W. H. D. Rouse
speaker
684 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 1 Aug
W. H. D. Rouse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
even the dingiest street has its pathetic badges of colour it is a great thing to have such a widespread community of sentiment which however varying in expression is identical in essence one may be amused when he sees the christmas annuals published by australian magazines and finds under the title a happy christmas in new south wales a photograph of girls and muslin enjoying themselves by picniting along shady streams
with canoes and mosquito nettings that kind of christmas we think would seem very grotesque for us but our friends the new south welsh evidently find it exhilarating but it is that mysterious and agreeable pre-christmas feeling which is the best of the whole matter christmas day itself is sometimes almost too feverish a business of picking up blizzards of wrapping paper
convincing the urchin that his own toys are just as interesting as the urchinesses and treading on tiptoe for fear of walking on the clockwork train or the lurking doll at christmas time we always think probably we are the only person who does
of the late admirable william stubbs once bishop of oxford and regius professor of history the author of those three fat mulberry-coloured volumes the constitutional history of england a work far from easy to read and which when we were compelled to study it seemed of an intolerable dulness
bishop stubbs in the dreadful words of the dictionary of national biography never forgot that he was a clergyman it is also said that his lectures never attracted a large audience but what we are getting at is this
that on christmas day eighteen seventy three the excellent bishop retired from the gambols and gaieties of his five sons and one daughter and wrote the preface to his history we love to think of him a worthy man shutting himself up from the yuletide riot in roomy old kettle hall now a part of trinity college oxford and sitting down to write those words
the history of institutions cannot be mastered can scarcely be approached without an effort now that we are somewhat matured we think that we could probably re-read his constitutional history with much profit in that christmas-day preface written while the young stubbses were we suppose
filling the house with juvenile clamor there is one phrase that catches our eye as we take the book down for its annual dusting constitutional history reads the exploits and characters of men by a different light from that shed by the false glare of arms the world's heroes are no heroes to it
two we shall remember the christmas of nineteen twenty one partly at any rate by the wonderful succession of pellucid frosty moonlit nights that preceded it we walked round and round our rustic grange trying to focus just what we wanted to say to our friends as a christmas greeting a curious misery was upon our spirits for we felt that in many ways we had been recreant to the spirit of friendship
when we think for instance of the unanswered letters we have sinned horribly yet we wanted to give ourselves the selfish pleasure of saying a word of affection to those who have been kind to us and to whom in the foolish but unavoidable hurry of daily affairs we have been discourteous the way to love humanity we said to ourselves is not to see too much of it
moreover to write a kind of christmas sermon is apparently to put oneself into the loathsome false position of seeming to assume those virtues one praises we remember the first clergyman who made an impression upon our childish mind
it was in a country church in a village where we were visiting some kinsmen this parson was a great bearded fellow long since gone the way of flesh he was a bit of a ritualist his white surplice and embroidered streamers of red and gold impressed us enormously he came very close to our idea of divinity itself
we used to sit and hear him booming away and think vaguely how wonderful to be as virtuous as that when the organ throbbed and his vast gray beard rose ecstatically above his white-robed chest we thought that here was goodness incarnate
years later we asked what had become of him we heard that he had lost his job because he drank too much the more we think about that the tenderer our feeling is towards his memory only the sinner has a right to preach thinking about this pre-christmas feeling and wanting to say something about it but not knowing how we got as we started to tell you on a train
we went for a few hours to another city there we saw exhilaratingly different but fundamentally the same the shining business of life going forward the people in that city were carrying on their own affairs were hot-foot upon their own concerns
we saw their eager absorbed faces and what struck us was here are all these people whose lives are totally sundered from our own but they have at heart the same hopes and aspirations the same follies weaknesses disgusts and bitternesses as ourselves and the same would be so of a thousand cities and of a hundred thousand
then we got into one of those things called a sleeper which ought to be called a thinker an ideal cloister for meditation all down the dark aisle we could hear the innocent snores of our fellows but we ourself lay wakeful we felt rather like the mystic russian peasant who goes to bed in his coffin we were whirled along through a midnight landscape of transparent white moonlight
and quite as cheerful as the dead child in hans andersen borne through starry space by the angel we made our peace with everything we claim no credit for this we would have slept if we could there was a huge bump in the middle of the berth and there was a vile cold draught we read part of stephen crane's magnificent sketch the scotch express but those miserable little dim lamps
and then strangely enough there came a sudden realization of the amazing richness and fecundity of life every signboard along the railroad track is an illustration of it hideous enough still it is a kind of endless vista into the huge jumble of human affairs here's a billboard crying out something about a spark plug
or about the hotel teresa or on the side of a little shabby brick tenement a painted legend about bromo seltzer some one worked to put that advertisement up some one had sufficient credulity or gambling audacity to pay for it
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