ROBERT FALCON SCOTT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20538, 12 April 1930, Page 1 (Supplement)

ROBERT FALCON SCOTT.

THE MAN.

nr KOTABE

Stephen Gwynn's "Captain Scott" is a surprisingly human book. There is a school of biographers that seems chiefly concerned to display its cleverness and originality. Its aim seems to be to find a single clue to the great man's character, and then to use the utmost ingenuity in • compelling it to explain everything. Sum a man up in a phrase, and then sort out the details of his life to provo that this phrase is a master-key that opens every lock. This type of biographer is always interesting; he contrives, if ho is clever enough, to fix a few salient features of his victim on the public mind, after tho manner of tho skilled caricaturist. The fact is that the great man whose lifo is allegedly being written and whoso character is being interpreted becomes merely an opportunity for a much smaller man to displfty his particular gifts. "A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope," said the famous classicist Bentley, "but you must not call it Ilomer."

Human nature is not as simplo as all that. No man is all of a piece. The wise man often acts below his wisdom; tho hero beneath his courage; tho man of lofty soul in a fashion scarcely worthy of his ideals. Tho complexities of the human heart cannot be trapped in a facilo formula.

Thoro is another type of biography where it is impossible to sec the wood for the trees. Tho mass of ill-digested details obscures the linos of the portrait. No clear-cut face looks out of the jungle of facts. Thete is a human being somewhere hidden in the confusion, but your best efforts cannot come at him. 'J he more modern sort of biography is piobably a protest against the old tanglo of undergrowth method. Where in the modern work the paths are too clear and run too straight, in the more cumbersome form there arc no paths at all. Self-Revelation. Mr. Gwynn manages to avoid both S evil a. and Charybdis—a most creditable piece of navigation. He assumes a \ery considerable amount of knowledge in his readers, and instead of doing all their thinking for them and battering them with his conclusions, ho puts down what seem to him the relevant and significant data, the farts essential to a reasoned judgment; the readers can then form their own conclusions. That ss tho sort of book 1 like. I am always suspicious of the man who is over-anxious to coinpel me to go with him. Mr. Gwynn pays his readers tho compliment of assuming that if he selects for them from his mass of material tho portions that flash a swift illunun.vbn m the personality of his hero, they will be intelligent enough to sco the obvious for themselves; or they may have treasures of experience that will enable them to interpret aspects of » rich character better than ho can from his own angle. ;\s a result ho casts no shadow 011 his book; it is Scott vou see from beginning to c.id.

And what of Ihe man Robert Falcon Scott ? 110 touched our New Zealand life for a few weeks. "Ihe Uerra Nova sailed from Lyttelton on Saturday, November 25, 1910; but she had to call again at Dunedin on Sunday night. On Monday there were farewells and a danco. On the Tuesday afternoon she finally set sail. JScott joined her here —Mrs. Scott with Mrs. Evans and Mrs. Wilson staying on board till she was past tlio Heads, when a tug took them ashore." And after that, the struggle South, the days of waiting and preparing, the growing anxiety through Amundsen's presence in the Antarctic, the great venture launched at last, the triumph that turned to ashes in their mouths when they found that Amundsen had forestalled them, the desperate march toward the base, Evans and Gates breaking up under the pressure and the others sacrificing their chances to escape in order to stand by them; and then the final blizzard which kept them penned in their tent until there was no strength left to cover the eleven miles to safety and supplies. It was from New Zealand the news was sent round the world that Scott had won and had failed. Our Southern hills fading on the sky-line wero the last glimpse he had of the lands of his people; to them the bearers of ill-tidings came. The Making of the Man.

What of the man these intimate letters of his reveal as the years in passing have given us a. true perspective, and wo are no longer blinded by the sudden blaze of glory that thrilled the world with pride and grief'!

There arc first the racial elements that went to the making of the man. Scott was a member of the same border family which a century before had produced Sir Walter Scott. A dour lighting race they were, with no very clear apprehension of the distinction between mine and thine. Life' was not a thing to be drowsed through for these hardy Scots. It was to bo measured by enemies overcome, insults avenged. The last thing that would occur to them was that they should play safe. They held the place of danger on the marches; death was for ever crouching at the door. .The borders were no place for the weakling, the craven, the man that could not make up his mind—the switherer as they call him in Scotland. The Devon Strain. That was one side of Scott. The branch of the family to which ho belonged had left Scotland in tho troubled turns of 1745, bad spent some time in exile on (lie Continent, and later settled in Devonshire. Captain Scott, then, was a combination of Scot and Devon man; two of the hardiest strains in tho British make-up united in him. The grim lighting spirit of the man, the quick power of decision in the hour of danger, may be traced to his Border ancestry (how Sir Walter would have loved his kinsman). Hut they were reinforced by the kindred elements in the Devon type, and the special Devon romantic: urge which sent Krobisher, Raleigh, Hawkins, Drake and a. thousand others to blazo trails in the golden West. There may be nothing in it; but it certainly seems that in l)im both strains, at their highest power, were focussed; generations have lived and ventured and fought and died both in North arid South that they might give to the stock the qualities which in tho fulness of timo weio to unite in one man and add the name of Robert Falcon Scott to the Valhalla of the Immortals.

Tho other qualities, personal for the most pari, and in no sense racial, which appear in the self-revelation of this book are sometimes surprising, but all in any right view essential to t lie making of tho man. I shall outline, this moro intimate sido of his personality next >vcek\