THE PRESENT-DAY NOVEL.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1627, 19 December 1912, Page 9

THE PRESENT-DAY NOVEL.

AECHBISHOFS CONDEMNATION.

The Archbishop of York, proposing the toast of "Sir Walter Scott's Memory," at the dinner of the Edinburgh Scott Club, last month, contrasted Scott's writings with present-day fiction. His Graco said the typical novel of to-day in Gmat Britain was a study of the abnormal. The bookstalls and circulating libraries wero full of the efforts of men, and still more of women, with a purpose. They dealt with a class of people who wore always odious in fiction, and they were made even more odious when the purpose waa so sickly and perverted as was often the caso at the .present time. Of course, thai, pseudo-realism saw in life what it described, but that was only because it first: isolated what it saw, and then turnett upon it the limelight of a diseased imagination. Above all this, twentieth-century fiction was obsessed with tho sex problom, and that not in its oldest, simplest, happiest form, but simply in its relation to sexual passion. Frankly, he was sick of that heart-panting, blear-eyed fiction of the present day. To turn froni it to tho novels of Scott, was a refreshing relief.