A PERIL TO LETTERS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20964, 1 March 1930, Page 12

A PERIL TO LETTERS.

To those who generally deserve the neglect which falls to their lot when they attempt to forecast coming events, Mr Hilaire Belloc seems to be an exception. His recent gloomy prediction concerning the decadence of literature is worthy, therefore, of some consideration. “ The writer,” he states, “ like other artists, has to depict the beautiful. How can he, under regular, exactly repeated, blind environments? How are you going to get it in the midst of a deafening, metallic noise?” Noise, inhuman and shattering, according to Mr Belloc, is invading every remote acre and has taken root in the ancient solitudes, to tlm peril of literature. The multifarious and discordant noises of this mechanical age are probably more irritating in England than in New Zealand, though, as we have had occasion to observe, they are distinctly troublesome in this country, but even so, it is questionable whether their ultimate effect on literary production is so far reaching as Mr Belloc would lead us to believe. There is probably more justification for his assertion that “the tendency of all the modern social curve is towards the destruction of leisure: not only of that occasional leisure which a man working, however hard, with his pen or at teaching or at any other liberal profession could always find

iu an older world, but of that more expanded leisure wherein flourished, as in a native air, the writer of every kind, the scholar, the romancer, the poet, the historian.” The production of the best literature requires an amply sufficient leisure, which was enjoyed formerly by the cultivated middle classes, enabling them to produce the greater part of the best of both our verse and our prose. The present era of industrialism, however, is tending to destroy these old conditions so that not only is literary productivity menaced but also u that organic function in the State—the critical faculty which created fame and handed down the ‘ corpus ’ of letters to posterity—is disappearing. Perhaps it is already lost.” This would appear to be at first sight a’ pessimistic view of the case, but it is generally admitted that at the present time, the most successful authors are those who are able to produce a stream of fiction which is sold on an enormous scale to a class of people that knows little or nothing of true leisure. In America, for im stance, the literary production per head of population is only one-fifth that of England, while the reading which most Americans do is confined chiefly to the tabloid newspapers, magazines of the “true story” type, and sentimental romances. Mr Belloc puts forward the somewhat fantastic speculation that we are moving towards a 'period, comparable to the Dark Ages, in which there will be a breach of continuity with the past, forming a gulf between the letters of the 'past and those of the' distant future. Whether this would imply crumbling of highly civilised nations in a manner corresponding to the disintegration of the Empires of Greece and Rome it is difficult to say, but it may be hoped that, as seems probable, Mr Belloc has taken an unnecessarily gloomy view.