THE BELITTLEMENT OF LITERATURE. [To THE EDITOR OF THE "
SPECTATOR."] Sia,—Having occasion to refer again to a recent number (December 4th, 1920) of the Spectator, my attention was caught by a letter, "The Memorial to Mrs. Humphry Ward," that I had missed on a first reading, and I was struck by what is surely a false and -jarring note in it. In the course of an appeal for funds to carry on the Children's Welfare schemes in which Mrs. Ward was interested, the distinguished signatories say, " She (Mrs. Humphry Ward) was not content with literary success alone. She used the power it gave her for greater ends."
Does such a statement as this bear investigation? Carried to a logical conclusion, does it not assert that Shakespeare would have been better employed in caring for the children of Strat-
ford-on-Avon than in writing The Tempest, Keats a more useful member of society as secretary of a Hampstead boys' club than as the author of the Ode to a Nightingale?
Surely the belittlement of literature may be left to the vulgar, and is no necessary part of an appeal for objects so worthy as: those to which this letter draws attention. Without entering upon the question of Mrs. Ward's literary status, it seems
rather hard that any writer's social activities should be used as a stick with which to beat his or her books. " There is no
way in which you can 'benefit society more than by coining the metal you have in yourself," says Ibsen; and to speak, with regard to any writer, of " greater ends " than writing is surely to imply that the literary metal of that particular writer is of
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