There was indeed a time, not long past, when it seemed that the greatest concrete object of love was one's nation; but the war has at least shown us that nations are but hordes of individuals behaving in the crude horde manner. And even internationalism, humanism, the religion of Life, are now suspected of being parochial fervours about matters of no real moment; for they all take for granted that man himself is a thing which ought to be preserved and can be improved; and this proposition is no longer self-evident.

Here lies the root of all modern disillusion. Having lost faith in everything that might be called God, we turned our admiration on man, and now man also is found to have feet of clay. We see him essentially a self-deceiver, a brute, pretending but never really striving to be an angel. His will we are told by the psychologists is at heart animal craving, though more cunning and less downright. Even his most generous impulses are said to draw their strength merely from the dynamics of the brute body, or at best from the itch of the brute mind. His love is mere greed; and his loyalty a response to no objective excellence but to the demands of his own tortuous nature. His intelligence, which was once thought capable of dispassionate knowledge of the thing that really is, is now said to be blinkered in the service of instincts. This view of human nature, which was so vigorously advertised by the psycho-analysts, is accepted by most psychologists, such as Professor McDougall, and many philosophers, such as Mr. Bertrand Russell, who reject other parts of the Freudian doctrine. And through their able advocacy it is likely to be incorporated in popular culture before the grain in it has been sorted from the chaff.

No wonder that we are disillusioned. All that was said to be noblest in man we suspect of being at heart motivated solely by a mere relic of the brute in him. The very distinction between noble and base fails now to ring true in our ears. Anything that anyone calls good or beautiful is suspect through the very fact that such radically insincere terms have been applied to them. Only the naive and the insincere, we feel, can use such words to-day without shame; and things which are applauded by the naive and the insincere are likely to be at heart other than they seem. And so in revulsion we affect to cherish things that no one could possibly call good or beautiful. And when it occurs to us that even this admiration is insincere, since it is the expression of a mere pose of sincerity in ourselves, we turn even from these idols and renounce admiration itself. Then our only solace lies in ridicule, and especially in jibing at whatever is commonly held sacred. Thus from disillusion we have at least distilled a refreshing draught of humour, wit and iconoclastic irony, which some would say is the best achievement of our age. But iconoclasm itself may become a cult, degenerating into a meaningless ritual of horse-play. Finally perhaps we are left with nothing but a bleak contempt for our own contemptuousness.

Modern literature of disillusion is of two kinds, which, though they are often difficult to distinguish and may be even blended in the same work, spring from very different motives. There is the literature which springs from disillusion solely. This is at bottom a mere gesture of disgust and revolt, a sort of spiritual vomiting-up of matter repugnant to our nature, of a whole universe, perhaps, apprehended as nauseating. This activity was wholesome at first, and was inevitably fostered by the war and its consequences. Thus in the war-verse of Siegfried Sassoon, though disgust is the dominant note, we feel it to be fired by loyalty to certain high values. But disgust itself may become a mere mannerism no less offensive than the gentility of the Victorians. In much contemporary work nausea seems an end in itself. And it is often difficult to say of any writer whether his vomiting is spontaneous or artificially induced for fashion's sake. Witness much that has appeared in certain "modernist" periodicals, often of transatlantic origin.

But there is another and more noteworthy literature of disillusion, whose motive is neither mere disgust nor mere protest against insincerity or prettiness. It is indeed concerned with disillusion, with all the defeat, pain, futility and insincerity of common life; but it is concerned with them not merely to vomit them up but to incorporate them in an organised and splendid texture.