LITERARY STYLE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 4, 5 July 1938, Page 7

LITERARY STYLE

DISCRIMINATION TESTS

W.E.A. EXERCISES

The class studying "Popular Literature Today" spent a good deal of time last Wednesday evening discussing the results of two tests in literary discrimination given the previous week. They had been first asked to decide which of the following two prose extracts was the better and to state why:—

(a) The garden stands silvered in moonlight. On the breeze is wafted the mingled perfume of roses, jasmin, violets. A fountain plays, the crystal drops sparkling like diamonds, as musically they splash and play. Across the scented air comes music—the "Invitation to the Waltz." . Gracefully, the lovely lady rises from the lawn, towards the house, where softly glow the lights. Her hair is like gold—no, like bronze and gold, burnished and shimmering. Her cheeks are remindful of a flower-petal, her eyes wistful, yet alight with the vivacity of life and youth . . . softly glow the lights. . . .

(b) Night came on and Somers sat in his tub of a summerhouse looking at the lights glittering thick in swarms in the various hollows down to the water, and the lighthouses flashing in the distance, and ship lights on the water, and the dark places thinly sprinkled with lights. It wasn't like a town, it was like a whole country with towns and bays and darknesses. And all lying mysteriously within the Australian underdark, that peculiar lost, weary aloofness' of Australia. There was the vast town of Sydney. And it didn't seem to be real, it seemed to be sprinkled on the surface of a darkness into which it never penetrated.

i The tutor, Mr. W. J. Scott, congratulated the class on the results of this test. Every member of the class had correctly chosen the second extract as the better. He then proceeded to compare these results with those of other groups to whom the same test had been given. Out of 120 Wellington Training College students, 115 had also preferred (b), but in a South Australian test 20 out of 65 senior secondary school pupils, 18 out of 46 W.E.A. students, 31 out of 60 commerce students, and 11 out of 52 others, had preferred (a). Why the New Zealand results should be so much better than the South Australian it was difficult to say. The groups might not be comparable, possibly the training in our secondary schools was -superior. "At any rate," said Mr. Scott, "there is no question about the choice to be made in this first test. The first extract must be dismissed by anyone with any taste at all as rubbish." The second test was as follows:— (a) The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again | a damp, crackling mast, razor-shells, creaking pebbles, "that on the unnumbered pebbles beat," woods sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada. Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath. He coasted them, walking warily. A porter bottle stood up, stogged to its waist, in the caky sand dough. A sentinel: isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets; further away chalk-scrawled backdoors; and on the higher beach a drying line with two crucified shirts. (b) He reached a stretch of foreshore, uncovered by the tide, running out to a jutting headland and a misty horizon of sea. Levels of sand lay between ledges and ridges of rock. The sand sldped to the rim of the tide; there were broad, plateaux of rock slippery with seaweed and bladderwrack, and opposite a gap in the cliff, a rough | roadway for carts and boats. For half a mile out the sea swung and swayed, smooth with floating ice; the smell of ice is in the wind, and from the south a gleam .of sun lit the cliff, the seaweed, the sand.

For this test, said the lecturer, he had only two sets of results to compare, those of the class and those of the Training College students. Of the former one-third preferred (a) and twothirds (b); for the latter the figures were 40 per cent, for (a), and 60 per cent, for (b). Discussion on the respective merits of these two extracts was very animated, the lecturer and the smaller group having great difficulty in persuading the larger one that (a) was much the better piece. It was objected that it was an incoherent formless muddle, ruined because the author was striving too obviously for effect. To this the reply was that the purpose of the author was to express, and to communicate to the reader, by sharp evocation of the physical actualities of the scene, its emotional significance to the character experiencing it. This, it was submitted, gave (a) a memorableness, vividness, and originality lacking in (b). During the discussion the class agreed that to condemn (a) on the grounds that it was "ugly" was to make a quite irrelevant criticism.

After discussing two more sets of comparable pieces, the class went on to examine the ways in which a spurious "style," illustrated in the first extract above ("The garden stands silvered, etc.), could debase both words and emotions, as it did in so many popular novels.

Next Wednesday more tests in discrimination will be considered, and the chapter in "Culture and Environment" entitled "Progress and the Standard of Living," will be studied.