The Age of Unreason
IT was about the turn of the century that the trouble began. It did not come from the rebels or the radicals ; for we see now clearly enough that Hardy and Shaw and even Wells were the last of the Victorians, and not the vanguard of the new age. It came rather with men like Kipling and Rostand, men loyal to the core to the old traditions, men of genius—and yet men who somehow did not quite pull it off. We knew that- Stalky was great ; we knew that he was in the true line of Vic- torian heroes ; yet people did not feel about him as their fathers felt about Mr. Pickwick or Harry Esmond. The world of Paris sat respectfully in the stalls and applauded Cyrano ; but their grandfathers had made a riot over Cromwell and Hernani. No, it was no longer the same thing. The great days of the glory of man and his achievements were numbered. The vein was petering out ; in some strange way it no longer came off. It was, men said, the end of the Victorian Age.
If we look back now over the literature of the last twenty-five years we can see that the most fundamental symptom of the change has been the disintegration of the human personality. Personality had long been a stumbling-block to the philosophers ; but the liberties they took with it had no more repercussion in literature than the liberties which they had, from time immemorial, taken with space and time. The trouble did not begin with them. It appears to have been the Russians who started it ; and there was a queer Frenchman with 'a German pseudonym who wrote Le Rouge et le Noir in'1830, and predicted that he would be read about 1880. He began to be read some fifteen or twenty years later and, aided and abetted by Dostoevsky and the psycho- analysts, to convince the world that human personality was a mere bundle of conflicting sensations common to humanity at large, and not in the least the individual coherent whole in which, for three centuries or more, we had so firmly believed. And, finally, when the process of disintegration seemed complete, there arose one Proust to prove not merely that the human personality was an imperfectly co-ordinated bundle of sensations, but that even the sensations themselves were but the fantastic echoes of a half-remembered, half-imagined past. Marcel Proust is one of thoie writers who have many prede- cessors, but can have no successor. He is complete and final. In the words of a recent French critic, he " reduces the whole idea of personality to dust." It was once the vulgar ambition of mankind to make something out of nothing ; PrOust brought to perfection the more genteel pastime of resolving everything into nothingness.
It is obvious that the new scheme of things allows no place for indiVidual greatness. We have banished the great man from history as we have banished the character from modem fiction. Where the Victorian biography was sculptural, contemporary biography is chemical ; it dissolves the apparently solid mass of personal achieve- ment into an undifferentiated fluid of universal emotions. We have discovered group psychology. The individual no longer, as in Hardy, defies a malignant destiny or, as in Kipling, imposes his will on the' inferior strata of mankind. He has ceased to be even a unit ; he is merely a component part of the multitude of sensations which we call humanity.
In these conditions it is not surprising that contem- porary man should suffer from a kind of chronic inferiority complex. All things considered, our modem prophets have been merciful. They are, indeed, convinced of our inferiority ; but they have not, as they might logically have been expected to do, compared us unfavourably with the animal and vegetable kingdoms. They have in fact been somewhat confused and inconsistent in their attacks ; for, while- Count- Keyserling would have us bow down before the mind and soul of the Oriental, D. H. Lawrence taunted us with the superiority of the Mexican Indians, on the ground that they have neither mind nor soul at all.
It is, perhaps, unnecessary for us to believe in the verbal inspiration of these latter-day minor prophets, who may be suspected of a desire to make our flesh creep ; but it is well to' be clear whither we are tending. What we called the end of the Victorian age was something far more significant. It was the end of a period of more than three centuries duration, which had set in when the Renaissance and the Reformation conspired to throw the individual on his own spiritual resources, and to lay the foundation of the now discarded superstitions of humanism and progress. " What a piece of work is man ! How noble in reason ! How infinite in faculty ! In form, in moving, how express and admirable ! In apprehension how like a god ! " In Hamlet's day it was the redis- covery of a long forgotten truth ; then for three centuries it was a truism ; and in another quarter of a century it was to become an outworn absurdity or a wild paradox. Not indeed altogether ; for, from the legacy of the Renaissance, your modem prophet will, illogically enough, allow you to retain a certain respect for physical beauty and fitness ; but for the nobility of reason he has as little use as the Victorian scientist for miracles.
It is a natural disability under which the defence of reason must suffer that, while your opponent may use the weapons of reason to attack your position, you are debarred from employing the same weapons to defend it. For if the assailant can prove by reason that the position of reason is untenable, you are lost ; but how- ever successfully you may defend reason by means of reason, your opponent will merely deny the validity both of your arguments and of your conclusion. For the disciples of unreason it is " Heads I win, tails you lose." It may, for example, be unreasonable for so ardent a detractor of reason as Aldous Huxley to reason with the public in print at the rate of several thousand words a month ; but if you were to tell him so, it would be per- fectly open to him to reply : " Of course, it is unreason- able ; and it is all the better for that." And you being (as he is not) bound by reason, would have to accept the answer. It may however be suggested, for the benefit of those who have still some weakness for consistency, that Chrome Yellow and Antic Hay are a far more adequate exposition of the philosophy of unreason than Proper studies or the Essay on Pascal.
It may nevertheless be confidently predicted that, when future generations wish to study this curious episode in English literature and thought, they will turn not to Chrome Yellow, but to Ulysses. It is true that the former is eminently readable, and that to digest the latter is a serious strain even on the most plodding bookworm. But there are, as the schoolboy knows to his cost, many unreadable classics in English, as in other literatures ; and it would be a mistake to imagine that some of them were ever readable. Into this category of unreadable classics Joyce's masterpiece will eventually fall ; for it is the one serious, and in its way successful, effort in English to create a new literary form for the school of unreason. It brilliantly combines the essential elements of the child's puzzle, the dyspeptic's nightmare, and the fever patient's delirium. It is purely sub- rational ; it is what might, a few years ago, have been called sub-human ; but, whatever the epithet, it will remain, for those who come after, the one adequate expression and symbol of our present discontents.
E. H. CARE,
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