In "Jean Christophe" Romain Rolland seems to be expressing on the Continent what Wells, Bennett, J. D. Beresford, Gilbert Cannan and others are trying to express here, that the young man of to-day is not content to accept religion, or the codes of morality or conduct which his father believed in and acted upon. The new age asks the right to discover a fresh religion for itself and to live according to the light of its own reason. The hero of the modern novel, if hero he can be called, is feckless and unsteady: like Dostoievsky he is continually on the look-out for what is round the corner. He prefers misery to happiness, for out of intense misery and unhappiness he learns to harden himself, in Hugh Walpole's words, by this means alone can he come to real adequate manhood and subdue fear and hypocrisy.
The most outstanding characteristic of the new school of hero is his selfishness: he thinks of no one but himself. It does not matter very much that he should be unhappy: he deserves to be and he almost seems to delight in being so, but unfortunately he brings every one else with whom he comes into contact into a like state—his womenfolk, his parents, are left heart-broken while he continues on his wild way, Mazeppa-like, riding rough-shod over old-established prejudices, subverting the minds of the young, overturning traditions and setting up new gods only to desert them in their turn.
I certainly prefer this new generation to the decadents of the nineties; at least we are spared artificiality, idle philandering, and that delicate languor of lilies and harping on vice as a desirable thing. Our new heroes are never dirty-minded though they frequently perform rotten things. If only they would not think so much they might be quite decent beings.
Unfortunately all these supermen lack the one great essential of all true men, they have no glimmer of humour in their composition. They are so deadly in earnest to find out the meaning of life that they have no time to turn aside and browse in the pastures which Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Charles Lamb and Dickens so enjoyed; the comic spirit seems to be dead in us.
They leave jesting to the music-hall artiste—they have no room for laughter in their scheme of existence. This is where the great American short-story writer scores so heavily. He is incurably romantic and yet alive and alert: he is interested in all humanity and like all sympathetic observers of erring mankind, he can afford to laugh not at but with them at the absurdity of things.
I find in J. M. Synge the best epitome of this age. He has a superb intellect (most of the young writers are prodigiously clever), his style is clear, simple, forcible and exact, and he tears up all our old ideas by the roots. In "The Playboy of the Western World" he has offended his own people of Ireland for all time. They cannot understand the universality of the theme. He did not write his play to show how excellent a thing it is to be a parricide, though incidentally he does carry on the Shavian idea that sons owe no duty to their parents—they did not ask to be born. What he did set out to do was to show how the feckless, unappreciated lout may realize that he has a soul, and how easily he stands alone without love of women or any other sentimental prop when he has found it. Stanley Houghton is another exponent of the twentieth-century philosophy. "Hindle Wakes" merely shows that the new theories of life have spread not only to the other sex, but to mill-girls and shop-girls. Fanny was willing to spend a week-end in the society of a man simply for enjoyment, and refused to bind herself to him for the rest of her life just to satisfy an effete convention. What she wanted and meant to have was freedom: she was well able to take care of herself; she was earning a good wage and had become self-supporting. Her parents might turn her out; she was not, on that account, like the forsaken mistress of the nineties, therefore bound to go on the streets. She could live her life in her own way, beholden to no man.
We are passing through grave and strenuous times and it is quite obvious that we shall have to adapt ourselves to new conditions: "new truths make ancient good uncouth."
We have come a long way from the sentimental, the artificial, the Restoration attitude to life. In the new age men and women are coming to work side by side, are beginning to understand one another better and do not contemplate seductions or marriage whenever they meet.
What are our schools doing to prepare their pupils for this new world? Nothing at all so far as I can see. Masters do not trouble to read the very obvious signs in the sky. At girls' schools I am told the same old methods of stringent secrecy about everything that matters are carried out. The girl of to-day leaves school with an outlook on life formed on an incomplete acquaintance with the world of Jane Austen. There has been no gradual unfolding of the new ideas—what an awakening lies before some of the wives of the next generation. But boys are in no happier case. They are being brought up to believe that they will go out into a world exactly similar to that in which their fathers lived. Theirs too will be a troublous time before they learn the lesson. I don't quite see how the problem is to be tackled. It is scarcely possible to give readings from all the modern novelists to schoolboys: the outspokenness of this new writing is frightening even to adult minds.