EFFECT OF MODERN LITERATURE.

Marlborough Express, Volume LXVIII, Issue 148, 25 June 1934, Page 3

EFFECT OF MODERN LITERATURE.

"The real effect of contemporary English literature, when we measure it against any accepted literary elassic of any period, is laek of vision," writes Mr John Gatehouse, in the Socialist Review. "The vision of a writer — and every writer, poet, novelist, or dramatist, must have vision — is, in, its: reverse aspect, his sense of reality, his capacity not only to understand the basic issues in the society of which he writes, but also to sense something .deeper, more fundamental than this, to present problems and work out experiences which will always concern men, whatever the particular structure of the civilisation in which they live. In all cases where man has aspired to highest literary effort we are conscious of this dual aspect of a writer's vision, his sense of the immediate realities of a situation, and his power to superimpose upon that situation coneeptions of human behaviour which transcend, in significance, the limitations of a particular structure of society."