EDITORIAL MANNERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 324, 7 September 1945, Page 5

EDITORIAL MANNERS

Sir,-While the wisdom, the eloquent sanity, of your editorial column remains a stable and most welcome feature of New Zealand writing to-day, many of your replies to "Letters from Listeners" on the same page seem strangely out of touch with the breadth and mellowness

of the neighbouring territory. My own feeling is that the urbanity and directness which distinguished your replies until about a year ago have largely been replaced by jests which side-step the issue, and that, far from suffering fools gladly, you have resolved (for aught that appears) to let the correspondent’s annoyance dictate the tone of your reply. For some time I assumed that it was J who had become irritable, but letters which have appeared in the last six months lead me to wonder whether the Editor is not the only one now in step. You may treat this protest in the cavalier manner you have perfected of late, but this will not remove the cause of writing. I believe there are others like myself who, proud of The Listener and of the glowing humanity of its editorials, are ashamed to read replies that are hardly more than cheap wit-ashamed, for we had come to feel that The Listener was our own, expressing our own feelings, though with aptness far beyond our range. Is this mere wistful longing for a past which exists only in my own imagination?

I. D.

CAMPBELL

(Wellington).