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4.

in the words of the poet as

"Feeble and restless youths, born to inglorious days".
Feeble is not the right word for them, and there is both pathos and
promise in their disquiet, but they are indubitably restless.

In their attitude to the great things of the past they
have what is called in the jargon of to-day, an inferiority complex,
with its inevitable converse, a superiority complex. They are perturbed
by the spectacle of something beyond their compass and find
consolation in affecting to despise it, like some Greek of the decadence
who chipped away the nose of a marble statue in order to make
the Goths laugh. We have many cases today of an easy notoriety won
by belittling great reputations. If you declare that Wordsworth as
a poet was much inferior to some hitherto unknown person called
Snooks, whom you have discovered, you make people stop to listen to
you and you flatter your own vanity, for you know that while you are
a long way from Wordsworth, you are pretty much on a level with
Snooks. So the attitude of these unfortunates to the masterpieces in
poetry is very much that described in the first lines of Browning's
"Grammarian's Funeral"

"Let us begin and carry up this corpse,
Singing together."

They are like the French Romantics at the beginning of last century
whose cry was "Qui nous delivra des Grecs et des Romains?" - Who will
deliver us from the tyranny of the great classics? They want to get
rid of them, to bury them ceremonially, for their calm perfection is
a standing reproach.