The Dominion. SATURDAY, AUGUST 26, 1911. "REVOLT" IN LITERATURE.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1216, 26 August 1911, Page 4

The Dominion. SATURDAY, AUGUST 26, 1911. "REVOLT" IN LITERATURE.

In the current number- of the Fortnightly Review there is a brilliant article of a kind that is frequently met with .nowadays in thoughtful newspapers and reviews. The writer is Mr. Alfred Noyes, the most notable of the younger poets of England, and the theme is the necessity for "a chivalrous revolt" against tho rule of anarchy in literature. This is an age of "revolt," not in the world of literature only, but in the spheres of politics and morals—an age when brains and ability aro increasingly directed towards encouraging the common man to reject all authority, to regard old establishment in a belief or an institution or an allowed truth tho best possible reason why that belief, should be derided, that institution overthrown, and that truth denied. The appeal being usually made directly to the baser side of tho human mind, the "rebels," as they arc proud to stylo themselves, are doing infinite damage to society, and it is' in literature that they most easily and most widely diffuse their poison. One has but to think for a moment of tho character of present-day English fiction to realise how far our writers have drifted away from the old safe moorings of truth and honour. Success comes most easily to . the author who is morbidly or poisonously pessimestic or opilcptically sensual; scores of novels by English writers appear each year, every one of which has such a, motif that if it were condensed and translated into French it would fall into the class of the Monstres Parisian of Catultc Mcndes. These are some of the literary horrors that inspire Mr. Noyes's eloquent protest. . Our authors, he says, have lost "the old completeness of view, tho old singlehearted synthesis which saw the complex world in its essential unity, saw it steadily and saw it whole, man as a soul and a body, life anel death as a march to immortality, and tho universe as a miracle with a single meaning." We do not (he says) want to bo fettered by the past, but we may be very 6urc that we cannot each inako tho world over again for himself, and that there is no possible progress in cutting adrift from the past, any more than there would bo in losing our individual memory. The modern habit in literature is to "seize on a novel presentment of the problem and jump at 1 an evasion of the one "J.ittlo # difficulty with cries of 'give us a religion of pure beauty and joy.' " .In a passage of scornful eloquence, he lashes the "rebels" who think that liberty means license and that freedom requires no submissions : "When every schoolgirl lisps her contempt of the 'Early Victorian' era and of the 'Philistines,' who aro in a sudden and strange minority; when a crowd- of undergraduates assembles to hear Mr. J3haw proclaim that no man who lcoks

upon Christ as the highest ideal is worth I working with; when an utterance which is at. least an unwarrantable assault upon some ci tho loftiest and noblest spirits of our times, and something of an insult to the most sacred of our dead, is made within the time-honoured walls of Cambridge University, for tho edification doubtless of same of the sons of those who simply and straightforwardly hold a high fhith; wh-.;-nml I say this weighing every word—some of th;so men, who do understand this epoch of the A.l- - Jest, this tyranny of ignoble laughter, may be stabbed in tho back by so foul n. blow, and are not healed by the explanation that if a dog should vomit upon their sacraments it is nothing but blague; when all tho intellectual snobs of Suburbia have hastened to make their peace with these things lest you should think them, too, 'Philistines' or lacking in humour, it is surelv time for a chivalrous rovolt against this conventional unconvontwnali'iy, this Philistine 'Artyncss' they have coined tho word themselves—this ritual of irreverence, this dogmatic lawlessness, this extraordinary idea of theirs that thev are all lonely and glorious 'rebels.' The lonely idealists, tho lonely rebols, at the present ' day, aro not to be- found among the crowds of self-styled 'rebels' who drift before every wind of fashion and every puff of opinion. Names are not the only constant things in this universe. The real rebels, in the great and honourable sense, are to be found accepting—to the astonishment of their 'advanced' friends, and, from a lonely point of view, a solitary height—accepting the gifts of their fathers, and sometimes, not without a need for courage, kneeling to their fathers' God."

There is wide room for such a protest. A few weeks ago the London Spectator found it necessary to denounce the English Review for its encouragement of lecherous writing, and it brought upon its head a volley of indignant outcries from the best-known writers of the day. They did not, any more than the Spectator, defend the poisonous stuff that had been criticised, but they all failed—and this is surely cause for depression—to grasp the point that the evil has grown so great that it must_ be attacked by all means. English writers are more and more forgetting the maxim!) of Stevenson "To treat all subjects in the highest, the most honourable, and the pluckiest spirit consistent with fact, is the first duty of a writer." Stevenson lealised, and clearly expounded in this essay ("Tho Morality of the Profession of Letters") tho extent to which the public mind is moulded by the print-ing-press, and he thus indicated tho peculiar danger of work done in any spirit but tho highest: "Over the far larger proportion of the field of literature, the health or disease of the writer's mind or momentary humour forms not only the leading feature of his work, but is, at bottom, tho only thing ho can communicate to others." And what, mainly, arc they communicating to tho world just now ? False views of the importance of sex in life, false morality, sympathy with moral disease. "Anarchism in literature," as the writer of a notable article in the Contemporary Review put it last year, "is poisoning the national thought, overturning all ideals, and bringing chaos into our language. . . . There- is an ominous unrest; shallow writers and agitators are realising elemental forces which they cannot control, and which threaten chaos rather than promise a millennium." And what is to be the remedy? One thing wo know must bo avoided as containing the seeds of an evil greater still, and that is a legal censorship or suppression by authority. We must oppose a censorship on tho ground upon which Johnson sought to stand in presenting his unsound objections to an acadenyy of letters: "I, who can never wish to sec dependence multiplied, hope the spirit of English liberty will hinder or destroy it." But we all know what JopNSON would have saidin this age, which, far more than bis own age, merits description / as one "in which it is a kind of publick sport to refuse all respect that _ cannot be enforced." The phase will pass, but it will pass tho sooner if honest writers will se,t their faces against appeals to tho baser side of the human spirit. And perhaps there may arise a man or a group of men who will lead literature back into the light by insisting, .to adapt from Matthew 'Arnold, that men should not mistake their natural taste for morbidity or even unclean things for a relish for the truth, and that if authors, cither ,with their tongue in their cheek or with a fine impulsiveness, tell people that the natural taste for morbidity and unclean things is a relish for tho truth, there is the moro need to tell them the contrary.