tite, which, with the widening of the field of choice, brings on its own paralysis. How choose from amid all the infinite possibilities of doing, knowing and feeling,—the seemingly boundless possibilities of freedom? (Compare William James' "possible Me's,") How resign one's self to the arduous necessity of choice, a necessity, as with André Gide of an older generation, that is implied in action, action becoming thus a limitation? Others feel anything but a sense of freedom. To the young Frenchman, the habit of freedom, become a memory, causes the American by contrast to appear a free being. The result is, if he cannot have freedom, he would conquer the illusion, an illusion of freedom and of power. The thing for which he is looking is a way out; his one desire is evasion, escape, a sort of Huysmansesque "hors du monde, n'importe où." This will explain the passion, one which the average American or the normal-going citizen anywhere will find difficult to understand, for the "acte gratuit," some action which shall assert one's power of doing, of choosing, as when, in the Caves du Vatican, Gide's Lafcadio, for no other reason, pushes an innocent victim out the door of a railway carriage.
Impotence, one way or another, it is that. The German Remarque has given a revealing interview. A combatant who knew only the last years of fighting, he confesses that he merely has transferred his own feeling of impotence in confrontation with life to the subject of war; in which respect, he stands in some contrast with the objective Renn. What we have is a certain apotheosis of unrest, as an end in itself, or, according to Marcel Arland, author of a three-volume war novel, a new mal du siècle.[1] This new mal du siècle, however, is not precisely the same as the one that Baudelaire knew; it differs from that of either the Romantics or the Decadents, although its victims, if anything, are more akin to the latter than to the former. A plausible attempt has been made to connect the new Weltschmerz with an older Sturm und Drang, and to trace the whole back to early German philosophic idealism. Signor Francesco Flora, for one, has
- ↑ Article in La Nouvelle Revue Française, February, 1924. See the French section, following.
in that year that Walter Hasenclevet's play, Der Sohn, the beginning of what the Germans know as "the revolt of the Sons," was produced; it was in that year that Dada really started; etc. "The drama," says Alberto Consiglio, "is in our own minds; the decent thing is to subdue it by expressing it." (See a review of Consiglio by Giansiro Fertata, in Solaria, January, 1930, pp. 53ff.)
