That strange
malady of the mind by which in the nineteenth century material progress
was supposed to create, _ipso facto_, a concomitant moral progress, and
which so plunged the world into catastrophe, has its counterpart in a
literature of objective realism. One of the most admired of
contemporary works of fiction opens with an infant's memory of a
mackintosh sheet, pleasantly warmed with its own water; another, of
almost equal popularity among the cultivated, abounds with such
reminiscences of the heroine as the paste of bread with which she filled
her decaying teeth while she ate her breakfast. Yet the young writers
who abuse their talents so unspeakably have right on their side when
they refuse to listen to the condemnation pronounced by an older
generation. What right, indeed, have these to condemn the logical
outcome of an anarchic individualism which they themselves so jealously
cherished? They may not like the bastard progeny of the various
mistresses they adored--of a Science which they enthroned above instead
of subordinating to humanistic values, of a brutal Imperialism which the
so-called Conservatives among them set up in place of the truly humane
devotion of which man is capable, of the sickening humanitarianism which
appears in retrospect to have been merely an excuse for absolute
indolence--but they certainly have forfeited the right to censure it.
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