Liberalism, with its great shout of progress, was to turn sour on people who experienced the First World War and found the science meant gas and guns.
There were Americans, sick of Puritanism and materialism, who found a myth in the continuity of Europead culture. First of them, Henry James, felt that his spiritual home was Europe and his novels deal with the theme of the impact of Europe on visiting Americans. The Americans feel themselves uncivilised, young, inexperienced, and Europe seems so old, wise and beautiful. Some other Americans /Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Hemingway, Fitzgerald.../ made their home in Europe. As for British authors, one reaction against Liberalism of Wells and Shaw was to be found in the novels and poems of the Englishman David Herbert Lawrence, who rejected civilisation and wanted men go back to the "natural world" of instinct. Lawrences s novels /Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterlay s Lower, Women in Love.../ are much concerned with the relationship between man and woman. Nobody has ever presented human passion, man s relationship to nature, the sense of the presence of life in all things, like Lawrence.
Often associated with Lawrence is Aldous Huxley whose early novels showed a world without aim or direction /artists, rich people, the Waste Land of post-war London/ and offered no solution to the puzzle of a seemingly meaningless existence. Point Counter Point especially seemed to show that man is a creature too mixed, too divided by "passion and reason" to find much happiness. Brave New World brilliantly satirised Wellsian Utopias, showing that, if man became completely happy and sociaty completely efficient, he would cease to be human and it would become intolerable. Huxley found a faith in brotherly love and non-violence. In later works he was turned to satire and mysticism. Somersat Maugham is perhaps best known for his short stories. The character who often tells the story became associated with Maugham himself in the minds of the public. He is shown as a man who travelled widely and has a great knowledge of people and places as well as expensive food and drink. Maugham is a sharp observer of people and is amused by them, but does not want to get closely involved with them. He wants to tell good stories rather than to explore characters deeply, and the stories often have a bitter or unexpected ending.