"CREATIVE EFFORT."

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 242, 12 October 1929, Page 2 (Supplement)

"CREATIVE EFFORT."

AN AUSTRALIAN CRITICISM OF LIFE. It would be difficult to define in ordinary terms the scope of Mr. Norman Lindsay's "Creative Effort} An Essay In Affirmation ,, (Cecil Palmer), and eveu more difficult to assess its literary or intellectual value. The author rightly entitles it "An Essay in Affirmation," for it is dogmatic and self assertive to the last degree, with a minimum of I reason and logic supporting its conclusions. Hβ deals with all the mysteries and problems of existence—evil and death, God and man, religion and truth, morality and sex —and he expresses his views for the most part in the form of maxims and aphorisms, which are frequently superficial, usually paradoxical, and generally represent, in more or less startling form, ideas that have often been expressed by other people before. The book displays all Mr. Lindsay's well-marked characteristics, his hatred of convention, his defiant and self-confident faith in his own creed, and the sex-obsession which so consistently burdena and degrades his artistic work. The value of his judgment on literary and historical and aesthetic questions may be gathered from his description of Napoleon as an "arrogant and destructive little beast," his conception of the art of Wordsworth, and Tennyson (a curious collocation) as the "mean stiburbanism of escaped curates," and his reference to Milton, Dante and Michael Angelo, as typical, of those "lesser minds" in whom "the sense of their own domestic tragedy turns on life its owrt disgust of life." The whole book, as an attempt at the interpretation of Life or Art, is spasmodic, preten. tious and flatulent to the last degree. TTio keynote of it all is that sex obsession which dominates all Lindsay's work, and which he has just expressed with remarkable clearness in a criticism of the Australian novel, "A House Is Built," which appears in "Desiderata," a guide to literature recently published in Adelaide. Mr. Lindsay holds that "the war of 1014 was a crescendo in blood lust, forced into being by the slow suppuration of suppressed emotion from iUic 'fifties downward." Apparently Mr. Lindsay, in his enthusiasm for the sexual explanation of all things, quite ! forgets that not all nations were suppressing their emotions quite so rigidly as the Victorian English, whom he hates and despises. His argument is that "since the motivity of the human entity is purely based on its sex content, to drive desire for the body back into the subconscious ia to force it to its only possible- release, hatred for the body, whose effect is those periodic outbursts of blood lust called war." This one sentence, with its., grotesque Freudian jargon* is quite adequate to explain Mr. Lindsay's attitude toward life, and to afford an estimate of his ability to interpret the facts and solve the problems of existence, and his qualifications to be taken seriously in regard to the treatment of such topics as he lias essayed to handle in "Creative Effort." Mr. Lindsay's work ia not important hi itself, but it is worth noting as representative of. a world-wide movement of badly-informed revolt.