POINT OF DEPARTURE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 803, 10 December 1954, Page 13

POINT OF DEPARTURE

THE NEW ZEALAND SCHOLAR, by J. C. Beaglehole; Margaret Condliffe Memorial Lecture, Canterbury University College, 1954. HE scholar’s task is not only evaluation but continual self-evaluation. He has to think of events in relation to men, and himself in relation to both. It is when self-evaluation turns to self-sat-isfaction that the scholar gets out of focus, and the difference between scholarship and eruditidn becomes emptily apparent. Who is your scholar? Dr. Beaglehole himself, certainly and modestly: it is with much diffidence that he invites us to examine the changes in his own attitude to the New Zealand scene, both changed .a@ great deal over the last twenty-five years. But "I take him to be the thinker in general," says Dr. Beaglehole, and this broad view is more than welcome when it allows him to tell us of the work of Joe Heenan, "that passionately informal, that impulsive, generous, quick-tempered, wise, imaginative, romantic, pig-headed,- enthusiastic, hard-boiled, sentimental, gullible, sceptical, prejudiced and tolerant man." An opening quotation from Emerson leads to a comparison between New England of the eighteen-thirties and New Zealand today, the proposition being that both may be thought of as provincial. rather than colonial. This leads to considerations of nationalism and the part aé_ transferred tradition plays in it. For the New Zealand scholar, "he must be in the tradition; but he must also stand outside it, and with a double duty, to make real in New Zealand both the old-world tradition, that which we share with others, ‘and the tradition that is peculiar jto ourselves." I do not know how widely this booklet has been published, but it will be widely discussed. It is, in lucid ‘brevity, a point of departure. An historian and a scholar has fertilised the "seedbed" of the present and indicated the future of our ever-but never-changine prob-

lems of scholarship.

D.

G.