DOI article:
Waugh, Arthur: Reticence in literature
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20196#0218
212
Reticence in Literature
various schools, has proved, without doubt, the most interestingand
suggestive development in the poetry and fiction of our time.
Düring the last quarter of a Century, more particularly, the
English man-of-letters has been indulging, with an entirely new
freedom, his national birthright of outspokenness, and during the
last twelve months there have been no uncertain indications that
this freedom of speech is degenerating into license which some of
us cannot büt view with regret and apprehension. The writers
and the critics of contemporary literature have, it would seem,
alike lost their heads; they have gone out into the byways and
hedges in search of the new thing, and have brought into the
study and subjected to the microscope mean objects of the road-
side, whose analysis may be of value to science but is absolutely
foreign to art. The age of brutality, pure and simple, is dead
with us, it is true ; but the age of effeminacy appears, if one is to
judge by recent evidence, to be growing to its dawn. The day
that follows will, if it fulfils the promise of its morning, be very
serious and very detrimental to our future literature.
Every great productive period of literature has been the resultof
some internal or external revulsion of feeling, some current of
ideas. This is a commonplace. The greatest periods of produc-
tion have been those when the national mind has been directed
to some vast movement of emancipation—the discovery of new
countries, the defeat of old enemies, the opening of fresh possi-
bilities. Literature is best stimulated by stirrings likt these. Now,
the last quarter of a Century in English history has been singularly
sterile of important improvements. There has been no very inspiring
acquisition to territory or to knowledge : there has been, in con-
sequence, no marked influx of new ideas. The mind has been
thrown back upon itself; lacking Stimulus without, it has sought
inspiration within, and the most characteristic literature of the
time
Reticence in Literature
various schools, has proved, without doubt, the most interestingand
suggestive development in the poetry and fiction of our time.
Düring the last quarter of a Century, more particularly, the
English man-of-letters has been indulging, with an entirely new
freedom, his national birthright of outspokenness, and during the
last twelve months there have been no uncertain indications that
this freedom of speech is degenerating into license which some of
us cannot büt view with regret and apprehension. The writers
and the critics of contemporary literature have, it would seem,
alike lost their heads; they have gone out into the byways and
hedges in search of the new thing, and have brought into the
study and subjected to the microscope mean objects of the road-
side, whose analysis may be of value to science but is absolutely
foreign to art. The age of brutality, pure and simple, is dead
with us, it is true ; but the age of effeminacy appears, if one is to
judge by recent evidence, to be growing to its dawn. The day
that follows will, if it fulfils the promise of its morning, be very
serious and very detrimental to our future literature.
Every great productive period of literature has been the resultof
some internal or external revulsion of feeling, some current of
ideas. This is a commonplace. The greatest periods of produc-
tion have been those when the national mind has been directed
to some vast movement of emancipation—the discovery of new
countries, the defeat of old enemies, the opening of fresh possi-
bilities. Literature is best stimulated by stirrings likt these. Now,
the last quarter of a Century in English history has been singularly
sterile of important improvements. There has been no very inspiring
acquisition to territory or to knowledge : there has been, in con-
sequence, no marked influx of new ideas. The mind has been
thrown back upon itself; lacking Stimulus without, it has sought
inspiration within, and the most characteristic literature of the
time