Their desire is to free
their souls from the restraints of circumstance, to break through
rule and convention, to let their hearts expand.
But they do not fly into Byronic melancholy or Wordsworthian
enthusiasm for the mysterious abstract; they are far more likely
to fly away from them. Byron and Wordsworth do not interest them,
and Tennyson they hate. Romantic in mood, they are realistic,
never classical, in their contact with experience. In poetry they
prefer free verse, in prose they eschew grand phrases and sonorous
words. It has been the hard realism of an unfriendly world that
has scraped them to the raw, and they retaliate by vividly
describing all the unpleasant things they remember. Taught by the
social philosophers and war's disillusions that Denmark is
decaying, they do not escape to Cathay or Bohemia, but stay at
home and passionately narrate what Denmark has done to them.
Romantic Zolas, they have stolen the weapons of realism to fight
the battle of their ego. And the fact that a few pause in their
naturalism to soar into idyllic description or the rapture of
beauty merely proves my point, that they are fundamentally
romantics seeking escape, and that autobiographical realism is
merely romanticism _a la mode_.
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