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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 783, 23 July 1954, Page 5

Sir,-As one of Bruce Mason’s more persistent critics--though on _ other grounds than L. Assheton Harbord adopts-I should like to get into this act. The agonised yell of the majority man who feels his standards attacked and has not the intellectual discipline to defend them by temperate reasoning is a familiar noise in civilised society, and always dangerous to it; and Mr. Asshetean Harbord, as they always do, goes too far. If the world has really acclaimed Outward Bound as a master-

piece, then so much the worse for the world; if "thousands of playgoers on both sides of the Atlantic" have enjoyed some other dose of pap, then they ought to be ashamed of themselves; if "the modern playgoer.in U.S.A. and England is just as mentally defective as he was 30 years ago," has anyone the smallest right to be surprised? We live in an age of the systematic debasement of standards; if this is to be resisted, the test of a play must be, not whether it has pleased large numbers of people, but whether it can satisfy the minimum demands of the civilised’ intellect. This question is one for the individual judgment, and to abuse the ‘critic because he pits his judgment against that of others-especially on the grounds that the others constitute a majority-is a betrayal of the citadel to. eunuchs and barbarians; it leads straight to intellectual tyranny and darkness. In our society, as a matter of fact, conduct such as Mr. Assheton Harbord’s is less menacing than trahison des clercs within the minority. But Mr. Assheton Harbord would have poisoned Socrates; he would have lynched Athanasius; and he would have howled against Ibsen-or else he hasn’t considered the meaning of what he says.

J. G. A.

POCOCK

(Dunedin)_