AN INTERESTING VISITOR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19364, 22 July 1925, Page 2

AN INTERESTING VISITOR

MR. J. C. NEWLANDS LN WANGANUI. An exceedingly interesting visitor to Wanganui is Mr. J. C. Newlands, the famous platform entertainer, who is to give three recitals in the city this week. I He has been in the city since Saturday | last, and has had a busy time visiting various educational institutions and places of interest in the city. Mr. Newlands, who is a native of Edinburgh, has not only had a long connection with the educational Ijfe of the Old Land, but is recognised as one of lhe most noted elocutionists in Britain. For twenty-five years he was Fulton Lecturer in Elocution at New College, Edinburgh, and during that long period there came under his tuition many who have become distingufched preachers and orators. Mr. Ncwlduds is now making a world tour. He has been through Cafida, and when he completes his New /inland itinerary he will go to Australia, India and South Africa.

Chatting to a “Chronicle” representative last evening. Mr. Newlands, who is a man of charming personality, spoke illuminatingly of the dramatic spirit which is the basis and soul of elocution. An elocutionist, by his words and gestures, should not bp the mere mechanical imitator of somebody else—he should breathe the spirit of his subject as it appeals to his own innermost mind.

Asked whether he had a message for students of elocution, Mr. Newlands said he was afraid there w r ere reciters w’ho considered the exterior too much. “Unless a reciter works from within,” said Air. Newlands, “he will never make the slightest impression on his audience. I think gesture, for gesture’s sake, is a bad thing. Every movement should have a meaning, and every inflection should be revealed through the. voice, not in a mechanical way, but by coming from the mind.” had shifted civilisation from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the civilisation of the Pacific would be far superior to anything the world had yet seen.

“That the various branches of the Anglo-Saxon race will play a predominant part in this civilisation,” added Captain McCullagh, “is a fact that need rot be insisted on, for they ar-* playing a predominant part now. But what docs perhaps need to be insisted on is the possibility that the Pacific may become, in course of time, the principle centre of Anglo-Saxon activity, the centre around which all the English speaking peoples will be grouped, for since the invention of the aeroplane England has ceased to bp a;i island, and since the Great War it has become unable to support its excessive population, a population too great for it, and only congregated there because of exceptional and temporary circumstances. The Anglo-Saxons of England are as sick of the follies of Europe as the Anglo-Saxons of America, and as determined to pursue their own peculiar path of development free from all entangling alliances. The only country in which they can do so is Now Zealand, which in some of its physical features bears such a striking resemblance to tho Motherland. Macaulay was wise m making a New Zealander the man who is to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s from a broken arch of London Ninety per cent, of the population of Now Zealand is British, which is more than can be said of Great Britain itself. Why then should New Zealand’s raw products have to go all the way to England in order to be converted into finished articles, which are shipped back again? Why should England have to depend for its existence on New Zealand meat, and New ZoZaland had to depend for its cxistof the long and dangerous line c-f communications, even for a few months, this perilous interdependence might mean the ruin of both New Zealand and Great Britain. The end < f the century may see all the Bra If ord factories established in New Zealand, and all the other factories as well, may see practically tho whole, English race settled in new seats under the Southern Cross, may sec England itself no longer the centre of the Empire, but, rather, a great garden, a great fortress on the flank of Europe, a huge naval base, a vast historical museum, containing the archives of the Empire, a palace for the King, and a council hall for the Witonagemot of the AngloSaxon States.’*