Now that most of our men in the prime of life have been in the army we seem to be in for a goodly literature of disappointment. All the ungifted young people came back from the war to tell us that they were "fed up." That was their ailment, in outline. The gifted ones are now coming down to detail. They say that a web has been woven over the sky, or that something or other has made a goblin of the sun—about as full details of a pain as you can fairly expect a gifted person to give, although he really may feel it.
No doubt disenchantment has flourished before. About the year 1880 nearly all the best art was wan and querulous; that of Burne-Jones was always in trouble; Matthew Arnold's verse was a well-bred, melodious whine; Rossetti was all disenamourment and displacement. Yet you could feel that their broken-toy view of the world was only their nice little way with the public. Burne-Jones in his home was a red, jovial man; Arnold a diner-out of the first lustre; Rossetti a sworn friend to bacon and eggs and other plain pleasures. The young melancholiasts of to-day are less good at their craft, and yet they do give you a notion that some sort of silver cord really seems to them to have come loose in their insides, or some golden bowl, which mattered to them, to have been more or less broken, and that they are feeling honestly sour about it. If they do not know how to take it out of mankind by writing desolatory verses about ashes and dust in the English Review, at least they can, if they be workmen, vote for a strike: they thus achieve the same good end and put it beyond any doubt that they don't think all is well with the world.
II
The higher the wall or the horse from which you have tumbled, the larger, under Nature's iron law, are your bruises and consequent crossness likely to be. Before we try shaking or cuffing the disenraptured young Solomons in our magazines and our pits it would be humane to reflect that some five millions of these, in their turns, have fallen off an extremely high horse. Of course, we have all fallen off something since 1914. Even owners of ships and vendors of heavy woollens might, if all hearts were laid bare, be found to have fallen, not perhaps off a high horse, but at least off some minute metaphysical pony. Still, the record in length of vertical fall, and of proportionate severity of incidence upon an inelastic earth, is probably held by ex-soldiers and, among these, by the volunteers of the first year of the war. We were all, of course, volunteers then, undiluted by indispensable Harry's later success in getting dispensable Johnnie forced to join us in the Low Countries.
Most of those volunteers of the prime were men of handsome and boundless illusions. Each of them quite seriously thought of himself as a molecule in the body of a nation that was really, and not just figuratively, "straining every nerve" to discharge an obligation of honour. Honestly, there was about them as little as there could humanly be of the coxcombry of self-devotion. They only felt that they had got themselves happily placed on a rope at which everyone else, in some way or other, was tugging his best as well as they. All the air was ringing with rousing assurances. France to be saved, Belgium righted, freedom and civilization re-won, a sour, soiled, crooked old world to be rid of bullies and crooks and reclaimed for straightness, decency, good-nature, the ways of common men dealing with common men. What a chance! The plain recruit who had not the gift of a style said to himself that for once he had got right in on the ground-floor of a topping good thing, and he blessed the luck that had made him neither too old nor too young. Rupert Brooke, meaning exactly the same thing, was writing:
Now, God be thank'd who has match'd us with His hour,
And caught our youth and waken'd us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpen'd power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary....