ART EXISTS FOR JOY.

Otago Witness, Issue 3861, 13 March 1928, Page 74

ART EXISTS FOR JOY.

By

H. G. Wells,

You will note that in this account I do not mention Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Hilton, Goethe, or any other of the great names that are so much imposed upon earnest young people as inevitable. I should say “ Try them.” But you mav find all these great writers dead and flat to you, and that may be not your fault, but just your difference. Let _ me be frank about these overpowering names. They are rammed down peoples throats; they are forced upon the young; there is need of protection against them. There is no reason why people who do not or cannot read Homer or Shakespeare should be bullied out of their intellectual self-respect. » * * Shakespeare bored Darwin dreadfully in his later years, and the great naturalist was man enough to confess it. For quite other reasons Shakespeare may bore or displease you. There is no need to be ashamed of it. Personally I cannot have too much of Falstaff and Juliet’s nurse and the players in the "Midsummer Night’s Dream'” but many and women find these characters coarse and unpleasing. On the other psnd, I find Juliet’s love-making about us delightful as the squeak of a passionate slate-pencil. It is known that all the plays ascribed to Shakespeare are not by him, and all those enthusiastic men of letters who talk in such a ravished way about his inimitable quality differ interminably about what he did or did not write. There is an enormous literature about the play of “Hamlet” and what it is about. A play that puzzles people like that is not a supreme work of art at all; it is a failure or an inexcusable riddle. * • r» *

People cannot even make up their minds whether Hamlet is mad or shamming madness, and the whole plav has the effect of being written by a’ man tired of or unsympathetic with the gory plot he has chosen. Not only is he tired of his plot, but he is bored and irritated by his world. He breaks away, as one is apt to do under such circumstances, into digressions and artificial and secondary issues. It is these incidental outbreaks that give the play of “ Hamlet ” its value—for those who appreciate its incidental outbreaks. There is a vigorous attack on contemporary actors, and Polonius is pretty plainly,, a caricature °f Sir Francis Bacon. Shakespdfire did a considerable amount of jeering in his plays, and manifestly had an unloving eye for many of his contemporaries; one may doubt if the other Elizabethans _ were as delightful to live with as many people assume. But youth and maiden are exhorted to read this play of “ Hamlet” as though it was the crowning utterance of a divinity. It is really very distressing to think ©f the endless aspiring self-educators who must have been bogged and lost in utter despair by the forcing of unsuit-

able and uncongenial masterpieces on their unprepared minds. Great art exists for joy. The joy in literature, like the joy in music, is. its only justification. There is no justification at all for the toilsome, industrious, joyless reading of “ great ” literature. There is no poetry, no work of literary art, that I would say everyone should read it. Written and made poetry is not necessary for everyone. There are many who can take the grandeur of history, the splendour of the stars, the majesty of natural law, the ripple in the water, and the beauty of a flower without the help of the poet. There are others who derive an added pleasure from the nightingale in calling it “ Philomel,” and who will drown the song of the lark on a golden afternoon by reciting Shelley—manifestly because they prefer Shelley to the lark. But there is no ground for shame in the fact that you can see without literary spectacles.

Should everyone read some fiction? I do not sec the necessity. We live nowadays amidst an enormous accumulation of novels and with constant additions to the heaps. A very large proportion of the novel reading that goes on is mere perversion of reading, a vice. The books are read, by youths and maidens more especially, as opiates, as a cheap evasive substitute for experience; often they are read with such inattention that if the book is taken from them suddenly they can hardly name its title or its characters; such-reading is really a life-wasting habit of assisted reverie. Not all such stories are ill-written. Such elaborate and careful writers as Robert Louis Stevenson and Marriott Watson ministered in their time to this indolent misuse of the mind. So did Sir Walter Scott. I do not think there is much more to be done with “ Waverley ” and “ Ivanhoe ” than a puerile sympathetic dreaming. But that does not apply to. another and a graver type of novels.

The novel has always been made a vehicle for the criticism of life and institutions and for the expression of new ideas about conduct. It has never been purely a work of art except in the imagination of a few pedantic critics and writers; it has always been aggressive. The true novelist tells you what he thinks about people and things as plainly and vividly as he can. Fielding and Smollett were conscious critics of life; the succession comes down through a long line of polemical commentators upon existence to the “ Forsyte Sagas ” and “Mr Prohack ” and “ Babbitt ” of to-day. Just in so far as novels help his questionings a man should read them. But I do not think that everyone should read them, and certainly there is no one novel at all that everybody should read. * * -XSo that after I have sifted this question out I am left with this, that “ Everyone ” should read habitually and much; that there should be a framework of universal history and some general ideas about tire universe, and that these are to be frequently refreshed by reading new-found books and comparing them with the old; there should be the gospels and Plato’s “ Republic,” and, for the rest, steady, and intensive reading of biography, of discussion, of the sincerer sorts of fiction, along the line of the individual reader’s interests and curiosities. Everyone should have that much in common, and have that much difference; the general history, the great message of brotherhood and the kingdom of heaven, the release from mental subservience to established institutions, the recognition that all the world’s affairs are matters of will and reason, these things “ Everyone ” should read, for these things are needed to form the basis of a common will and understanding in that reconstruction of human law and order that goes on to-day; and beyond that, within that framework of the great adventure of the race, “ Everyone ” should to the best of his powers and opportunities pursue his own individual interest and read, what he can and as much as he can.—John o’London’s Weekly.