"AGE OF INTERROGATION."

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 165, 14 July 1928, Page 2 (Supplement)

"AGE OF INTERROGATION."

A SURVEY OF PRESENT-DAY

LITERATURE.

Here is a book on twentieth century literature to remind us that the century is well advanced, and that in the thirty years (nearly) since the Great Queen died and an epoch (so they reckon it) came to an end, writers have raised new horizons. Mr. Max Beerbohm depicte.'l the nineteenth century looking at a future that was a duplicate of itself, but the twentieth as regarding a note of x interrogation; and Mr. A. C. Ward chooses "The Age of Interrogation" as the sub-title of his book. "Among twentieth century writers," he says, "the Victorian idea of the Permanence of Institutions has been displaced by the sense of a universal lack of fixity." Brightly and fairly, he surveys in "Twentieth Century Literature" (Methuen) the work of the novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists and biographers of our time. It is no small achievement to have written such a review in the small space of 200 pages, and while giving plenty of facts, to have furnished so readable a collection' of opinions. Perspective is very difficult to obtain in looking at one's own age, and those who would like to form a coherent idsa of the tendencies of present-day literature will be grateful to Mr. Ward. He discusses, among other things, the development of the "naturalistic" novel, which "desires to be as dispassionate and detached as a cinematograph camera"; the breadth and vigour of the dramaShaw he regards as the dramatist second to Shakespeare; the Georgian poets; and the new method that Mr. Lytton Strachey brought to biography. Welle, Galsworthy, Chesterton, Barrie, Conrad, D. ,H. Lawrence, and many others are judged with knowledge and in pointed style. With some estimates we cannot entirely agree—we would,- for example, put Chesterton higher, and it is astonishing that Mr. Ward should think so little of the devastating ode" on P. E. Smith, now Lord Birkenhead—but no critic can I hope in a work like this to please everybody. We have to thank him for much enlightenment. ' Special mention should be made of his straight condemnation of the sex-obsessed—his reference to D. H. Lawrence's "dreary pre-occupation with animal things in a world of frustrate passions," and to the "cocktail drama" of Noel Conrad and others- It is proof of his breadth of taste that he has a good word for Wodehouse, and for that masterpiece among detective novels, "Trent's Last Case." The main impres-j sion of the book is of a literary world which, while it: does not contain so many giants as the Victorian age, shows a great deal of work of high quality is rich in variety and originality, %

The purpose of the "Shakespeare Review," a new monthly published at Stratford-on-Avon, with Sir. A. EL Chesterton as editor, is "to herald the fame of tlie world's master-singer in such a manner that the purveyors of pornographic filth will fly before the vanguard of a renaissance which will redeem the sacrifice of a million brave Englishmen on the fields of France." We believe (says the "Spectator") there is such a renaissance coming, and wish this little herald of it all success, a wish that will be supported on this side of the world.

There are never enough good readable books for,boys. Messrs. Angus and Robertson, of Sydney, have issued several excellent stories for this purpose, and one of the best, and the best we have read and reviewed, lis "Dogsnose," by J. H. M. Abbott, ex-journalist, and author of "Tommy Cornstalk." It is fitting that this land of adventures— Australia—should produce virile books, and there cannot be anywhere in our colonies, a boy who will not wish to sit up at night to read "just one more chapter" of "Dogsnose." The descriptions (quoted from some of the author's newspaper articles) of certain districts are a marked feature of the book. The illustrations lack the spirit and vigour of the story, which runs on from one excitement to another in a way to make a boy forget his worst trouble—provided it is not toothache. Mr. Abbott must have been a boy himself, and never forgotten it.