INTELLIGENT PEOPLE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 800, 19 November 1954, Page 5

INTELLIGENT PEOPLE

Sir,-Reading James Bertram's admirable review of a book on. prisoners of war, I was struck, like your correspondent "A Perturbed Student," by his reference to the superior intelligence of the French, I think I know what Mr. Bertram means, It is that the Frenchman is intellectually more active and curious, and more critical. That the Frenchman is more so in respect to the arts, is generally accepted. This was illustrated by what an Englishman said to me who had served in France through the First War. He knew the language and, I think, taught it in an English school. He told me he never returned to England for any of his leave, but spent it all in France, because he liked the life there. "Compare talk in an English mess with talk in a French mess,’ he commented. Also, it is widely agreed that in certain ways of life, such as eating and drinking, the Frenchman is more intelligent than the Englishman, or the New Zealander. But are there limits to being "intelligent’? I have been asking myself for some years if Frenchmen are really as intelligent as they are believed to be. The art and science of war call for intelligence, but consider the record of the French (inheritors of the Napoleonic tradition) in three great wars. They were invaded and beaten in 1870. In 1914, after more than 40 years to prepare for another possible attack, they gravely miscalculated the weight and direction of the German thrust. The British high command appraised the situation more accurately. In 1940 they were overwhelmed, partly because they judged as impossible what proved to be possible. Or take politics. Is it intelligent to have so many parties and change the government every few months? It has been suggested by a highly competent authority that the trouble with French politics is that the French bring to them the high critical faculty they apply to the arts. Is this intelligent? Is it not better to realise that, as Gladstone said, in politics one must be content with second best? TI am not a philosopher or a metaphysician, and I put forward these ideas in no dogmatic spirit. I don’t know what distinction philosophers make between intelligence and wisdom, but I suggest there is a difference. Wisdom consists, I should say, of intelligence plus emotion, plus intuition-plus something beyond pure reason, The English are proverbially a stupid people. But are they really? Among the great nations their political system is the best. largely because it has a considerable element of the _ illogical or irrational. Perhaps it was wisdom rather than intelligence that’ caused them to conduct themselves so well in _ prison camps. I should put it in one word*character."

IRISH-NEW ZEALANDER

(Wellington),