Modern Literature

Of even more pervasive importance, however, than individual experiments and styles, was the fact that such manipulation of tra­ditional literary forms, whether poetry, drama, or fiction, abruptly altered what had usually been a comfortable relationship between English writers and their readers. The shared aim of Conrad and his contemporaries was not simply to educate or amuse or even to shock but, as he put it, to present a «rescued fragment» of life and to «reveal the substance of its truth». It was a conviction of these writers that the revelation of truth required both new techniques and the manipulation of old ones on the part of the writer, and thus much more critical and interpretive skill on the part of modern read­ers. It is not simple nostalgia, then, which makes even the rela­tively sophisticated contemporary reader of their works long occa­sionally for the more straightforward and approachable voices of such novelists as Thackeray, George Eliot, and Dickens, and such poets as Tennyson and the Brownings.

Beyond this conscious shift to new or modified styles and forms, English literature between 1880 and 1915 is characterized by its content, often a sharp departure from the subject matter of earlier writing. Here the most relevant contrast is perhaps that between Rudyard Kipling and H. G. Wells, who differed from each other as much as both differed from their predecessors. Particularly in such early work as «Barrack Room Ballads» and «Plain Tales from the Hills», Kipling recorded with honesty and sympathy the emotions and events which humanized life in distant comers of the Empire. He conveyed the heroism of the British «Tommy», the valor of his «Fuzzy-Wuzzy» Sudanese adversary, and the loyalty of his Indian comrade, «Gunga Din». In his essential sympathy and adherence to the traditional, as well as his belief in the «white man's burden», as justification for the British presence in India and Africa, Kipling was clearly a product of late Victorianism. Wells, on the other hand, reflected the England of Victoria's successor, Edward VII, which shared both materialism and a sense of stability with the preceding era, but also saw some prophetic intellectual forays into the mod­ern age. In particular Wells was a social critic, unafraid to direct irony and satire at «modern» failings; and he was a man trained in science, aware of the implications of modem weaponry, airplanes and airships, and travel into space — in the end one of the pioneer science-fiction writers of our time. His writing reflects the shift from modern, industrial England to the world of the technological future.

Between Kipling and Wells as writers with new subjects and themes were numerous others, such as George Gissing, A. E. Housman, and Thomas Hardy. Gissing was concerned with the in­creasingly depressing conditions of urban existence, and especially the tenuous, peripheral status of the alienated writer; he voiced these

concerns in such novels as «New Grub Slrect». Housman, a clas­sics scholar and poet who seemed equally doomed by love and fate, confronted the sense of fatality he shared with Gissing, Conrad, and others with a subdued stoicism which he found necessary de­spite the compensations of human society and the consolations of the natural world. Hardy, often as pessimistic in spirit as Gissing and as devoted to the English rural landscape as Housman, wrote several remarkable novels which treated earthy and, to some audi­ences, shocking themes and subjects; «The Mayor of Casterbridge» and «Tess of the D'Urbcrvilles» contain several cases in point. And then, as if to assert his independence even of his own success, Hardy devoted the rest of his career to the writing of a large and varied body of poetry which is equally earthy, ironic, colloquial, and dark.

Finally, though, the most fully representative author of this rich and crucial period of new directions in English literature was the playwright, Bernard Shaw. As a dramatic artist Shaw led the revolt against the «well-made» but often contrived and sentimental play, and against the coercion of drama by convention and censorship. As a thinker, Shaw addressed himself to modem issues before they came into fashion arid rejected old ideas which had become dogma. For example, he rejected theatrical realism and championed psychologi­cal realism, and he rejected society's notions of femininity in order to present women in such plays as «Candida», «Pygmalion», and «Saint Joan» as clever, intelligent, gifted, and strong — in short, worthy individuals and companions. In fact, Shaw is most signifi­cant as an author of «discussion plays», drama which creates a pro­vocative, probing dialogue with an eye toward enlightenment and reform. At times he slipped into preaching and pronouncements, but he seldom failed to address with an honest eye and a witty tongue not only the perennially engaging themes and issues — money and status, love and sex, ignorance and education — but also the key concerns of his day, including socialism and democracy, aestheti- cism and Ibsen. The years of Shaw's artistic maturity and achieve­ment coincide almost exactly with those of «new directions», so in this respect too he is a key figure of his time; but as an ironist, social critic, and believer in reform Shaw, who died in 1950 at the age of 94, no doubt took delight in seeing a number of his insights and ideas eventually embraced, not so much in his own time as in ours.