The modern age [antikvár]

GENERAL INTRODUCTIONThis is the final volume of the Pelican Guide to English Literature. Inevitably the project as a whole has taken a good deal longer to carry out than was originally planned, with the result that a number of the earlier volumes in the series have already been through several impressions. Indeed, from the point of view of sales the Guide seems to have done very well, at any rate well enough to modify the comment made in the original General Introduction that 'this is not an age which is altogether sympathetic to such an undertaking'.Yet though the sales of Pelican books undoubtedly signify something (if only a guilty conscience about the topics that one has always meant to 'take up'), they cannot of themselves dispel one's sense of the 'deep-seated spiritual vulgarity that lies at the heart of our civilization', in L. H. Myers's phrase. Other ages have no doubt suffered from their own kinds of grossness and vulgarity, which (and it would be a legitimate criticism) the earlier volumes of the Guide have not always sufficiently emphasized. The reason for this, perhaps, was that ultimately the critical preoccupation of these volumes was with the meaning of literature for our own age and for the non-specialist and non-historical reader of today, who might be glad of guidance to help him to respond to what is living and contemporary in literature. For, like the other arts, literature has the power to enrich the imagination and to clarify thought and feeling. Not that one is offering literature as a substitute religion or as providing a philosophy for life. Its satisfactions are of their own kind, though they are satisfactions intimately bound up with the life of each individual reader and therefore not without their bearing on his attitude to life.This attempt to draw up an ordered account of literature that would be concerned, first and foremost, with value for the present, has meant that the Guide has been a work of criticism rather than a standard history of literature. And if this was so in the case of the earlier historical volumes, it was always certain that when it came to offering guidance about the literature of this century, the work would have to be conducted in an unusually critical and yet exploratory spirit. Of all the volumes, this last was bound to be the hardest to assemble, for the major writers are still very much part of our time and yet they are just sufficiently in the past for it to have become fashionable to find some of them unfashionable; and at the same time, the profusion of lesser writers have a certain inescapable currency that makes it very hard, in a7