CLEAN FICTION

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 40, 15 August 1925, Page 16

CLEAN FICTION

PLEA FOR HIGHER STANDARD IN

LITERATURE.

Sanity implies soundness. Our greatest fiction is sound at core. And as much can be said of our "best sellers," otherwise they would not appeal to an immense public that is essentially eaue. But there seems to be an increasing tondency on the part of some of our younger and more gifted writers to introduce into their work what is unsound, declares Horace A. Vadell in the "Daily Mail." This means that there is a demand for tainted stuff which we find in certain plays, films, and novels. Possibly the supply has created the • demand. Much of this "stuff" is pathological, out of place except in a medical treatise; much of it is ugly and therefore inartistic.

How comes it that a few young meu and women are straining their • sprightly wits in the rather grotesque attempt to ally them to madness V Do they confound violence with strength? Have they lost their sense of smell? Soundness in a great wine includes sweetness. I have read one or two novels lately that simply—stank. Is there a not negligible public that really prefers the smell of the midden to rose-water? ,

Sanity ought to be the touchstone of culture and conduct. If a writer, however clever he may he, is unsound, he fails to inspire conviction in his readers. It becomes impossible to take him either lightly or seriously. Whether his object be to entertain or instruct, we feel that he is squinting at life, re? garding it through the wrong end of the telescope. • . * After all, in spite of sporadic outbursts, we are as a nation pre-eminently cane. Long may we remain so. And most of us expect from our writers selfexpression, fteally, the novelist' can't divorce himself from his work. The right sort puts what is best in him into it. Somo of the younger men am showing great promise; they have aroused in us an expectation that they should take heed not to disappoint. Let them k<?b to if, in (heir own interest as well as ours, thai their wares are not offensive, because",' inevitably', v?e phall/ damn them as being offensive too. We havn a standard of common decency and sanity. .Lot youth respect it...