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TO, LENOX FOUNDATIONS.

THE LIVING AGE:

I Weekly Magazine of Contemporary Literature and Chought.

SEVENTH SERIES VOLUME XXVI.

(FOUNDED BY E. LITTELL IN 1844.)

NO. 3160. JAN. 28, 1905.

FROM BEGINNING Vol. CCXLIV.

AFTER THE REACTION.

Literature as detached as is the literature of to-day from the middle and working classes, the unconscious rulers of England, would appear to be independent of the actual processes of political and social change. A few vigorous story tellers, a group of writers of pleasant verse, some youthful and brilliant journalists, will make up a literary "movement"; which will take itself seriously, parade a pomp and circumstance, and continue until the respectabilities of advancing age, and often, alas! the revelations of a failing inspiration, have once again demonstrated the triumph of time and change. Yet this emphasis of aloofness is not the whole truth. Literature, indeed, has no direct concern with the dust of the party struggle, with bills of licensing or local government. But the larger transitions of any period, the spirit which underlies some definite upheaval, whose appearance in the world of action astonishes the unthinking, is certain to find itself first articulate in the universe of art. Estimate in that universe a vital movement of

revolt from some accepted ideal and tradition; you will be estimating a force which in no long time destined to enter into the play of outward affairs and to mould the courses of the world.

No better example could be adduced than the history of the Reaction of the later years of the nineteenth century. Weary of the long work of reform, a little bored by the strenuousness of the appeal to disinterested causes, conscious of the possession of unparalleled means of enjoyment, and of great possessions, the nation was evidently prepared for a new spirit, a new inspiration. That spirit and inspiration came with the Reaction; whose literature some fifteen years ago revealed the only confident and secure proclamation of any kind of definite appeal. As the former enthusiasms subsided and the former systems were found unsatisfying; as, in a word, the new England disentangled itself from the old; so the message proclaimed by a few men of genius, and diffused through a thousand obscure channels in Press and platform, became sud

denly arresting: and it now stands crystallized in the past as the characteristic product of those extraordinary years.

The contrast was glaring between the literature of the earlier Victorian era and the literature of the closing days. The old had been cosmopolitan; the new was Imperial. The old had proclaimed the glory of the "one imperishable cause," allied through all lands; the struggle for liberty against the accumulated atheisms of a dozen centuries. The new was frankly Tory; with the Tory scoffing at the futilities of freedom, described now as a squalid uprising of the discontented against their masters. The old had been "Liberal"; in that wide definition including such extremes as a Browning or a Tennyson; the new branded Liberalism as but a gigantic fraud by which the weak deluded the strong into an abnegation of their individuality. The old had been humanitarian; preaching, if with a somewhat thick voice, yet with a sanguine air, the coming of the golden age; with war abandoned as irrational, and a free and universal trade binding the nations into one brotherhood, and the diffusion of the sweet reasonableness of the English character through all the envious nations of the world. The new had no such hopes or dreams. It revolted always against the domination of the bourgeois. It estimated commerce as a means of conflict and a weapon of offence. It clamored for the ancient Barbarism; and delighted in war; and would spread an English civilization, not by the diffusion of its ideas but by the destruction of its enemies. It was literature congruous to a nation wearied of the drabness of its uniform successes; with the dissatisfaction and vague restlessness which come both to individuals and communities after long periods of order and routine. To the friends of progress the dominance

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of such a spirit seemed of the elements of tragedy. Literature, after its long alliance with the party of reform, had gone definitely over to the enemy. the minds of the few faithful the dismay was somewhat similar to that aroused in the defenders of the inviolate city when the Shekinah departed from the courts of the temple and passed into the camp of its foes.

This new spirit of the Reaction gathered itself especially round two men, each possessing more than a touch of genius-Mr. W. E. Henley and Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Mr. Henley's vitriolic denunciation of the accepted codes of life, the almost insane lust of blood and violence of one physically debarred from personal adventure, became reflected in a hundred eager followers, who plied the axe and hammer of sneer and gibe round the humanitarian ideal and the house of the good citizen. Mr. Kipling's proclamation of the Imperial race co-operating with God in the bloody destruction and domination of subject peoples passed into the commonplaces of a journalism which every morning revealed to the astonished clerk his devastation of Afghanistan, or civilization of Zanzibar, or slaughter of ten thousand fantastic Dervishes in a night and a day.

It was a literature of the security of a confident triumph; with that quality which distinguishes the work of a dawn from the work of a declining day. Its appeal was to many permanent elements of human emotion. It proclaimed the supremacy of England as a mother worth dying and living for; her children seeking danger as a bride, searching all the confines of the world; encountering and joyfully mastering enemies and natural forces, the winds and the seas and the terrors of elemental things. There were visions of ships steering through deep waters and harvests gathered from all seas; of the

pioneers whose bones have marked the track for the advancing army that they might follow where these had trod; of the flag of England descried amid mist and cold or in the Southern sun as everywhere triumphant by the testimony of all the winds of Heaven. It was a literature of intoxication; adequate to a nation which, having conquered the world in a fit of absence of mind, has suddenly become conscious of the magnitude of its achievement. Small wonder that to the eyes of the men of the time there came with it something of the force of a gospel; as the boundaries of their thought lifted to disclose larger horizons than they had ever known.

It was a literature on the other hand of a rather forced ferocity; of an academic enthusiasm for the noise and trappings of war; the work of men who despised death because there was present in their minds, not death as a reality but only death as an idea. It preached a boastful insularity with a whole-hearted contempt for disloyal Ireland or the cretins of the continent; revealing the Briton to himself, a majestic figure, lord of the earth, who with the approbation of God, but by the power of his own right arm, had gotten himself the victory.

It pre

sented a figure of the Imperial race, like Nietzsche's Overman, trampling over the ineffective, crushing opposing nations, boasting an iron supremacy, administering an iron justice. It thought scorn of all the ideals of philanthropy of the middle classes with their timidities and reticence and dull routine, of the poor with the clumsiness of their ineffectual squalor. "More chops, bloody ones with gristle," so a critic has summed up Mr. Kipling's demand from life in his own words. It neglected and despised the ancient pieties of an older England, the little isle set in its silver sea. Greatness became bigness; specific national feel

ing, parochial. Imperial Destiny replaced national well-being; and men were no longer asked to pursue the "just" course, but to approve the "inevitable."

The thing lasted only so long as it could keep divorced from real things and confined to its world of dreams. While British wars consisted of battues of blacks, with the minimum of loss and pain to ourselves, the falsity of the atmosphere of Mr. Kipling's battle tales was undiscoverable. The blind and gibbering maniac of the end of "The Light that Failed," who shrieks, "Give 'em Hell, men, oh, give 'em Hell," from the security of an armored train, while his companions annihilate their enemies through the turning of the handle of a machine gun, seemed not only a possible but even a reputable figure. The sport of such "good hunting"-"the lordliest life on earth" -was not recounted by the historian of the hunted, the tribes of the hills whose land was laid desolate and wells. choked up and palmtrees cut down. and villages burnt, who were joyfully butchered to make an Imperial holiday. Their verdict upon such "hunting" might have been less exuberant; as Newman said in the famous parable in his defence of Catholics in England, "Lions would have fared better, had lions been the artists."

With the outbreak of real war and some apprehension of its meaning the spell snapped. Directly Mr. Kipling commenced to write concerning the actual conflict in South Africa, the note suddenly jarred and rang false. His judgment was found to be concerned not with war but the idea of war; the conception in the brain of a journalist. The jauntiness and cocksureness, the surface swagger, were suddenly confronted with realities;-Death and Loss and Longing. "There was a good kill. ing at Paardeberg; the first satisfactory killing of the whole war";-this attitude

was revealed suddenly in its essential vulgarity; a grimace from the teeth outwards; war as viewed from Capel Court or Whitechapel, or any other place where men shout and are impotent.

Real war gave indeed a revelation of high sacrifice, the coming of the "fire of Prometheus" into the common ways of men; flaming up under the stress of a vast upheaval in the conflict of life and of death. It was not given to the Apostles of the New Imperialism to estimate or even to understand those deeper tides of the human soul. Their conception was of war carried on in the spirit of the music hall comedy; the men at the close of the struggle wiping their hands which have successfully gouged out the eyes of their enemies, while they hum the latest popular song. It was left for another poet of a different spirit, Mr. Henry Newbolt, to strike the deeper notes in the only memorable verse called forth by this three years' struggle.

With the coming of a war which it had so vigorously demanded, the literature of the reaction fell suddenly, first into shrillness, then into silence. Read to-day, the whole thing stands strangely remote and fantastic, the child of a time infinitely far away. Of its authors, some are dead; and some survive in a strange shadowy life in an alien time. Mr. Kipling continues to compile such mournful productions as "Traffics and Discoveries." But the pipe fails to awaken any responsive echoes. Even those who before had approved now turn away their heads. He appears like one dancing and grimacing in the midst of the set grave faces of a silent company. And so of the others. Mr. Street, one of the briskest of the original young men, contributes long letters on Tariff Reform to the columns of the Times. They suggest nothing so much as the return from beyond the grave of the

tenuous phantoms of the Greek heroes. The spectacle is not without its pathos. We have not changed, these writers might complain. Here is the same music which you once approved, which once moved you clumsily to caper in the market place. What has caused the charm suddenly to cease?

It has ceased-is the reply-because your world of phantasy has been judged and condemned by real things; because with that judgment a new Spirit is dawning in England.

This inspiration should make its first appearance in literature. And the question immediately arises: can we estimate to-day anything confident and vital which can be interpreted as the work of the pioneers, the Spring of a Summer to be?

We shall find, I think, on examination two classes of such writings. The first is of those who growing up under the spirit and dominance of the Reaction, have yet refused to give it their allegiance; a Literature of protest colored by a sense of isolation from the ideals of its age. The second is of those developing when that dominance is passing away and who exhibit therefore all the security and triumph which comes from the conviction of a winning

cause.

Of the first, the most noteworthy name is of one who has always stood apart and alone, whose verse has shown a conviction that he is speaking to a people indifferent to his art. The work of Mr. William Watson will appear in the future by the side of that of Mr. Rudyard Kipling as representing a conflict of ideas which go down to the basis of man's being. The very methods reflect the diversified ideals. The one is detached, elusive, cold; standing apart upon the height; content in a serenity and a fastidious taste in words. The other is colored, barbaric, human; tumid and rhetorical; moving and rejoicing in the every-day world;

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