MODERN AUTHORS AND THEIR INFLUENCE

Evening Star, Issue 23113, 12 November 1938, Page 23

MODERN AUTHORS AND THEIR INFLUENCE

‘‘Where are the writers who make the same appeal to this generation as Macaulay, Carlyle, Ruskin, John Henry Newman, or, among the writers of ' fiction, as Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, Meredith, Hardy, Henry James, did -to a previous generation?” asks Mr J. A. Spender, in the ‘ Yorkshire Observer.’ 11 1 take'the names as they occur to me, and among them are both bestsellers ami worst-sellers,” Mr Spender goes on. “ Henry James used to say that ho was ‘ the world’s worst seller,’ and Meredith at times was not far ahead of him. But best-selling and worst-selling had little to do with the influence they exerted. All through the nineteenth century there was a recognised body of writers whose leadership was acknowledged without question by the great mass of intelligent people. ‘Mn spite of the greater accomplishment of a larger number there is no such leadership to-day. There are a great many literary coteries which have their favourite authors and a groat many favourite authors who produce astonishingly clever books. But there is no company of authors whom 1 can think of as exercising at all the same influence as the great company of authors which was still at work when I was young. “ Writing, it seems to me. has for the time being got out of touch with the common mind. It has lost the spontaneity which writes out of the fullness of the heart and damns the consequences. “ So many oven of the best writers seem to he thinking of what the clever young men will say if they seem to be unacquainted with the latest foreign models, Proust, Tehekov, and the rest, or the new sexual interpretation of life brought from Vienna. “ In this way the simplicity which has always been the greatest quality of the best English writing is lost in complications borrowed from Russian. French, and German sources. “ The result is sometimes learned and dull, sometimes nasty and morbid, hutin general it gives one the feeling that the writers are burrowing underground for far-fetched explanations of facts and motives which explain themselves “Again and again on reading hooks of this kind one is tempted to say what a great and splendid writer this man or that woman might be if only they would' clear their minds of fashion and theory and just let themselves go.”