THE MODERNS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 139, 13 June 1936, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE MODERNS.

ARE THEY REALLY MODERN?

GHOSTS FROM THE PAST.

(By QUENTIN POPE.)

The young are ever eager in their beliefs and to the young the modern author is usually the heroic figure in literature. He becomes so from the mere fact that he is modern, in the sense that he is contemporary, living amongst us and moving through our own disordered world. But in the more important sense of dealing in the things of present day life, reflecting our minds and beliefs and revealing a picture of the present age many of the writers of to-day are not moderns at all.

Even in the matter of style it is often difficult to detect the old, safely dead and sometimes discarded writers of the past. If you look at the description of the preparations made for the funeral of Mr. Polly's father (published in 1920), you will find there an atmosphere and even a trick of arrangement which is similar in all respects to that recording the arrangements for the obsequies of° Mrs. Gregory (published 50 years before). The passages bring out points of similarity in the minds of Wells and Charles Dickens; both are humorous, botjx employ an imagery largely visual, both "have the same point of view and even use the same tricks of style.' There are passages in Richardson which in manner and material approximate those of Henry James, both men being anxious psychologists. And once we invoke the assistance of Sterne, of Rabelais or Voltaire, it is to realise that there is a fundamental something about the minds of great men which refuses to be confined to a single era. Such a mind as that of da Vinci, for instance, could never be prisoned by the most limiting of intellectual restrictions, and would be perfectly at home to-day. Ihe bewildering interests and adventurousness of such a man, the immense range and fertility of idea and capacity foi writing which is shown in the array ot volumes left by Voltaire would match the most accomplished of our modern minds.

In technique, in the method of approach, it is also difficult to find anything that is fundamentally of our own time. Not so long ago we _were assured that the pace of modern life left little time for reading, that what a writer had to say must be compressed, polished, made nervously alive and stark. 10-day the pendulum swings and we have our "Broome Stages," "Vanessas" and "Rogue Herries," "Five Silver Daughters" and "Anthony Adverse." Indeed, if we think back, it is doubtful if we ever qscaped into that mannered compression which is the Ronald Firbank ideal. Foi all through the Edwardian age the Ben-

netts and the Cannans and the Compton Mackenzies were writing and writing, books which followed one another in time and which dealt with the same sets of characters and trilogies used to be popular work before Galsworthy began using "Saga." And in those days immediately pre-war it is certain that a good deal of the social and intellectual unrest of the time did become mirrored in the fiction which was written, but of the actual society in which the writers lived little that matters has been preserved. It is true tliat Galsworthy made the attempt, and that a great deal of the ideals of the Victorian age, its respect for salvation and 3 per cent, the stability of the pound and the saddle of mutton, has been recorded by him. But the present-day world left him bewildered and hostile, and he was reduced to' depicting it through the eyes of the vaguely philosophical Michael Mont and of the hard, restless, sensation-craving Fleur. We are in a different world after the death of Timothy, and we can never accept the present. Of the other novelists who were hailed as great or neargreat in Edwardian days none has accomplished the feat of accepting the modern world and making literature of it. D. H. Lawrence, heretic of love, was lost in his private universe where surrender was not to be greeted by surrender, where man was to have all and remain whole. Compton Mackenzie became a writer of novelettes, Gilbert Cannan wrote himself out in a dark passion of revolt and Russian influences, while Hugh Walpole, a superficially brilliant craftsman, became the bondsman of his conventional ideas.

Strength of Women Novelists. The more modern writers are no closer to life. Aldous Huxley has reacted against the modern world and expressed his contempt in a book where the stupidities of the present day are magnified in the future. J. B. Priestley had to escape from reality into a belief that the characteristic of the English novel was humour. T. F. Powys and Richard Hughes turn to elaborate and rather sterile fantasies, and of the others, the Sitwells,'Wauglis, Mottrams and Coppards, they coyer their poverty with remarkable technique but suffer "a barrenness of general ideas. It is rather curious that at this moment it should have, been the women who have saved English fiction, but it is certainly true that the literature would not be the same without the names of G. B. Stern, Storm Jameson, Margaret Kennedy, Romer Wilson and Virginia Woolf. We have become familiar with two or three general types of fiction which have been fairly representative in the last decade. In one a young intellectual, seeing through the whole of civilisation, disillusioned with the universe and with himself, seeks for real experience, and when lie finds it commits suicide. In another, various • types of members of the leisured class met in a desultory

sort of way, drifted about, met again, chatted brightly and arranged themselves in different patterns of sexual relationships. A third type,might deal with the failure of a member of that class to live up to the traditions wliicn had been set by his forefathers —Galsworthy was ingenious in this, as may be seen in "Loyalties" or "Flowering Wilderness." But the great core of English life remained unexplored. Shci'a Kaye Smith had written one fine novel rl' the land in "Sussex Gorse." lu had to- wait years for recognition, aaa no one has ever equalled it since. "The land," however, was something to be discussed vaguely 113 Galsworthy, or a place in 'which to spend occasional weekends. The great bulk of the activity was restricted to the recording of the sayings and doings of a fraction of the people. And it was so for very definite reasons —because the mass of the population wished to read about these people. It was the population's way of escape and it was not peculiar to England, for a recent survey of American magazines reveals that the modern American heroine, eight times in ten, 110 longer earns her own living. The Modern Weakness. It Is perhaps true, as Sir Edmund Gosse maintained, that the poverty of the English novel is due to the national genius having goivj into poetry, but it is also certain that until there is sincerity of outlook and approach there can be 110 hope of building up any sort of structure worth the name. You must believe in the importance of your materials and in the significance of the work you are doing to create anything, in art as in engineering. To skim the surface of a nation's doings is not to penetrate far into the national character or to give the world any characters of your own. If we look back to our famous, novelists of the past we find that Defoe's Roxana, Smillett's Count Fathom, Fielding's Jonathan Wild may not have been pleasant people to know, but at least they were alive and moving through a scene that is recognisably part of the land in which they lived. They were not merely pent in drawingrooms and country houses, or flitting from nightclub to nightclub with occasional visits to ladies' boudoirs.

The denial of life as it is lived, the acceptance of a small portion of it for the whole, the reading of national character in terms of the epigram, the modern flat and the cocktail-shaker, or else in terms of the middle-class family with relatives throughout the professions and a comfortable existence—that is the weakness of the modern English literature. It is, perhaps, one explanation of the fact that- the basic theme in English comedies for the past generation and in English films to-day is the (perfectly innocent) visit of a young lady to a gentleman's bedroom. It has certainly robbed that literature of vitality, and it has equally certainly divorced it from modernity because of a divorce from the realities of modern life.