ART AND LETTERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 76, 30 March 1935, Page 2 (Supplement)

ART AND LETTERS.

"BRIGHT, YOUNG REBELLION. I '' To those who. are familiar with current art and letters, the following passage taken from a criticism by Alfred Xoves will not seem one bit exaggerated. Reviewers of novels in particular will endorse what he says as true of too many of the novels being published. They do not charm —they revolt one. "On every side," he says, '"the same light is being waged in art and letters as is being waged politically in Russia: a fight not between old fogeyism and bright young rebellion, but an abnormal struggle between sanity and downright insanity; between the constructive forces that move by law and the destructive forces that, conseiouslv or unconsciously, aim at destroying real values, at obliterating all the liner shades and tones in language and in thought, and at exalting incompetence. -

"In a recent number of the 'Quarterly Review,' there was a review—an exceedingly able review—of a recently published novel, which I say without hesitation is the foulest thing that has ever found its way into print. Much of it is obscure, through sheer disorder of the syntax. My attention was first called to it by a column and a half in a leading journal, where it was said to be eagerly awaited by 'select literary circles.' I call the reader's particular attention to that phrase. The writer said that, 'Its very obscenity, is somehow beautiful,' and 'if this is not high art, what is?'

"I have jead the book, and it is contemptible in every respect. The technical quality of the writing k beneath contempt. An artist, at least, endeavours to select significant details, but this author simply .puts everything in chaotically. No word or thought common to gutter phraseology is omitted. There io no criminal court in the country which would not brand the book as inexpressibly degraded; and yet only a short time ago, in a leading newspaper, I saw its author referred to as one of our masters. Weighing every word, I say that, whether we know it or not. this is nothing less than a national disgrace. "At the present moment the destructive mind in literature is popular, fashionable. It is the conventional thing to he a rebel, and the rebels arc patronised by the reactionary Press. We talk of giving the new generation its opportunity. and the cynics are laying upon its shoulders the heaviest and the dreariest burden the young have ever been called upon to bear.

"I know of nothing sadder than the sight of the young trying to conceal the intellectual wounds which the elderly cynics have inflicted upon them. For the quiet sadness of many of the more thoughtful of the younger generation arises from that bitterest and most desolate feeling of the human heart: 'They have taken away my Master, and I know not where they have laid Him.'"'