WHAT PEOPLE READ.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XLVII, Issue XLVII, 11 March 1912, Page 4

WHAT PEOPLE READ.

AN INTERESTING REVIEW

UPON information gathered from leading booksellers and libraries, Mr T. H. S. Escott bases an interesting survey in the "Fortnightly Review" of England's taste in literature. Smart society he finds anything but mindless, but, on the contrary, quick to detect literary merit. In fiction it welcomes any writer who dcais broadly and sincerely with any-

thing that tends towards rending the veil hiding the invisible from the visible. It seized eagerly upon "John Silence," and upon Mr F. W. Bain's adaptations of Eastern stories dealing with the spiritual phase of human existence. Society's old interest in theology has given place to an interest in works such as Fielding Hall's "Inward Light," or the writings of, say, Maeterlinck. "Society," according to Mr Escott, "revels in the mystic, not the mysticism of 'the Vulgar spiritualist charlatan from Kansas or San Francisco, but rather in the delicate and cul tured medieval mysticism of Catherine of Sienna and Thomas a'Keixjpis.' -

At the same time, it delights in books dealing with sport and'outdoor life, and it loves biography and history delicately and lightly written—Lady Dorothy Nevill's Memoirs, fot example, or Francis Gribble's book 011 Rousseau and the women he loved. Of science it is generally shy, because it does not possess the patience necessary for the elucidation of abstruse writings; but it rejoices in Sir Oliver Lodge when he wanders away to the conjectural, and in Metchnikoff when he discusses the nature of man. Poetry altogether seems to be at a discount in smart Society, as also is mere learning. The solid upper middle classes of the best London suburbs and of the "county" have, like smart Society, deserted theology, but are still as devoted as ever to hunting and racing books. Their women especially take kindly to sociological works, and are, like the women denizens of smart society, coming under the spell of the mystic, as if they, too, were seeking relief from the roar of the motor horn and the tinkle of the telephone bell in literature of "other-worldliness."

The ordinary person revels, it would seem, in fiction of the most sentimental description, and, like the society woman, but unlike the women of the working class, is always eager to get a chance of reading "The Yoke," or any other banned novel of a like kind. The boy of to-day has evidently no use for Ballantyne and Kingston, with their stories of 'threei-deckcrs, South Sea savages, and North American Indians. He wants his "stories to be about detectives and motors, aeroplanes, and submarines. It is a fact worthy of notice that the lower middle class and the masses generally in England care little or nothing for biography, and in the

reading of artisans may be noted a distinct intellectual falling off, in spite of State education, from their predecessors, who worked with Kingsley and Maurice, or followed eagerly in the wake of Huxley and Spencer.