principal Secretaries of State to King William III, who having resigned his Place, died in his Retirement at Easthamsted in Berkshire, 1716.

A PLEASING Form; a firm, yet cautious Mind;

Sincere, tho’ prudent; constant, yet resign’d:

Honour unchang’d, a Principle profest,

Fix’d to one side, but mod’rate to the rest:

An honest Courtier, yet a Patriot too;

Just to his Prince, and to his Country true:

Fill’d with the Sense of Age, the First of Youth,

A Scorn of wrangling, yet a zeal for Truth;

A gen’rous Faith, from superstition free;

A love to Peace, and hate of Tyranny;

Such this Man was; who now, from earth remov’d,

At length enjoys that liberty he lov’d.

Sir William evidently bore the principal characteristics of a Trumble, indeed most minor Trumblisms are here present also, and reading this epitaph we are struck by how closely, how completely it might encapsulate our late and beloved father. It really could be him.

Parliament

Our great-grandfather, the Hon. William Pearson, M.L.C. (above), was one of three members of our mother’s family who, between them, served in both houses of the legislature in colonial Victoria and, in the case of the Hon. Alexander Hay Borthwick, M.L.C., immediately before and during World War II. I had hoped that a discreet survey of their various speeches, faithfully recorded in the relevant early volumes of Hansard, might yield gleaming nuggets of oratory; reveal brave stances on imperial and colonial matters, or further evidence of probity, brilliance, and statecraft. However, the pickings kindly proffered by the Parliamentary Librarian in Melbourne turn out to be decidedly slim. I fear the political activities of the Hon. William Pearsons (father and son), and of Uncle Lex Borthwick, were of but marginal interest in the life of the nation, and the Empire. This is hardly surprising; indeed it conforms to a forlorn pattern of under-achievement. In the younger William Pearson’s case, as is suggested by the immense, handwritten, creamy foolscap document in which in 1896 several hundreds of his neighbours formally urged him to stand for election to the Legislative Council seat for the Province of Gippsland—the signature of great-grandfather Lieutenant-Colonel William Borthwick, V.D., of Bald Hills, is fourth on the list, followed several spots down by Mr. Pearson’s father-in-law, George Cornelius Gooch of The Fulton, Sale—the property qualification of the electors to the upper house (which, incredibly, persisted until 1950) insured that our great-grandfather’s sole function was to represent the landed interest. This he appears to have done, through thick and increasingly thin, as the Depression of the 1890s carved, blew, and flooded its way across stations on the coastal plains that stretch between Traralgon and Orbost, and between the Great Dividing Range, the Gippsland Lakes, and the Ninety Mile Beach. It may also have been useful for Mr. Pearson to have access to the luncheon room, and indeed those fellow members of parliament, particularly ministers of the crown, whose influence might be of benefit to him and his fellow directors in the discharge of their responsibilities on the board of the gradually ailing and soon-to-be liquidated Long Tunnel Gold Mine at Walhalla. When travelling up to Melbourne for sittings, great-grandfather Pearson caught the Sale train by waving it down with a red flag at his own private railway station at Kilmany Park. That pretty little weatherboard building is today preserved at Old Gippstown, the Gippsland Heritage Park at Moe (rhymes with blowy) near Morwell in Victoria.

Legal Education—For What?

In 1963, my father, P. C. Trumble, who was then serving as President of the Law Institute of Victoria, delivered the following address to final year law students at the University of Melbourne. It was intended to provide them with a sense of what full-time legal practice would be like, and to proffer a little gentle advice on the eve of their graduation. Today, Peter’s voice seems to drift out of another era, when lawyers were “compleat,” and the extreme degree of specialization that has come to define almost every branch of the legal profession in Australia, indeed almost everywhere, was as yet quite unknown. It is a period piece certainly, but the values it espouses still seem pretty admirable; perhaps in these parlous times we may hope that they may be partially recovered, or, failing that, at least appreciated:

To all ladies and gentleman to whom these presents shall come: Greetings.

This is the voice speaking for the great white fathers who await you in the jungle of life downtown. I bring you good wishes and solace in the bleak mists which will dull the next few months. And I bring you some pearls of wisdom and hope for the future.

My message will be gratifyingly brief, so I hope you will show the patience and forbearance which it will be your lot to acquire when you join us.

In the first place these remarks are addressed to you by a solicitor and for the purpose of telling you what you may expect in our side of the profession. I think that none of you will really have a clear idea of what is involved in being a solicitor except of course those of you who are already working part time in an office. It never turns out to be quite what you expected. This is perhaps our fault for not coming up more often and telling you about it and I hope that we may have the opportunity of doing this soon and at regular intervals. It is also perhaps the fault of your old schoolmasters who, I don’t think by and large, really understand what they let you in for when they encouraged you to choose law as a profession. It is a curious thing that a profession which requires the highest degree of meticulous preoccupation with fact and circumstance should be associated with so many prerequisite subjects which are preoccupied with opinion and broad conjecture. The title of your publication [De Minimis] is one which tends to obscure the real nub of our profession. The practising solicitor is constantly concerned with what some people would consider to be trifles. No fact is too small to be overlooked, if overlooked it exposes the client to liability—or endangers his rights. This is what hits the articled clerk first when he deals with his first few matters. His letters are ripped to pieces, his documents shown to be full of loopholes, his calculations to be on thoughtless assumptions. The practice of creating, changing, explaining, defending, and enforcing rights is of the most exacting kind and this I charge you to remember: Do not despair because if you don’t remember it, many swift humiliating and enlightening experiences at the hands of your masters will soon serve to make you aware of it. This is really the first thing I would say to you. Please believe me that the administration of the law is as precise as any mathematical science and much harder because instead of relatively simple semantic tools, you have the horror of applying an uncertain language to many obscure circumstances in a forest of even more obscure rules.

The second thing I would like to say—and a little more encouraging—is that you have the whole, and I mean the whole, drama of life to play around with. There is not a single facet of social, commercial, or industrial life which does not involve the action and reaction of rights and liabilities. This you will find of intense and lasting interest. No two matters are ever the same. Your practice will range from advising a charitable organisation on the holding of a garden fête to the defence of a purveyor of obscene literature; from the prosecution of a traffic offender to the issue of a prospectus; from the estate of a lunatic to the defence of a jerry-builder; from the purchase of a department store to the hire of a bloodstock stallion; from the accidental death of a brewery worker to the breach of a covenant against erecting garden fences. The one thing in common for all lawyers who have to face these things is that they must be aware of the facts of life; they must understand human frailties and the basis of human passions; they must be able to refrain from being one-eyed about their clients’ point of view; they must be able to handle people. True it is that we specialize, and it would be absurd to expect the beefy extrovert common law solicitor to be happy dealing with the preparation of wills for old ladies or the quiet, unassuming equity man to bulldoze his way through a defended paternity suit. But you will find that both of those lawyers have a highly developed sense of balance and justice which enables them to be quite capable of understanding the human problems which are inherent in the other’s matter. You see, the common lawyer may have to deal with a challenge of the old lady’s will by the old lady’s maiden sister—and will need to understand the domestic circumstances which surround the making of the will or the jealousies and bitternesses which resulted in it being brought before the Courts.

And the quiet equity lawyer may have to face the sordid truth of his client’s private life and be responsible for the welfare of some unhappy social outcasts. Therefore, please learn to understand life. I may say that this can be done without the need to acquire first hand experience in every facet. Otherwise, you may think of us as a bag-eyed bunch of reformed libertines trading on the wit and wisdom of bitter experience.

On the contrary I assure you, it will be your duty to help maintain the social standards—both legal and moral—which restrain and control all the many primitive emotions which lie so close to the surface of what we are pleased to call civilization.

These are two broad precepts for your thoughts. If you learn to appreciate this you will have the stuff of which lawyers are made and you will succeed. What you learn at the Faculty of Law are your tools of trade so that with awareness of life you will know what they are and how to use them.

Finally a word about articles. It has always been the tradition that the sine qua non for admission is a period of articles. Here you learn the business of the lawyer from those who have experience. It has worked satisfactorily for many years and has helped to produce judges, barristers and solicitors indiscriminately. But we are in the middle of an adult population explosion. Suddenly there are more people wanting to do articles. At the same time more people are entering the wage earning class, buying cars and houses, causing new enterprises to start and old ones to expand. Legal offices are struggling with the weight of expansion but the development of professional recruiting is lagging behind. Practising lawyers find it harder to get trained staff and find less time to train inexperienced staff. The result has been the development of a barrier against taking articled clerks. The barrier is under fire and more solicitors are realising their responsibility to the profession but the problem of doing adequate justice by the clerks remains. I have over-simplified that but it is my belief that there is room and indeed a need for many more lawyers and the problem of absorption is the problem of early training.

I can say that the legal profession as a whole is conscious of this and we are at this very moment planning new ideas to equip the student who wants to come into the profession with a measure of practical training so that he will be readily absorbed into an expanding profession without the barrier of reluctance which pressure of work has raised against him. The Council of Legal Education, the Faculty and the Law Institute are all working on the immediate problems which face many of you today. I cannot say just now exactly how we will cope with it either on the short or the long term view. I hope, however, we will soon be able to provide a working improvement on the present unsatisfactory position.

We of the Law Institute wish you well in the exams, and hope to see you all as our colleagues very soon.

P. C. Trumble

Sayonara

The artist George Stubbs was teetotal for the last forty years of his life, which leaves the first forty intriguingly unaccounted for. At forty-four—as usual I am late—I have now been firmly nudged by reliable, indeed impressively qualified medical authorities here at Yale. Their advice, while gently articulated, is unequivocal: The time has come for me to follow suit. The fact that I find myself so crestfallen at the very thought of bidding adieu to that civilized aperitif the martini, with its ingeniously thought-inducing properties at the end of the working day, probably constitutes sure and certain proof that their advice is sage, and my decision the right one. Nobody is holding a gun to my head. Nor indeed do we necessarily rejoice when the shutters come clattering down over certain avenues of particular pleasure. Resistance is entirely natural, but in the end sadly futile. The body must take precedence over the mind. At any rate, I suppose the knack is to conceive of this little change as holding the promise of other, equally enjoyable branch-lines or by-ways of pleasure by which to continue on the next stage of my life’s journey, and try not to mind about it too much. Easier said than done, but if George could do it (and succeed in the gin-drenched London of 1764) then how much easier should it be for me to accomplish the same thing now?

Fraud

One can only conclude that in these days of financial catastrophe credit card fraud is becoming an enormous problem for all banks.

Last week I received a new credit card to replace the previous one, which was peremptorily canceled several weeks ago, owing, said my bank, to some vaguely articulated “potential exposure.” Leaving aside the question as to the nature of that exposure, and the tens of thousands of other people’s credit cards similarly affected, my bank assured me that the new credit card would work properly when eventually it arrived in the post. Finally it came.

On Friday I paid into the relevant account a sum in cash larger than was necessary to secure the new computer I need to purchase; waited until yesterday; rang the bank just to make sure that this large transaction would encounter no glitch or block; was assured that it wouldn’t; took a deep breath, and at 11.45 a.m. lodged my order on-line, assisted by my colleague, the excellent Elena Grossman. This morning, I find that Apple Computer Inc. wishes to inform me that my credit card was declined.

I rang my bank. Successfully navigating the labyrinthine menu-tree in fifteen painful minutes that skipped by in just a quarter of an hour, I reached a young male person. He was pretty sensible, and I did my best not to sound testy. If I did, and my call was maybe monitored for verification and training purposes, they will no doubt be able to play it back for a laugh. In any case, brightly the bloke at my bank assured me that my credit card was blocked thanks to an “over-zealous” consultant in the fraud department, presumably anxious to live up to the bank’s acronym—“nab”—notwithstanding that my earlier (and prudent) telephone call had been “noted in the system.” There it was, he reckoned, standing out perkily from the mass of surrounding data. However, in a sinister and unwelcome development, it now seems that my $4,000 in cash, though certainly received by the bank—insofar as, yes, I did indeed hand it over to them, and have in front of me the receipt to prove it—has nevertheless somehow not “hit the card.”

Graciously, and with a tone that suggested above all generosity and special treatment, my bloke at the bank said he’d lift the block so that I could proceed with my transaction. “Thank you so much,” I gritted.

But, he added, I must be sure to telephone the customer service department—surely the ne plus ultra of tautologies—to ascertain what has happened to my money. “Is there no way that you can check for me now?” Unfortunately, no, that wasn’t his department.

In Kafka-esque situations such as these keeping some tenuous grasp upon your sanity, I suppose, depends upon the ability to be thankful that your bank is being vigilant, but I cannot help feeling maddened with irritation by being obliged so regularly to seek their permission to spend my own money. O tempora, o mores.