They in no sense corresponded with the
descriptions of society given by the new social thinkers whose
ideas had leaked through to him. They did not square with his own
experience. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" rang false to a
member of the 26th Division. Quiet stories of idyllic youth in New
England towns jarred upon the memories of a class-conscious
youngster in modern New York. Youth began to scrutinize its own
past, and then to write, with a passionate desire to tell the real
truth, all of it, pleasant, unpleasant, or dirty, regardless of
narrative relevance.
The result was this new naturalism, a propaganda of the experience
of youth, where the fact that mother's face was ugly, not angelic,
is supremely important, more important than the story, just
because it was the truth. And as the surest way to get all the
truth is to tell your own story, every potential novelist wrote
his own story, enriching it, where sensation was thin, from the
biographies of his intimates. Rousseau was reborn without his
social philosophy. Defoe was reincarnated, but more anxious now to
describe precisely what happened to him than to tell an effective
tale.
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