MODERN AS VISION
365
is apparent, I think in the gulf that separates
The Waste Land
from
Four Quartets.
It may well be that the change was, in literature,
at all events, inevitable. All the same the price that is paid for the
present reaction is the abandonment of the aim of representing a
whole modern situation, which produced the greatest works of the
modern movement: withdrawn into the limited fortified area that
is the outpost of what remains of the continuous line of the tradition,
poets turn away from the vast areas of the modern world where these
connections no longer count, critics use the communicating lines as a
means of getting back into the works of the past, and condemning
all that is modern and unprecedented. Myth becomes split off from
tradition, mere illustration for academic poems by academic poets.
Inevitably, poetry seems as an
art
to have receded, and while
painters digress into futurism, the most hopeful tendency in literature
is the realism of novelists and playwrights oblivious of the aims that
were modern, but at least contemporaries in the manner of Arnold
Bennett, and energetic propagandists of an impassioned argument
that they are in the line of the true tradition. In place of the upper
class tradition-universally admitted to be in decline-they have in
England set up their little standard of insularity.
Although the present reaction may be inevitable,
it
seems im–
possible that, on the premises now put forward by criticism and
by novelists and playwrights content to be contemporaries in a limited
social realist tradition, that work on the scale of the greatest achieve–
ments earlier in the century could be written. Re-consideration of the
aims
of the modern and an attempt to relate them to the most vigorous
developments today, are surely necessary.
