The Daily News. MONDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1911. THE PEOPLE'S BOOKS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 147, 18 December 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. MONDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1911. THE PEOPLE'S BOOKS.

! Mr. H. G. Weiis, xnc brilliant literateur, whose writings have had a profound effect on current thought, is among that modern school of novelists who have messages to convey. He knows and you know and we all know tliat apart from the newspaper press, which is largely ephemeral, the people assimilate their knowledge of life from works of fiction. "Of the making of books there is no end," and the effect that works of fiction may have on people and institutions, social and national evils, is wonderfully illustrated by the success (still continued) of Charles Dickens' pages from life. That is the point—Mr. Wells' point. He believes that all life can and should be put into novel*. Dickens frequently caricatured life in order to ram '»ome his points. Real life as it is without caricature can by simple recital be made so pointed that no literary flourisher can hope to outclass the simple narrator of truth. The person who has read the vivid brain work of many modern novelists is not impressed by imaginative creations and distorted views of life. He knows the true from the false. He is able, for instance, to understand that Barrie wrote real things and that Hall-Caine did not, that Wells is always real and that Corelli thinks she is. Wells pleads for permission to be very real. "We are going to write," he says, "subject only to our own limitations, about the whole human life. We are going to deal with political questions and religious questions and social questions. We cannot present people unless we have this free hand, this unrestricted field. What is the good of telling stories about people's lives if one may not deal freely with the religious beliefs and organisations that have controlled or failed to control them? What is the good of pretending to write about love, and the loyalties and treacheries and t quarrels of men and women, if one must not glance at those varieties of physical temperament and organic quality, those deeply passionate needs and distresses from which half the storms of human life are brewed? We mean to deal with all these things, and it will need very much more than the disapproval of provincial librarians, the hostility of a few influential people in London, the scurrility of the Spectator, and the deep and obstinate silences of the Westminster Gazette, to stop the incoming tide of aggressive novel-writing. We are going to write about it all. We are going to write about business and finance and politics and precedence and pretentiousness and decorum and indecorum until a thousand pretences and ten thousand impostures shrivel in the cold, clear air of our elucidations. We are going to write of wasted opportunities and latent beauties until a thousand new ways of

living open to men and women. We are going to appeal to the young and the hopeful and the curious, against the established, the dignified and defensive. Before we have done, we will have all life within the scope of the novel." It is because of the tremendous reality of the tilings he wrote about that Bret Harte's name will not die, that O. Henry jumped at once from his place as a commercial traveller into the forefront of shortstory writers, that Henry Lawson, of Australia, left his paint-pot and brush and wrote the heart of the Australian bush and its people. The most vivid sermons ever delivered have jumped from the pages of fiction, the fiction that shows the heart of real people, describes real things, real emotions, the iJcal social inside of things. The public is beginning to discriminate between the work of diseased minds which produce the wretched sex novels and the reality of sex relationship, sex being the commonest basis of most fiction. It is only the prurient person who hates the truth about real things. The writer who writes merely to relate the baser sensations is going out of fashion. The writer who handles the pressing problems of life is coming into his own —and let it be soon! —■—— in »^—p