READING, FILM, AND RADIO TASTES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 449, 30 January 1948, Page 5

READING, FILM, AND RADIO TASTES

Sir,-I was most interested in Mr. Fairburn’s review of "Reading, Film, and Radio Tastes of High School Boys and Girls," by W. J. Scott, While I have not as yet read the book itself, may I suggest that the real reason for the cultural desert in which so many millions of English-speaking peoples live to-day, is that most of us are children of the Industrial Revolution? Prior to the Nineteenth Century, while the population of the Anglo-Saxon world was for so long relatively static, men inherited ’ a culture of great antiquity and: their lives held sufficient meaning to create good taste. The increase of population in Great Britain during the past 100 years-15 million to 50 million-means, that about 35 million Englishmen to-day have no background save three or four generations of squalor and mechanical slavery. It is natural that they lag sadly behind the cultural standards of (say) their Elizabethan countertype, of whom a common sailor was able to clothe his thoughts in the then-uni-versal poetry and write to Her Majesty that: "The pinions of a man’s life are. trimmed with the plumage of death." The sins, of our forefathers are now

veing visited upon us, and our expiation will be troublesome, Yet surely much can be done by a moderate control. Without any absolute ban upon such mental narcotics as strips, digests, and sensationalist literature, surely they can become legs commonly and widely distributed, and the public thus weaned from their use; many of them originate in America, and cost us dollars as well as intelligent citizens. With less of these} and more reprints of merit, the tide will turn as people unconsciously educate themselves, In England at the present time, by virtue of necessity, much that is trivial and pernicious in leisure is being done away with. Englishmen, perforce, see more of their own films (sometimes precious, but usually intelligent), read reprints of proven worth (the paper shortage forbids less-certain publications), and in general are given little opportunity for cultural decadence.

R. A.

DENNANT

(Auckland).