Can Literature be Identified with A Nations' History.

Dr. Beaglehole says "Yes."

Under the auspices of the Literary Society, Dr. Being in an address given recently made a plea for the better study of history.

Dr. Beaglehole, like Carlile, identified history with poetry, considering that history was only of any value in so far as it was literature. He stated that not only should history be literature, but a knowledge of history was essential tor the study of literature or art. This point his audience considered debatable, but Dr. Beaglehole argued that a knowledge of the conditions of Puritan England would produce a better understanding for Paradise Lost while to appreciate "The Waste Land'" or "Ulysses" one must be at home in the intellectual atmosphere of the present day.

Conversely he considered literature essential for the study of history. Somewhere it was said that text book contained all the facts and none of the truth, and the historical novel the truth and none of the facts. "History," he said, "acted by men passionate in their time, must be written with passion and read with passion as if slacking an intellectual thirst." It is to Kipling, with all his rollicking vulgarity, rather than to the historian, we turn, to understand the spirit Cecil Rhodes and the Jameson Raid and to see in perspective the whole epoch of English Imperialism with all its nastly implications.

In concluding, he asked had the absence of any real literature in New Zealand, the shoals of bad verse yearly produced, any meaning in the history of the country? Was there any connection between Art in New Zealand" and the National Expenditure Adjustment Act—did they signify something mediocre in the colonial mind?