made the effort; but there still remains a difference between the two. The new is anti-lyrical; it lacks the Romantic's release of tears; it is, in short, marked by what the French term sécheresse. Any one who would get the difference has but to read such a book as Drieu La Rochelle's Le Jeune Européen and contrast the author's attitude with that of Lord Byron or Alfred de Musset.
How is one to bring some kind of critical order out of this apparent chaos? The modern attitude is always a complex and often in appearance, an incoherent one. Is there some logical concatenation of tendencies, one reflective of what might be called the collective soul of the epoch? A case in point is that auctorial "unintelligibility" which is one of the most persistent of the reproaches hurled at the young writer of today. A business man is to be heard speaking disdainfully of a volume "parts of which even the most erudite persons find it impossible to understand." Is there something that can bring such a reader to see the reason for this? What is wanted is not one of the patented quick guides to culture, but a sincere attempt at a rapprochement.[1] The difficulty is, the young writer is inclined to scorn any such unbending, superciliousness being a part of his attitude, if not of his creed. Such a gesture from the extreme Left is, it may be, a trifle too much to expect; but there is a certain middle ground, however much the inexorable Left may contemn it, from which something at once intelligent and intelligible may be said; and it is from this "extreme center," as he describes it, that M. André Berge addresses us in his L'Esprit de la Litterature moderne,[2] which is, perhaps, the first wholly sympathetic and satisfactory effort to gather up the manifold tangled threads of after-the-War modernity as embodied in the art of writing.[3]
II
Everything depends upon the critic and his approach. Les Jeunes, for the most part, decline to hold any brief for themselves. They are even content to let their "sincerity" be challenged, and to bear the
- ↑ Such an attempt has been made by a French scholar, M. Émile Bouviet (Initiation à la Littérature d'aujourd'hui, 1927). M. Bouvier genially observes that he would rather be "elementary than esoteric (hermétique)".
- ↑ Paris, 1930.
- ↑ Too often, the "critic" of the newer literature is like the American reviewer of the English translation of Joseph Delteil's Sur le fleuve Amour: "What is one to say of a book that comes bound in black oilcloth and the title of which is a pun?"
