Roberts, William Goodridge

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1960
WILLIAM GOODRIDGE ROBERTS
to be Doctor of Laws

May I preface my citation by remembering aloud that at this academic ceremony thirty years ago I personally had the privilege of presenting the candidate's illustrious father, Theodore Goodridge Roberts, for the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters?

The name Roberts is among Fredericton's greater glories; and among our lovelier surviving residences is the old Georgian rectory on George Street, which was the boyhood home of Theodore and Sir Charles, and nursed the infancy of Goodridge.

That glory is the richer in that the genius of a talented family, long manifested in literature, has been reincarnated in a painter. To his home, his father, his uncle, to his relative, Bliss Carman, he may indeed owe his deep yearning for the Countryside. The voice is the Roberts voice, but the soul is the soul of Goodridge. Devoid of their elegiac tenderness, it has something profounder, starker and entirely his own. In his landscapes every brushstroke is a
pulsation of his heart, and the paint so many drops of its blood. The Canada that emerges is not Nature but the man himself; as untidy as she but as organized, embodying all human melancholy in a weed-grown fence, eternity in a forest oak, fraught with a primeval gloom, or bathed in "light that never was, on sea or land".

To paint is his whole life. Constitutionally unable to share painting with anything else, he has endured earlier days cramped by poverty or distracted by teaching. But, in this past year, while making one more gallant sacrifice, he may well have achieved his miracle. Endowed as the University's resident artist, he has brought what he claims is fulfilment to himself, and what we know is inspiration to an entire community.

Concerning his art he has two more utterances. "I like" he says, "to paint young people . . . ones who have as yet retained their grace with a quality of both skeleton and the young flower about them, before they have filled out and settled into solid citizens, or have become types, whether of success or failure."

The other is his ambition one day to join the great company of mural painters.

Mr. President, let us crown this fruitful year by promising Goodridge Roberts the consummation of both these ambitions. Among our future buildings -- and they will be many -- let there be one, the noblest and most gracious of them all. And let it have a large and lofty expanse of white wall. The models, as you know, will not be lacking. Where else but on a University campus, our University campus, will Goodridge find such bands of young people that "have not yet filled out and settled into solid citizens, or have become types, whether of success or failure" ?

This, surely, is to invite a masterpiece!

From:
Cattley, Robert E.D. Honoris causa: the effervescences of a university orator. Fredericton: UNB Associated Alumnae, 1968.