Really, Our Publics...!

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 773, 20 September 1929, Page 14

Really, Our Publics...!

Prom one of Mr llugh Walpole's “Londokt Letters ” to the \ civ 1 ork “Herald-Tribune.’’ Mr Walpole has been expressing surprise at the popularity of Charles Morgans 'Portrait in a Mirror ,” a novel which might have been expected now, and would certainly have been expected once , to appeal to only a very small public. Mr Morgan is A. R. Wa lkley’s successor as dramatic critic of “The Times.”

REALLY our publics here are becoming by any common reckoning too hopelessly confused. Twenty years ago when 1 was a young man in London everytning was clear enough. There were three publics, sharply divided one from another — first the limited, special, and superior one, very small, and readers, oddly enough, of almost no contemporary fiction: they swore by George Meredith, an occasional George Moore and a little Henry James. Second, there wa3 the “gentlemanly upper class public,” liking things to be in good taste, with a touch of elegant prose, a flavouring of topics cf the moment, no coarseness, and if not an English background at least a background where Englishmen were predominant. It was this very large and prominent class that made the success of Mrs Humphry Ward, Anthony Hope, Edith Wharton, that refused to look at Conrad and was affronted by “The New Machiavelli.” This class read only fictio'n and cooked biography—biographical works with titles like “Seven Splendid Sinners,” or “The Mistresses of Louis XIV.” Thirdly there was the class of the Circulating Libraries, a class that had no hypocrisies, that knew fust what it liked and went for it, that laughed if you told it* that Literature had anything to do with Art, that ate its novels as it ate chocolates. The gods of this class were for many years Hall Caine and Marie Corelli. I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of “The Christian” and “God’s Good Man” were sold, but the point was that these circulations were certain; any novel by these authors would secure these huge sales, and behind these two huge Leviathans swam jhoals of little fishes, all swinging their tails and opening their mouths In tho same way and hoping for some of the same, nourishment. Well, the war came and killed all that, and now, less and less with every year that passes, do we know where we are. All that division between the publics is gone. The names of Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley art household words in the Seven Dials and “Death Comes for the Archbishop” and “Portrait in a Mirror” are best sellers. The nonsense of this 13 that no one seems to realise this change In condition. Best sellers are still spoken of with opprobrium and Michael Arlen, for instance, whose “Lily Christine” is by far the best-of his novels, is not read by many people who would undoubtedly enjoy him, simply because “The Green Hat” once sold 60,000 copies.