NOVELS OLD AND NEW.

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 180, 17 August 1937, Page 6

NOVELS OLD AND NEW.

The theory that people who read "the clever novels produced by highbrows" are really studyirig life was cxiticised by Lord JElton xn a recexxt broadcast. I'O his way ot thinking} these clever novels are usuaily much further removed from life than the wildest romance of the handsome hero who fells five fully-armed gangsters with his bare lists, or the blueeyed office gurl who inarries the disguised prince of iiuritania. "We eraile," 6aid Lord Efton, "at what appear to us to be the stiited and unnatural conventions in the Victoriaii novels our grandparents read. The blushixxg Angelina, the whiskered Edwin seem to us xnere figures of pasteboard. But tlie fashionabl© novels of to-day seem to me, I must.confess, to be full of conventions every bit as unreal. To begin with, there is the obvious fact that an overwhelming majox*ity ol: the people you encounter, if you read highbrow novels, are persons of either very loose or very perverted morals, or both; whereas nine-tenths of the people one meets in everyday life are sober, decent folk. That is an odd convention. Just as odd as the convention of manly Edwin and biusbing Angelina. Just as odd and not so pieasant. And then there is the ha bit oi writingj in full length in th'e plainest of plain English of matters which twenty-five years ago were only mentioned in Latin in the footnotes to works on medical jurisprudence. That convention is sureiy just as odd as the convention of Edwin and Angelina^ and uot half so agreeable*'-