By British Men of Letters.
The following address, signed by a number of distinguished
writers in Great Britain, and intended for publication in
Russia, appeared in The London Times on Dec. 23, 1914.
_To Our Colleagues in Russia:_
At this moment, when your countrymen and ours are alike facing death for
the deliverance of Europe, we Englishmen of letters take the opportunity
of uttering to you feelings which have been in our hearts for many
years. You yourselves perhaps hardly realize what an inspiration
Englishmen of the last two generations have found in your literature.
Many a writer among us can still call back, from ten or twenty or thirty
years ago, the feeling of delight and almost of bewilderment with which
he read his first Russian novel. Perhaps it was "Virgin Soil" or
"Fathers and Sons," perhaps "War and Peace," or "Anna Karenina"; perhaps
"Crime and Punishment" or "The Idiot"; perhaps, again, it was the work
of some author still living. But many of us then felt, as our poet Keats
felt on first reading Homer,
"like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken."
It was a strange world that opened before us, a world full of foreign
names which we could neither pronounce nor remember, of foreign customs
and articles of daily life which we could not understand. Yet beneath
all the strangeness there was a deep sense of having discovered a new
home, of meeting our unknown kindred, of finding expressed great burdens
of thought which had lain unspoken and half-realized at the depths of
our own minds. The books were very different one from another, sometimes
they were mutually hostile; yet we found in all some quality which made
them one, and made us at one with them. We will not attempt to analyze
that quality. It was, perhaps, in part, that deep Russian tenderness,
which never derides but only pities and respects the unfortunate; in
part that simple Russian sincerity which never fears to see the truth
and to express it; but most of all it was that ever-present sense of
spiritual values, behind the material and utterly transcending the
material, which enables Russian literature to move so naturally in a
world of the spirit, where there are no barriers between the ages and
the nations, but all mankind is one.
And they call you "barbarians"! The fact should make us ask again what
we mean by the words "culture" and "civilization." Critics used once to
call our Shakespeare a barbarian, and might equally well give the same
name to Aeschylus or Isaiah. All poets and prophets are in this sense
barbarians, that they will not measure life by the standards of external
"culture." And it is at a time like this, when the material civilization
of Europe seems to have betrayed us and shown the lie at its heart, that
we realize that the poets and prophets are right, and that we must, like
them and like your great writers, once more see life with the simplicity
of the barbarian or the child, if we are to regain our peace and freedom
and build up a better civilization on the ruins of this that is
crumbling.
That task, we trust, will some day lie before us. When at last our
victorious fleets and armies meet together, and the allied nations of
East and West set themselves to restore the well-being of many millions
of ruined homes, France and Great Britain will assuredly bring their
large contributions of good-will and wisdom, but your country will have
something to contribute which is all its own. It is not only because of
your valor in war and your achievements in art, science, and letters
that we rejoice to have you for allies and friends; it is for some
quality in Russia herself, something both profound and humane, of which
these achievements are the outcome and the expression.
You, like us, entered upon this war to defend a weak and threatened
nation, which trusted you, against the lawless aggression of a strong
military power; you, like us, have continued it as a war of self-defense
and self-emancipation. When the end comes and we can breathe again, we
will help one another to remember the spirit in which our allied nations
took up arms, and thus work together in a changed Europe to protect the
weak, to liberate the oppressed, and to bring eventual healing to the
wounds inflicted on suffering mankind both by ourselves and our enemies.
With assurances of our friendship and gratitude, we sign ourselves,
WILLIAM ARCHER, J.W. MACKAIL,
MAURICE BARING, JOHN MASEFIELD,
J.M. BARRIE, A.E.W. MASON,
ARNOLD BENNETT, AYLMER MAUDE,
A.C. BRADLEY, ALICE MEYNELL,
ROBERT BRIDGES, GILBERT MURRAY,
HALL CAINE, HENRY NEWBOLT,
G.K. CHESTERTON, GILBERT PARKER,
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, ERNEST DE SELINCOURT,
NEVILL FORBES, MAY SINCLAIR,
JOHN GALSWORTHY, D. MACKENZIE WALLACE,
CONSTANCE GARNETT, MARY A. WARD,
EDWARD GARNETT, WILLIAM WATSON,
A.P. GOUDY, H.G. WELLS,
THOMAS HARDY, MARGARET L. WOODS,
JANE HARRISON, C. HAGBERG WRIGHT.
ANTHONY HOPE,
HENRY JAMES,