HANOVER BROWSING

IN LAST MONTH'S article I suggested that the task of the present generation of scientists and philosophers, saints and artists is to synthesize the accumulations of the new facts and knowledge which have been such a marked feature of the history of the past century. When we turn our attention to the current state of affairs in industry, economics, politics, ethics, art, philosophy and religion we are overwhelmed by the confusion visible in these diverse fields. To say the least, we could do with a greater degree of harmony and co-ordination in both the material and the immaterial spheres of modern civilization. The bewilderment and the incoherence so often expressed in literature reveals this lack of unification in the objective embodiments of contemporary civilization as well as in the minds of the human beings who are its creators and carriers. I am far from saying Jhat it is an easy task to unify modern knowledge, or that it is a simple thing to use our available resources effectively to fashion a better world.

At best both tasks are likely to be found arduous enough. Yet we must begin to give serious attention to this task of unification and synthesis. A close study of many different kinds of recent books has convinced me that the world today is not only in a crucial economic crisis but also in a profound intellectual and spiritual crisis. In a previous issue I called this a cultural depression. Some critics explain this also as a crisis of overproduction on the one and of underconsumption on the other hand. We have produced unprecedented quantities of knowledge and facts but we are at a loss to know what to do with them. For we have not yet been able to consume them effectively. Consumption here of course means using these stores of new facts and knowledge for purposes of fineness of living, and for the deepening and enriching of individual and social life. Needless to say this theory of overproduction and underconsumption as applied to the present intellectual and spiritual crisis must not be pushed too far. At best it is based on an analogy. And it does not cover all the facts in the crisis. We not only fail to use the knowledge already in our possession, but the new world which has been made by it seems to have led to too large a volume of disillusionment and despair.

The loss of faith in man and in civilization is a serious aspect of the cultural depression. And even yet there are not many signs of recovery in this field. The problem is to bring about new reinforcements of hope and faith and spiritual zest which will remove some of the pessimism and the cynicism abroad in the land today. I do not

want to exaggerate this in any way. But no sensitive man familiar with modern life and thought can ignore the inadequacy of the inner resources of many modern men and women when confronted by the incoherencies and the relative chaos of contemporary civilization.

In my recent reading I have tried to discover whether the temper of modern literature is changing to any appreciable extent in this regard. I have also been interested in the explanations given by various critics to the pervasiveness of these disillusioning moods. It has surprised me a little how often these interpretations lack a proper historical perspective. Many thinkers seem to forget that moods and ideas of this character appear and reappear periodically in the history of thought. They are not altogether new things in either life or thought or literature. Neither do they affect all people. For instance scientists as a group are more hopeful than artists or poets or novelists. One discovers interesting differences in hopefulness of outlook and purposefulness of living among different elements and groups in the population. These differences are probably related to factors in the work and environments of people, at least to some extent.

Another thing which impressed me is the tendency of many interpreters of the modern scene to view modern disillusionment as if it were almost altogether a result of the Great War and its disenchanting aftermath. This again shows the absence of historical mindedness. It is tempting to overemphasize the effects of the war in this connection. Undoubtedly the war accentuated the pessimistic tendency of modern life and thought. It also helped to spread these pessimistic moods and ideas generally throughout the world. But they antedate the war. What has definitely increased since the war is the volume of literature of criticism of our economic system and its ideals and standards. The dissatisfaction with the values and incentives and rewards of modern civilization has also increased since the war. It is true that too much of this criticism is destructive in temper and aim. Much of it has also been too indiscriminating in its rebelliousness against the traditions and ideas and ideals and values of the past. Along with this unconstructive rebelliousness often went a note of cynicism and clever sophistication. However, there are signs of a change for the better in this respect. I detect signs in recent literature of refreshing elements of honesty, sincerity and simplicity. Cleverness for the sake of cleverness is not quite so much in the mode. Cynicism and brutal egoism and smart sophistication are still in evidence but they are getting to be stale and boring and pretentious. Recent novels of this general class tend to return to the eighteenth century type.

And I rather like that type. It is salty and earthy and healthily unsentimental. We can do with more novels of this kind. They are entertaining when they are well Written. I can recommend to those who like books of this sort two recent novels, namely: Magnus Merriam by Eric Linklater. (Farrar and Rinehart, 1934), and Finnley Wren, Philip Wylie. (Farrar and Rinehart, 1934.)

BUT I DO NOT want to write of novels of this class this month. So I must return to what I started to say about the presence of scepticism and pessimism in pre-war and post-war literature. The statement which sent me off on this line came from Norman Douglas's Looking Back: An Autobiographical Excursion, a disappointing book to those who enjoyed his South Wind and to a lesser degree some of his other works. In this autobiographical book he states "I skim through what I have written and note just one thing; taking us all round, we of those days must have had a fairly concrete and positive view of life. We lived with greater zest than the present generation seems able to do. We had more fun of that I am convinced. I often look around me and wonder what has come over the youngsters of today. Are they losing the sense of reality? Why are they listless, as if their blood temperature were two or three degrees below the normal?" I shall leave this to the youngsters of today to answer. Douglas suggests that they are, in a phrase of T. S. Eliot's, "measuring out their lives with coffee spoons," and writes as if the war was responsible for the difference he notes. We find Van Wyck Brooks saying also: "Who can deny that all this is largely the result of a war that has made reality hateful and seared and withered the life of the emotions? The great ideas that animated literature twenty years ago are too strong for the enfeebled stomachs of today." And in a recent book of poetry by Herbert Palmer called Summit and Chasm I note the lines

"Because the soul of man is sick of late,Complex and scheming, Groxuing old, itseems;

Too dull for worship and too mean inhate,

Too cold to blaze with love or dream greatdreams."

That is not good poetry but the thought brings unquiet to the mind. Yet I cannot accept the intimations that this assumed lowering of vital energies is of post-war origin. One could duplicate them from the literature of the nineteenth century. In Mallock's The New Republic, written I think m 1877, one of the characters says: "Yousee, the age we live in is an age of change.But this age, said Leslie, is peculiar surelym the extraordinary rapidity of its changesaid this has plunged us into a state ofmental anarchy that has not been equalledsince mental order was known. There is norecognised ride of life anywhere Allsociety it seems to me is going to pieces." If I had not said that this came from the eighteen seventies most of my readers Would take it as typical of many post-war books. It has a very modern sound. It niight easily be taken as coming from Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, or Galsworthy's White Monkey or Robert Hernck's Waste, or any number of modern novels. Similarly the scepticism of the last decade can be duplicated from the nineteenth century.

In the first published work of Pierre Loti, we find him making his declaration of no faith in these words: "There is noGod, there is no morality. Nothing existsof all we have been taught to respect I will make you my confession of faith. Myrule of conduct is to do always what I like,in defiance of all moral laws and social conventions. I do not believe in anything oranybody; I have no faith and no hope." Rebelliousness can hardly assume a more negative form than this. Of course it can be matched from post-war literature. A French dramatist who is fond of interpreting life in psycho-analytic terms, Lenormand, in the play The Aivakening of Instinct, makes one of the characters boast stridently: "You speak of God, of prohibition, of duties. For me these are notionsemptied of sense which do not correspondto any reality. Know then, if you wish tounderstand me, that I have broken all theyokes, human and divine. I have crushedthe sophism of duty. I obey only the lawsI give myself. I am a free being." In these quotations we have pre-war and post-war scepticism and violent egoism vociferously vocal. And there is not much difference between them.

IT WOULD BE EASY to add to these passages. I am not concerned for the moment with the subtle differences between nineteenth century pessimism and unbelief and the kind one discovers in writers like James Joyce and T. S. Eliot of Waste-Land and Richard Aldington in his bitter war poems or in The Fool in the Forest.

The reader can now sample the Ulysses of James Joyce, for the ban on its publication was lifted a few months ago. Joyce still views modern civilization as a thing of sham and pretence—a vast and ugly orgy of cheapness and vulgarity—a chaos of fraud and unlovely animalism. There are other modern writers who conceive man as too small for his illusions. It is this that accounts for the gulf between his visions and his performance. From this point of view the ideals of the raee are comic impossibilities. Mankind lacks the intelligence and the inner resources of goodness and nobility to ever realize them. That, they say, is the tragedy and the comedy of the present crisis in civilization. The burden is getting to be too great for man. Perhaps this attitude is not quite so common in the literature of the last year or two, but it is not by any means a thing of the past. Tn this connection I was interested to see whether Robinson Jeffers in his new book of poems bearing the title Give Your Heartto the Hawks (Random House—l 933), would strike a new note in so far as the pessimism in his earlier books was concerned. But I failed to see any signs of a change of heart in this poetic hawk. Humanity is still "the mould to break away from." The contrast between the pitiful and intolerable littleness and impotence of man and the majestic grandeur of nature still forms the main theme of his poetic vision. Brutality, cruelty, perversion, sadism are here almost to the same degree as in his other volumes. The long hawk-like sweep and rhythms of his narrative poems and the vision of a defeated civilization gives a strange effect to his poetry. There is genuine poetic feeling and a wild poetic beauty in some passages but his vision of life is violent and terrible. I turned from this recent work of Jeffers to a slight volume of poems by Gilbert Maxwell. He is one of our younger American poets and his poems not only promise much for the future but even now merit the appreciation of the critic. The title of his volume is Look to the Lightning. (Dodcl Mead and Cos., 1933.) I liked some of his sonnets, and of the separate poems I enjoyed Rebel,This Year of Our Lord, River Road, LostHeritage, and Wake.

I REFERRED IN a previous article to some of the younger English poets of today. Let me recommend the recent volume of one of the best of them, namely, Poems by Stephen Spender: (Faber and Faber, London, 1933). There is a certain amount of unevenness in his work, but his best poems appeal to me. The new collective proletarian element finds expression in some of his poems as well as in the poetry of Auden and Lewis. Like Auden he also protests against a "world that has had its day," and is "haunted by the emptiness" of the lives of modern men. Space does not permit me to quote some of the splendid passages in these poems. One line particularly impressed me. It is the line "He is richened bysorrow as a river by its bends." I can see the beautiful bends in the Connecticut river from my study window, and that line moved me. These modern collective poets are critical of civilization as they see, feel, experience, and know it. But they are not without hope and faith in a better world.

On the whole, I think, literature still reflects a sick world and tortured men. But the pessimism associated usually with a distressed civilization is not as pronounced or as bitter as it was a few years ago. Recovery is partly on the way here as it is said to be in the economic world. But it is spotty recovery. But there are significant individual signs of a renewal of hope and a renasence of faith. The latest play of Eugene O'Neill, Days Without End (Random House, 1934), may be regarded as an individual instance of this sort. I have not seen it on the stage, but I was favorably impressed by the reading of it. It has weaknesses—a little stilted in its form and here and there lacking in interest. I wish also that the dramatist would have put more poetry in it. But the conflict dramatised in it is a real one and the solution is set forth in terms of the redemptive symbolism of the cross. Its concluding sentence is also true to the Christian tradition. The old spirit of negation of John Loving dies in a vision of the meaning of the cross, and the new John Loving breaks out in a spirit of triumph and hope: "Life laughs with God'slove again. Life laughs with love."

LET ME LIST the books which I found worth reading this month. I cannot comment on them for lack of space. Here they are.

A. Novels.

1. Shadow Before. William Rollins. Robert M. Mcßride Cos. 1934. A very good proletarian novel.

2. The XJnforgotten Prisoner. H. C. Hutchinson. Farrar and Rinehart. 1934. I liked parts of this.

3. Anthony Adverse. Hervey Allen. Farrar

and Rinehart. 1933. I have not had a chance to list this before now. It is too bulky, but i£ you have a few days to spare to read a fairly good historical novel it is worth reading. The characterization in it is splendid. The adventure sections are also interesting. Its philosophy is vague in parts, and it drags on to unnecessary lengths. It has too many coincidences in its plot for a good novel. Its style is effective but lacking in beauty and distinction. A picturesque, romantic novel better than the average. It Could be improved by vigorous pruning.

4. No More Trumpets. George Milburn. Harcourt Brace and Cos. 1933.

A collection of short stories with a touch of humor and satire.

5. The Fool of Venus. George Cronyn Covici Friede. 1934.

Another historical romance of the period of the Third and Fourth Crusades and the Troubadours. Peire Vidal is the fool of the title. I would have preferred Marcabru or best of all Bernart.

6. Peter Abelard. Helen Waddell. 1933. The story of Abelard and Heloise in fiction.

7. Jonathan Bishop. Herbert Gorham. Farrar and Rinehart. 1933.

A novel of the Paris Commune days. I liked it.

8. Raggle-Taggle. Walter Starkie. Dutton and Cos. 1933.

A robustous account of a peerade of an Irish Professor among the gypsies of Hungary and Rumania. Enjoyable reading.

B. General Books.

l. Towards the Understanding of KarlMarx. Sidney Hook. John Day Cos. 1933.

The best American interpretation of the works and ideas of Marx. It is a left-wing sympathetic interpretation. Here and there it is vulnerable.

2. Recent Political Thought. Francis W. Coker. Appleton-Century Cos. 1934.

A splendid review of the dominant political ideas and movements of the last seventy-five years or so. Can be recommended to the serious student.

3. Soviet Literature. An Anthology. Edited and Translated by George Reavey and Marc Slonim. Covici Friede. 1934.

A helpful and worth while anthology to the student of the literature of revolutionary Russia. It contains short stories, sections of novels, prose selections and criticisms, and poetry.

4. Christianity and the Crisis. Edited by Dr. Percy Dearmer. Victor Gollanz, London. 1933.

A stimulating collection of articles by various well-known English social and religious thinkers. It has some very fine chapters.

5. Prometheans: Ancient and Modem. Burton Rascoe. G. P. Putnam. 1933.

Another provocative book. I liked his treatment of some of the rebels, but was provoked by others. His long chapter 011 Saint Mark is fantastic in the extreme. It lacks literary and historical balance.

6. The Life of Jesus. Maurice Goguel. Macmillan and Cos. 1933.

I recommend this modernistic book to those who may have read Burton Rascoe's volume. It is a critical and historical treatment of the rise and development of the Gospel narratives of the life and teaching of Jesus. The best historical investigations of the last thirty years are analysed and used with discrimination. The evidence for the historicity of Jesus is presented with rare insight into the difficulties of the question.

7- Culture in the South. Edited by W. T. Couch. University of North Carolina Press. 1934-

Worth reading.

8. Can We Limit War? Hoffman Nickerson. Frederick Stokes. 1934.

One of the best of recent books dealing with war.