DOI article:
Waugh, Arthur: Reticence in literature
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20196#0219
By Arthur Waugh
213
time has been introspective. Following one course, it has
betaken itself to that intimately analytical fiction which we
associate primarily with America ; it has sifted motivesand probed
psychology, with the result that it has proved an exceedingly
clever, exact, and scientific, but scarcely stimulating, or progressive
school of literature. Following another course, it has sought for
subject-matter in the discussion of passions and sensations, common,
doubtless, to every age of mankind, interesting and necessary, too,
in their way, but passions and sensations hitherto dissociated with
literature, hitherto, perhaps, scarcely realised to their depth and
intensity. It is in this development that the new school of realism
has gone furthest; and it is in this direction that the literature of
the future seems likely to follow. It is, therefore, not without
value to consider for a moment whither this new frankness is
leading us, and how far its freedom is reconciled to that Standard
of necessary reticence which I have tried to indicate in these pages.
This present tendency to literary frankness had its origin, I
think, no less than twenty-eight years ago. It was then that the
dovecotes of English taste were tremulously nuttered by the
Coming of a new poet, whose naked outspokenness startled his
readers into indignation. Literature, which had retrograded into
a melancholy sameness, found itself convulsed by a sudden access
of passion, which was probably without parallel since the age of
the silver poets of Rome. This new singer scrupled not to revel
in sensations which for years had remainedunmentioned upon the
printed page; he even chose for his subjects refinements of lust,
which the commonly healthy Englishman believed to have become
extinct with the time of Juvenal. Here was an innovation which
was absolutely alien to the Standard of contemporary taste—an
innovation, I believe, that was equally opposed to that final
moderation without which literature is lifeless.
Let
213
time has been introspective. Following one course, it has
betaken itself to that intimately analytical fiction which we
associate primarily with America ; it has sifted motivesand probed
psychology, with the result that it has proved an exceedingly
clever, exact, and scientific, but scarcely stimulating, or progressive
school of literature. Following another course, it has sought for
subject-matter in the discussion of passions and sensations, common,
doubtless, to every age of mankind, interesting and necessary, too,
in their way, but passions and sensations hitherto dissociated with
literature, hitherto, perhaps, scarcely realised to their depth and
intensity. It is in this development that the new school of realism
has gone furthest; and it is in this direction that the literature of
the future seems likely to follow. It is, therefore, not without
value to consider for a moment whither this new frankness is
leading us, and how far its freedom is reconciled to that Standard
of necessary reticence which I have tried to indicate in these pages.
This present tendency to literary frankness had its origin, I
think, no less than twenty-eight years ago. It was then that the
dovecotes of English taste were tremulously nuttered by the
Coming of a new poet, whose naked outspokenness startled his
readers into indignation. Literature, which had retrograded into
a melancholy sameness, found itself convulsed by a sudden access
of passion, which was probably without parallel since the age of
the silver poets of Rome. This new singer scrupled not to revel
in sensations which for years had remainedunmentioned upon the
printed page; he even chose for his subjects refinements of lust,
which the commonly healthy Englishman believed to have become
extinct with the time of Juvenal. Here was an innovation which
was absolutely alien to the Standard of contemporary taste—an
innovation, I believe, that was equally opposed to that final
moderation without which literature is lifeless.
Let