"What great literature did it produce?" asked Mr. Howells in turn. "As I look back over my life and recall to mind the great number of books that the Civil War inspired I find that I am thinking of things that the American people have forgotten. They did not become literature, these poems and stories that came in such quantities and seemed so important in the sixties.
"There were the novels of J. W. De Forest, for instance. They were well written, they were interesting, they described some phases of the Civil War truthfully and vividly. We read them when they were written—but you probably have never heard of them. No one reads them now. They were literature, but that about which they were written has ceased to be of literary interest.
"Of course, the Civil War, because of its peculiar nature, was followed by an expansion, intellectual as well as social and economic. And this expansion undoubtedly had its beneficial effect on literature. But the Civil War itself did not have, could not have, literary expression.
"Of all the writings which the Civil War directly inspired I can think of only one that has endured to be called literature. That is Lowell's 'Commemoration Ode.'
"War stops literature. It is an upheaval of civilization, a return to barbarism; it means death to all the arts. Even the preparation for war stops literature. It stopped it in Germany years ago. A little anecdote is significant.
"I was in Florence about 1883, long after the Franco-Prussian War, and there I met the editor of a great German literary weekly—I will not tell you its name or his. He was a man of refinement and education, and I have not forgotten his great kindness to my own fiction. One day I asked him about the German novelists of the day.
"He said: 'There are no longer any German novelists worthy of the name. Our new ideal has stopped all that. Militarism is our new ideal—the ideal of Duty—and it has killed our imagination. So the German novel is dead.'"
"Why is it, then," I asked, "that Russia, a nation of militaristic ideals, has produced so many great novels during the past century?"
"Russia is not Germany," answered the man who taught Americans to read Turgenieff. "The people of Russia are not militaristic as the people of Germany are militaristic. In Germany war has for a generation been the chief idea of every one. The nation has had a militaristic obsession. And this, naturally, has stifled the imagination.
"But in Russia nothing of the sort has happened. Whatever the designs of the ruling classes may be, the people of Russia keep their simplicity, their large intellectuality and spirituality. And, therefore, their imagination and other great intellectual and spiritual gifts find expression in their great novels and plays.