GREAT WRITERS

Waikato Times, Volume 119, Issue 19880, 8 May 1936, Page 2

GREAT WRITERS

SOME PRANK OPINIONS. “JOHN BUCHAN’S” LIKES AND DISLIKES. Lord Tweedsmuir. Canada’s Gover-nor-General, whose reputation as an author was made under the name of John Buchan, spoke very frankly to his fellow-craftsmen of the Canadian Authors’ Association at a dinner in Montreal, about his own likes and dislikes. “I cannot read the Restoration dramatists at all.’’ he said. “I am not enthusiastic about the eighteenth century British novelists with the exception of Fielding. I am rather blind to the merits of Charlotte 73ronte. Coming to our own days I think that people like the late Samuel Butler and the living Mr. Bernard Shaw have been very much over-praised, and with me a little of D. H. Lawrence goes a very long way.” Lord Tweedsmuir discussed post-war literature in these words:— “I think that after the war we struck a very bad patch in art and litorature. There was a tendency to be contemptuous about everything that had gone before, and for youth to regard its little novelties as tho last word in human perfection. The result if this combination of ignorance and arrogance was the creation of a number of little coteries and conventicles which tended to get smaller and smaller and more exclusive till they were about t.hc size of the barrel in which Diogenes lived. “We had shapeless and meaningless novels and philosophies where the shallowness was concealed by the confusion. Our noble English tongue was grossly abused; and since there was also considerable confusion in manners and morals there is justice in the phase I have heard applied to certain typical novels of the period —that they were like ‘a series of explosions in a cesspool.’ ” The Governor-General thought “that bad time” had largely gone, to be succeeded by “a more wholesome epoch.” “For good work in any form of art," he added, “we need the combination of the questing critical spirit and what I can best describe in the words of the Scriptures as ‘reverent\e and godjy fear.’ We must harmonise freedom and discipline.”