The war, which confused and afterward dulled our thinking,
stirred innumerable critical impulses, which are coming to the
surface, some like bubbles and others like boils, but some as new
creations of the American intellect. The new generation has shown
itself acrimoniously critical. It slaps tradition and names its
novels and poetry as Adam named the animals in the garden, out of
its own imagination. The war shook it loose from convention, and
like a boy sent away to college, its first impulse is to disown
the Main Street that bore it. Youth of the 90's admired its elders
and imitated them unsuccessfully. Youth of the nineteen twenties
imitates France and Russia of the 70's, and contemporary England.
It may eventually do more than the 90's did with America; in the
meantime, while it flounders in the attempt to create, it is at
least highly critical. Furthermore, the social unrest, beginning
before the war and likely to outlast our time, has made us all
more critical of literature. Mark Twain's "Yankee in King Arthur's
Court" turned the milk of Tennyson's aristocratic "Idylls" sour.
The deep drawn undercurrent of socialistic thinking urges us
toward a new consideration of all earlier writing, to see what may
be its social significance.
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