The darker side of the Nineties and all that was self-divided and thoughtful and poetic come to us with none of this pathos, but untarnished. We have substituted analysis for introspection, irony for satire, and a spirit of huge, bitter, passionless mockery seems so exclusively appropriate to us that we sometimes overstrain to achieve it. The great men of the Nineties (Mr Hardy and Mr Yeats are living proof of it) were in the world and in life and had great concerns far more than they were, in their time. And whenever, even in the less great, the experience of being held in the hand of fate (rather than in the fell clutch of circumstance) asserted itself, they presented to us an outlook upon life which was the first suggestion of our own despair and disillusion. The difference is that for the most part their disillusion hurt them, and ours does not.
Until I had read The Waste Land by Mr Eliot I believed that Ulysses was the only complete expression of the spirit which will be "modern" for the next generation. (Complete, I say, because in part Mr Eliot and Mr Joyce had already expressed it in their earlier work; and others also.) The analysis and tagging of that spirit is a necessary work, to be accomplished when the distrust of classifications has somewhat abated. I have indicated how it differs from the Nineties, in its attitude towards its own disillusion; it differs more, I venture, in having no faith and in believing, more or less consciously, that no faith is possible, in wanting very much not to be called upon to make the effort to have faith. It is as sceptical of ideals (directions, "ends,") as Spinoza; it may recover from its détraquement sufficiently to understand the competition between its own interests and passions and by recognizing their relations arrive at what Mr Santayana terms the life of Reason. That infinite intellectual love which God has for himself, according to Spinoza, is perhaps the last remaining contact of this age with what is divine.
What is interesting about The Undertaker's Garland is that the authors apparently despaired of finding any unity in our lives and were compelled to find it in Death. It is, to be sure, of life that they are writing; yet for them life seems insupportable unless, until, it is regarded from the impregnable fortress of the grave. In this, in their preoccupation with Lucifer, in their extraordinary seriousness about secondary things, in a certain heaviness and a certain loftiness, they are close to the Nineties; if I may borrow a phrase which M Bergson used and Mr Santayana demolished, ils
