eliness
of desire, that brooding preoccupation with self and egotistical
relationships, which is hell for the individual, treason to the race,
and exile from God....'

Section 12

As things round themselves off and accomplish themselves, one begins for
the first time to see them clearly. From the perspectives of a new age
one can look back upon the great and widening stream of literature with
a complete understanding. Things link up that seemed disconnected, and
things that were once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be but
factors in the statement of a gigantic problem. An enormous bulk of the
sincerer writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries
falls together now into an unanticipated unanimity; one sees it as a
huge tissue of variations upon one theme, the conflict of human egotism
and personal passion and narrow imaginations on the one hand, against
the growing sense of wider necessities and a possible, more spacious
life.

That conflict is in evidence in so early a work as Voltaire's Candide,
for example, in which the desire for justice as well as happiness beats
against human contrariety and takes refuge at last in a forced and
inconclusive contentment with little things. Candide was but one of
the pioneers of a literature of uneasy complaint that was presently
an innumerable multitude of books. The novels more particularly of the
nineteenth century, if one excludes the mere story-tellers from our
consideration, witness to this uneasy realisation of changes that call
for effort and of the lack of that effort. In a thousand aspects,
now tragically, now comically, now with a funny affectation of divine
detachment, a countless host of witnesses tell their story of lives
fretting between dreams and limitations. Now one laughs, now one
weeps, now one reads with a blank astonishment at this huge and almost
unpremeditated record of how the growing human spirit, now warily, now
eagerly, now furiously, and always, as it seems, unsuccessfully, tried
to adapt itself to the maddening misfit of its patched and ancient
garments. And always in these books as one draws nearer to the heart
of the matter there comes a disconcerting evasion. It was the fantastic
convention of the time that a writer should not touch upon religion.
To do so was to rouse the jealous fury of the great multitude of
professional religious teachers. It was permitted to state the discord,
but it was forbidden to glance at any