But now look at the writers who begin to attract notice — some of them had begun writing rather earlier, of course — immediately after the last war: Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Huxley, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis. Your first impression of them, compared with the others — this is true even of Lawrence — is that something has been punctured. To begin with, the notion of progress has gone by the board. They don’t any longer believe that men are getting better and better by having lower mortality rates, more effective birth control, better plumbing, more aeroplanes and faster motor cars. Nearly all of them are homesick for the remote past, or some period of the past, from D. H. Lawrence’s ancient Etruscans onwards.
All of them are politically reactionary, or at best are uninterested in politics. None of them cares twopence about the various hole-and-corner reforms which had seemed important to their predecessors, such as female suffrage, temperance reform, birth control or prevention of cruelty to animals. All of them are more friendly, or at least less hostile, towards the Christian churches than the previous generation had been. And nearly all of them seem to be aesthetically alive in a way that hardly any English writer since the Romantic Revival had been.
Now, one can best illustrate what I have been saying by means of individual examples, that is, by comparing outstanding books of more of less comparable type in the two periods. As a first example, compare H. G. Wells’s short stories — there’s a large number of them collected together under the title of The Country of the Blind — with D. H. Lawrence’s short stories, such as those in England, my England and The Prussian Officer.
This isn’t an unfair comparison, since each of these writers was at his best, or somewhere near his best, in the short story, and each of them was expressing a new vision of life which had a great effect on the young of his generation. The ultimate subject-matter of H. G. Wells’s stories is, first of all, scientific discovery, and beyond that the petty snobberies and tragi-comedies of contemporary English life, especially lower-middle-class life. His basic ‘message’, to use an expression I don’t like, is that Science can solve all the ills that humanity is heir to, but that man is at present too blind to see the possibility of his own powers.
The alternation between ambitious Utopian themes and light comedy, almost in the W.W. Jacobs vein, is very marked in Wells’s work. He writes about journeys to the moon and to the bottom of the sea, and also he writes about small shopkeepers dodging bankruptcy and fighting to keep their end up in the frightful snobbery of provincial towns. The connecting link is Wells’s belief in Science. He is saying all the time, if only that small shopkeeper could acquire a scientific outlook, his troubles would be ended. And of course he believes that this is going to happen, probably in the quite near future.
A few more million pounds for scientific research, a few ore generations scientifically educated, a few more superstitions shovelled into the dustbin, and the job is done. Now, if you turn to Lawrence’s stories, you don’t find this belief in Science — rather a hostility towards it, if anything — and you don’t find any marked interest in the future, certainly not in a rationalized hedonistic future of the kind that Wells deals in. You don’t even find the notion that the small shopkeeper, or any of the other victims of our society, would be better off if he were better educated. What you do find is a persistent implication that man has thrown away his birthright by becoming civilized. The ultimate subject-matter of nearly all Lawrence’s books is the failure of contemporary men, especially in the English-speaking countries, to live their lives intensely enough. Naturally he fixes first on their sexual lives, and it is a fact that most of Lawrence’s books centre round sex. But he isn’t, as in sometimes supposed, demanding more of what people call sexual liberty.
He is completely disillusioned about that, and he hates the so-called sophistication of bohemian intellectuals just as much as he hates the puritanism of the middle class. What he is saying is simply that modern men aren’t fully alive, whether they fail through too narrow standards or through not having any. Granted that they can be fully alive, he doesn’t much care what social or political or economic system they live under. He takes the structure of existing society, with its class distinctions and so on, almost for granted in his stories, and doesn’t show any very urgent wish to change it. All he asks is that men shall live more simply, nearer to the earth, with more sense of the magic of things like vegetation, fire, water, sex, blood, than they can in a world of celluloid and concrete where the gramophones never stop playing. He imagines — quite likely he is wrong — that savages or primitive peoples live more intensely than civilized men, and he builds up a mythical figure who is not far from being the Noble savage over again.
Finally, he projects these virtues on to the Etruscans, an ancient pre-Roman people who lived in northern Italy and about whom we don’t, in fact, know anything. From the point of view of H. G.Wells all this abandonment of Science and Progress, this actual wish to revert to the primitive, is simply heresy and nonsense. And yet one must admit that whether Lawrence’s view of life is true or whether it is perverted, it is at least an advance on the Science worship of H. G.Wells or the shallow Fabian progressivism of writers like Bernard Shaw. It is an advance in the sense that it results from seeing through the other attitude and not from falling short of it. Partly that was the effect of the war of 1914-18, which succeeded in debunking both Science, Progress and civilized man. Progress had finally ended in the biggest massacre in history. Science was something that created bombing planes and poison gas, civilized man, as it turned out, was ready to behave worse than any savage when the pinch came. But Lawrence’s discontent with modern machine civilization would have been the same, no doubt, if the war of 1914-18 had never happened.
Now I want to make another comparison, between James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses, and John Galsworthy’s, at any rate, very large novel sequence The Forsyte Saga. This time it isn’t a fair comparison, in effect it’s a comparison between a good book and a bad one, and it also isn’t quite correct chronologically, because the later parts of The Forsyte Saga were written in the nineteen-twenties. But the parts of it that anyone is likely to remember were written about 1910, and for my purpose the comparison is relevant, because both Joyce and Galsworthy are making efforts to cover an enormous canvas and get the spirit and social history of a whole epoch between the covers of a single book. The Man of Property may not seem to us now a very profound criticism of society, but it seemed so to its contemporaries, as you can see by what they wrote about it.
Joyce wrote Ulysses in the seven years between 1914 and 1921, working away all through the war, to which he probably paid little or no attention, and earning a miserable living as a teacher of languages in Italy and Switzerland. He was quite ready to work seven years in poverty and complete obscurity so as to get his great book on to paper. But what is it that was so urgently important for him to express? Parts of Ulysses aren’t very easily intelligible, but from the book as a whole you get two main impressions. The first is that Joyce is interested to the point of obsession with technique. This has been one of the main characteristics of modern literature, though more recently it has been a diminishing one. You get a parallel development in the plastic arts, painters, and even sculptors, being more and more interested in the material they work in, in the brush-marks of a picture, for instance, as against its design, let alone its subject-matter.
Joyce is interested in mere words, the sounds and associations of words, even the pattern of words on the paper, in a way that wasn’t the case with any of the preceding generation of writers, except to some extent the Polish-English writer, Joseph Conrad. With Joyce you are back to the conception of style, of fine writing, or poetic writing, perhaps even to purple passages. A writer like Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, would have said as a matter of course that the sole use of words is to express exact meanings as shortly as possible. And apart from this technical obsession, the other main theme of Ulysses is the squalor, even the meaninglessness of modern life after the triumph of the machine and the collapse of religious belief. Joyce — an Irishman, remember, and it’s worth noting that the best English writers during the nineteen-twenties were in many cases not Englishmen — is writing as a Catholic who has lost his faith but has retained the mental framework which he acquired in his Catholic childhood and boyhood.
Ulysses, which is a very long
