NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE.

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 89, 7 March 1941, Page 4

NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE.

Sir,-It is common ground in this discussion, I think, that local colour is no substitute for good writing and character-drawing and that there has been too much use of local colour in New Zealand literature. G. R. Gilbert, however, seems to be in danger of going to the other extreme and under-rating the value of local material. "A great writer is a great writer anywhere." Granted. But a great writer has to write about something or somebody, and an army of great writers have gone for subjects to the things and people about them, the things and people they know. Mr. Gilbert recognises this for he says, "If a great writer is born or lives in New Zealand he writes of New Zealand people." This has been true of a very large proportion of great writers from Homer to the present day. Tolstoy is by universal consent one of the greatest of novelists. He gives you a sense of the universal. But Tolstoy is primarily a Russian novelist who writes of Russian life-the life he lived himself. It will hardly do to say that the Russian element in his books is "quite incidental." Isn’t Balzac primarily a novelist of French life? Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, all wrote of the life they knew. Jane Austen took a small, secluded corner of life and made it immortal. These writers didn’t begin by saying to themselves: "I’m going to be universal; therefore I will

avoid describing this landscape and that custom." They simply went ahead and wrote, and as they wrote they took anything that suited their purpose from the life around them, be it man or bird or tree or song. They succeeded because, roughly speaking, they raised the particular to the level of the universal. But they would not have succeeded had they not felt intensely about this particular. This, I feel sure, is what Mrs. Andrews "meant. For the most part,

New Zealand writers must write about New Zealand, just as English writers must write about England and American writers about America. Poetry as well as prose can give the local and the particular an unusual significance. Horace writes of scenes in and round ancient Rome, but we still read him. Shakespeare is a world genius, but at heart he was an Englishman, steeped in the sights and sounds and speech of his country. Really the fairy story of "A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is enacted, not in a wood near Athens, but in a wood in Warwickshire. The play is English at Bottom. Keats got the idea of the Nightingale Ode (so I believe) in an English garden. The bird and the trees were familiar. Are New Zealanders to be warned against writing poetry to the riro-riro by name, "lest they should run the risk of being thought locally minded? We know the nightingale only by association, but we know the riro by sight and sound. Incidentally, a musician from Europe said he thought the riro the sweeter singer. Very well; let us jolly well write as much as we like about the riro, but it must be sincere, passionate writing, the fruit of close observation and deep feeling, not mere pretty decorative stuff. Then it may happen that someone in New Zealand will write about the riro as Keats wrote about the nightingale. My contention is that New Zealand writers must think more and not less about New Zealand. They must steep themselves in New Zealand-study her, understand her, love her-and by New Zealand I mean everything New Zealand, animate and inanimate. From a full mind and heart wisdom will proceed. After all, we have the highest authority for believing that a man cannot love God if he does not love his neighbour. I suggest that the principle

be applied to literature.-

ALAN

MULGAN

(Well-

ington).