19
I
certitude, minor moods perhaps, to evoke fresh strong-
responses. These assume for a time greater potency
than their mighty predecessors. The literary history of
France from 1830 to 1922 is replete with examples of
reactions of this sort, the last being the present brilliant
activities of Messieurs Aragon, Breton, Eluard, Soupault,
et al. The exhaustion of certain literary forms, as, for
instance, theFlaubertian novel-form seems to be exhausted
today also shifts the importance of subject matter.
Experiment and discovery of new methods can
often be conducted better if what the writer has to
say is not so overwhelmingly urgent that he must say
it at all cost. The presentation rather than the matter
must be his urgency and his attention is more efficiently
spent upon that if it is less distracted by the subject
matter. This reduces to the simple statement: in some
periods what a writer says is of supreme importance
to the esthetic emotion, in others the evasion of the
grandly serious is the most provocative.
❖ *
*
Secession exists for those writers who are preoccupied
with researches for new forms. It hopes that there is
ready for it an American public which has advanced
beyond the fiction and poetry of Sinclair Lewis and
Sherwood Anderson and the criticism of Paul Rosen
feld and Louis Untermeyer.
Interested readers may look up an important origin
and a general program for Secession in an essay by
Malcolm Cowley entitled „This Youngest Generation,“
N. Y. Evening Post Literary Review, oct. 18, 1921.
G. B. M.