MODERN NOVELS
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I believe that many of your readers will feel grateful to Sir S. H. Scott for his timely and valuable remarks as to the influence on our young people of much modern literature. It is grievous to find undoubted talent and intellect bestowed in fiction on descriptions and scenes in life which are at least suggestive, and likely to awake curiosity in the youthful mind, which may seek in similar pages for 'further revelations which, as Sir S. H. Scott says, should not come within the sphere of ordinary literature.
The new " Book Society" brought us hope that the books recommended would combine with their literary excellence a- higher standard of morality and decency.
The second book so chosen by the new "Book Society," The Embezzlers, has brought some of us much disappointment. Brilliant it may be in description, and vigorous in style, but when these are granted what remains ? A picture of de- bauchery and drunken revelry!, with a total lack of real humour which we can still enjoy in the pages of George Eliot, Thackeray and Dickens, combined with an excellence of the moral experience which makes for righteousness.
The writings of these authors (and happily many others in the past) help us to clothe the mind with purity of thought, and appreciation of what is good, so that we may be well content to be classed as old-fashioned and " prndish."—I am,
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