NOTES AND COMMENTS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 62, Issue 9, 22 October 1941, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

TITILLATING THE APPETITE. “After’ all, it. is not what we eat, but fyhat we digest that counts, and digestibility depends not only on the physical property of the meal, but upon the anticipation and realisation by the mind of the tastiness of what is partaken,” said Lord Dawson of Penn, the eminent physician, speaking in the House of Lords. “The more eager your expectancy of nice tasty food the more gastric juice you will secrete in anticipation of what you are hoping to enjoy. If you give your, dog a biscuit you may throw that biscuit on the ground and let the dog get on with it, but there is an alternative method and that is to break the biscuit up into several portions and then offer each portion to the dog to eat. There will be a vast difference in the effect on the dog of those two methods. That has been proved by experiment, and interestingly enough by one of the most famous scientists, the late Professor Pavloff, of Russia. When you hand the portions of biscuit one by one to the dog, you produce in him a sense of eagerness and anticipatory pleasure, land if you compare the secretion of his digestive juices in those two instances you will find that in the latter instance the digestive juices that the dog will produce will be several times greater than if you throw the biscuit to him and let him get on with it without any interest. If that is true of the dog, how much more true must it be of civilised man?” NEW TREND IN LETTERS. “During the past year three wellknown novelists have died, and I want to refer to them, because their passing is in a sense symbolic, and marks the end of an epoch,” said Mr E. M. Forster, th® novelist, in a survey of books in 1941. “They are James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Hugh Walpole. They are very different, these three: James Joyce was a writer with a vision of the universe which he expressed through recollections of his early life in Dublin; Virginia Woolf was a poetic writer, whose novels are best understood if they are read as poems; Hugh Walpole was a story-teller, who carried on the tradition of Scott and Trollope. Yet though they are so different, they have one quality in common; they are all professionals. Their main job was to sit down and write, and in this sense they mark the end of an epoch, because the professional writer is coming to an end. I think myself that this is a pity and that civilisation will be the poorer if it happens. But the detached artist who lived, and sometimes starved, in independence, is a vanishing type. The writer to-day is increasingly drawn into the fabric of society, and his writing is a by-product of his ordinary work. It is not his main job to sit do\Cn and write. The two best novels I have come across this year are novels of action, written by men of action and I think -this is significant of the future.’ The professionals—whether of the type of Joyce, Mrs Woolf or Walpole are, for economic reasons, passing away.