THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES TUESDAY, MAY 3, 1927. CURRENT ENGLISH LITERATURE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20088, 3 May 1927, Page 8

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES TUESDAY, MAY 3, 1927. CURRENT ENGLISH LITERATURE.

A scrutiny of tho physiognomy revealed in the numerous portraits of pioneers in the galleries of the Early Settlers’ Association reveals that the faces have more of seriousness, more of conviction, and loss of vivacity than the faces of to-day. The change of expression in tho countenance is external evidence of a change in character. The British world of seventy years ago had a fixity of purpose, a solidarity and an apparent assurance of rectilineal progress, so to speak, that it no longer possesses. The numerous new forces that have for half a century played upon the central germ-cells of character, whatever and wherever these may be, have brought iuto activity new manifestations of life and thought. It is the case, or seems to be the case, that nothing can come out iu the individual or in society that was not inherent in what biologsists call the “genes”—the hypothetical units of structure. Of course, human knowledge is in this question still in shadow-land. For aught that can bo dogmatically asserted what is issuing in human life to-day is only what is bound to issue. This view is a machine view. It is more natural and not less rational to believe that what comes out in society is partly the result of unconscious evolution, partly of conscious evolution, with human creative free-will playing a large part in the production, adoption, and adaptation of tho determinants of community thought, ethics and conduct. English literature is one of these determinants, or rather it is partly a determinant and partly a resultant. Definite conviction and serious life-purpose are not physiognomical characteristics of this present generation. Literature is marked by the same traits, or, to be more accurate, by their absence. Most of our leading writers to-day, Shaw, Wells, Chesterton among them, arc without a consistent body of serious principles that they can advocate and expound to the edification of their readers. They arc, like the faces of the young people to-day, vivacious, but not consistent in presenting a harmonised unity. They resemble the “movies.” Thrills, bright thoughts, no matter how unreal or buffoonish, provided they are picturesque aud brief—these are their characteristics. A witty Italian, when recently asked his opinion of the modern jazzing, short-skirted girl said, “She Is like a bad photograph, over-exposure and ‘uncier-developmcnt.’ ” The same is true of literature. It exposes everything, even vile language; it develops little, except unrest. • Masefield lias language in his best poem that would cause its utterer in the streets to be arrested : it is a case of over-exposure. In the same poem he reaches without any more sequence than is displayed in a kincma “thriller” a complete cleansing of tongue and heart. It may ho picturesque, but it is not great art. Shaw and "Wells are interesting and stimulating; but they are more concerned with knocking over than with setting up. Shaw tries to picture a Joan of Are that shall be historically accurate, and succeeds in getting the combined atmosphere of low comedy and theological controversy. At tho same time he has a brilliant, if unsystematic, mind, and a wonderful, too wonderful, vocabulary. A man with such, a range of vocabulary is a menace to himself. His thoughts tend to become a display of intellectual acrobatics. Certainly he has convictions, but

they are negative, inconsistent, and liable to inruptious from the Barbari that dwell in the land of Farce. He interests young people and tickles their sense of the ridiculous by turning society topsy-turvy, but when the serious seeker asks him, “Whithe. would’st thou lead usP” he has no answer. The fact is that he and Wells are both resultants and determinants. The static condition of society is gone. Not only is evolution taking place in society, but, what is of equal importance, men aro conscious that it is taking place. The wide diffusion of enlightenment, the ever-growing power of the daily press, the fall of ancient thrones, the conquest of the air above and of the world below the brine, all these forces are playing upon the “genes” of society. It is small wonder, then, that literature is as it is. The age of criticism, demolition, re-exami-nation of fundamentals must do its work before constructive progress can lead to some degree of equilibrium. If the leading writers of the day could but direct us what to work for, could lighten our path, and cheer us on the way! Kipling did the work for a time. He made British people feel that the Empire was a reality, full of romance as well as of power. But the rather jingoistic Imperialism he engendered is now less sure of itself. The Great War has altered the current of men’s thoughts. Yet the war when seen by the historian of the future will be regarded as the result rather than the cause of the changes and of the uncertainty and the lack of serious conviction of this generation. Great literature cannot result from mental agility or kiuetoscopic colouring. It can only arise from high thinking and desperate earnestness. It remains to be seen whether the old Puritan leaven of the British character will reappear, or whether a new form of national enterprise and glory will produce a Shakespeare to interpret it, or whether the scientific spirit will evolve a new literature already prefigured in Allred Noyes, in Masefield’s Sonnets, in Huxley’s Essays, and further back in Tennyson’s “Two Voices” and Browning’s “Caliban Upon Setcbos.” It would not be a hazardous prediction to choose religion, renewed, re-interpreted and re-iuvigo-rated as the future inspirer of English literature. To-day we toss upon the seas of change.