POET AND SCHOLAR

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19661, 1 December 1933, Page 13

POET AND SCHOLAR

MR LAURENCE BIN YON. A distinguished poet, Mr Laurence Binyon, has left England to join the staff of the Harvard University as Professor of Poetry. For 40 years Mr Binyon has bc i: on the staff o: the British Museum, latterly as Keeper of Prints and Drawings. When Mr Binyon’s decision was announced Mr Harold Laski paid a great tribute to him. “The inner life of a scholar is rarely known to the multitude. Its main events take place within his own mind; its creativeness is too specialised to appeal to the world at large,” wrote Mr Laski. “I suspect, therefore, that Mr Laurence Binyon's retirement after 40 years' service in the British Museum will be less marked in the Press than would be the resignation of a minor Under-Secretary from the Government “An unanswerable case could be made for the assertion that the Museum is one of the supreme educational instruments in Great Britain. It is not only a great palimpsest of human history. It not only preserves the record of human evolution with that fullness of devotion which alone makes possible its adequate understanding. It has been the mainstay of scholarship in the country. From its materials there have emerged more and more valuable insights Into the process of civilisation than ever came from Whitehall or Westminster. “Mr Binyon is a typical Museum official in one sense; though it must be added that few Museum officials have attained his remarkable distinction. He is a typical Museum offlc . 1 in that for half a lifetime his main thought has been to make the great collections with which he is charged more available and more illuminating to the public. To make them tell their story he has been compelled to understand their story To understand it he has made himsell a distinguished figure in the world ol Oriental scholarship. “We know things to-day about the significance of Chinese art that wt could not have known if men like Mi B'.r.yon had not given 1 ng yt patient devotion to grim matters like chronology’ and cataloguing, to th< exact comparison of styles and forms to the patient reconstruction from i chaos of materials of something lik< the beginnings of an ordered survey. “In Harvard and in Munich, in Pari; and Chicago and Madrid. I have heart men speak ol what they owed to M Binyon. the official and the scholar. IL has been a living demonstration c' th« great ideal that a scholar's work —if It be a true scholar—makes him part o a great fellowship which knows in limits.”