LITERATURE TODAY

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 100, 29 April 1937, Page 22

LITERATURE TODAY

TREND OF OUJLOOK

A W.E.A. LECTURE

In the first of his lectures at the Trades' Hall for the W.E.'A. on "Modern Literature," Mr. W. J. Scott, M.A., gave a comprehensive review of literature today as compared with the trend of thought and outlook of English authorship in previous centuries.

The speaker said that the most important element in the present cultural situation was undoubtedly the conflict between the "lowbrow" and "highbrow." At the moment the victory was going to ■. the 'former, and the "highbrow," put very much on the defensive, was being compelled to apoolgise for his tastes. This was the age of mass civilisation and minority culture, for it could not be denied that the mass civilisation produced by industrialism had not only destroyed the old village culture, but had also undermined the • supremacy and authority of the minority in whose care the culture of the city had hitherto been placed. Of the new culture now being established the characteristic expressions were the best-seller, the newspaper, the film (the best-seller in pictorial form), and the radio (the best-seller in musical form). Consequently, the adult attitudes created by present conditions of life and art were unsympathetic to the poetry of Wordsworth .the drama of Shakespeare, and the novels -of Feilding, as well as to modern literature demanding a similar level of response. Analysing the changes in social life and in the attitudes of writer and reader since the eighteenth century, Mr. Scott explained how and why the gap between the cultivated and the popular taste began to show in the nineteenth century and broadened in the twentieth. He quoted Sir Walter Scott's criticism of Lord Lytton's novels:—"There is, I am sorry to say, a slang tone of morality which is im-; moral," and said that this "slang tone of morality," apparent in their cheap emotionalism and excessively simple view of life, had become and was likely to remain the basis of the best-seller. These characteristics were clearly to be seen in the novels of such writers as Rice Burroughs, Margaret Pedler. Jeffrey Far-nol, Warwick Deeping,: Ethel Dell, and others. A division, not wholly arbitrary, of reading public and novelists into three classes could • be made today—that of the best-seller, that of the "middlebrow," represented by. writers like Galsworthy, Walpole. and Priestley, able, serious, cultured, but without the intensity, penetration and originality of the greater writers, and,- thirdly, that of the "highbrow' like Joyce or Lawrence, . who had many of the gifts of true genius. These three groups tended to be exclusive, the reader at the first level did not as a rule read Galsworthy or Walpole, much less Lawrence pr Joyce, of whom he had probably never heard, or heard only expressions of disapproval. There was a good deal of merging among the second and third groups, but a suspicious unsteadiness in ,the. critical judgments of the former, who seemed frequently to regard,'say, "The Good Companions" as of similar merit to "Tom Jones", or E. M.' Forster's "Passage.! to; India;" :.: ' ;The lecturer referred to the effect on culture of the popular.Press, which showed the: same . main. faults as the novel, and he analysed the nature of the appeals made- by certain^ typesof advertisement, the language.in which they were expressed > and the revelations ■of the quality, of popular taste that they made..; Sun an analysis, he said, explained why we as a society did not relish genuine satire, were unable to read poetry with the concentration and subtlety of response _that it demanded, and liked tragedy least of all the forms of dramatic art. The best, literature of our day, therefore, was a literature of revolt. Lawrence, for example, had revolted against the sentimentalising and vulgarisation _of love, Joyce.against the restrictions imposed by conventionalised language on the free explanation of the individual personality, and Eliot against the ugliness of life under industrialism, the debased culture of the cities, and the avidity and. "timidity of the. lives led. by the cultivated bourgeois. 'An interesting discussion followed: In his next lecture.Mr. Scott will consider the work of D. H. Lawrence, the novelist: .' .