J. C. Beaglehole’s desk. Photograph by Lyn Corner.
The New Zealand Scholar: J. C. Beaglehole’s 1954 Lecture
If there is one New Zealander who has a claim to be the New Zealand scholar, it is John Cawte Beaglehole: authority on Captain James Cook, lifelong professor at Victoria University in Wellington, man of culture and letters. Beaglehole studied Cook, a man whose journeys and discoveries “enlarged the world”, as Allen Curnow’s poem put it, and in doing so Beaglehole both enlarged the world of knowledge and created a tradition of scholarship in this country.
117 years after Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his lecture on the nature and aspirations of The American Scholar, Beaglehole delivered his own lecture taking up the same question in the New Zealand context. The date was the 21st of April 1954; the occasion, the Margaret Condliffe Memorial Lecture at Canterbury University College. The lecture Beaglehole delivered, later turned into an essay, is a New Zealand classic. When I first read it a couple of years ago on a brief trip back to New Zealand while studying overseas I was stunned by how deftly Beaglehole took up Emerson’s challenge, moved beyond it, and seemed to embed all the while a sense of what New Zealand uniquely needs in its minds.
However, the lecture/essay is notoriously difficult to track down. There is certainly a Digital Emerson, but nothing similar for Beaglehole. The only stand-alone book produced with the essay was done in an edition of 100, and, so far as I can tell, the essay has never been published online. Your best bet in finding the essay has been a book published in 1969 on the occasion of John Beaglehole’s retirement: The Feel of Truth, edited by Peter Munz.
Like Emerson’s was to so many Americans, Beaglehole’s essay is a guiding beacon for New Zealanders wondering where and how to direct their mental energies. It was a particularly bright beacon during a time when New Zealand had little in the way of culture to speak of; but culture and tradition is never-ending, so the beacon should not be much less bright today. Beaglehole calls Emerson’s lecture America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence”; and I hazard that Beaglehole’s own lecture might be seen in similar terms in this former colony.
Beaglehole’s description of the war of intellectual independence:
“A war of intellectual independence is, in the region of the mind, a pretty bloody, painful and wearing thing. It is a civil war; and it shocks into division not merely society—that would not matter so much perhaps—but also the mind of the individual.”
For America, before the declaration of intellectual independence, Beaglehole says that “Culture, the life of the mind, still came from the east.” Ambitious Americans travelled to England, to be “in contact with the heart of things”:
“The expatriates come not from the colony, but from the province. The individual becomes mature—or rather, the potentially mature individual has the unease, the discontent, the growing pains that afflict him in a limited society, and he turns his eyes and his feet towards the metropolis. Nor is this simply a matter of the ambitious young person wanting to make his fortune; not inadequate fortunes are to be made in the province, as every shrewd metropolitan businessman knows. It is a matter of the provincial wanting more life, as a writer perhaps or an artist—to be in contact with the heart of things, even if the heart of things is felt in poverty in a garrett.”
And for the New Zealander prior to 1954, Beaglehole says (though we can ask whether the same is still true today) that:
“For the New Zealander, to go home was to go into exile; the New Zealander was like an Antaeus who sucked up not life but death from the soil, the death of the mind. Is this too melodramatic? Then consider the plight of the sensitive and articulate New Zealanders who have lived much abroad. They are people torn in twain. They are a Katherine Mansfield, with “New Zealand in her bones”, but with New Zealand perforce taking on a rather romantic distant haze, of her own remembered childhood and youth; they are a Robin Hyde, who (to quote Mr McCormick) “knew her country with an intimacy and an understanding that few have equalled, but… was drawn by an irresistible compulsion to Europe where she was to meet her death”—her physical death; they are a John Mulgan, to the first few paragraphs of whose Report on Experience I refer you; they are others to whom I have talked within the last five years, and for whom it is, now, too soon, or too late, to come back.”
After that declaration of intellectual independence America had its own tradition, its own culture, that meant its citizens were not to go into exile should they come home—and it is that idea of how New Zealand might come to have the same thing that Beaglehole takes up in the rest of the lecture:
“Must we continue to consider him as a “post-graduate scholar”, fleeing to the other end of the earth for salvation, driven back only by circumstance to a state where he feels damned? My autobiographical fragment will show that my own answer to this has become No; and I think that the concept of tradition may give us a lead into the function that should be his.”
Beaglehole is using Emerson’s definition of a scholar as man thinking. This is a broad definition and allows for not only academics but writers and artists and musicians, people of any kind who use their minds to “enlarge the world”. And it is the creation of a tradition by people thinking that can allow life to be “rich and varied” in a place that is not already a cultural ‘centre’:
“Now existence in a provincial context can be very satisfying if the province communicates life: if the individual, however highly cultivated (I do not say the intellectual snob) can feel at home in it, and has demands made upon him that he feels it worth while to meet. The province will communicate life only if it has a rich and varied life; and the province that has a rich and varied life has a rich and varied tradition.”
How, then, can the province have a rich and varied life, and therefore a rich and varied tradition? This takes Beaglehole to the thrust of his lecture, of the very role of the scholar, of anyone thinking deeply in the country. It is this passage that stands out for me of the whole lecture, particularly where Beaglehole draws attention to the double role that thought must play, being both within the “old-world tradition” and the “tradition that is peculiar to ourselves”:
“A tradition is not a thing that just happens, and persists without the conscious knowledge of those it affects. If we are to profit from it in the best possible way, to extract from its riches the maximum nourishment, we must discover it. It needs critical enquiry, conscious exploration. It is the scholar’s job to make the tradition plain. As a 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 to ourselves. He is concerned with the pattern of life we have got from our own past, as a community in this country, and so with our sense of the age we live in, in this place now. Our scholar, for this purpose, tended to be a literary critic; but in a broad sense he must be a historian, whether his subject-matter be literature, art, politics, economic development, social relations of any sort at all… Whatever he is, he must be conscious of what he is doing, he must be critical.”
Beaglehole draws attention to a tension in T. S. Eliot’s writing, where he says at one point that tradition must be “in the blood”, but that we must also obtain it “by great labour”. But, Beaglehole says,
“I do not think the paradox that emerges from the changed emphasis of the Eliotian mind is at all a real contradiction. For our scholar, our critical historian, is also according to the measure of his greatness in some sort a creator. As he disentangles our tradition, as he makes us conscious of ourselves, he gives us ourselves.”
The measure of success of New Zealand’s culture and tradition might be measured not in how many New Zealanders we manage to encourage to stay in this country for study and beyond, but, rather, how many of those New Zealanders who do leave happen to come back:
“We can, I think, discern with due joy some auspicious signs of the coming days. It would not be auspicious if fewer New Zealanders left New Zealand; I would increase the flow from the province to the metropolis… Obviously some, having gone, will never find it in their hearts to come back. But a province with a tradition rich enough, with a pattern of life varied enough, with a sense of its own identity and its own time lively enough, will always bring enough of them back.”
More on Beaglehole:
“I think I am becoming a New Zealander”: Letters of J. C. Beaglehole, edited by Tim Beaglehole
A Life of J. C. Beaglehole, by Tim Beaglehole
J. C. Beaglehole: Public Intellectual, Critical Conscience by Doug Munro