THESE LITERARY TIMES

The growing popularity of wit for wits sake both in literature and in the drawing-room has led the editors of the Bookman to suggest that contemporary society in living in another age of Pope. The ascendancy of the light, smart novel as exemplified by Arlen, van Vechten, Huxley and their school, the Restoration atmosphere of the stage, the cynicism of the columnists--all point, they think, to "the hollowness of the times, a Godlessly clever age."

Undoubtedly modern life has much in common with the glittering sophistication of the Augustans. The past few years have witnessed an astonishing revival of interest in Pepys, Congreve, and the Johnson circle, while pre-Raphaelites, transcendentalists, romanticists go unread. Indeed the present has little sympathy with many of the ideals and standards of the nineteenth century. Traditions, morals, and conventions have to bear the daily shafts of the lighter humorists, to say nothing of the sledge-hammer blows of H. L. Menken and the rest of the Grub Street fry on the American Mercury. Emerson, Carlyle, and Mill are no longer known at first hand. Writers of little depth have succeeded to popularity, if not to their places. It is quite likely that society has suffered from this. But who will say that it is the worse for having outgrown the sentimentality of the Victorians? For outside of Herold Bell Wright and the moving-pictures, Wertherism is almost a thing of the past.

There is, however, one great and radical difference between the literature of today and that of the eighteenth century, which makes the similarity of this age and that of Pope nothing more than a one-sided resemblance. The neoclassical age was preeminently an age of form. Today the fashion runs to formlessness. Instead of the stately heroic couplet, poetry now flies to the freedom of vers libre. Instead of the terse, direct prose of Swift, satire now expresses itself in the genial lunacy of Donald Ogden Stewart or Ronald Fairbank.

These characteristics seem to show that contemporary literature has thus far failed to establish standards for itself: an indication that however much its spirit may resemble that of another period, twentieth century literature is still in a transitional stage.