London Letter
Edward Shanks
London, Dec. 1, 1914.
I have to humiliate myself at the beginning of this letter. Nietzsche did not provoke the war; he did not imagine there was ever any specifically “Teutonic” culture, worthy of being spread at any cost; and he seems to have disliked Prussia as much or more than I do. I say this not to inform the readers of The Little Review, who know it all already from the number in which my error appeared, but to unburden my soul. I sinned like a daily journalist and spoke from hearsay—for I confess I have never been able to read Nietzsche with sufficient attention to gain more than a vague notion of his ideas. Two persons set me right—Mr. Harold Monro, the editor of Poetry and Drama, with some heat and indignation, and, more gently, Mr. A. R. Orage, the editor of The New Age, who was in old days one of the first to bring Nietzsche to England. It would seem that his efforts were of little use, for my blunder was merely an incident in a carnival of misapprehension which is now engaging our pseudo-intellectual critics. I have sinned in numerous, if evil, company.
I must withdraw another statement—namely, that the war has produced no adequate and agreeable verse. Mr. Maurice Hewlett’s Sing-songs of the War (published by the Poetry Bookshop) is an admirable little volume. Wisely pitching his note neither too high nor too vulgarly, he has struck closer to the mark than he has ever in any attempt. He has achieved an excellent patriotic song, beginning
O, England is an island,
The fairest ever seen:
They say men come to England
To learn that grass is green.
That needs only supporting music to be a fine song of the pleasant boisterousness and exaggeration that it should be. Of the others, The Drowned Sailor and Soldier, Soldier, have caught a wonderful and touching note of the folk-song. Mr. Hewlett’s work here is not ambitious, he has profited enormously by not keeping in his mind the necessity of producing a fine piece of literature. He has tried honestly to produce “something that will do” and much good poetry has been written in that way.