the growing impatience of the American people with the monstrous and
socially paralysing party systems that had sprung out of their absurd
electoral arrangements, led to the appearance of what came to be called
the 'Modern State' movement, and a galaxy of brilliant writers, in
America, Europe, and the East, stirred up the world to the thought
of bolder rearrangements of social interaction, property, employment,
education, and government, than had ever been contemplated before. No
doubt these Modern State ideas were very largely the reflection upon
social and political thought of the vast revolution in material things
that had been in progress for two hundred years, but for a long time
they seemed to be having no more influence upon existing institutions
than the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire seemed to have had at the
time of the death of the latter. They were fermenting in men's minds,
and it needed only just such social and political stresses as the coming
of the atomic mechanisms brought about, to thrust them forward abruptly
into crude and startling realisation.

Section 5

Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre is one of those autobiographical
novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades of the
twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must understand
Wander Jahre rather in a spiritual and intellectual than in a literal
sense. It is indeed an allusive title, carrying the world back to the
Wilhelm Meister of Goethe, a century and a half earlier.

Its author, Frederick Barnet, gives a minute and curious history of his
life and ideas between his nineteenth and his twenty-third birthdays. He
was neither a very original nor a very brilliant man, but he had a
trick of circumstantial writing; and though no authentic portrait was