SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF MODERN

LITERATURE.

BY ALFRED NOYES, C.B.E., LITT.D., F.R.S.L.

[Read October 25th, 1922.]

DESPITE the vagueness of the title which I have given to my paper, I want to attempt a very definite and difficult task this afternoon. I believe that the

time has come, in art and literature, as in every other department of life, when we must take our bearings ; when we must try to discover, if possible, the direction in which we are moving, and still more importantthe direction in which we ought to be moving. We ought to make up our minds about certain fundamental principles, and say definitely whether we really want or do not want some of the new ideas which the police are engaged in suppressing, and many critics of art and literature encouraging. It is time, in short, to wake out of our Laodicean slumbers, and decide whether we are on the side of development and construction, or on that of destruction and a return to barbarism. The intellectual world is suffering to-day from a lack of any profound belief. It has lost its religion, and it has lost that central position from which it could once see life steadily and see it whole, under the eternal aspect. Rules and conventions, being no longer related to any central certainty, have degenerated into mere social codes which are subject to every

whim of fashion. The ruling passion, with old and young, is the desire to be in the "movement," no matter where it may be leading; and still more, the fear of being thought to be "out of the movement.' It is a matter for curious reflection that these people are doing precisely what they quite erroneously think was done by the nineteenth century. They are slavishly following conventions, and forgetting (simply because their conventions are new) that there are realities, and eternal realities; standards, and eternal standards; foundations, and everlasting foundations.

One of the results of the great enlargement of the field of human thought during the last century was the increasing tendency among modern writers to lose sight of these realities, and to lose their hold on any central and unifying principle; to treat all kinds of complex matters as if they were quite simple, and, where a hundred factors were involved, to treat a problem as if it involved the consideration of only two or three. It was a century of specialisation, and each group of specialists strayed farther and farther from the common intellectual centre where they could once all meet. The old completeness of view, the white light of vision in which men so different as Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson could see the essential unity of this complex world; man as a soul and a body; life and death as a march to immortality, and the universe as a miracle with a single meaning; all that white light of vision has been broken up into a thousand prismatic and shifting reflections. We are in danger of losing the white light, not because it is no longer there, but because the age has grown too vast for us to re-combine its

multicoloured rays. Analysis has gone so far, specialisation has gone so far, decentralisation (or, in the most exact meaning of the word, eccentricity) has gone so far that we are in danger of intellectual disintegration. It is time to make some synthesis, or we shall find that art and letters are lost in a world without meaning. There are signs of it already on every side. On every side the same fight is being waged in art and letters as is being waged politically in Russia, a fight not between old fogeyism and bright young rebellion, but an abnormal struggle between sanity and downright insanity; between the constructive forces that move by law, and the destructive forces that, consciously or unconsciously, aim at destroying real values, at obliterating all the finer shades and tones in language and in thought, and at exalting incompetence.

There is an enormous difference between some of the destructive movements of to-day and the progressive revolutions of the past. Up till about thirty years ago revolutions in art and letters had a way of adding something of value to what we already possessed. The new revolutions merely take away. They say, for instance, to the painter: "It is unnecessary for you to know how to draw." (The Bolshevistic value of that statement, of course, can be estimated by the multitude that it admits into the fold.)

In poetry, your new revolutionist invents no new forms that would involve a difficulty, and he searches always for the easier way. He very often uses the old forms made easier. He says, sometimes, you should abandon metrical form altogether, and he

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believes apparently that the regularly recurrent rhythms of the tides, the stars, the human heart, and of almost every true poet from Homer to the present day, were an invention of Queen Victoria. His own contribution is what he calls "free verse," and, as Mr. Chesterton said recently, you might as well call sleeping in a ditch free architecture. If it were not too frivolous for this occasion I should very much like to read to this audience some of the work which is being published in school and college textbooks, and to give you also some extemporaneous and deliberate nonsense verses. I think I could defy anyone here to say with certainty which was the educational work. But the important thing is that the whole movement is backward from the highly and delicately organized to the indifferent homogeneousness of the lifeless-halting on the way, of course, at various stages of primitive brutality.

But there is a more serious aspect of the matter than this. All over the English-speaking world this hunt for the easier way in technique has been accompanied by a lowering of the standards in every direction. The quality of the thought and the emotion has been incredibly cheapened, and the absence of any fixed and central principles has led to an appalling lack of discrimination. Literary judgments in many cases have become purely arbitrary. Sometimes they are merely a matter of the coterie to which an author belongs, and they are marked by an intolerance, a dogmatism and an ignorance for which there is no parallel in our literature. The desire to break the continuity of our tradition has been fought by three or four outstanding

critics. It has been met by Mr. Edmund Gosse, with the weapon of an irony as delicate as that of Anatole France. Critics of a later generation like Mr. Clutton Brock, Mr. J. C. Squire and Mr. Robert Lynd have also steadily sought to maintain a just balance between the old and the new. In the London Mercury some months ago there was an article by Mr. Clutton Brock which should be read in every educational institution of the Englishspeaking world. But the tendency of the moment, backed by a hundred influences, some of them political, some of them apparently originating in Central Africa, and others in the cinematograph studios of Los Angeles, is to submerge all the finer shades of thought, all the subtler tones of beauty, in the general flood of half-educated mediocrity, tyrannously ruled by little literary Soviets, the members of which are able to spread their views in slackly edited journals. Instead of endeavouring to comprehend all that is of value in our literature, these people are continually endeavouring to eliminate everything but the particular result which they themselves desire to achieve.

The modern revolutionary, who merely uses the old forms made easier, does not usually know enough about them to recognise the really new and more difficult development. I say development because the really new is always a development. Your modern will congratulate himself on his freedom from the restrictions of Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Swinburne, without considering whether he has subjected himself to any compensating law, or evoked the beauty that can only arise out of a difficult medium, rebellious to the hand and brain. But if