"ART IN NEW ZEALAND."

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 147, 23 June 1934, Page 2 (Supplement)

"ART IN NEW ZEALAND."

FUTURE OP OUR LITERATURE. The outstanding item in the June number of "Art in New Zealand" is Mr. A. R. D. Fairburn's article on the future of New Zealand literature and art. This, the work of one of the most gifted of our younger poets, who again shows himself to be a prose writer with an exceptionally fine style, is one of the most important contributions to New Zealand criticism in. recent years. The theme of "Some Aspects of New Zealand Literature and Art," is that we must look less to Britain for our models, that we must shape our letters and art more in keeping with our own life and landscape, and that we may look with profit to the literature of the United States. Mr. Fairburn does not deny the strength of the connection with England or desire to break it entirely, but he considers we have been too much in thrall to it. We are, lie thinks, English people* born in exile rather than New Zealanders with roots of our own. Ho thinks it hopeless to try to copy certain great or second-rate English writers. Ho find's a resemblance between our state of mind and that of America, a century ago, and he thinks we have a good deal of sympathy with the really native American current of literature, from Mark Twain up to Ernest Hemingway. From the point of view of the New Zealand writer, "Huckleberry Finn" is, in Mr. Fairburn's opinion, tlio most important novel ever written, because the life depicted thero is the sort of life we know. "Wo understand Huck, tho true colonial, wliero we can only pretend to understand Tom Brown, the English public-school boy." Mr. Fairburn is outspoken about a fashion of imported decadence that became popular in Australia and New Zealand. As a result of this introduction of an art expressing the weariness of an old civilisation, Australian art and literature "are to this day over-run with fauns, satyrs, dryads and all the paraphernalia of a shoddy paganism, shoddy enough in Swinburne and Beardsley, but trebly shoddy in their new-world imitators. . . . This fake-pagan Australian art has left imitation goattracks all over. New Zealand poetry." This needed' saying, and it is well said. Tho decadence of the 'nineties was depressing enough in the Old World; it is apt to be nauseating out here. A good deal might bo said in comment on this thoughtful and stimulating essay. Mr. Fairburn exaggerates somewhat the "cxilo" business. Attachment to the English tradition is quite compatible with a robust local patriotism. and an eye for the unique features .of our landscape and society. A distinct New Zealand note in our letters can bo discerned. Nor (so it may be suggested) docs he make sufficient allowance for the difference between "colonial" conditions in the United States and conditions here. American lifo is so vast, so sprawling, so varied and so effervescent. One has only to compare the background of one of the best of New Zealand novels, Miss Mandor's "Story of a New Zealand River," with that of "Huckleberry Finn" and "Show Boat" to seo the difference—the Wairoa beside the Mississippi. Beside the United States We are like an English county. However, Mr. Fairburn has given us something to think about, and we should be grateful.

As if to reinforce Mr. Fairburn's article, the editor has included in this number one of the most original and racy-of-the-soil poems yet written in this country. "Timber Mill," by Arnold Cork, which occupies five pages, is a beautiful and moving piece of work, faithful to the sights and smells of the country, quite novel in conception and execution, and charged with real emotion.

The other Contents of this lfational quarterly are as interesting as usual. Tliey include a criticism by Mr. A. J. C. Fisher of the Auckland Society of Arts Exhibition, and reproductions of some of the pictures in the British loan collection. Our copy is from the publishers, Harry H. Tombs, Ltd., Wellington.