When this war began, the Englishman rubbed his eyes steeped in peace, he is still rubbing them just a little, but less and less every day. A profound lover of peace by habit and tradition, he has actually realized by now that he is “in for it” up to the neck. To any one who really knows him—that is a portent!
Let it be freely confessed that from an æsthetic point of view the Englishman, devoid of high lights and shadows, coated with drab, and superhumanly steady on his feet, is not too attractive. But for the wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business of this war, the Englishman—fighting of his own free will, unimaginative, humorous, competitive, practical, never in extremes, a dumb, inveterate optimist, and terribly tenacious—is equipped with victory.
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.