THE AFTER-WAR SPIRIT
IN LITERATURE
I
That literature, the practitioners of which are often vaguely referred to as "the young," which has sprung up in Europe since the War, and which has not been without its effect upon America, presents to the casual beholder a bewildering set of facets. That there is an after-the-War literature sufficiently distinct for critical demarcation, no one is likely to deny. There is, even, a readily recognizable after-the-War mode of writing; and behind this mode of writing there must lie a mode or modes of thought and feeling, a view of and an attitude toward life and the world that would not, conceivably, have been the same if the War had not occurred. What is that view, that attitude; what are those intellective, emotional and, it may be added, volitional modes which, if not directly produced by the Great Struggle, certainly have left their indelible impress upon the decade that followed it?
Looking about him and reading the works of les jeunes, one's first impression is that of a greater or less degree of anarchy;[1] but does this creative-aesthetic anarchy, and in how far, represent an anarchy upon the moral plane? That there has been a wide-reaching and deep-searching revaluation of values is not to be doubted; and this revaluation has been and is being accomplished, not so much by those who were close up to the rain of shells,—too frequently, these were left with little more than a sense of blind and furious impotence,—but more by that generation which immediately followed the fighters. The older men, most of them now in their forties, had, it is true, something like a foreshadowing of the new spirit, a sense at least of the imminence of a new order, as in those lines of the Italian soldier-poet, Oxilia, quoted above: "The Past is dead, and
3
- ↑ See M. Paul Valery's "La Crise de l'Esprit," in the first Variété (1924). See, also, an article by the late D. H. Lawrence, "Chaos in Poetry," in Échanges, No. 1.
