With a new and greater success, it will
draw all our other efforts with it. If it fails, hope for the
interesting review, the well-balanced weekly, is precarious. If
they all submerge, we who like to read with discrimination and
gusto will have to take to books as an exclusive diet, or make our
choice between boredom and journalism.
III
THE NEW GENERATION
THE YOUNG ROMANTICS
We have talked about the younger generation as if youth were a new
phenomenon that had to be named and described, like a strange
animal in the Garden of Eden. No wonder that our juniors have
become self-conscious and have begun to defend themselves.
Nevertheless, the generation born after the 'eighties has had an
experience unique in our era. It has been urged, first by men and
then by events, to discredit the statements of historians, the
pictures of poets and novelists, and it has accepted the
challenge. The result is a literature which speaks for the younger
writers better, perhaps, than they speak for themselves, and this
literature no reader whose brain is still flexible can afford to
neglect; for to pass by youth for maturity is sooner or later to
lose step with life.
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