THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
1918 which enclosed their moderated indifference to chaos, had
broken down, and a new generation who talked about revolutions,
who took sides, who were politically naked, who wrote clumsily, and
very few of whom had been to Paris, had arisen.
In fact, it is true that although some of the writers of the 1930's
(MacNeice, Day Lewis and Empson, for example) were fine scholars,
we were less cultivated than our predecessors, just as they in their
tum were less cultivated than Henry James. By "cultivated" here I
do
not mean erudite. I am using the word in the rather special way
in which people do use it when they consider themselves to have
culture. I mean having a kind of intelligence which tends to insist
on past values and despise present ones. In this sense of the word,
Henry James was more cultivated than Bloomsbury, and indeed he
regarded the younger generation of writers in
his
time with horror,
finding their insistence on certain aspects of living coarse. It may
be
that there has been a continual loss of past values at the expense
of present ones during this century. One sees why: for to each new
generation it will appear that the previous generation sacrifices too
much awareness of contemporary life to the preservation of tradi–
tional values. To the older generation it will seem that the value of
living consists of the values they have known from the past and to
some extent created within the present. There is not much point
in
arguing here about what "life" is. More important to realize that
in
an age where social conditions are changing rapidly, there will
always be a pressure on contemporary culture brought to bear from
two sides. From one, by those who consider that culture belongs
primarily to the past and must be saved from the disintegrating in–
flow of actuality. From the other, by those who think that culture
must be perpetually extended, strengthened, operated on and trans–
fused with new life or it will wither into the conventional and the
academic. There is also a third attitude, a combination of both these,
that of the revolutionary traditionalist, who wishes in his work to
accomplish a revolution whereby the greatest sense of the traditional
is
interpreted within the greatest sense of the modem. It can be
argued that James Joyce's
Ulysses
is at once the most traditional
and
the most modem of works.
The young writers of the 1930's read into the work of Eliot
and
Joyce the assumption that Western civilization was ended:
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