LITERATURE AND RACE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 107, 11 July 1941, Page 4

LITERATURE AND RACE

Sir-J. K. Alexander has written an emotional letter to castigate Mr. Gilbert for "the emotional use of a meaningless word — race." Apparently in his anxiety to blink such a huge and disturbing fact as race,.Mr. Alexander prefers to ignore it even in literature. Mr. Gilbert has said "that in writing about people and places, all the writer has to orient himself is his race." If Mr. Gilbert means by "race" (and I. presume he does), that mass of cultural. heritage and custom which every nation possesses, his statement is almost axiomatic. The writer’s outlook and the mechanics of his writing and his mode of expression must certainly be influenced by race. ’ Mr. Alexander says that Tolstoy felt and thought and wrote as only Tolstoy could, and not as a Russian. I confess that this statement puzzles me. Did Tolstoy then think as Tolstoy, some international patriot of nowhere, "untainted" by environment or heritage or culture? To suppose some such idealistic and unfettered soul is to go to ridiculous lengths to support a pitifully weak thesis. I readily concede that love, truth and the other emotions and virtues and vices are common to all mankind. But the ex-

pression varies from nation to nation, and expression is the heart of literature. Even so great a pantheist and internationist as Shelley had to fall back on so very national and English a symbol as the skylark to express the emotion of joy. A magnificent poem, admittedly, but one could be pardoned for believing that an untravelled Chinese, reading a translation in far Cathay, might be unable to appreciate to the full the imagery and the figures of the poem.-

SEFTON

WALSH

(Waipukurau).