But at the ebb of an emotion he would understand again. Who could retain temper or patience with the continual bickerings of family life, and forever pressing economic needs? Often enough John felt himself driven wild with the oppression of home life. What way was there to smash down all the barriers and have a degree of freedom to act, and if the impulses he had were sinful, who had made them so? But what was he to do? He’d hate farm work; he’d hate office work in the city, and despise the people working around him for their clerkish acquiescence. What was life about? A sickness of it was in his stomach, tiring him to complete non-resistance for the time being. I shall stop here with the diagnosis of this precocious pessimism. John Campbell is a representative young American. He is only a child, but in his case, despair and cynicism have not waited for the years to ripen. Alas! John Campbell is hardly a fiction. The readers of American dailies could give him many brothers. Suicides and juvenile criminality are not rare in the United States. Yet, poor little John’s pessimism had not yet reached the purely conscious stage. That was left to his elders. He had not suffered sufficiently or reflected enough upon his distress to play the real Hamlet. He died while climbing a fence with a loaded pistol in his hand, and it was never ascertained whether his death was accidental or premeditated. Robert McAlmon also displays for our benefit more matured and more self-conscious pessimists who ask again, like John Campbell, “What about life?” Amazement before the mystery of existence, a sentiment of general futility, misanthropy spreading from the family to the entire social group, desire and hatred of women, lack of faith, despair and sarcasm, such is the mental attitude of the young people we meet with in “Village.” The last pages of the book are particularly symptomatic. They recall the kind of talk heard in the yards of French Lycées, when “Bel Ami,” “Nana,” “Against the Grain,” “Azyade,” and the “Garden of Berenice,” first appeared. There was the same tone of cursing and irony in Arthur Rimbaud’s “Illuminations.” In France doubtless they spoke better and wrote better, but not any more sincerely, and at bottom the sentiments and the pessimism were identical. Towards 1890 the young Frenchmen were already _fin de siècle_. In 1926 the young Americans are _commencement de siècle_, and they join forces with the French in doubting life and upholding Shakespeare’s dictum about it: “a tale told by an idiot and which hath no meaning.”