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.
ART AND THE WAR
(From the Atlantic Monthly and Fortnightly Review, 1915.)
Monsieur Rodin—perhaps the greatest living artist—has lately defined art as the pursuit of beauty, and beauty as “the expression of what there is best in man.” “Man,” he says, “needs to express in a perfect form of art all his intuitive longings towards the Unknowable.” His words may serve as warning to those who imagine that the war will loosen one root of the tree of art—a tree which has been growing slowly since first soul came into men’s eyes.
This world (as all will admit) is one of the innumerable expressions of an Unknowable Creative Purpose, which colloquially we call God; that which not every one will admit is that this Creative Purpose works in its fashioning not only of matter but of what we call spirit, through friction, through the rubbing together of the noses, the thoughts, and the hearts of men. While the material condition of our planet—the heat or friction within it—remains favourable to human life, there will, there must needs be, a continual crescendo in the stature of Humanity, through the ever-increasing friction of human spirits one with the other; friction supplied by life itself, and, next after life, by those transcripts of life, those expressions of human longing, which we know as art. Art for art’s sake—if it meant what it said, which is doubtful—was always a vain and silly cry. As well contend that an artist is not a man. Art was ever the servant as well as the mistress of men, and ever will be. Civilization, which after all is but the gradual conversion of animal man into human man, has come about through art even more than through religion, law, and science. For the achieved “expression of man’s intuitive longing towards the Unknowable, in more or less perfect forms of art” has ever—after life itself—been the chief influence in broadening men’s hearts.
The aim of human life no doubt is happiness. But, after all, what is happiness? Efficiency, wealth, material comfort? Many by their lives do so affirm; few are cynical enough to say so; and on their death-beds none will feel that they are. Not even freedom in itself brings happiness. Happiness lies in breadth of heart. And breadth of heart is that inward freedom, which has the power to understand, feel with, and, if need be, help others. In breadth of heart are founded justice, love, sacrifice; without it there would seem no special meaning to any of our efforts, and the tale of all human life would still be no more than that of very gifted animals, many of whom, indeed, are highly efficient, and have unity partly instinctive, partly founded on experiences of the utility thereof; but none of whom have that conscious altruism which is without perception of benefit to self, and works from sheer recognition of its own beauty. In sum, human civilization is the growth of conscious altruism; and the directive moral purpose in the world nothing but our dim perception, ever growing through spiritual friction, that we are all bound more and more towards the understanding of ourselves and each other, and all that this carries with it. To imagine, then, that a conflagration like this war, however vast and hellish, will do aught but momentarily retard the crescendo of that understanding, is to miss perception of the whole slow process by which man has become less and less an animal throughout the ages; and to fear that the war will scorch and wither art, that chief agent of understanding, is either to identify oneself with the petty and eclectic views which merely produce æsthetic excrescences, or to be frankly ignorant of what art means.