GENERAL SMUTS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 25, Issue 3759, 22 May 1936, Page 11

GENERAL SMUTS

A GREAT CAREER. By general admission Jan Christian Smuts is one of the great men of our time, writes Mr. J. A. Hobson in the Manchester Guardian. But the mere enumeration of his varied fields of success as statesman, lawyer, soldier, philosopher does not explain his .greatness as a man, though it doubtless carries a presumtion of all-round capacity. The essential character of Smuts lies in an inpenetrable background. For behind the unexpected powers he gives out in his changeful life there rests the unique nature from which these powers flow, the “Holism” of his personality, to use the word which he has invented to express his deepest thought upon life and the universe.

Born and reared in early boyhood on the illimitable veld, of Boer parentage, speaking Dutch, and in little contact with British South Africans until early manhood, he had no schooling, until at 12, a “pale and weedy” boy, he went to a school in Riabock West, from which he passed four years later to college at Ste'llenbosch for preparation as a preacher, a career to which he was then inclined and which his family favoured. There he laid the foundations of a wide knowledge of the classics and discovering a deep interest in Shelley, which soon extended to other poets, English and German.

The love Smuts has for Shelley, for Keats, for Whitman, for Milton and Goethe, and Schiller and Shakespeare and the Bible, is not founded on any urgent desire towards Beauty. Smuts has little aesthetic feeling. He admits it. “I have no taste,” he says, “and have no sense of humour.” How far this itself is humorous self-disparagement only those who know Smuts personally, can judge. Years at Cambridge. .The statement that he had little aesthetic feeling has a sounder basis. For Smuts early made it evident that his poetic studies were directed to the discovery of certain sorts of truth only expressed in poetry and not to beauties of poetic form. His earliest work, written at Cambridge, to which he passed with a scholarship from Stellenbosch, was an elaborate study of Walt Whitman, which never saw the light of publication, though George Meredith, as reader for Chapman and Hall, gave it a high commendation. Surely a strange occupation for a young collegian, reading law and heading the list in both parts of the Law Tripos. But not so strange when one knows that the dominant strain of his intellectual life has been the effort to understand the unique wholeness of personality, a task towards which Whitman made a conspicuous contribution. The account of Smuts at Cambridge is that of an alien who spent his afternoons in the University library and took no part in games. The qualities of Cambridge never really touched him: He had no intimates, he says, nor was he influenced by anything there except books. He remained, as ever, contentedly lonely. This depressing picture must be qualified. For one at least of his older associates at Cambridge kept in close touch with him for many years, constantly supplying him with the new books on philosophy and politics which were his chief reading, and others of his contemporaries esteemed and admired him.

But not until his return to Capetown as a qualified barrister in 1895 did he begin to feel his feet, to pass to that middle ground between thought and action called politics. Captured for a brief period by the magnetic force of Rhodes, he soon broke away after the Jameson Raid, and carried his energy into the Transvaal, where by Kruger’s shfrewd insight he soon became State Secretary, a capacity in which he conducted most of the diplomatic intercourse immediately preceding the outbreak of the Boer War. It was then that he was plunged suddenly into the world of action and displayed qualities that were almost as surprising to him as to those around him. Though a sincere admirer of Kruger, “the greatest man I have known,” he played for peace, and had it not been for the fanatical war spirit of Milner, brought into personal conflict with Kruger at Bloemfontein, he might have secured a reasonable compromise on terms which Chamberlain was willing to accept. South African War. When war came Smuts quitted a life of thought and politics for active service. It was a dreadful life of personal peril and hardship. But Smuts discovered himself indifferent to danger, and the years of strenuous endurance changed him physically from the pale, weary young politician of 1899 to the stalwart, vigorous, bearded figure that came to England after Vereeniging.

The condition of South Africa since the war has been a constant inflammation of racial issues, and though the firm strength of Botha and Smuts succeeded in quelling the hostilities of British and Dutch the deep underlying antagonisms of colour, inflamed by the introduction of Chinese labour and of Indian coolies, are still unresolved. Here we come back to the strain of the veld and the voortrekker in Smuts, who has never admitted full

equality of political and economic opportunity to Asiatics or native Africans. The story of his dealings with Gandhi is told with interesting detail, while “one feels his impulse towards the natives resembles that of his fellow-Boers."

If he was —if he is—a Liberal by conviction, he was and remains a dictator by disposition. All very well for Smuts to say he likes the simple folk, the real human beings, that he rests on the common sense of the common man. His faint reliance, in intercourse or practice, on the common man, the things he believes the common man believes, do not support him.