NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20618, 17 July 1930, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

LIMITATIONS OF FICTION.

"It cannot be denied that the novel to-day is being widely used as a populariser of ideas, but I wonder how manv readers depend on fiction for their understanding of life," writes Mr. Robert Lynd in the London Daily News, "ff a man has so little understanding of life that he has to go to fiction for it, he will never find it there. Fiction to-day, as always, is valuable less as a monitor than as an enlarger of imaginative experience. The pictures of life that we get in it are usually of doubtful accuracy and they are mutually contradictory, and, oven in psychological novels, the heroes and heroines are frequently exceptional individuals whose lives throw very little light on how .'your fellows spend their entire lives.' Apart from this, although curiosity about the lives of others is undoubtedly a strong motive in reading fiction (as wo see from the recent popularity of war novels), it is scarcely the commonest motive. And \vo may judge from the discussion that has raged over war novelists how disputable is the truth of the picture of other people's lives tliab the novelists give us. The truth is, fiction can give us only the novelist's personal view of life and that view of life is important only if he is a roan of eminent genius."

MASS PRODUCTION. "The new conception of production which is making America great is surreptitiously transforming the man himself and there lies its main and intenso gravity," says M. Andre Siegfried, in'a contribution to tho Yale Review, in which he expounds his misgivings at tho application of mass-production methods. "We have in France, as well as in many other countries of Europe, n class of artisans in which the European genius, as formed by a tradition of more than a thousand years, still expresses itself. . . Jt is, above all, an expression of the dignity of the man, considered mainly as creator. Artisans and artists belong, after all, to tho samo family. It is doubtful whether mass-production and intense mechanisation, as wo see them growing everywhere, would allow such a class to maintain itself in Europe. In America, it is already largely a thing of tho past. There is something pathetic in this opposition of the old and tho new worlds, because, although the discussion is chicflv about wages and cost of production, its real meaning goes much deeper than merely technical considerations. What is at stake, after all, is nothing less than a whole conception of man, of society and of life. At tho very moment when our employers aro religiously introducing mass-production and scientific management according to tho latest methods on the other side, many of us instinctively feel the latent presence of a danger."

HUMAN BEINGS OR PRODUCERS. I do not want, ot course, to suggest that America is materialistic, in contrast with an idealistic Europe; it would not bo true," says M. Siegfried. "Hut I feel entitled to say that in its conception of a new order America has, above all, emphasised the prestige of production. Rightly or wrongly, we fear that the individual, considered not as a producer or as a consumer, but as a human being, may appear in tho long run to bo tho loser. I should not dare to take sides ou such an issue—but what, finally, do wo wish mankind to stand for: the individual as a thinking unit or as a unit of production? If, to-day or to-morrow, the human race prefers to be well-equip-ped, comfortable, with a high standard of living, the answer is clear, it will follow Ford and Iloover. We mako no mistake about it; we know perfectly well that, for the present, it is on the American plan that tho world is revising its estimates. Yet, if humanity is ever again preoccupied with the question of tho individual, his thought') and his right to think for himself, irrespective of economic production, then it will not be talks about refrigorators, vacuum cleaners and efficiency which will move the world. Old passions, now unknown in now and prosperous countries, may win again the hearts of men."