Atlanta semi-weekly journal. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1898-1920, 1919-04-08
THE FOUR KINDS OF LITERATURE
By Dr.. Frank Crane

There are Four Interesting Things.
They are Love, Money, Danger and Good
ness.
There is no Literature, of tie kind that
reaches u.s. that Is not based on one or more
of these themes.
Come, let Us talk about what we like, for
that is the essence Of all conversation that
is interesting.
like Love Stories, which are alas! too few.
Most Of them are disappointing. 1t seems to
take the utmost craft to write of Love and
produce a work of art. Nobody nowadays
seems to he able to write such wonderful
Love Tales as Charles Reade. OTIS been years
since [ read them. and | wonder if they would
be so good nOw.(
set down, as the best Love Story I ever
read, Lorna Doone. And a close second is
The Able COnstantin.
The best yarn on the Money motif, playing
up the thrill and fascination of great wealth,
is The Count of Monte Cristo. More than any
other novel, [ regret that I ever read this, so
that I could read it now for the first time.
The happiest mortal in existence, should
say. is the boy of seventeen beginning to
read The Count of Monte CristO. Especially
if he has been told he mustn't.
I Danger literature includes War, Crime, and
Adventure, and the greatest of these is Crime.
Crime includes both of Patrick Henry's alter
natives, both Liberty and Death; Liberty
from the moral restraints chat bind most OF
u.s. and always the possibility of Death,
put Conan Doyle at the head of all deal
ers in Danger His Sherlock Holmes tales are
to us what The Wandering Jew was to our
fathers.
went to see play the other night, Three
Faces East, that filled my soul with such JoV
that I seemed to be fifteen years old again. 1t
was a regular Detective Story, and l adore
Detective Stories with all the fervOr L have
left wherewith to ferve. My favorite mag
azine is red and yellow one called Detective
Stories.
Homers Ilad is a great war story; some
body is killed every lines.
The most interesting literary production
with the Goodness motif is The New Tesla
ment. And of. all theses Goodness has the
most enduring appeal, and also requires tie
most COnSummate genius in its treatment.
ANY tyro can write of murder and lust and
pessimism and black and ugly things And
most of them do.
Only oncu in a thousand years does a mind
appear that can write such book as Les
Miserables, and make kis drive at the divinity
that is Within 1t was many year between
Jesus and Jean Vatican, and it will probably
be as long before the next of the line.
When the present forms Of religious express
sion shall have passed, when religion snail
have lived down it's organization phase, when
sects shall have ceased to assume that al the
supreme wonder at Goodness belongs to them
when "the River of God flows through the
streets of the City, when religion shall cease
to be propaganda and 1espectablllty ana move
over into Life, Education and Art, then we
shall have our greatest literature, because 1t
will utilize the finest and highest emotlon OF
which humankind is capable, the Passion for
Goodness, and we shall have plays of the kind
indicated by The Passing of the Third t1oor
Back, and Music like that of Parsifal and
novels like Les Miser;~bles.
But our work is too Gmateurish as yet: We
bungle these. The Supermen or the Futufe
will write them.
| (Copyright. 1919, by Frank Crane)