LITERATURE AND MORALS

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 139, 9 December 1929, Page 10

LITERATURE AND MORALS

(To the Editor.)

Sir,—l was interested in your leader oc Saturday s issue culled "Much Ado About— What?" Incidentally, that is what I aske<l myself attcr reading the comments or the writer trying to deal once more with what had already been finally expressed. If good beef steak is minced too often the product deadens the healthy appetite it should stimulate. With all due respect I must criticise some of the statements made in the article. In the first two lines it is calmly assumed that the reading of sexual roat^ ters bniiga sophistication. Now "sophistication contains an essential idea of misleading, of making artificial by depriving of simplicity. I submit that the assumption is false. Is there any fallacy in. genuine knowledge? Further on youth's "feeling fo literature" is discussed, and it is suggested that young people are Riven to the parading of what they do not know. I am uncertain whether this is a compliment or not. Every middleaged citizen knows, of course, the merits or demerits of Mr. D. H. Lawrence, Mr. William Gerhardi, Mr. Geoffrey Moss, and Robert Keable, and which "to-day uses vice as a key to the market," but for a first-hand knowledge of Scott and Dickens the grubby little schoolboy is perhaps more to be relied on.

It is also asserted that those who think themselves possessed of complexes really suffer from too much simplex. This is a neat example of antithesis, and perhaps means nothing. Intelligence is what is needed to-day; the last, and many generations previous, had none. If the "simplex" of modern youth means intelligent thought and the scrapping of the great complexes of "patriotism" and Dr. Arnold's "virtue" in education then may wo all be simplicissimi-—I am, etc.,

LITTLE CHILD.