NEW BRITISH MIND

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22628, 20 July 1935, Page 21

NEW BRITISH MIND

CULTURE IN DOMINIONS ART, SCIENCE, POLITICS • NOT MANY GREAT NAMES In an article on “ The New English Mind ” published in United Empire, Mr A. Wyatt Tilby attempts to analyse intellectual tendencies in the dominions. He states the theory that a colonial civilisation is necessarily imitative and inferior and then tries to test it by acting out relevant facts. In doing so, he writes, an analysis was made of the names considered worthy ox inclusion in the Encyclopaedia Bntannica as being men of more than local reputation, and a few prominent contemporaries were added to bring the list up to date. The results were interesting. By wav of comparison it should be said that the British Isles, with a much longer history and larger population, yielded a list of 1800 famous men and women. On re-examination, however, some of these were found to have been born abroad, a few more were omitted on one ground or other, and the revised British total was, therefore, approximately 1700. HANDICAP OF REMOTENESS.

On the other hand, the overseas total numbered 140. Of these, 71 were born in Canada, the senior Dominion; 19 in Australia, 6 in New Zealand, 20 in South Africa, 13 in India, and 11 in various islands# (five in the West Indies). It is clear from these figures that Australia and New Zealand have been handicapped by distance from the centre as well ns youth, and I may add that a detailed examination of this and other evidence shows that small island communities are still more seriously handicapped. It is not that they are less likely to produce talent than Continental countries, but that talent has fewer opportunities' of fruition. An oak cannot grow in a flower pot. Of the 19 famous Australians, nine were born in Victoria, three in South Australia, only four in New South Wales — an older and larger State than Victoria — and none in Queensland. The intellectual predominance of the temperate south is significant, and is precisely parallel to a similar declension in the United States, while 13 of the 20 famous South Africans were of Dutch origin. OWN NATIONAL LEADERS.

Broadly speaking, half these men were statesmen or lawyers engaged in public life; that is to say, they were concerned with the political side "of dominion achievement. The quality as well as quantity of the list —which included such names as Lanrier, Blake and Bonar Law, in Canada, Barton and Forrest in Australia, and Botha and Smuts in South Africa —showed that the new countries could produce their own national leaders, and in this respect at least were very like the old.

I shuffled my human cards afresh and the tabulated results were curious. There were 23 authors on the list, nine artists and 13 scientists; one philosopher, but no distinguished divine —the churches exist overseas, but the great preachers and inspired prophets have still to come. Not only have the dominions failed so lor to produce a new religious revelation —by way of contrast, the United States has already produced two, the Latter Day Saints and the Christian Scientists —but they have done little in (he way of new theology. Different skies, it seems, do not always discover a new way to heaven. Turn now from the sacred to the secular sphere. Six of our authors were poets—Kendall, of New South Wales, and Roy Campbell, of Natal, are representative of the new talent, but the inspired singer has yet to appear; and nine were novelists. These were mostly of the second or even the third class—Gilbert Parker, Mrs Humphre/ Ward and Guy Boothby are a typical selection. DRAMATISTS LACKING. The drama, however, is altogether lacking: and this last deficiency becomes more, and not less, curious from the fact that a similar and parallel list for the United States exhibits the same shortcoming. Does modern democracy, then, not produce distinguished dramatists; and if not, why not? Five of onr artists were painters, and only one a musician; in the dominions, as in Britain, the most creative and spiritual of the arts unfortunately remains the Cinderella of the English-speak-ing world. So much for the Muses, who have yet to assert their claims; now for the sciences. Medicine heads the list, with five distinguished names, closely followed by four geologists; but rather strangely, in view of the rich field of observation available, there was no famous Dominion biologist. Nor, greatly to my surprise, were there any conspicuous inventors of the type that distinguish the rival lists of eminent men in Britain and the United States. In the dominions I found neither a Trevithick nor n Stephenson, neither a Kelvin nor an Edison: none, in fact, of the particular cast of mind that has done more than the statesmen or the artisl or the man of letters to revolutionise social and industrial life, and to make the modern world ns we know it to-day. This is a serious omission, and one which casts an implied reflection on the originality of the Dominion intellect ng revealed in these lists. On the other hand, a catalogue which contain* the names of Osier, Banting, and Rutherford shows that in discovery as distinct from its brother, invention, the new overseas countries can produce as good men as any in England. LOSS BY EMIGRATION.

Finally. I took the point of emigration from the Dominion circumference to Empire centre. Of these 140 eminent men. 42 sought and found fame outside the country of their birth; but the tiue proportion Is very much higher than it sounds, for half the grand total were politicians whose careers were necessarily passed in the dominions. More than half the remainder therefore left their native country in order the better to pursue their chosen career; a loss which, though obviously inevitable in the circumstances, is nevertheless regrettable from the point of view of a new civilisation. It is fair to add, however, that the dominions gain something by way of intellectual imports as well as losing through intellectual exports. In Canada, for example, the poet R. W. Service, the naturalist Thompson Seton. and the economist Stephen Leacock all come from England; while Lindsay Gordon, the poet whom Australia has taken to her heart as a national possession, was born in the But at present, Mr Tilby concludes under this head, the dominion* lose more than they gain in this mental exchange, and this is likely to continue for some considerable time —until, in fact, the new overseas civilisations have developed a distinctive intellectual quality and calibre of their own. And that, judging by the example of the United States, may take a century or more to bring about.