STANDARDS OF ART.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 159, 7 July 1926, Page 18

STANDARDS OF ART.

' ! (To the Editor.? i Sir, —I notice by your issue of June 30 ' that Mr. Charles E. Wardle deplores ! anything in the least indelicate in art. ' May I presume that if he objects to indelicacy in art, he also objects to this sort of thing in literature? Very well, will. Mr. Wardle, then, abolish, in addition to our disgusting Art Gallery, 90 per cent of the Bible (including, of course, that masterpiece of eroticism, The Song of Solomon); 99 per cent of Shakespeare's plays, all the work of the other Eliza- I be than playwrights, of Feilding, of | Sterne, of Shaw, of Hardy, and, I in short, of just about everything worth while in English ; literature—all, be it observed, to ■ satisfy the exacting demands of 'Mr. j Charles Wardle's Victorian morality. Of course, we should have a few gems left to us after this wholesale purging—a few tons or so of junk bequeathed to us in them ore inspired moments of the Kipling-Hichens type, the entire bunch of which contains no more intellectual worth than an equal weight of chopped hay. No, Mr. Wardle evidently belongs to that large and well-ordered band who can conceive of nothing more virtuous than attending religious demonstrations regularly every Sunday at 7 p.m., or | propagating their futile creeds amongst j the impressionable young. I may state | tliat I do not know Mr. Wardle, but I do think that he should choose some medium in which to display his narrow- i outlook other than the public Press.—-I I am, etc., R. E. HARDING, i