PUTTING HUMANITY IN A BOX

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 259, 9 June 1944, Page 10

PUTTING HUMANITY IN A BOX

Van Loon’s Picturesque ‘Perspective "’

HE news reached us the other day that Hendrik Willem van Loon, the writer of popular histories "The Story of Mankind,’ "The Arts of Mankind," etc., had died in America. Ven Loon must have been well known to many New Zealanders, and so we have looked up something for our readers about his life and work. AN LOON’S career, briefly, reads like this: born in Rotterdam, 1882, educated in Holland; went to the United States at the age of 21, and made it his country. Studied at Cornell, Harvard and Munich, and worked as a foreign correspondent both before and during the Great War. Taught history and art in various American universities. Tremendous success of his book The Story of Mankind (1922) made him become a full-time writer. He enlivened his work with sketches done in a highly individual style (two of which we reproduce here). His books have been translated into 21 foreign languages, including Bantu and Urdu. As a historian, van Loon was more imaginative than scholarly, more vivid than exact. He might be called a specialist in general knowledge, and what his work lacked in depth of learning it made up in the breadth of its

appeal. He had a knack for putting historical and geographical data into some _ sort of rough perspective, whether in prose or line, that appealed instantly to the youthful mind, and must have proved its usefulness in hundreds of thousands of homes where children ask awkward questions about the world and its inhabitants. ... And That Would Be All Here, for instance, is a sample of his "perspective," a condensation of the opening paragraphs of his geographical work The Home of Mankind: ,; If everybedy in this world of ovrs were six feet tall and a foot and a-half wide and a foot thick . .. . then the whole of the human race ... . could be packed into a box measuring half a mile in™each direcee If we transported that box to the Grand Canyon of Arizona and balanced it neatly on the low stone wall . .. and then called little Noodle the dachshund, and told "him (the tiny beast is very intelligent, and loves to oblige) to give the unwieldy contraption a slight push with his soft brown nose,, there would be a moment cf crunching and ripping as the wooden planks loosened stones and shrubs and trees on their downward path, and then a low and even softer bumpity-bumpity-bump and a sudden splash when the outer edges struck the bank; of the Colorado River. Then silence and oblivion. The human sardines in their mortuary chest would soon be forgotten. The canyon would go on battling wind and air and sun and rain as it has done since it was created. The world would continue to run its even course through the uncharted heavens. The astronomers on distant and. nearby planets would have noticed nothing out of the ordinary. A century from now, a little mould, densely covered with vegetable matter, would perhaps indicate where humanity lay buried. And that would be all. Views on New Zealand That is how van Loon introduces a 500-page book of geography. And since his geography included not unnaturally, a short chapter on New Zealand, it is interesting to look it up and read a few excerpts: The Maoris are evidently one\of the few examples of a native stock which has been (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) able to maintain itself against the white man, and to adopt some of the more agreeable virtues of Western civilisation without at the same time drinking itself to death. They have given up several of their ancient habits and customs, such as eating their enemies tattooing their faces, and they send representatives to the New Zealand Parliament and build churches which are in every way as unattractive as the chapels constructed by their white masters: all of which bids well for the future, as far as the racial problem is concerned. New Zealand is not in any way tropical. It is as far removed from the equator as Italy, and enjoys the same sort of climate. This means that it is much more likely to become a permanent European establishment than Australia. All sorts of European fruits, such as peaches and apricots and apples and grapes and oranges, can be cultivated in the valleys, while the mountain sides provide excellent, grazing for cattle. A native flax, which must not be confused with the flax grown in Europe, is used for making clothes and mats, and the slow-growing trees of the North Island, exported chiefly from Auckland, make excellent timber. Ten Minutes for Dinner _ That is not exactly the way a New Zealander would distribute the emphasis in a description of his own country, but there is one other remark at the end of the same book that suggests that van Loon did know at least one of our national characteristics fairly well. On his last page, among a few parting remarks on the destiny of humanity, he says: Thus far we have always lived as if we were a sort of accident-as if cur stay on this planet were only a matter of years, or at best, of centuries. We have behaved with the indecent greed of passengers ‘on a New Zealand train who know that they will only have 10 minutes for the three-course dinner to be served at the next halting-place. To read that paragraph, one would conclude that van Loon either had visited New Zealand or was sufficiently impressed by someone’s account of our railway-platform customs to recall it for his simile. In fact, van Loon probably did set foot in New Zealand the year after The Home of Mankind was published. Who’s Who in America says he came to Australia and New Zealand on a lecturing tour in 1934, but it seems that what he really did was to travel on a luxury liner to give lectures to the passengers, and that if he landed in New Zealand he remained incognito. —

HOW VAN LOON illustrated the idea of historical time. The caption to this drawing from "The Story of Mankind" reads: "High up in the north in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by."