(From _The Times_ Literary Supplement, 1915.)
For the purpose of the following speculations the word Literature is
used to describe the imaginative work of artists and thinkers—that is,
of writers who have had, and will have, something to say of more or less
lasting value; it leaves out the work of those who, for various reasons,
such as patriotic sentiment, or the supplying of the Public with what it
may be supposed to want, will, no doubt, dish up the war as a matter of
necessity, whether serving it wholesale in eight courses, or merely
using it as sauce to the customary meat and fish.
How will our literature, thus defined, be affected by the war? Will it
be affected at all?
One must first remember that to practically all imaginative writers of
any quality war is an excrescence on human life, a monstrous calamity
and evil. The fact that they recognize the gruesome inevitability of
_this_ war, in so far as the intervention of our country is concerned,
does not in any way lessen their temperamental horror of war in itself,
of the waste and the misery, and the sheer stupid brutality thereof.
The nature of the imaginative artist is sensitive, impressionable;
impatient of anything superimposed; thinking and feeling for itself;
recoiling from conglomerate views and sentiment. It regards the whole
affair as a dreadful though sacred necessity, to be got through somehow,
lest there be lost that humane freedom which is the life-blood of any
world where the creative imagination and other even more precious things
can flourish. The point is that there is no glamour about the
business—none whatever, for this particular sort of human being.
Writers to whom war is glamorous (with the few exceptions that prove the
rule) are not those who produce literature. We must therefore discount
at once prophecies that the war will lift literature on to an epic
plane, cause it to glow and blow with heroic deeds, and figures eight
feet high. They come from those who do not know the temperament of the
imaginative artist, his fundamental independence, and habit of revolting
against what is expected of him. But the whole thing is much deeper than
that.
It seems to be forgotten by some who write on this matter that the
producer of literature has been giving of his best in the past, and will
be able to do no more in the future. The first thing that has mattered
to him has been (in the words of de Maupassant, but which might have
been those of any other first-rate writer) “to make something fine, in
the form that shall best suit him according to his temperament.” No
amount of wars can vary for the artist that ideal—as it was for him, so
it will be. It seems also to be thought that the war has been a
startling revelation to the imaginative writer of the heroism in human
nature. This is giving him credit for very little imagination. The
constant tragedies of peace—miners entombed, sinking liners, volcanic
eruptions, outbreaks of pestilence, together with the long endurances of
daily life, are always bringing home to any sensitive mind the inherent
heroism of men and women. The very glut of heroism in this war is
likely, as it were, to put an artist’s nature off, to blunt the edge of
perceptions that are always groping after fresh sensation, that _must_
be always groping, in order that expression may be of something really
felt—for novelty is, of all, the greatest spur to sharp feeling.
The top notes of human life and conduct can be but sparingly sung, or
they grate on the nerves, and jar the hearing of the singer, no less
than of his listener. By some mysterious law frontal attacks to capture
heroism and imprison it in art are almost always failures. Few of the
great imagined figures of literature are heroic.
Another thing is forgotten. The real artist does not anticipate and
certainly cannot regulate the impulses that shall move his brain and
heart and hand. What exactly starts him off, even he cannot tell. He
will never write heroics to the order of the Public.
Ah! but he will now be influenced unconsciously in the choice of
subjects by sympathy with the fine deeds of the day, a lift will come
into his work, his eyes will be raised to the stars! True, perhaps, for
the moment; but, then, such times as these are in many ways unfavourable
to the creative instinct; moreover they will leave in restless,
sensitive natures lassitude, recoil, a sense of surfeit. Quite probably
the war may produce a real masterpiece or two, formed out of its very
stuff, by some eager mind innocent hitherto of creative powers, for whom
actual experience of the sights and feelings of war may be a baptism
into art. Almost certainly there will come of it a masterpiece or two of
satire. But, generally speaking, this welter of sacrifice and suffering,
the sublimity and horror of these days, their courage and their cruelty,
are enveloping the writer like the breath of a sirocco, whirling his
brain and heart around at the moment, but likely to leave him with an
intense longing for a deep draught of peace, and quiet scented winds. On
one whose whole natural life is woven, not of deeds, but of thoughts and
visions, moods and dreams, all this intensely actual violence, product
of utterly different natures from his own, offspring of men of action
and affairs, cannot have the permanent, deepening, clarifying influence
that long personal experience or suffering have had on some of the
world’s greatest writers—on Milton in his blindness; on Dostoevsky,
reprieved at the very moment of death, then long imprisoned; on de
Maupassant in his fear of coming madness; on Tolstoi in the
life-struggle of his dual nature; on Beethoven in his deafness, and
Nietzsche in his deadly sickness. It is from the stuff of his own life
that the creative writer moulds out for the world something fine, in the
form that best suits him, following his own temperament. His momentary
and, perhaps, intense identification with the struggle of this war has
in it something spasmodic, feverish, and almost false; a kind of deep
and tragic inconsistency. It is too foreign to the real self within him.
At one time it was said of certain new troops: “They’re first-rate,
except for one thing—they _will not_ bayonet the Germans.” It is like
that in the artist writer’s soul—with the work of his hands, the words
of his lips, his thoughts and the feelings of his heart, he identifies
himself with this war drama, yet in the very depths of him he recoils.
What would you have? The artist-man has but one nature.
For all these reasons the war is likely to have little deep or lasting
influence on literature. But one immediate effect it may surely have.
Let who will snatch a moment in these days to be with Nature—let him go
into a wood, or walk down the Flower Walk in Kensington Gardens, of a
fine afternoon. On the still birch trees a pigeon will be sitting
motionless among the grey twig tracery; the cedar-branches are dark and
flat on the air; the sun warms the cheek, and brightens the cream and
pink chestnut and maple buds just opening; the waxy hyacinths deepen in
hue, and the little green shoots everywhere swell as he gazes. A
sensation of delight begins to lift his heart, he takes a deep breath;
and suddenly, from a bench he hears: “One of ’em’s alive an’ two’s
dead.” Or: “The Germans are movin’ ’em!” Gone is the beginning of
delight. The heavy hand comes down again. No good! There is no Spring!
The sky is _not_ bright. The heart cannot rejoice. As with any man, so,
and even more, with the artist-writer. When the war is over and the
heavy hand lifted, his heart and brain will rush to that of which he has
been deprived too long—will rush to the beauty which, for sheer pity
and horror, he cannot now enjoy, will rush as a starved and thirsting
creature. There may well be an instant outburst of joyful and sensuous
imaginings; a painting of beauty, not faked but really felt, by brushes
at once more searching and yet softer.
And very likely, too, there will be a spurt of zest and frankness, as
from men who have been too long constrained to a single emotion under
the spell of a powerful drug.
One more thought may be jotted down. Unless the national unity now
prevailing lasts on into the years of peace that follow, the country
will certainly pass through great internal stress. That stress will most
likely have a more intimate and powerful influence upon literature than
the war itself. If there is to come any startling change, it should be
five or ten years after the war rather than at once.