The First World War left Britain in a disillusioned and cynical mood: some soldiers celebrated their return home with a frantic seereh-forpleasures others were-haunted by a sense of guilt for the horrors of trench warfare. An increasing feeling of rootlessness and frustration, led to a transformation of the notions of imperial hegemony and white superiority. Nothing seemed to be right or certain: scientists and philosophers destroyed the old, predictable universe which had sustained the Victorians in their optimistic outlook, and new views of man and the universe that had emerged at the beginning of the century spread through society.
The first set of new ideas had been introduced by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in his essay The Interpretation of Dreamas (1900). Freud's view of the developing psyche emphasised the power of the unconscious to affect behaviour; the discovery that man's action could be motivated by irrational torces of which he might know nothing was very disturbing. The effects in the sphere of family life were deep: the relationship hetween parents and children was altered, and the conventional models of relationship between the sexes were readiusted, also thanks to the movement for women's suffrage. Freud also provided a new method of investigation of the human mind through the analysis of dreams and the concept of “free association”, which deeply influenced the writers of the Modern Age.
The growing crisis of confidence was also due to the introduction of “relativity” in science. Albert Einstein's (1879-1955) theory of relativity discarded the concepts of time and space, which he saw as subjective dimensions. As a consequence, the world view lost its solidity and the scientific revolution was complemented by verbal experimentation and the exploration of memory in literature; the rebellion against perspective and against phenomenal representation in art; or the revolution of tone, rhythm and harmony in music.
The idea of time was also questioned by the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941). He made a distinction between historical time and psychological time. Historical time is external, linear and measured in terms of the spatial distance travelled by a pendulum or the hands of a clock, whereas psychological time is internal, subjective and measured by the relative emotional intensity of a moment.