LITERARY LEADERSHIP.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 59, Issue 33, 18 November 1938, Page 4

LITERARY LEADERSHIP.

- Where are the writers who make the same appeal to this generation as Macaulay, Carlyle, Ruskin, John Henry Newman or, among the writers of fiction, as Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, Meredith, Hardy, Henry James, did to a previous generation, asks Mr J. A. Spender, writing in the “Yorkshire Observer.” All through the 19th century there was a recognised body of writers whose leadership was acknowledged without question by the great mass of intelligent people. In spite of the greater accomplishment of a larger number there is no such leadership today. There are a great many literary coteries which have their favourite authors, and a great many favourite authors who produce astonishingly clever books. But there is no company of authors whom I can think of as exercising at all the same influence as the great company of authors which was still at work when J was young. Writing, it seems to me, has for the time being got out of touch with the common mind. It has lost the spontaneity which writes out of the fullness of the heart and damns the consequences. So many even of the best writers seem to be thinking of what the clever young men will sav if they seem to be unacquainted with the latest foreign models, Proust, Tchekov, and the rest, or the new sexual interpretation of life brought from Vienna. In this way the simplicity which has always been the greatest quality of the best English writing is lost in complications borrowed from. Russian, Eieneh and German sources. The result is sometimes learned and dull, sometimes nasty and morbid, but in general it gives one the feeling that the writers are burrowing underground for far-fetched explanations of facts and motives which explain themselves. Again and again on reading books of this kind one is tempted to say what a great and splendid writer this man or that woman might be if only they would clear their minds of fashion and theory and just let themselves go.