DEMOBILISATION
_Nelson_: What are you thinking, that you speak no word?
_Hardy_: ... Thoughts all confused, my lord:--their needs on deck,
Your own sad state, and your unrivalled past;
Mixed up with flashes of old things afar--
Old childish things at home, down Wessex way,
In the snug village under Blackdon Hill
Where I was born. The tumbling stream, the garden,
The placid look of the grey dial there,
Marking unconsciously this bloody hour,
And the red apples on my father's trees,
Just now full ripe.
_Nelson_: Ay, thus do little things
Steal into my mind, too. But, ah my heart
Knows not your calm philosophy!--There's one--
Come nearer to me, Hardy,--One of all,
As you well guess, pervades my memory now;
She, and my daughter--I speak freely to you.
'Twas good I made that codicil this morning
That you and Blackwood witnessed. Now she rests
Safe on the nation's honour....
THOMAS HARDY: _The Dynasts_.
I
On the morrow of the armistice the population of the emergency
offices was sharply divided into those who wished to leave, but
were required to stay, and those who wished to stay, but were
required to leave. Though the raising of the blockade was almost
automatic, the blockade departments took time to wind up; and the
temporary officer was not infrequently demobilised several months
before the temporary civil servant was released.
These days of transition were a time of endless comings and
goings, of unexpected returns and abrupt departures. Men who were
thought to be dead reappeared suddenly from East and West Africa,
from Palestine and India, demanding news of their scattered and
decimated friends; women who had been lost to view for nearly five
years emerged from hospitals, offices and factories; and all of
a stricken generation who had survived set themselves once more
to make a career or a livelihood. By now they were in age nearer
thirty-five than twenty-five, uprooted and unsettled by the war,
with greater experience and smaller hope, more resignation and
less resiliency. The time ahead of them was ten years shorter than
when they came down from their universities; many had married
and begotten children; they could not long afford to wait; their
"common problem" was no longer
"to fancy what were fair in life
Provided it could be,--but, finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to" their "means; a very different thing!"
By an oversight, excusable enough in hard-driven ministers who
could not be expected to think of everything, no provision had been
made by the government to secure that every soldier on leaving
the army should be at least no worse off than when he joined it,
at the risk of his life, to fight in defence of his country.
Machinery was indeed erected for liberating first in order those
for whom work was waiting; officers in search of employment were
encouraged to submit themselves and their qualifications to a
hastily constructed labour-exchange; the king and Field-Marshal Sir
Douglas Haig invited all employers of labour to give preference to
ex-service men; funds were collected, speeches were made; and, as
it is always impolitic to foster a sense of grievance, even the
grievance of hunger, in men who have been drilled to shoot and, in
shooting, to hold their own lives cheaply, a system of temporary
doles was instituted to bridge the interval until industrial
conditions became normal, or, in less pretentious language,
until something turned up. Admirable as were these remedies, the
demobilized officers and men felt that the hands which had waved
them forth to die were chill of touch when extended in welcome to
those who had not died after all.
For two years the men who were once so deafeningly acclaimed as
heroes that, for their own protection, less heroic but still
appreciative patriots were forbidden to stand them drink have
been advertising daily for any work that will keep them fed; in
times of trade depression they have marched through the streets of
London under banners inscribed with the device "WANTED IN 1914: NOT
WANTED NOW"; and the passers-by feel that it is very sad (though,
to be sure, some of these mendicants are impostors; and, of the
unemployed, some are always unemployable), but that, if anything
could be done, it would have been done long ago. While it would be
foolish to minimise the difficulties of employers who are asked
to replace tried men and women with unskilled soldiers, it may be
submitted that the government which caused and the society which
sanctioned such an upheaval as the late war are responsible for
restoring order when war is at an end. If a civilian can within
six months be turned into a soldier, the soldier can in little
longer time be turned back into a civilian; as, during his military
training, the state maintained him, so it should maintain him while
he is being trained for civil work; as he was fed and clothed
in camp, so he should be fed and clothed until he is needed in
field or mine, office or shop. The voluntary organisations and
patriotic appeals are being launched among the descendants of
Nelson's countrymen; they have an opportunity of wiping out their
great-grandfathers' disgrace. To suggest that the whole community
is responsible for the men who have faced death on its behalf
is to court the terrific imputation of "socialism"; yet war is
the greatest possible socialisation of society, and it is not
unreasonable to propose that public responsibility shall continue
until the first dislocation of war has been corrected. By now
hundreds of thousands have been found employment; but, so long as
one suffers from want, the whole community is disgraced. The price
of a woman's dress would keep him in affluence for half a year.
In the first weeks of demobilisation the problem was more difficult
in that those who needed and wanted work needed and wanted a
holiday first. The best-intentioned efforts to regulate or retard
the flow of men from the army until there was a sure position for
them outside it were met with desertion and mutiny till the sluices
were opened wide and only sufficient troops retained to enforce the
terms of the armistice. The countries which had been devastated by
the war and those which were threatened with ruinous indemnities
set to work at once to repair the damage and to build up their
resources; England, which had endured as long a strain as any
without having iron driven into her soul at the sight of her land
laid waste or of her industries ruined, settled down to drowsy
recuperation until the next crisis should rouse her with the threat
of financial disaster, revolution or another war.
In those first months of peace there was much talk of
"reconstruction,"[46] but the only thing reconstructed at this time
was one part of the leisured, social life of the country. To some
extent this was inevitable at a time when political interest was
centred in Versailles and when a new House of Commons, filled with
"hard-faced men who looked as though they had done well out of the
war," chafed at the long-continued absence of the prime minister
and tinkered with such unimportant legislation as was entrusted
to the control of Mr. Bonar Law. In an atmosphere of suspense and
unreality, the graver issues were postponed; and all energies were
concentrated on creating a life as similar as possible to that
which had been interrupted by the war and one in which the war
could be forgotten. Foreign and domestic responsibilities, which
in a democratic country are the concern of every adult man and
woman, were lost to view in the preoccupation of a "Victory Ball"
and of the first "peace Ascot." In 1919, for the first time since
1914, there were garden-parties at Buckingham Palace and a gala
night at Covent Garden; the Derby was run; great balls were given
in historic houses; entertaining and sport reached a perfection and
profusion only inferior to 1914 standards in the number of those
who, killed or maimed by four and a half years of war, were unable
to attend. They, were they able to see the "reconstruction" of
the country which they had redeemed and of the people whom they
had reprieved, would have known at last what they had sacrificed
everything to preserve.
II
If at the first calling of the half-forgotten roll they were unable
to answer to their names, others stepped quickly forward to take
their place. In breaking down social barriers, the war continued
and went some distance towards completing a process which had
been going on for twenty years. It has already been suggested
that, in the last decade of Queen Victoria's reign, "society"
was a word with at least a fairly definite negative connotation:
certain acts or qualities expelled a man from it; certain other
qualities were needed to admit him to an intimate and interrelated
community of a few hundred men and women who drew their prestige
from land, basked in the sunshine of the court, supplied drafts
for the diplomatic service, the foreign office, the brigade of
guards, the household cavalry and a chosen few other units and
felt neither need nor desire to know any one outside their own
world. The first American invasion abolished the pedigree test;
later, the monied-cosmopolitan invasion abolished every other.
The close corporation was disbanded; and, though a few hostesses
received only their old friends--without their old friends' new
friends,--the others scattered in search of distraction; and even
before the outbreak of war the two essentials in almost every
gathering were that wealth should secure the generous minimum
of comfort and that brains or eccentricity should provide the
amusement. If in 1890 social success could be roughly appraised
by the number of people that a man did not know, in 1920 it was
measured by his industry and skill in getting to know everybody:
aristocratic London and artistic London, diplomatic London and
political London, financial London and theatrical London have all
overflowed their old boundaries and now meet in the undefined vast
pool of London.
To dwellers in other capitals that is London's distinguishing mark;
to many it is, within limits, London's greatest charm: the city
is big enough to find room for every one, and each may lead his
own life among his own friends. The _rastaquouère_ is not penned
within his own fold, as in Paris, nor the actress in hers, as in
New York; soldier and civilian meet on an equality that would amaze
Berlin; Jew and gentile, pre-Conquest family and new rich in a
way which Vienna would not tolerate. Diplomats in London have no
corporate life of their own; ambassadors and _attachés_ scatter and
lose themselves in a more numerous community; lawyers, merchants,
politicians and newspaper-proprietors are everywhere. Above the
super-tax limit London is wholly democratic: those few houses which
struggled to exclude all but their owners' friends are one by one
being sold or closed; a grave scandal is required to bar the road
to court; a title is still to be had without any "damned nonsense
of merit."
As society has been diluted, its political power has evaporated.
For some years yet the old charm will indeed work fitfully in
a country so well trained to the exercise of "influence"; but,
outside the sphere of recommendations and minor appointments, the
aspirant to office will now carry to Fleet Street the ambitions
which in former years he laid on the doorsteps of Downing Street;
when every woman is a "political hostess," the most hardened
wire-puller must feel that she does not change the course of
history by inviting a labour member to luncheon; the game has
become so easy that all can compete without training or practice.
Politics were finally desocialised when Mr. Asquith moved to
Cavendish Square; they were commercialized and put on a business
footing when Mr. Lloyd George took his place. No longer, as in
the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward and in the plays of Oscar Wilde,
do high-born undersecretaries and omniscient editors chaffer away
state secrets to sinister millionaires and seductive adventuresses
at a glittering reception in the townhouse of a cultured duke; it
may be doubted if they ever did. Nowadays, politics and the press
meet over a hospitable breakfast-cup of coffee in a minister's
house or engage in a friendly round of golf, with the minister's
press-secretary ever at hand to carry the clubs and to dart back
with telephone-messages; at night all take their places at the
table of some untiring woman to whom society means the collection,
under one roof, of the greatest number of most incongruous guests.
The war lent a powerful impulse to this promiscuity. The old
entertaining was perforce suspended; but London still contained
several hundred men and women who were bitten with a craving to
meet the celebrity of the hour; and war is prolific of celebrities.
Every day threw up on the patient shores of England the man who
had invented the new collapsible machine-gun, the man who had
dropped bombs on Bagdad, the man who knew President Wilson's real
feelings, the man whose slim volume of war-sonnets had convulsed
the tea-tables of Chelsea. Night after night, they were to be met
at dinner; as their eyes lost the early dazed look, they became
men with a message; later, as their message, whether on Bagdad or
the White House, became crisply stereotyped, they faded to the back
of the room and made way for some one yet more arresting.[47] Had
the heroes of the hour passed like lions in an itinerant menagerie,
there would have been no congestion; but, inside the theatre and
out, London is loyal to its old favourites.
Thus, by the beginning of the first season after the war, London
had so far completed its gradual transformation that its numbers
were wholly unmanageable; and, though timid efforts were made
to dislodge the tentacles of war friendships, it was easier to
break down a barrier than to build one up. The former rulers had
deliberately abdicated; and, though a man has only himself to
blame for admitting to his house any one of whom he disapproves,
nowadays he cannot help meeting in the houses of others many
who would not have been tolerated in the stricter days of his
youth. The degeneration of society is to be reckoned less by its
promiscuity than by its abrogation of all moral standards. It is
still true, presumably, that, in a country as much addicted as
England to bridge, those who are caught cheating at cards will not
be received, though toleration is extended to those who do not pay
their card-losses; for any other offence there is no such thing
as what used to be called "being turned out of decent society":
if one door is closed in a man's face, he has only to go to the
next; the enclosure at Ascot may know him no more, but he will be
in excellent company outside. No longer is there a social taboo
for the corrupt politician, the fraudulent financier, the habitual
drunkard, the sexual pervert and the professional correspondent; to
wish for one marks the critic as "old-fashioned" or "provincial";
and, in an age of universal toleration, these are the two moral
kinks for which there is no forgiveness. The mad orgy which broke
out in 1918 seems, indeed, to have spent itself; but it came to a
natural end and was not cut short by the influence or opinion of
any individual or group; no one has the power, perhaps no one has
the desire to set and to insist on a standard of seemly conduct.
A drawback more serious in the eyes of those who think that life
should go with a swing is that the democratisation of society tends
to suppress all individuality. There is probably as much wit,
charm and wisdom in London to-day as at any time, but over the new
vast area it is spread so thin that it is almost imperceptible.
The strident egotism and resounding, inverted platitudes with
which Oscar Wilde once held dinner-tables in marvelling subjection
would now be drowned in the more strident babel of _cliché_
patter and the stolen humour of public comedians. The intelligent
foreigner, revisiting London after twenty years, would find
difficulty in discovering the new great hostesses, the new great
conversationalists, the wits, the beauties, even the eccentrics.
The most famous Duchess of Devonshire is dead; Stafford House is
a museum; where are the new stars shining? Who are the successors
to the "Souls"? Among the authors and statesmen, the artists and
actors, the soldiers and musicians, the journalists and financiers
of the day there is abundant wisdom and wit, their women are
sometimes radiantly beautiful; but it would be difficult to name
more than six of the younger generation whose force of personality
or strength of lung could prevail over the clatter of a society
wherein a machine-gun-fire of colloquialisms, Robeyisms and the
signs and countersigns of an exotic group do duty for intellect.
Not until society has subdivided into manageable groups will a
single weak human voice be able to make itself heard; and, until it
is less blatantly vulgar, it would be surprising if a voice worth
hearing cared to try.
III
After five years of food-shortage and servant-problems, the
country-houses were, in 1919, beginning to open their doors.
Everywhere the first year of peace was one of interlude and
experiment; as the war was being wound up and the war-machine
dismantled, thousands of officers, hundreds of thousands of men
were being demobilised; the government-offices, the factories and
hospitals were pouring forth their supernumeraries; every one
explored cautiously to see how far the old life could be resumed;
no one could forecast the condition of public finance, wages,
prices or labour a twelve-month ahead nor predict whether he would
be able to keep his house open in a year's time.
Fortunate, in those days, were the few to whom demobilisation meant
leisure to continue long-interrupted work; more fortunate the yet
smaller company of those who were financially independent of the
necessity to join in the hunt for paid appointments. The doctrine
that a man's best work is done at the spurring of poverty has lost
its former popularity: those to whom creation is a fiercely urgent
need will express themselves in sickness and in health, at leisure
and in the brief intervals of annihilating labour, when they have
to beg for food and to borrow for ink and paper; those who are
enervated by comfort and made slothful by luxury have not been
impelled by love of creation for its own sake but by creation as a
means to soft living and easy applause. The true artist works in
spite of himself, the quality of his work is conditioned not by the
public market but by his private conscience; and poverty is not so
much a spur to his spiritual ambition as a thorn in his material
flesh, distracting his mind with squalid cares when he would fain
keep it serene and tempting him to youthful prostitution that
he may later have the means of living in virtue. "Pot-boiling,"
writing to order and self-advertising are more commonly the fruit
of poverty than is the accomplishment of a masterpiece.
For even the most conscientious, some degree of independence is
essential for the free development and play of their genius. Not
only must they be secured freedom from interruption and from
competing demands on their energy, but they must enjoy full liberty
to work as they choose without regarding the blandishments of
publishers or the exhortations of critics: the one would restrict
them to working a single rich vein until it was exhausted, the
other would lop or lengthen them until they fitted the Procrustean
bed of the day's fashion. Rightly or wrongly, the creative artist
claims to choose his own theme and to treat it in his own way;
sooner or later the veering standards of criticism will concentrate
upon him a massed attack to resist which he needs the fortitude of
independence. At one moment the long novel, pardoned in Dickens,
is condemned in De Morgan; at another the novel-sequence, praised
in Balzac, is deplored in Compton Mackenzie; at another, again,
the social and political world which Thackeray and Disraeli painted
is put out of bounds for Galsworthy. In some years the drab life
of grey skies and mean streets is commended as the novelist's
single hope of salvation; in others he is urged to study Conrad
and the Russians, as Prince Florizel advised the young men in holy
orders to study Gaboriau. This urgency the novelist withstands
at his peril, for his impenitence is likely to be rebuked with a
magisterial reminder that the critics have spoken about this sort
of thing before.
The happiest moment in the existence of all who live by their pens
must surely be that in which they attain sufficient independence
of position, temperament or pocket to write without regarding too
much the jeremiads of a publisher or the cautioning of a reviewer;
and this happy moment comes earlier and more often into the life
of the novelist to-day than at any time since novels were first
written. In spite of enhanced cost for producers and of diminished
incomes for consumers, the prospects of the novel have never been
more bright; the number of those who before the age of thirty
enjoy an honourable reputation all over the world has never been
higher; and the deference paid in private to the novelist and in
public to his opinions has become so great that some may think it
exaggerated and undeserved. The columns of the press lie open to
him when he wishes to air an opinion of his own subject; and hardly
a week passes without bringing him a prepaid telegram in which he
is invited to enrich the common stock of thought on any theme from
"youth" to "the future of the cinematograph industry." During the
war he was the supreme court of appeal in strategy and politics; he
is regarded no less seriously than was the musical-comedy actress
of ten years ago; and, when his books are used as the basis of a
film scenario, his name is quite frequently printed in company with
those of the adapter, the producer and the chief actors.
This last is perhaps a chivalrous concession by the victor to
one who continues to put up a game fight. As time and money are
limited, it is probable that, when film dramas have worked through
their present ingenuous crudity, they will develop at the expense
of the novel and of the stage; at present they have much progress
to make and, even in their highest imaginable perfection, they will
only compete with that novel in which every other ingredient is
subordinated to action. At present they are for many novelists a
source of unearned increment.
Though the practice of their craft bring, at least to the more
fortunate of story-tellers, honour, affluence and friendships more
precious than either, most of them find their richest reward in the
results of their creative energy. This does not mean the elation
which comes to a man when he feels that he can call his work good:
such gratification he shares with the painter and the sculptor,
the poet and the dramatist; nor does it mean the sensation that,
after working at what he loves best and perhaps winning honour and
riches from it, he is possibly leaving behind him something that
may endure when the tongue of the statesman is silent and when the
hand of the surgeon is cold; alone in all the world of art, the
novelist, working in rivalry to the first creator, fashions men and
women in whosesoever image he pleases and sets them in a garden of
his own planning, where with the knowledge of good and evil and
with the power of life and death he controls their destinies and
makes the span of their existence long or short. It is impossible
for a man to love Balzac or Dickens, Thackeray or Stevenson without
taking up his abode in their company: Paris becomes a city wherein
he may at any moment encounter Vautrin, Nucingen and Lucien de
Rubempré on one night and in one setting of streets and clothes,
Pinkerton and Loudon Dodd on another; the infinite spaces of
London are star-spangled with the cigar-divan in which the former
prince of Bohemia led his Olympian if sedentary existence, with
the Goswell Street lodgings from which Mr. Pickwick set out on his
journey to Rochester and with the academy in Chiswick at which
Becky Sharp, already a lost soul, hurled her copy of Dr. Johnson's
"Dixonary." To the novelist of imagination these people and places
are more real than the usurpers whom he finds in their stead.
Much more real, however puny the imagination, are the men and
women whom he carries so long in the womb of his own fancy. Their
features and their clothes, their speech and their mannerisms, the
greatness and the meanness of their characters are better known to
him than is the single thought of a child to its mother. In their
company he withdraws from what others would call "the real world,"
forgetting alike its general ugliness and its occasional flashes
of startling beauty; when he walks abroad and rubs shoulders with
the passers-by, he is still in their company, their shadows are
more potent than the clumsy substances among which he dodges in and
out, their voices ring clear above the drone of traffic and the
broken mutter of the street. London, if they were born there, is
different from any London that other eyes have seen: an hotel in
Piccadilly, crowded with officers in uniform, is for him the place
where before the war the transparent shade of a girl stood at the
foot of the stairs to receive the guests at her coming-out ball;
a shuttered house in Curzon Street, under renovation for a rich
American, is the scene in which an engagement was made or broken
off; Pall Mall is overlaid, as in a palimpsest, with imaginary
clubs; and the narrow, silent streets behind the Abbey are roused
to life by the hoot or jingle of phantom cabs on their way to a
political dinner.
It is a world complete in all its generations, all its social
grades. They are born and educated, these dream-children; they
love and quarrel, marry and separate, make money and lose it, live
and die. Another generation presses upward to take their place;
but, if, as in life, they are forgotten by the newcomers, they can
never be forgotten by the parent who gave them life and who lives
among them so continuously that he can shed tears of pity for their
imaginary sorrows, while the "real world" of which others speak
becomes shrouded in twilight unreality.
Any one who holds that a book--like a picture or a statue--should
be its own explanation, grows quickly suspicious of introductions
and footnotes; but a defence or even a postulate may be allowed
against a school of criticism which threatens the former, late-won
freedom of artistic choice. If it be granted that a story-teller
may take what theme he likes, it must be granted also that he may
tell the story of an epoch as freely as of an episode, the story of
a class or nation as freely as of an individual; he may select as
his model _War and Peace_, in which Tolstoi chose for subject the
life of all Russia under the cloud of the Napoleonic wars; he may
copy Romain Rolland in describing the intellectual history of two
generations; he may bow his knee to Balzac, who with superlative
genius and daring planned his human comedy to cover no less a
subject than the whole of French life under the restored Bourbons.
An English author is entitled, if he have the presumption, to write
in ten or in fifty volumes, each linked to its predecessor, of
the whole English world as it existed before the war and as the
war transmuted it; if he make it unreadable, it is his fault; if
no one read it, his misfortune; but, so long as ambition remain
obdurate, he is unlikely to be persuaded into other paths. If he be
independent of sales, he is beyond the reach of fear; if the world
into which he withdraws be real to him, he needs no other than
this, the story-teller's, reward.
IV
The period of demobilisation, that twelve months' interlude between
war and peace, is a convenient time for pausing to take stock of
English literary and artistic development since the end of 1914.
The æsthetic lives of those who were born in the eighties fall
naturally into three divisions; there is first the period in which
the Indian summer of Victorian literature paled before the new
suns of the nineties; there is then the period in which a quieter
and more reasoned revolt against the self-imposed limitations of
Victorianism expressed itself in a mood of universal experiment
among writers and of universal receptivity among readers; before
the second phase had worked to a natural end by discarding novelty
for its own sake and by choosing among the new forms and methods
those which yielded the most fruitful results, the third period
crashed into existence at the impulse of a war which upset all
orderly progress.
It may not be superfluous to recall the names of at least a
few of those who occupied the forefront of the stage in 1914.
Conrad, after long neglect by all but a tiny _intelligenzia_,
had lately come into his own; Galsworthy continued to break new
hearts with the exquisite tenderness and beauty of each new
book; Wells, no less prolific than versatile, was pouring out an
astounding profusion of challenges to religion, official politics,
conventional morals, accepted economics and established education,
with an occasional glorious lapse into such skylarking as _Boon_
and into such immortal comedy as _Mr. Polly_; Bennett, most expert
of craftsmen, was completing his great series of giant miniatures
and taking an occasional holiday with _The Card_ and _The Regent_.
At long intervals there came a new volume of Kipling stories, more
restrained than of old and lacking the early generous fire. Moore
and James had foregone novel-writing for autobiography and the
retouching of their earlier work.
It would not be difficult to make a longer list of men with settled
and deserved reputations who at this time were continuing to
produce work of first-rate technique and achievement; but in 1914,
as in 1921, the public was less interested in reading catalogues
of names than in looking at the men who had won chief place of
honour and in asking who would reign in their stead when they were
gone. In a famous article which he contributed before the war to
the literary supplement of _The Times_, Henry James discussed
the form of some half-dozen of the younger novelists; and, since
that date, there has raged without intermission an informal
competition to name the winners among the writers of the future.
How far this usurpation of posterity's prerogative diverts a living
writer from the unembarrassed prosecution of his work might be
argued at length; some may feel that no critic, breathing the same
intellectual atmosphere, can pass more than ephemeral judgements on
the writers of his generation; the game continues, however, despite
the awful example of those who, forty or fifty years ago, tried to
place the fame of their own contemporaries beyond challenge, and,
if it be regarded as no more than a game in which no finality is
possible, it is a harmless intellectual pastime.
In 1914 the younger novelists of promise included Compton Mackenzie
and D. H. Lawrence, J. D. Beresford and Hugh Walpole, Gilbert
Cannan and W. L. George. The poets received less attention, in
part because there were fewer of them and in part because poetry
was less read before the war, though Masefield in his narrative
poems enjoyed a greater popularity than had befallen any one since
Kipling. The younger dramatists were generally ignored: apart from
Houghton, Brighouse and Knobloch, few had succeeded in making their
names known; and the stage was the almost unraided preserve of
Barrie and Shaw, Pinero, Barker, Bennett and Maugham, Sutro and
Jones, Carton and Chambers.
The impact of the war, unexpected and incomprehensible, beggaring
the resources of language and yet demanding that it should be
described and expressed even as it was felt, urged to write those
who had not written before and urged those who had written before
to write differently. It is not to be expected that the permanent
literary fruits of the war will be seen for another ten years in
the work of the younger and more impressionable writers.[48] Young
authors of either sex were for the most part engaged in grimmer
business than that of writing; and, alike among old and young,
balance and perspective are not to be found in a time of dazing
shock, of fierce indignation and of numbing grief; the repose in
which great work is planned and executed was shattered by the noise
of war; calm vision was disturbed by the vivid blaze of sudden
contrasts; and, though inspiration has charged the atmosphere, the
form in which it will materialise has not yet been revealed. The
literature of the last six years should be regarded as contemporary
documents to illuminate the psychology of a war in progress rather
than as the considered and definite contribution made by the
creative artists of a generation which had been shaken by war from
the seating of tradition.
Among these contemporary documents many are of the highest
quality.[49] _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_, _Peter Jackson: Cigar
Merchant_, _The Dark Forest_, _The Pretty Lady_, _Saint's Progress_
and _Naval Occasions_ each commemorate, in a way that has not yet
been excelled, a phase of experience, an attitude of mind towards
the war, a mood of hysteria, a changing ethical standard or an
unchanging spirit first interpreted and proclaimed. The authors
of these documents were for the most part well known before the
war; but the last six years have seen emerging the less familiar
names of E. M. Delafield and Clemence Dane, Stella Benson and Enid
Bagnold, Rebecca West and Dorothy Richardson, Frank Swinnerton,
St. John Ervine and Eimar O'Duffy. While it is not surprising
that war should give an unequalled opportunity to women writers,
it is remarkable that in half-a-dozen years six young women of
individuality so strong and so distinctive should all have made
good their claim to a place in the sun; it is encouraging for the
future free development of the English novel.
And individuality is sorely needed at a time when so many writers
shelter themselves behind an illustrious model or conceal their
native talent by using eccentric tools. In novel-writing the
worst original is usually more valuable than the best copy; but
the atmospheric effects of Dostoevski and Conrad, the exhaustive
analysis of James and the sweeping abruptness of Wells prove too
strong a fascination for many young writers. Of late, the study of
psycho-analysis has obsessed more than one brain and distorted more
than one novel. If a criticism may be ventured on the present phase
of novel-writing, it would be that the whole is subordinated to one
overgrown part: much is heard of "the novel of realism," "the novel
of manners," "the novel of atmosphere," "the novel of psychology";
less of "the novel of perspective." In the hands of the great
masters, realism and romance, manners and atmosphere, psychology
and discussion had each its allotted place and proportion. It would
have been as inconceivable for Thackeray to write a "novel of
psychology"--so proclaimed--as for Vardon to play a championship
round with a putter. This preoccupation with a single tool has
injured the story-teller's art to the extent that the younger
generation is less concerned than were the great masters with the
business of telling a story.
If poetry be the highest form of literary expression and lyrical
poetry the immediate response to the keenest stimulus, it might be
expected that the war would have effected a rich output of the most
precious material and that we should not have to wait ten years
while the shock of war was absorbed. Although, once again, the
judgement of a contemporary is impotent to predict what posterity
will or should admire, there is a present test by which the poetry
of the last six years must be regarded as disappointing: though
its technical excellence has seldom been higher and never more
widely diffused, it has not been assimilated into the thought,
the language or the life of its own generation. While the novels
of the war were read, discussed and quoted, while a passage from
this one or that may seem the classic description of an episode
or the flawless expression of a mood, the poems of the war have
seldom caught and held an emotion so inevitably as to pass into the
currency of a plain man's daily reflections. Two poems by Rupert
Brooke and one by Masefield fix the mingled anguish, wonder and
elation of the early days when the world was wrenched from the
security of peace; they indeed register a frame of mind as clearly
and finally as did _The Loss of the Birkenhead_ and may become as
much a part of the common stock as did _The Charge of the Light
Brigade_. It is difficult to recall another of which the same can
be said.
That modern poetry should remain so obstinately divorced from
modern sentiment and modern life is the more disappointing in that
it has never enjoyed more generous opportunities of making itself
heard and accepted. Poetry is more read and bought than at any
time within living memory; its single blossoms, too fragile to
burgeon alone, are gathered into yearly anthologies; it is coaxed
with prizes and encouraged with unprecedented space in weekly
reviews and monthly magazines; but almost always it fades in the
season that gave it birth.
The fault does not lie wholly at the door of an unappreciative
public, for, though the English submit with incredible docility to
the tenth-rate, they welcome the first-rate when they can get it.
Within the last six years the normal conservatism of the London
stage has been assailed by new writers, new plays and new modes
of production. Drinkwater and St. John Ervine have established
themselves; the long rule of inanity has been overthrown in places
by _The Lost Leader_ and _Abraham Lincoln_, by _The Skin Game_ and
_John Ferguson_, by _The White-headed Boy_ and by the revival of
_The Beggars' Opera_, all of which reflected as much credit on the
audiences as on the authors.
Genius works at unexpected times and in unexplained ways: there
is no obvious reason why the last months of the war should have
been chosen for an experiment in biography which has upset the
old-fashioned biographer's every standard. Lytton Strachey's
_Eminent Victorians_ occupies a place by itself in the literature
of any period. Its wit and irony, its learning and lightness,
its humour and mischief make of it a unique literary sport; its
appearance at the close of an epoch encourages the hope that, in
the new epoch, it will be the model for future biography.
How, then, should this stock-taking at the end of the war be
summarised? Among old and young there was much activity; the
former never fell below their standard, the latter gave promise of
a standard not less high. The enthusiasm, the conscientiousness,
the efficiency and versatility of those who stand in the front rank
of contemporary literature are hopeful portents for the future.
Into the Jellaby and Postlethwaite game of awarding premature
immortality it is foolish to be drawn.