OUR LITERATURE AND THE WAR

(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.