Last night, when the half-moon was golden and the white stars very high, I saw the souls of the killed passing. They came riding through the dark—some on grey horses, some on black; they came marching, white-faced—hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands.

The night smelled sweet, the breeze rustled, the stream murmured; and past me on the air the souls of the killed came marching. They seemed of one great company, no longer enemies. All had the same fixed stare, braving something strange that they were trying terribly to push away. All had their eyes narrowed yet fixed open in their grey-white, smoke-grimed faces. They made no sound as they passed. Whence were they coming, where going, trailing the ghosts of guns, riding the ghosts of horses; into what river of oblivion—far from horror, and the savagery of man!

They passed. The golden half-moon shone, and the high white stars. The fields smelled sweet; the wind gently stirred the trees. The moon and stars would be shining over the battlefields, the wind rustling the trees there, the earth sleeping in dark beauty. So would it be all over the Western world. The peace of God doth indeed pass our understanding!

(From a Symposium on “Nationality,” 1915.)

In these times one dread lies heavy on heart and brain—the thought that after all the unimaginable suffering, waste, and sacrifice of this war nothing may come of it, no real relief, no permanent benefit to Europe, no improvement to the future of mankind.

The pronouncements of publicists: “This must never happen again,” “Conditions for abiding peace must be secured,” “The United States of Europe must be founded,” “Militarism must cease”—all such are the natural outcome of this dread. They are proclamations admirable in sentiment and intention. But, human nature being what it has been and is likely to remain, we must face the possibility that nothing will come of the war, save the restoration of Belgium (that, at least, is certain); some alterations of boundaries; a long period of economic and social trouble more bitter than before; a sweeping moral reaction after too great effort. Cosmically regarded, this war is a debauch rather than a purge, and debauches have always to be paid for.

Confronting the situation in this spirit, we shall be the more rejoiced if any of our wider hopes should by good fortune be attained.

Leaving aside the restoration of Belgium—for what do we continue to fight? We go on, as we began, because we all believe in our own countries and what they stand for. And in considering how far the principle of nationality should be exalted, one must remember that it is in the main responsible for the present state of things. In truth, the principle of nationality of itself and by itself is a quite insufficient ideal. It is a mere glorification of self in a world full of other selves; and only of value in so far as it forms part of that larger ideal, an international ethic, which admits the claims and respects the aspirations of all nations. Without that ethic little nations are (as at the present moment) the prey—and, according to the naked principle of nationality, the legitimate prey—of bigger nations. Germany absorbed Schleswig, Alsace-Lorraine, and now Belgium, by virtue of nationalism, of an overweening belief in the perfection of its national self. Austria would subdue Serbia from much the same feeling. France does not wish to absorb or subdue any European people of another race, because France, as ever, a little in advance of her age, is already grounded in this international ethic of solid respect for the rights of all nations which belong, broadly speaking, to the same stage of development. The same may now be said of the other Western democratic Powers, Britain and America, “To live and let live,” “To dwell together in unity,” are the guiding maxims of the international ethic, by virtue of which alone have the smaller communities of men—the Belgiums, Bohemias, Polands, Serbias, Denmarks, Irelands, Switzerlands of Europe—any chance of security in the maintenance of their national existence. In short, the principle of nationality, unless it is prepared to serve this international ethic, is but a frank abettor of the devilish maxim: “Might is right.” All this is truism; but truisms are often the first things we forget.

The whole question of nationality in Europe bristles with difficulties. It cannot be solved by theory and rule of thumb. What is a nation? Shall it be determined by speech, by blood, by geographical boundary, by historic tradition? The freedom and independence of a country can and ever should be assured when with one voice it demands the same. It is seldom so simple as that. Belgium, no doubt, is as one man. Poland is one man in so far as the Poles are concerned, but what of the Austrians, Russians, Germans settled among them? What of Ireland split into two camps? What of the Germans in Bohemia; in Alsace; in Schleswig? Compromise alone is possible in many cases, going by favour of majority. And there will always remain the very poignant question of the rights and aspirations of the minorities. Let us by all means clear the air by righting glaring wrongs, removing palpable anomalies, redressing obvious injustices, securing so far as possible the independent national life of homogeneous groups; but let us not, dazzled by the glamour of a word, dream that by restoring a few landmarks, altering a few boundaries, and raising a pÆan to the word “nationality” we can banish all clouds from the sky of Europe and muzzle the ambitions of the stronger nations.

In my belief the best hope for lasting peace, the chief promise of security for the rights and freedom of little countries, the most reasonable guarantee of international justice and general humanity, lies in the gradual growth of democracy, of rule by consent of the governed. When Europe is all democratic, and its civilization on one plane—instead of as now on two—then and then only we shall begin to draw the breath of real assurance. Then only will the little countries sleep quietly in their beds. It is conceivable, nay probable, that an ideal autocracy could achieve more good for its country and for the world at large in a given time than the rule of the most enlightened democracy. It is certain that ideal autocracies hold sway but once in a blue moon.

If proof be needed that the prevalence of democracy will end aggression among nations that belong to the same stage of development, secure the rights of small peoples, foster justice and humaneness in man, let the history of this last century and a half be well examined, and let the human probabilities be weighed. Which is the more likely to advocate wars of aggression? They who, by age, position, wealth, are secure against the daily pressure of life, they who have passed their time out of touch with the struggle for existence, in an atmosphere of dreams, ambitions, and power over other men? Or they who every hour are reminded how hard life is, even at its most prosperous moments, who have nothing to gain by war, and all, even life, to lose; who by virtue of their own struggles have a deep knowledge of the struggles of their fellow-creatures; an instinctive repugnance to making those struggles harder; who have heard little and dreamed less of those so-called “national interests” that are so often mere chimeras; who love, no doubt, in their inarticulate way, the country where they were born and the modes of life and thought to which they are accustomed, but know of no traditional and artificial reasons why the men of other countries should not be allowed to love their own lands and modes of thought and life in equal peace and security?

Assuredly, the latter of these two kinds of men are the less likely to favour ambitious projects and aggressive wars. According as “the people,” through their representatives, have or have not the final decision in such matters, the future of Europe shall be made of war or peace, of respect or of disregard for the rights of little nations.

It is advanced against democracies that the workers of a country, ignorant and provincial in outlook, have no grasp of international politics. True—in a Europe where national ambitions and dreams are still for the most part hatched and nurtured in nests perched high above the real needs and sentiments of the simple working folk who form nine-tenths of the population in each country. But once those nests of aggressive nationalism have fallen from their high trees, so soon as all Europe conforms to the principle of rule by consent of the governed, it will be found—as it has already been found in France and in this country—that the general sense of the community informed by growing publicity (through means of communication ever speeding-up) is quite sufficient trustee of national safety; quite able, even enthusiastically able, to defend its country from attack.

It is said that democracies are liable to be swept by gusts of passion, in danger of yielding to Press or mob sentiment. But are not the peoples of democratic countries as firmly counselled and held in check by their responsible ministers and elected representatives as are the peoples of autocratically governed countries? What power of initiative have “the people” in either case? They act only through their leaders. But their leaders are elected—that is the point.

Representative Governments must answer for their actions to their fellow-men. Autocratic Governments need only answer to their gods. The eyes of representative Governments are turned habitually inwards towards the condition of the people whom they represent. The eyes of autocratic Governments may indeed be turned inwards, but what they usually see of the people whom they do not represent is liable to make them turn outwards. In other words, they find in successful foreign adventure and imperialism a potent safeguard against internal troubles.

The problem before the world at the end of this war is how to eliminate the virus of an aggressive nationalism that will lead to fresh outbursts of death. It is a problem that I, for one, fear will beat the powers and good-will of all, unless there should come a radical change of Governments in Central Europe; unless the real power in Germany and Austria-Hungary passes into the hands of the people of those countries, through their elected representatives, as already it has passed in France and Britain. This is in my belief the only chance for the defeat of militarism, of that raw nationalism, which, even if beaten down at first, will ever be lying in wait, preparing secret revenge and fresh attacks. How this democratization of Central Europe can be brought about I cannot tell. It is far off as yet. But if this be not at long last the outcome of the war, we may still, I fear, talk in vain of the rights of little nations, of peace, disarmament, of chivalry, justice, and humanity. We may whistle for a changed Europe.

(From the Amsterdamer Revue, 1915.)

After many months of war, search for the cause thereof borders on the academic. Comment on the physical facts of the situation does not come within the scope of one who by disposition and training is concerned with states of mind.

But as to the result: The period of surprise is over; the forces known; the issue fully joined. It is now a case of “Pull devil, pull baker!” and a question of the fibre of the combatants. For this reason it may not be amiss to try to present to any whom it may concern as detached a picture as one can of the real nature of that combatant who is called the Englishman. Ignorance in Central Europe of his character tipped the balance in favour of war, and speculation as to the future is useless without right comprehension of his nature.

The Englishman is taken advisedly, because he represents four-fifths of the population of the British Isles.

And first let it be said that there is no more unconsciously deceptive person on the face of the globe. The Englishman does not know himself; outside England he is but guessed at.

Racially the Englishman is so complex and so old a blend that no one can say what he is. In character he is just as complex. Physically, there are two main types: one inclining to length of limb, narrowness of face and head (you will see nowhere such long and narrow heads as in our islands), and bony jaws; the other approximating more to the ordinary “John Bull.” The first type is gaining on the second. There is little or no difference in the main character behind.

In attempting to understand the real nature of the Englishman, certain salient facts must be borne in mind.

The Sea.—To be surrounded generation after generation by the sea has developed in him a suppressed idealism, a peculiar impermeability, a turn for adventure, a faculty for wandering, and for being sufficient unto himself in far and awkward surroundings.

The Climate.—Whoso weathers for centuries a climate that, though healthy and never extreme, is, perhaps, the least reliable and one of the wettest in the world, must needs grow in himself a counter-balance of dry philosophy, a defiant humour, an enforced medium temperature of soul. The Englishman is no more given to extremes than is his climate; against its damp and perpetual changes he has become coated with a sort of bluntness.

The Political Age of his Country.—This is by far the oldest settled Western Power, politically speaking. For eight hundred and fifty years England has known no serious military disturbance from without; for nearly two hundred she has known no serious political turmoil within. This is partly the outcome of her isolation, partly the happy accident of her political constitution, partly the result of the Englishman’s habit of looking before he leaps, which comes, no doubt, from the climate and the mixture of his blood. This political stability has been a tremendous factor in the formation of English character, has given the Englishman of all ranks a certain deep slow sense of form and order, an engrained culture—if one may pirate the word—that makes no show, being in the bones of the man, as it were.

The Great Preponderance for Several Generations of Town over Country Life.—Taken in conjunction with centuries of political stability, this is the main cause of a growing inarticulate humaneness, of which—speaking generally—the Englishman appears to be rather ashamed.

The Public Schools.—This potent element in the formation of the modern Englishman, not only in the upper but of all classes, is something that one rather despairs of making understood—in countries which have no similar institution. But! Imagine one hundred thousand youths of the wealthiest, healthiest, and most influential classes, passed, during each generation, at the most impressionable age, into a sort of ethical mould, emerging therefrom stamped to the core with the impress of a uniform morality, uniform manners, uniform way of looking at life; remembering always that these youths fill seven-eighths of the important positions in the professional administration of their country and the conduct of its commercial enterprise; remembering too, that, through perpetual contact with every other class, their standard of morality and way of looking at life filters down into the very toes of the land. This great character-forming machine is remarkable for an unself-consciousness which gives it enormous strength and elasticity. Not inspired by the State, it inspires the State. The characteristics of the philosophy it enjoins are mainly negative, and, for that, the stronger. “Never show your feelings—to do so is not manly, and bores your fellows. Don’t cry out when you’re hurt, making yourself a nuisance to other people. Tell no tales about your companions and no lies about yourself. Avoid all ‘swank,’ ‘side,’ ‘swagger,’ braggadocio of speech or manner, on pain of being laughed at.” (This maxim is carried to such a pitch that the Englishman, except in his Press, habitually understates everything.) “Think little of money, and speak less of it. Play games hard, and keep the rules of them, even when your blood is hot and you are tempted to disregard them. In three words: Play the Game”—a little phrase which may be taken as the characteristic understatement of the modern Englishman’s creed of honour, in all classes. This great, unconscious machine has great defects. It tends to the formation of “caste”; it is a poor teacher of sheer learning; and, Æsthetically, with its universal suppression of all interesting and queer individual traits of personality—it is almost horrid. Yet it imparts a remarkable incorruptibility to English life; it conserves vitality, by suppressing all extremes; and it implants everywhere a kind of unassuming stoicism and respect for the rules of the great game—Life. Through its unconscious example, and through its cult of games, it has vastly influenced even the classes not directly under its control.

Three more main facts must be borne in mind:—

These, the outcome of the quiet and stable home life of an island people, have done more than anything to make the Englishman a deceptive personality to the outside eye. He has for centuries been licensed to grumble. There is no such confirmed grumbler—until he really has something to grumble at; and then, no one perhaps who grumbles less. There is no such confirmed carper at the condition of his country, yet no one really so profoundly convinced that it is the best in the world. A stranger might well think from his utterances that he was spoiled by the freedom of his life, unprepared to sacrifice anything for a land in such a condition. Threaten that country, and with it his liberty, and you will find that his grumbles have meant less than nothing. You will find, too, that behind the apparent slackness of every arrangement and every individual are powers of adaptability to facts, elasticity, practical genius, a spirit of competition amounting almost to disease, and a determination, that are staggering. Before this war began, it was the fashion amongst a number of English to lament the decadence of the race. These very grumblers are now foremost in praising the spirit shown in every part of their country. Their lamentations, which plentifully deceived the outside ear, were just English grumbles; for if, in truth, England had been decadent, there could have been no such universal display for them to be praising now. All this democratic grumbling, and habit of “going as you please,” serve a deep purpose. Autocracy, Censorship, Compulsion, destroy humour in a nation’s blood and elasticity in its fibre; they cut at the very mainsprings of national vitality. Only if reasonably free from control can a man really arrive at what is or is not national necessity, and truly identify himself with a national ideal by simple conviction from within.

Two words of caution to strangers trying to form an estimate of the Englishman: He must not be judged from his Press, which, manned (with certain exceptions) by those who are not typically English, is much too-highly-coloured to illustrate the true English spirit; nor can he be judged from his literature.

The Englishman is essentially inexpressive, unexpressed. Further, he must not be judged by the evidence of his wealth. England may be the richest country in the world per head of population, but not 5 per cent. of that population have any wealth to speak of, certainly not enough to have affected their hardihood; and, with inconsiderable exceptions, those who have enough are brought up to worship hardihood. For the vast proportion of Englishmen, active military service is merely a change from work as hard, and even more monotonous.

From these main premises, then, we come to what the Englishman really is.

When, after months of travel, one returns to England, he can taste, smell, and feel the difference in the atmosphere, physical and moral—the curious damp, blunt, good-humoured, happy-go-lucky, old-established, slow-seeming formlessness of everything. You hail a porter; if you tell him you have plenty of time, he muddles your things amiably with an air of, “It’ll be all right,” till you have only just time. But if you tell him you have no time—he will set himself to catch that train for you, and catch it faster than a porter of any other country. Let no foreigner, however, experiment to prove the truth of this, for a porter—like any other Englishman—is incapable of taking a foreigner seriously (after a year of war he is not even yet taking the Germans seriously); and, quite friendly, but a little pitying, will lose him the train, assuring the unfortunate that he can’t possibly know what train he wants to catch.

The Englishman must have a thing brought under his nose before he will act; bring it there and he will go on acting after everybody else has stopped. He lives very much in the moment because he is essentially a man of facts and not a man of imagination. Want of imagination makes him, philosophically speaking, rather ludicrous; in practical affairs it handicaps him at the start; but once he has “got going”—as we say—it is of incalculable assistance to his stamina. The Englishman, partly through this lack of imagination and nervous sensibility, partly through his inbred dislike of extremes and habit of minimising the expression of everything, is a perfect example of the conservation of energy. It is very difficult to come to the end of him. Add to this his unimaginative practicality, and tenacious moderation, his inherent spirit of competition—not to say pugnacity—a spirit of competition so extreme that it makes him, as it were, patronize Fate; add the sort of vulgarity that grows like fungus on people who despise ideas and analysis, and make a cult of unintellectuality; add a peculiar, ironic, “don’t care” sort of humour; an underground humaneness, and an ashamed idealism—and you get some notion of the pudding of English character. It has a kind of terrible coolness, a rather awful level-headedness—by no means reflected in his Press. The Englishman makes constant small blunders; but few, almost no, deep mistakes. He is a slow starter, but there is no stronger finisher, because he has by temperament and training the faculty of getting through any job he gives his mind to with a minimum expenditure of vital energy; nothing is wasted in expression, style, spread-eagleism; everything is instinctively kept as near to the practical heart of the matter as possible. He is—to the eyes of an artist—distressingly matter-of-fact; a tempting mark for satire. And yet he is at bottom an idealist, though it is his nature to snub, disguise, and mock his own inherent optimism. To admit enthusiasm is “bad form” if he is a “gentleman”; and “swank,” or mere waste of good heat, if he is not a “gentleman.” England produces more than its proper percentage of cranks and poets; this is Nature’s way of redressing the balance in a country where feelings are not shown, sentiments not expressed, and extremes laughed at. Not that the Englishman is cold, as is generally supposed in foreign countries—on the contrary, he is warm-hearted and feels strongly; but just as peasants, for lack of words to express their feelings, become stolid, so does the Englishman, from sheer lack of the habit of self-expression. The Englishman’s proverbial “hypocrisy”—that which I myself have dubbed his “island Pharisaism”—comes chiefly, I think, from his latent but fearfully strong instinct for competition which will not let him admit himself beaten, or in the wrong, even to himself; and from an ingrained sense of form that impels him always to “save his face”; but partly it comes from his powerlessness to explain his feelings. He has not the clear and fluent cynicism of expansive natures, wherewith to confess exactly how he stands. It is the habit of men of all nations to want to have things both ways; the Englishman wants it both ways, I think, more strongly than any; and he is unfortunately so unable to express himself, even to himself, that he has never realized this truth, much less confessed it—hence his “hypocrisy.”

He is sometimes abused for being over-attached to money. His island position, his early discoveries of coal, iron, and processes of manufacture have made him, of course, a confirmed industrialist and trader; but he is more of an adventurer in wealth than a heaper-up of it. He is far from sitting on his money-bags—has no vein of proper avarice (the humble Englishman is probably the least provident man in the world)—and for national ends he will spill out his money like water, if convinced of the necessity.

In everything it comes to that with the Englishman—he must be convinced; and he takes a lot of convincing. He absorbs ideas slowly; would rather not imagine anything decidedly till he is obliged; but in proportion to the slowness with which he can be moved, is the slowness with which he can be removed! Hence the symbol of the bulldog. When he does see and seize a thing, he holds fast.

For the particular situation which the Englishman has now to face, he is terribly well adapted. Because he has so little imagination, so little power of expression, he is saving nerve all the time. Because he never goes to extremes he is saving energy of body and spirit. That the men of all nations are about equally endowed with courage and self-sacrifice, has been proved in these last six months; it is to other qualities that one must look for final victory in a war of exhaustion. The Englishman does not look into himself; he does not brood; he sees no further forward than is necessary; and he must have his joke. These are fearful and wonderful advantages. Examine the letters and diaries of the various combatants, and you will see how far less imaginative and reflecting (though often shrewd, practical, and humorous) the English are than any others; you will gain, too, a deep, a deadly conviction that behind them is a fibre like rubber, that may be frayed and bent a little this way and that, but can neither be permeated nor broken.

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.

(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.

(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.

Recognition of the relativity of art is constantly neglected by those who talk and write about it. For one school the audience does not exist; for another nothing but the audience. Obviously neither view is right. Art may be very naÏve and still be art—still be the expression of a childish vision appealing to childish visions, making childish hearts beat. Thus:

is art to the child of five, whose heart and fancy it affects. And:

is art to the writer and the reader of these words.

On the other hand, Tolstoi, in limiting art to such of it as might be understanded of simple folk, served his purpose of attacking the extravagant dandyisms of Æstheticism, but fell lugubriously short of the wide truth. The essence of art is the power of communication between heart and heart. Yes! But since no one shall say to human nature: “Be of this or that pattern,” or to the waves of human understanding: “Thus far and no further,” so no man shall say these things to art.

Anybody can draw a tree, but few can draw a tree that others can see is like a tree, and not one in a million can convey the essential spirit of Tree. The power of getting over the footlights to some audience or other is clearly necessary before a man can be called an artist by any but himself. But so soon as he has established genuine connection between his creation and the gratified perception of others, he is making art, though it may be, and usually is, very childish art. The point to grasp is this, and again this: Art is rooted in life for its inspiration, and dependent for its existence as art on affecting other human beings, sooner or later. The statue, the picture, or the book which, having been given a proper chance, has failed to move any but its creator, is certainly not art. It does not follow that the artist should consider his public, or try to please others than his own best self; but if, in pleasing his best self, he does not succeed in pleasing others, in the past, the present, or the future, he will certainly not have produced art. Not, of course, that the size of his public is proof of an artist’s merit. The public of all time is generally but a small public at any given moment. Tolstoi seems to have forgotten that, and to have neglected the significance attaching to the quality of a public. For, if the essence of art be its power of bridging between heart and heart (as he admitted), its value may well be greater if at first it only reaches and fertilizes the hearts of other artists rather than those of the public, for through these other artists it sweeps out again in further circles and ripples of expression. Art is the universal traveller, essentially international in influence. Revealing the spirit of things lying behind parochial surfaces and circumstance, delving down into the common stuff of nature and human nature, and recreating therefrom, it passes ten thousand miles of space, ten thousand years of time, and yet appeals to the men it finds on those far shores. It is the one possession of a country which that country’s enemies usually still respect and take delight in. War—destructive outcome of the side of man’s nature which is hostile to all breadth of heart—can for the moment paralyse the outward activities of art, but can it ever chain its spirit, or arrest the inner ferment of the creative instinct? For thousands of generations war has been the normal state of man’s existence, yet alongside war has flourished art, reflecting man’s myriad aspirations and longings, and, by innumerable expressions of individual vision and sentiment, ever unifying human life, through the common factor of impersonal emotion passing from heart to heart by ways more invisible than the winds travel, carrying the seeds and pollen of herb life. If one could only see those countless tenuous bridges spun by art, a dewy web over the whole lawn of life! If for a moment we could see them, discouragement would cease its uneasy buzzing. What can this war do that a million wars have not? It is bigger, and more bloody—the reaction from it will but be the greater. If every work of art existing in the Western world were obliterated, and every artist killed, would human nature return to the animalism from which art has in a measure raised it? Not so. Art makes good in the human soul all the positions that it conquers.

When the war is over, the world will find that the thing which has changed least is art. There will be less money to spend on it; some artists will have been killed; certain withered leaves, warts, and dead branches will have sloughed off from the tree; and that is all. The wind of war reeking with death will neither have warped nor poisoned it. The utility of art, which in these days of blood and agony is mocked at, will be rising again into the view even of the mockers, almost before the thunder of the last shell has died away. “Beauty is useful,” says Monsieur Rodin. Aye! it is useful!

Who knows whether, even in the full whirlwind of this most gigantic struggle, art work may not be produced which, in sum of its ultimate effect on mankind, will outlive and outweigh the total net result of that struggle, just as the work of Euripides, Shakespeare, Leonardo, Beethoven, and Tolstoi outweighed the net result of the Peloponnesian, sixteenth century, Napoleonic, and Crimean wars? War is so unutterably tragic, because—without it—Nature, given time, would have attained the same ends in other ways. A war is the spasmodic uprising of old savage instincts against the slow and gradual humanizing of the animal called man. It emanates from restless and so-called virile natures fundamentally intolerant of men’s progress towards the understanding of each other—natures that often profess a blasphemous belief in art, a blasphemous alliance with God. It still apparently suffices for a knot of such natures to get together, and play on mass fears and loyalties, to set a continent on fire. And at the end? Those of us who are able to look back from thirty years hence on this tornado of death will conclude with a dreadful laugh that if it had never come the state of the world would be very much the same.

It is not the intention of these words to deny the desperate importance of this conflict now that it has been joined. Humanism and Democracy have been forced into a sudden and spasmodic death-grapple with their arch-enemies; and the end of that struggle must be brought into conformity with the slow, sure, general progress of mankind. But if, by better fortune, this fearful conflict had not been forced upon civilization, the same victory would have made good, in course of time, by other processes. That is the irony. For, of a surety, wars or no wars—the future is to Humanism.

But art has no cause to droop its head, nor artists to be discouraged. They are the servants of the future every bit as much as, and more than, they have been the servants of the past; they are even the faithful servants of the present, for they must keep their powers in training, and their vision keen against the time when they are once more accounted of. A true picture is a joy that will move hearts some day, though it may not sell now, nor even for some years after the war; beauty none the less “the expression of what there is best in man” because the earth is being soaked with blood.

Monsieur Sologub, the Russian poet, speaking recently on the future of art, seems to have indicated his view that after the war art will move away from the paths of naturalism; and he defines the naturalists as “people who describe life from the standpoint of material satisfaction.” With that definition I do not at all agree, but it is never good to argue about words. Confusion in regard to the meaning of terms describing art activity is so profound that it is well to sweep them out of our minds, and, in considering what forms art ought to take, go deep down to the criterion of communication between heart and heart. The only essential is, that vision, fancy, feeling should be given the concrete clothing that shall best make them perceptible by the hearts of others; the simpler, the more direct and clear and elemental the form, the better; and that is all you can say about it. To seek remote, intricate, and “precious” clothings for the imagination is but to handicap vision and imperil communication and appeal; the artists who seek them are not usually of much account. The greatness of Blake is the greatness of his simpler work. Though, in this connection, it is as much affectation to pretend that men are more childish than they are, as to pretend that they all have the subtlety of a Robert Browning. If the range of an artist’s vision, the essential truth of his fancy, and the heat of his feeling be great, then, obviously, the simpler, the more accessible the form he takes, the wider will be his reach, the deeper the emotion he stirs, the greater the value of his art.

“What is wanted,” says Monsieur Sologub, “is true art.” Quite so! What is wanted in a work of art is an unforced natural and adequate correspondence between fancy and form, matter and spirit, so that one shall not be distracted by its naturalism, mysticism, cubism, whatnotism, but shall simply be moved in a deep impersonal way by perception of another’s vision. Two instances come into the mind: A picture of Spring, by Jean FranÇois Millet, in the Louvre. Therein, by simple selection, without any departure whatever from the normal representation of life, the very essence of Spring, the brooding and the white flash of it, the suspense and stir, the sense of gathered torrents, all the special emotion, which, every Spring of the year, is sooner or later felt by every heart, has been stored by the painter’s vision and feeling, and projected from his eyes and heart to other eyes and hearts.

And: Those chapters in a novel of Monsieur Sologub’s compatriot, Turgenev—“Fathers and Children”—which describe with the simplest naturalism the death of Bazarov. There, too, is the heart-beat of emotion as universal as it well can be, rendered so vividly that one is not conscious at all of how it is rendered.

These are two cases of that complete welding of form and spirit which is all one need or should demand of art; the rest is a mere question of the artist’s emotional quality and stature. Art, in fact, will take all paths after the war just as before; and now and then the artist will fashion that true blend of form and fancy which is the achievement of beauty.

For Monsieur Rodin, beauty is the adoration of all that man perceives with his spiritual senses. Yes. And the task of artists is to kneel before life till they rive the heart from it and with that heart twine their own; out of such marriages come precious offspring, winged messengers.

There is a picture of Francesca’s in the Louvre, too much restored—some say it is not a Francesca, but if not, then neither are they Francescas in the English National Gallery, and those, so far as I know, are not disputed—a picture of the Virgin, with hands pressed together, before her naked Babe, in a landscape of hills and waters. Her kneeling figure has in it I cannot tell what of devotion and beauty, which makes the heart turn over within one. With his spiritual senses the painter has perceived, and in adoration set down what he has seen, mingling with it the longings of his own heart. And they who look on that picture know for evermore what devotion and beauty are. And if they be artists, they go away fortified again to the taking up of a long quest.

This is the utility of art. It plays between men like light, showing the heights and depths of nature, beckoning on, or warning of destruction, and ever through emotion revealing heart to heart. It is the priestess of Humanism, confirming to us our future, reassuring our faltering faith in our own approach to the Unknowable, till the tides of the Creative Purpose turn, and our world gets cold; and Man, having lived his day to the uttermost, finds gradual sleep.

(From the Book of Italy, 1916.)

Most of us who have lived a good long time have found some part of the world to look on as the happy hunting-ground of our spirits, the place most blessed by memory. And within that sacred circle there will be some spot, above all others, enchanted.

Tre Cime di Lavaredo! Drei Zinnen! You three rock mountains above Misurina of the Italian Tyrol—how many times have we not climbed up, to lie on your high stony slopes, steeping our eyes in wild form and colour, wherefrom even a dull spirit must take wings and soar a little! Width of thought is surely born, in some sort, of majestic sights—cloud forms, and a burning sky, rock pinnacles, and wandering, deep-down valleys, the gray-violet shadows on the hills, the frozen serenity of far snows. All the outspread miracle there lies fan-shaped to the south, south-east, south-west, having that warmth which so makes the heart rejoice the moment one passes over and looks southward from any mountain. What traveller does not feel strange loveliness steal up into his soul from southern slopes? Domodossola below the Simplon; Val d’Aosta beyond the Matterhorn; Bormio beneath the Stelvio; and many another holy place. It is not merely charm and mellowness—the South can be savage as the North—it is some added poignancy of form and colour, and a look of being blessed.

Tre Cime di Lavaredo! Music comes drifting up your slopes, from pasture far down enough to give magic to cow-bells.

But now, where but three years ago we watched a little white cow licking its herd’s sprained hand, men are fighting to the death. Batteries must be adorning that steep forcella running from the refuge hut. A new kind of thunder reverberates, in whose roar the stones that were for ever falling will have lost their voices. And the beasts, the gray, the dun, the white, mild-eyed—their pasture below must be a desert! Even the goats surely have gone. Or do they and their young masters attend placidly on these new mysteries, just pricking their ears now and again at some too raucous clap and clatter of guns?

Let those who are killed up there be buried in their tracks! Out of their bodies on the lower slopes a few more flowers will spring—gentian, mountain-dandelion, alpen-rose; and higher, nearer those peaks, they will be grateful food for root of edelweiss. And may their spirits—if men have such after death—stay up on those wild heights! Nowhere else could they have such free flitting space! Friend-spirit, foe-spirit, they will fight no more, but on the winter nights in comradeship haunt the frozen hills, where no shred of man or beast or bird or plant is left, till Spring comes again.

To fight up here, where Nature has designed one vast demonstration of her own fierce untameness, of all the stubborn face she opposes to the crafts of man! What irony! Up in this wild stony citadel, among these rock minarets and red-and-gold-stained bastions, above ravines remote from man—up here, where in winter all is ice, and even in summer no green thing grows; on these invincible outposts of an earth not yet subdued by incalculable human toil throughout a million years; among these sublime unconquered monuments, reminding us of labour and peril infinite in our long death-grip with Nature—up here man has fellow-man by the throat. Yea! Irony complete! Nor the less perfect in that each soldier on these heights who in duty clubs his fellow-Christian’s brains out, or sends forth the shell that shall mingle his body with the rock rubble and the edelweiss, and sets up a little cross, perhaps, to the departed soul, is a true hero, holding his life in his hand, throwing it down grandly for his country’s honour. Verily we are strange animals, we men—little walking magazines of too great vitality! Out of our sheer rampancy comes war; as though superfluity of vital fluid were for ever accumulating, to free ourselves of which we have found as yet no better way than this. Shall we never learn to spend the surplus of our vital force in efforts of salvation rather than destruction? If the mountains cannot teach us, and the wide night skies above them, sparkling with other worlds, then nothing will. For on mountains and beneath such skies man feels at his greatest, flies far in fancy, dreams of nobility; yet does he perceive what a puny midget of a creature walks on his two feet, glad of any little help he can get or give, glad of good-will from any living thing. In loneliness up here he would soon be frozen and starved, or slip to death. His tiny strength, his feeble cunning, would avail him but short span. Unroped to other men, he is but a sigh in the night, a cross of bleaching lime in to-morrow’s sunlight....

Tre Cime di Lavaredo! Golden sounds of a golden speech! When, if ever, we see your beloved rocks again, that may be your only name; no longer perhaps will the words Drei Zinnen compete for you ... But will you know the difference? As of old, gigantic, silent, or, clamorously, in the loosening rains and heat, casting down your stones—you will lift up your black defiance in the clear mountain nights, your grandeur to the sun by day.

Once we saw you with the young moon flying toward, like a white swallow, like an arrow aimed at your hearts, as it might be in duel between bright swiftness and dark strength. The moon was vanquished—for she flew into you that stood unmoved.

Tre Cime di Lavaredo! You will outlast the race of men upon this earth. When we, quarrelsome midget heroes that we be, are all frozen from this planet, you will be there, whitened for ever from head to foot. You will have no name, then—neither of North nor South!

(From Scribner’s Magazine, 1915.)