CRITICISMS BY DEAN INGE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21542, 14 January 1932, Page 14

CRITICISMS BY DEAN INGE

“AUNT SALLY” OF FLEET STREET ' . ABUSE FROM RELIGIOUS PAPERS. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON. December 7. The Dean of St. Paul's was in critical vein at the annual dinner of, the Savage Club, at which he was the guest of honour. The chair was occupied by Mr C. E. Lawrence (joint editor of the Quarterly Review). Referring to the absence of the Prime Minister, who was to have been a guest, the dean remarked: “Doubtless his speech would have been edifying. Mine will not edify a cow.” Remarking that it was a queer fate for hint 20 years , ago, when he left his pro* fessorial chair at Cambridge to come to St. Paul’s, ’he proceeded:, , “I . believed myself to be a shy scholar, a clear thinker, and had also a very modest opinion of myself; but as soon as I came to London every gutter-' snipe in Fleet street began to pelt mud at me. 1 was very much taken aback at first, but set my teeth and determined to send my critics to whatever place it is that clergymen can send people. They have'gone on making me their Aunt Sally ever since, but I have gone on saying what I believe to be true and shall go on, however gloomy it may be. “From some people I have also received kindly criticism, which I have always welcomed, and I have also received a liberal supply of manure. The worst of all the abuse came from the religious, newspapers. I have had a great deal to suffer from Socialist newspapers,, too, but never from, the Daily Herald,’which is a very decent paper, in spite of the perversity of its politics. There arc, however, a few Socialist weeklies who do not seem to like me at all, although they write a lot about me.” With regard to some of the weeklies, he could only sqy that the malignity of their comments was balanced by -the smallness of their circulation. He would be very ungrateful, however, if he did not admit that he had had quite as much of the genial friendly sunshine as was good for him. COMMENTS ON LITERARY CRITICISMS.

The dean appealed to those who were connected with literature to do something to restore the credit of British reviewing, and remarked that in his opinion, with the exception of The Times Literary Supplement and one or two other publicationa, the reviewing was conducted in way that was no credit to literature. England had no academy like the French Academy, whose business it was to give recognition only to those writers who wrote the purest French. INSULTS A GUINEA PER HUNDRED. “ I do not subscribe to any press cutting agency. I think a guinea too much to pay for a hundred insults. If there is something spicy about me some kind friend is sure to send it on to me.” Some reviewers set themselves to praise certain novelists whose work turned out to be not genius, but garbage. There was a dearth of first-rate ability, but a considerable supply of the second rate. British writers, on the whole, had acquired a very good_ and clear style, but the pestilent habit of dictation had impaired it here and there, and our had been affected by imported Americanisms, though writers like Santayana and Thornton Wilder were among the best of our prose writers.

In the opinion of the dean, a savage was a very fine thing to be, but be himself was one of the mildest of men, and he had never killed anything larger than a' wasp, save in self-defence. The clergy were not forbidden to take life, but only to shed blood; consequently, in the Middle Ages they went into battle with a chib so that they could pound the enemy without breaking the skin. — (Laughter.) POETS AND SCULPTORS. One thing our Georgian poets never did was to scan; they merely told the printer to cut their writing up into lengths. British sculptors seemed to copy the statues of either Easter Island or of Benin in Africa. They carved their material into some semblance of a human figure, and then asked them all to admire. Lately, at Athens, he had been enjoying statues and bronzes as beautiful as anything they could ever see; but modern exhibitions, after these, were simple lunacy which no sane person could possibly admire. He begged the critics to abolish these things and send people back to the old Greek ideals.