In face of such disillusionment the men who attempt literature attempt escape in various ways. And “escape” is the prominent aspect of to-day’s art, in a deliberate turning away from the realities of the present, which only a few accept as substance for artistic interpretation. Some fling themselves out of the main stream of life like the “Decadents,” finding satisfaction in sense-given impression, repudiating ultimate purposes. To these the present is already in Autumn, and its noises and tumults but the jarrings of a machine running down; worn with the dust of its own grinding. Others, like the psychological novelists, attempt analysis without affirmation or denial. They exhibit the world as they see it, or a particular select portion of it. They dissect a character or a situation in all its implications and aspects. They would be the first to repudiate either approval or criticism of this subject-matter of delicate and refined writing. At the opposite pole are the apostles of protest--a Gorky, a Wells, a Mark Rutherford, who stab and slash at a life so remote from the ideal, in furious revolt against its complacencies and cruelties. Some fall back on dreams and memories, finding, either in a transfigured past or in the kingdom of fantasy which never was upon the solid ground, satisfaction denied in a world which has become “so unworthy.” And others seek refuge in dreams of a transfigured humanity from the implacable defiance of present things; with pictures of that new world which yet shall rise when “every life shall be a song.” Beyond these are the fugitives who frankly take to flight; like Lafcadio Hearn, turning first to the south, then to the east, “to the unexplored Eastern mind which may yet afford a refuge from ‘modernism,’” and finding his latter days saddened by the aggressive entrance of “modernism” even into these remote fastnesses, and civilisation ravaging the simplicities of old Japan. In the near East, Mr. Scott James found the challenge frankly flung down, and the two forces--romanticism and “modernism”--joined at death grips. “‘Time!’ ejaculates the Montenegrin. ‘What is time? Time is nothing. You live, and then you die.’” The same resistance, the same overthrow is being revealed here as Mr. Fielding Hall discovered in a far East, and so unforgetably stamped into literature, in his picture of the passing of the soul of Burma before a conquering imperialism and a vigorous commercial development. “I know what it means, this civilisation,” says the priest of “Our Lady of the Rocks” in the remote mountain fastness of the Balkans. “My poor people. They have no idea what life is, out in the great world, and it is coming to them.” “Till now they have lived with God and the mountains. It is so very little that one needs in this life. We have so short a time here.”