NINETIES—TWENTIES—THIRTIES
The Eighteen Nineties. By Holbrook Jackson. Illustrated. 8vo. 304 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $5.
The Undertaker's Garland. By John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson, Jr. 12mo. 192 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.
"HE was," says Mr Lytton Strachey of the hero of The Rousseau Affair, "modern. Among those quick, strong, fiery people of the eighteenth century, he belonged to another world—to the new world of self-consciousness, and doubt, and hesitation, of mysterious melancholy and quiet intimate delights, of long reflexions amid the solitudes of Nature, of infinite introspections amid the solitudes of the heart."
This was written fifteen years ago, and I wonder whether Mr Strachey, rewriting it to-day, would not stop over one word, to qualify it or to give it a date. I wonder whether any man who so profoundly influenced the spirit of the nineteenth century and was contemporary with every year of it, can be modern in the third decade of the twentieth. It does not seriously matter in what terms we conceive the war; we may think of it as an incident or as a culmination, as a divine act of justice or as an error in the divine calculations. We know that it marks decisively the break between us and our immediate past; there was a black moment just after the Peace when one fancied that the nineteen-twenties had been dissevered from the whole course of civilization, that isolated and unhappy as we were we could console ourselves only with the hope that we had no future, as we had no past. That is gone; yet it is likely that we shall continue for long to look upon the nineteenth century with that same mingling of hatred and irritation and contempt which the Yellow Nineties had for the early Victorian era, and probably with neither more nor less of justice. And if we are to find contemporaries in the past they will be those who had least to do with the form and character of that rejected time; among the rebels they will be those who were not too violently in revolt,
