And
as we come up to the time of the Last Wars, this newer conception of the
everyday life as a reaction to an accelerated development is continually
more manifest. Barnet's book, which has served us so well, is frankly a
picture of the world coming about like a ship that sails into the wind.
Our later novelists give a vast gallery of individual conflicts in which
old habits and customs, limited ideas, ungenerous temperaments, and
innate obsessions are pitted against this great opening out of life that
has happened to us. They tell us of the feelings of old people who have
been wrenched away from familiar surroundings, and how they have had to
make peace with uncomfortable comforts and conveniences that are still
strange to them. They give us the discord between the opening egotisms
of youths and the ill-defined limitations of a changing social life.
They tell of the universal struggle of jealousy to capture and cripple
our souls, of romantic failures and tragical misconceptions of the trend
of the world, of the spirit of adventure, and the urgency of curiosity,
and how these serve the universal drift. And all their stories lead
in the end either to happiness missed or happiness won, to disaster or
salvation. The clearer their vision and the subtler their art, the more
certainly do these novels tell of the possibility of salvation for all
the world.
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