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Section 12
As things round themselves off and accomplish themselves, one begins for
the first time to see them clearly. From the perspectives of a new age
one can look back upon the great and widening stream of literature with
a complete understanding. Things link up that seemed disconnected, and
things that were once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be but
factors in the statement of a gigantic problem. An enormous bulk of the
sincerer writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries
falls together now into an unanticipated unanimity; one sees it as a
huge tissue of variations upon one theme, the conflict of human egotism
and personal passion and narrow imaginations on the one hand, against
the growing sense of wider necessities and a possible, more spacious
life.
That conflict is in evidence in so early a work as Voltaire's Candide,
for example, in which the desire for justice as well as happiness beats
against human contrariety and takes refuge at last in a forced and
inconclusive contentment with little things. Candide was but one of
the pioneers of a literature of uneasy complaint that was presently
an innumerable multitude of books. The novels more particularly of the
nineteenth century, if one excludes the mere story-tellers from our
consideration, witness to this uneasy realisation of changes that call
for effort and of the lack of that effort.
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