The Conservative, observing the complacent indifference of most amateurs toward the present state of literature and general aesthetics, hath frequently wondered how acute be their realisation of just what is taking place. The average amateur paper, when it can spare the space from subjects so titanic as politics, conventions, and personalities, is unique in its allegiance to the accepted art and literature of the past; and in its happy oblivion regarding the menaces offered by the present and future. To read such a paper one would gather that Tennyson and Longfellow are still taken seriously as poets, and that the sentiments and sentimentalities of our fathers are still capable of awakening the Muse and forming the basis of future works of art. A protest against this species of myopia was some time ago uttered by one of our ultra-radicals; but lost force because of its origin and form. Perhaps it would not be improper for a Conservative, whose sympathy with extreme manifestations is little enough, to call renewed attention to the situation.

Do our members realise that the progress of science within the last half-century has introduced conceptions of man, the world, and the universe which make hollow and ridiculous an appreciable proportion of all the great literature of the past? Art, to be great, must be founded on human emotions of much strength; such as come from warm instincts and firm beliefs. Science having so greatly altered our view of the universe and the beliefs attendant upon that view, we are now confronted by an important shifting of values in every branch of art where belief is concerned. The old heroics, pieties, and sentimentalities are dead amongst the sophisticated; and even some of our appreciations of natural beauty are threatened. Just how expansive is this threat, we do not know; and The Conservative hopes fervently that the final devastated area will be comparatively narrow; but in any case startling developments are inevitable.

A glance at the serious magazine discussion of Mr. T. S. Eliot’s disjointed and incoherent “poem” called “The Waste Land”, in the November Dial, should be enough to convince the most unimpressionable of the true state of affairs. We here behold a practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general; offered to the public (whether or not as a hoax) as something justified by our modern mind with its recent comprehension of its own chaotic triviality and disorganisation. And we behold that public, or a considerable part of it, receiving this hilarious melange as something vital and typical; as “a poem of profound significance”, to quote its sponsors.

To reduce the situation to its baldest terms, man has suddenly discovered that all his high sentiments, values, and aspirations are mere illusions caused by physiological processes within himself, and of no significance whatsoever in an infinite and purposeless cosmos. He has discovered that most of his acts spring from hidden causes remote from the ones hitherto honoured by tradition, and that his so-called “soul” is merely (as one critic puts it) a rag-bag of unrelated odds and ends. And having made these discoveries, he does not know what to do about it; but compromises on a literature of analysis, chaos, and ironic contrast.

What will come of it? This we cannot say; but certainly, great alterations are due amongst the informed. European culture has reached the Alexandrian stage of effeteness, and we probably cannot hope for anything better than diverging streams of barren intellectualism and of an amorphous, passionate art founded on primal instincts rather than delicate emotions. The emotions will be minutely analysed and laughed at; the instincts will be glorified and wallowed in. The hope of art, paradoxically enough, lies in the ability of future generations not to be too well informed; to be able, at least, to create certain artificial limitations of consciousness and enjoy a gently whimsical repetition and variation of the traditional images and themes, whose decorative beauty and quaintness can never be wholly negligible to the sensitive taste. It is, for example, hardly possible that moonlight on a marble temple, or twilight in an old garden in spring, can ever be other than beautiful in our eyes. Bourgeois and plebeian literature, of course, will undoubtedly go on without change; for the thoughts of the great majority are rarely affected by the subtleties of progress. The Edgar A. Guests are secure in their unassuming niches. But it is only by the higher strata that we can judge a literature in its historic perspective, so that the permanent residuum of folk or ballad aesthetics does not figure in the problem. Never before, it is interesting to note, have the popular and the sophisticated types of literature been so widely divergent as at present.

Meanwhile it is singular that so few echoes of the prevailing turbulence should have reached our amateur press. Shall we remain comfortably cloistered with our Milton and Wordsworth, never again to know the amusing buzzing of such quaint irritants as Les Mouches Fantastiques? The Conservative confesses himself curious to know what other amateur authors and editors think of “The Waste Land” and its bizarre analogues!