Evening Post. SATURDAY, MARCH 12, 1927. SCHOLARSHIP—THE BEST TYPE

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 60, 12 March 1927, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, MARCH 12, 1927. SCHOLARSHIP—THE BEST TYPE

For variety and excellence of talent and attainment the record of Mr. Walter Leaf, whose death at or about the age of 75 was reported on lhursday, must surely be hard to beat Commerce, finance, classical scholarship and archaeology, letters education, and mountaineering, have all claimed his attention, not for the most part in turn but concurrently and he has made a success of them all. For Walter Leaf there was apparently no such thing as having too many irons in the fire. At Cambridge he won the Craven and was bracketed with another as Senior' Uassic. He was Chairman of the Westminster Bank when he died. In the interval he had been President of the Hellenic Society, Chairman of the London Chamber of Commerce ot winch he had been one of the founders, Vice-President of the Alpine Club, Member of the London County Council, Chairman of the Committee of London Clearing Banks, President of the Institute of Bankers, President of the Classical Association, and President of the International Chamber of Commerce. Kegard for our space prevents our attempting to give an exhaustive list or making more than a passing re ference' to tha fact that two of the great banking amalgamations of our time—the amalgamation of the London and Westminster Bank with the London and County Bank, and of the London County and Westminster Bank with Parr's. Bank—are attributed in large measure to Mr. Leaf's initiative and personal negotiation. And in order to appreciate fully the demands of his immense banking responsibilities one has to remember that he had to carry them through all the perils and. anxieties of the Great War.

this great aggravation of his burden by the War failed to part Mr. Leaf from his first love. One of the greatest of his contributions to classical scholarship appeared during the war, and, apart from its date, it bears interesting evidence of the fact. He had been appointed the Norman Wait Harris Lecturer for 1914-15, had selected "Homer and History" for his subject, and was due to deliver the lectures before the North-western University at Evanston, Illinois, in or about January, 1915. But the War prevented Mr. Leaf from keeping his engagement, and the lectures were printed without being delivered. In a preface dated the 18th September, 1915, he explains the position as follows:—

The Norman Wait" Han-is .Lecture Committee have most generously given their •permission to tlio publication of the book as one of the series, though the lectures have never been given; and it has been decided that it should now appear, little consonant though it is -with the surroundings of the moment. It may at least serve as a protest, faint and feeble enough, against the extinction of intellectual interest in the Hood of barbarous materialism which lias been let loose upon Europe. That 'such work as this should receive attention or encouragement at such a time seems to bo past hope; it can at best be a memento of days when research was not wholly concentrated upon explosives and poison gas.

Though the world is not yet perhaps completely restored to sanity, its thoughts are no longer "wholly concentrated upon explosives and poison gas," and it is a safe conjecture that in the land which was chiefly responsible for letting loose "ihe flood of barbarous materialism" upon Europe Mr. Leaf's book has been studied at least as diligently as in England or America.

In peace time at any rate scholarship is without respect of persons or nations. Even if it were not, the studies of the English scholar who has described the work of Schliemann, the German archaeologist, on die sites of Troy and Mycenoe as "no less than the creation of prehistoric Greek archaeology," and has adopted his principal conclusions, could not fail of a welcome in Germany. Though there are fortunately no international boundaries in learning, one may point with pride to Mr. Leaf as illustrating the very best type of British scholar—the scholar who is also a man of the world, and who can bring all beautiful theories and "a priori" assumptions to the test of practical experience and common sense. The sanity of our scholarship is due in large measure to the help that it has constantly received from men who do not come to it as professionals, and whose balance and breadth of view are guaranteed by their other interests. What they lack in technical equipment may be more than counterbalanced on points which require practical judgment and taste for their adjustment. Mr. Leaf was in the rare position of combining these external advantages with a technical scholarship which the cares of business seem never to have prevented him from keeping up to date.

There seems, indeed, lo he a special affinity between the business

which was Mr. Leaf's principal care and learning. Like him, George Grote Walter Bagehot, and Edward C odd were all bankers, and as Mr. Clodc who is still with us at the age of 86, is described "as one of the interesting group of Victorians who have combined banking with authorship successfully," there have doubtless been others- Of th o =e named the closest parallel to Leaf is presented by Grote, whose "History of Greece," begun more than a century ago and completed more than seventy years ago, has not yet been superseded as a whole, and on its strongest point—the treatment of Atnenean democracy—is still unsurpassed: who received the best degrees Oxford and Cambridge could offer for entirely different service to learning, viz., his share in the founding of London University; and who had also a very creditable record in politics and philosophy. If Leaf has surpassed Grote in the variety of his activities and in his special eminence as a banker, Grote will probably be given the first place in the solidity and permanence of his contributions to learning. That Achilles was not a solar myth, nor Agamemnon and Troy mere figments of the poetic imagination; that Agamemnon probably reigned in Argos and .certainly led a Greek expedition to Troy; that in Leafs words, "there was a real reT Ti ,real GVents ' and out of this the Iliad grew"; that, whether the poem was mainly the work of a single genius or of a syndicate ot minor poets who stumbled :"t0 collective greatness, the Iliad should be read as history rather than tarry tale, and as conveying a true picture of a real civilisation; and toat what brought the Greek hosts to Troy was not the abduction of Helen but competition for the trade of the Aegean and the Euxine—these are some of the propositions which Leal s researches have helped to illuminate. Paradoxes fifty years ago they may all be truisms before a few more years have passed; and how much will then be thought of the labours that brought about the change? Leaf's share in the beautiful translation of the "Iliad," which after 45 years is still without a rival, may prove to be his most enduring title to the public gratitude.