The Modern Spirit

Nowhere can the contrast between the essentially Victorian and the characteristically modem be more sharply drawn than in the contrast between Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad, perhaps the most important novelists of their respective periods. While Dickcns himself suffered as a child from the misery and helplessness of labor which was forced upon him, he nevertheless found it pos­sible to write novels which contain humor, sentiment, and happy endings. A characteristic plot in his fiction, that of the orphan in search of a family, is a plot he shared with numerous other Victo­rian novelists. As in «Oliver Twist», these orphan figures often find the place in society which they so earnestly believe is theirs. In contrast there is Joseph Conrad, whose life and work reflect the fragmented and unsettling conditions of modern life. Conrad was Polish by birth, but an exile in his youth, later becoming a British citizen. He was first a seaman and only later a novelist, writing in a language he did not learn until he was twenty. As an artist he pos­sessed a vision of irony, the darkly comic, and the grotesque.

The England reflected in the literature of the period between 1880 and World War I is an empire in the process of self-discovery and acknowledging that while progress and change in human af­fairs are vital, they can also be unpredictable, excessive, uncontrol­lable, and destructive. And insofar as this was a period of social, cultural, and ideological change, it nurtured a wide range of artistic responses by writers who also shared an insistent sense of explora­tion.

One of these responses was aestheticism. The Aesthetic Move­ment embodied a philosophy of artistic freedom from conventional expectations of content and form with a belief in «art for art's sake»; its emphasis was on sensory perception, the appreciation of beauty, the presentation of mood, and the perfection of technical expres­sion, rather than an attempt to serve as a moral guide. Another, more enduring artistic development was the absorption of the con­cepts of French Symbolism into modern writing. The Symbolists

explored the subtle changes in the human psyche and conveyed them with symbol and metaphor rather than by direct statement. Most remarkable in this context was William Butler Yeats, who began his career with the Aesthetic writers but gradually devel­oped a magnificent personal vision of history and myth, which in its poetic richness and power has few equals. Symbolism went on to bccome the dominant mode of twentieth-century poetry, and Yeats became the greatest poet in English of our time.

Yet perhaps the single most significant characteristic of the early modern penod in English literature was the deliberate testing and expansion of genre and style on the part of poets and novelists alike. Yeats, whose work involved continuous experimentation with lan­guage, rhythm, and symbol, was one example of this. Another was Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest who wrote in relative isola­tion from other poets and cannot properly be considered a member of any literary group. Hopkins believed deeply in the distinctive­ness of tilings — in nature, in human affairs, in the world of the spirit — and felt that this distinctiveness could only be convcyed in a unique, arresting manner. For this reason he reactcd against the bulky, ornate, and «propcD> in verse by writing poetry character­ized by a striking use of colloquial diction, a manipulation of syn­tax and the poetic line, and a unique theory of flexible or «sprung» rhythm. And Joseph Conrad, taking up the psychological emphasis of modern thought, projected it into his greatest stories and novels, among them «Heart of Darkness», «The Secret Sharer», and «Lord Jim». Specifically, Conrad experimented with multiple, sometimes «unreliable» narrators and with disruptions of chronological order in the telling of his tales.