The Children of the Waste Land: 1920–30

Abstract

This chapter is concerned principally with the child: not so much the ‘golden age’ of children’s books and the ‘boy who would not grow up’ as with the boys who did grow up, and found it impossible to fulfil the condition of manhood; with children of all ages at the mercy of incomprehensible fate; with the descendants of the Three Sisters, searching for ‘some integrating revelation’;² with grown men and women whose uncertainty about life’s signposts sends them back to re-examine the metaphor of ‘the child in the house’. In order to do this I shall abandon the mainly chronological pattern adopted so far because I want, however briefly, to consider in one place one of the most important sub-themes of the mediaeval question — chivalry, quixotism and manners — which is also one of the main themes in modern literature. It seems to me that the question of what happens to the child — and what happens to the child in the man — is at the heart of the development from mid-Victorian to late Georgian art and politics. That question is evident in mediaeval chivalry itself, in the relation of the squire to the knight, of Sancho Panza to Quixote; in the approach of the Pre-Raphaelite painters to the treatment of youth; in the growth to manhood of the young heroes of Henty’s historical imperialism.

Human beings are tiny centers of consciousness in the void, with only their frail bodies to keep out the overpowering nothing of infinity which presses in on them — little creatures growing and building against the annihilation of space and the organic world.

Edmund Wilson¹