DEMOBILISATION

Nelson:What are you thinking, that you speak no word?

Hardy:... Thoughts all confused, my lord:—their needs on deck,
Your own sad state, and your unrivalled past;
Mixed up with flashes of old things afar—
Old childish things at home, down Wessex way,
In the snug village under Blackdon Hill
Where I was born. The tumbling stream, the garden,
The placid look of the grey dial there,
Marking unconsciously this bloody hour,
And the red apples on my father's trees,
Just now full ripe.

Nelson:————————Ay, thus do little things
Steal into my mind, too. But, ah my heart
Knows not your calm philosophy!—There's one—
Come nearer to me, Hardy,—One of all,
As you well guess, pervades my memory now;
She, and my daughter—I speak freely to you.
'Twas good I made that codicil this morning
That you and Blackwood witnessed. Now she rests
Safe on the nation's honour....

Thomas Hardy: The Dynasts.

I

On the morrow of the armistice the population of the emergency offices was sharply divided into those who wished to leave, but were required to stay, and those who wished to stay, but were required to leave. Though the raising of the blockade was almost automatic, the blockade departments took time to wind up; and the temporary officer was not infrequently demobilised several months before the temporary civil servant was released.

These days of transition were a time of endless comings and goings, of unexpected returns and abrupt departures. Men who were thought to be dead reappeared suddenly from East and West Africa, from Palestine and India, demanding news of their scattered and decimated friends; women who had been lost to view for nearly five years emerged from hospitals, offices and factories; and all of a stricken generation who had survived set themselves once more to make a career or a livelihood. By now they were in age nearer thirty-five than twenty-five, uprooted and unsettled by the war, with greater experience and smaller hope, more resignation and less resiliency. The time ahead of them was ten years shorter than when they came down from their universities; many had married and begotten children; they could not long afford to wait; their "common problem" was no longer

"to fancy what were fair in life
Provided it could be,—but, finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to" their "means; a very different thing!"

By an oversight, excusable enough in hard-driven ministers who could not be expected to think of everything, no provision had been made by the government to secure that every soldier on leaving the army should be at least no worse off than when he joined it, at the risk of his life, to fight in defence of his country. Machinery was indeed erected for liberating first in order those for whom work was waiting; officers in search of employment were encouraged to submit themselves and their qualifications to a hastily constructed labour-exchange; the king and Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig invited all employers of labour to give preference to ex-service men; funds were collected, speeches were made; and, as it is always impolitic to foster a sense of grievance, even the grievance of hunger, in men who have been drilled to shoot and, in shooting, to hold their own lives cheaply, a system of temporary doles was instituted to bridge the interval until industrial conditions became normal, or, in less pretentious language, until something turned up. Admirable as were these remedies, the demobilized officers and men felt that the hands which had waved them forth to die were chill of touch when extended in welcome to those who had not died after all.

For two years the men who were once so deafeningly acclaimed as heroes that, for their own protection, less heroic but still appreciative patriots were forbidden to stand them drink have been advertising daily for any work that will keep them fed; in times of trade depression they have marched through the streets of London under banners inscribed with the device "WANTED IN 1914: NOT WANTED NOW"; and the passers-by feel that it is very sad (though, to be sure, some of these mendicants are impostors; and, of the unemployed, some are always unemployable), but that, if anything could be done, it would have been done long ago. While it would be foolish to minimise the difficulties of employers who are asked to replace tried men and women with unskilled soldiers, it may be submitted that the government which caused and the society which sanctioned such an upheaval as the late war are responsible for restoring order when war is at an end. If a civilian can within six months be turned into a soldier, the soldier can in little longer time be turned back into a civilian; as, during his military training, the state maintained him, so it should maintain him while he is being trained for civil work; as he was fed and clothed in camp, so he should be fed and clothed until he is needed in field or mine, office or shop. The voluntary organisations and patriotic appeals are being launched among the descendants of Nelson's countrymen; they have an opportunity of wiping out their great-grandfathers' disgrace. To suggest that the whole community is responsible for the men who have faced death on its behalf is to court the terrific imputation of "socialism"; yet war is the greatest possible socialisation of society, and it is not unreasonable to propose that public responsibility shall continue until the first dislocation of war has been corrected. By now hundreds of thousands have been found employment; but, so long as one suffers from want, the whole community is disgraced. The price of a woman's dress would keep him in affluence for half a year.

In the first weeks of demobilisation the problem was more difficult in that those who needed and wanted work needed and wanted a holiday first. The best-intentioned efforts to regulate or retard the flow of men from the army until there was a sure position for them outside it were met with desertion and mutiny till the sluices were opened wide and only sufficient troops retained to enforce the terms of the armistice. The countries which had been devastated by the war and those which were threatened with ruinous indemnities set to work at once to repair the damage and to build up their resources; England, which had endured as long a strain as any without having iron driven into her soul at the sight of her land laid waste or of her industries ruined, settled down to drowsy recuperation until the next crisis should rouse her with the threat of financial disaster, revolution or another war.

In those first months of peace there was much talk of "reconstruction,"[46] but the only thing reconstructed at this time was one part of the leisured, social life of the country. To some extent this was inevitable at a time when political interest was centred in Versailles and when a new House of Commons, filled with "hard-faced men who looked as though they had done well out of the war," chafed at the long-continued absence of the prime minister and tinkered with such unimportant legislation as was entrusted to the control of Mr. Bonar Law. In an atmosphere of suspense and unreality, the graver issues were postponed; and all energies were concentrated on creating a life as similar as possible to that which had been interrupted by the war and one in which the war could be forgotten. Foreign and domestic responsibilities, which in a democratic country are the concern of every adult man and woman, were lost to view in the preoccupation of a "Victory Ball" and of the first "peace Ascot." In 1919, for the first time since 1914, there were garden-parties at Buckingham Palace and a gala night at Covent Garden; the Derby was run; great balls were given in historic houses; entertaining and sport reached a perfection and profusion only inferior to 1914 standards in the number of those who, killed or maimed by four and a half years of war, were unable to attend. They, were they able to see the "reconstruction" of the country which they had redeemed and of the people whom they had reprieved, would have known at last what they had sacrificed everything to preserve.

II

If at the first calling of the half-forgotten roll they were unable to answer to their names, others stepped quickly forward to take their place. In breaking down social barriers, the war continued and went some distance towards completing a process which had been going on for twenty years. It has already been suggested that, in the last decade of Queen Victoria's reign, "society" was a word with at least a fairly definite negative connotation: certain acts or qualities expelled a man from it; certain other qualities were needed to admit him to an intimate and interrelated community of a few hundred men and women who drew their prestige from land, basked in the sunshine of the court, supplied drafts for the diplomatic service, the foreign office, the brigade of guards, the household cavalry and a chosen few other units and felt neither need nor desire to know any one outside their own world. The first American invasion abolished the pedigree test; later, the monied-cosmopolitan invasion abolished every other. The close corporation was disbanded; and, though a few hostesses received only their old friends—without their old friends' new friends,—the others scattered in search of distraction; and even before the outbreak of war the two essentials in almost every gathering were that wealth should secure the generous minimum of comfort and that brains or eccentricity should provide the amusement. If in 1890 social success could be roughly appraised by the number of people that a man did not know, in 1920 it was measured by his industry and skill in getting to know everybody: aristocratic London and artistic London, diplomatic London and political London, financial London and theatrical London have all overflowed their old boundaries and now meet in the undefined vast pool of London.

To dwellers in other capitals that is London's distinguishing mark; to many it is, within limits, London's greatest charm: the city is big enough to find room for every one, and each may lead his own life among his own friends. The rastaquouÈre is not penned within his own fold, as in Paris, nor the actress in hers, as in New York; soldier and civilian meet on an equality that would amaze Berlin; Jew and gentile, pre-Conquest family and new rich in a way which Vienna would not tolerate. Diplomats in London have no corporate life of their own; ambassadors and attachÉs scatter and lose themselves in a more numerous community; lawyers, merchants, politicians and newspaper-proprietors are everywhere. Above the super-tax limit London is wholly democratic: those few houses which struggled to exclude all but their owners' friends are one by one being sold or closed; a grave scandal is required to bar the road to court; a title is still to be had without any "damned nonsense of merit."

As society has been diluted, its political power has evaporated. For some years yet the old charm will indeed work fitfully in a country so well trained to the exercise of "influence"; but, outside the sphere of recommendations and minor appointments, the aspirant to office will now carry to Fleet Street the ambitions which in former years he laid on the doorsteps of Downing Street; when every woman is a "political hostess," the most hardened wire-puller must feel that she does not change the course of history by inviting a labour member to luncheon; the game has become so easy that all can compete without training or practice. Politics were finally desocialised when Mr. Asquith moved to Cavendish Square; they were commercialized and put on a business footing when Mr. Lloyd George took his place. No longer, as in the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward and in the plays of Oscar Wilde, do high-born undersecretaries and omniscient editors chaffer away state secrets to sinister millionaires and seductive adventuresses at a glittering reception in the townhouse of a cultured duke; it may be doubted if they ever did. Nowadays, politics and the press meet over a hospitable breakfast-cup of coffee in a minister's house or engage in a friendly round of golf, with the minister's press-secretary ever at hand to carry the clubs and to dart back with telephone-messages; at night all take their places at the table of some untiring woman to whom society means the collection, under one roof, of the greatest number of most incongruous guests.

The war lent a powerful impulse to this promiscuity. The old entertaining was perforce suspended; but London still contained several hundred men and women who were bitten with a craving to meet the celebrity of the hour; and war is prolific of celebrities. Every day threw up on the patient shores of England the man who had invented the new collapsible machine-gun, the man who had dropped bombs on Bagdad, the man who knew President Wilson's real feelings, the man whose slim volume of war-sonnets had convulsed the tea-tables of Chelsea. Night after night, they were to be met at dinner; as their eyes lost the early dazed look, they became men with a message; later, as their message, whether on Bagdad or the White House, became crisply stereotyped, they faded to the back of the room and made way for some one yet more arresting.[47] Had the heroes of the hour passed like lions in an itinerant menagerie, there would have been no congestion; but, inside the theatre and out, London is loyal to its old favourites.

Thus, by the beginning of the first season after the war, London had so far completed its gradual transformation that its numbers were wholly unmanageable; and, though timid efforts were made to dislodge the tentacles of war friendships, it was easier to break down a barrier than to build one up. The former rulers had deliberately abdicated; and, though a man has only himself to blame for admitting to his house any one of whom he disapproves, nowadays he cannot help meeting in the houses of others many who would not have been tolerated in the stricter days of his youth. The degeneration of society is to be reckoned less by its promiscuity than by its abrogation of all moral standards. It is still true, presumably, that, in a country as much addicted as England to bridge, those who are caught cheating at cards will not be received, though toleration is extended to those who do not pay their card-losses; for any other offence there is no such thing as what used to be called "being turned out of decent society": if one door is closed in a man's face, he has only to go to the next; the enclosure at Ascot may know him no more, but he will be in excellent company outside. No longer is there a social taboo for the corrupt politician, the fraudulent financier, the habitual drunkard, the sexual pervert and the professional correspondent; to wish for one marks the critic as "old-fashioned" or "provincial"; and, in an age of universal toleration, these are the two moral kinks for which there is no forgiveness. The mad orgy which broke out in 1918 seems, indeed, to have spent itself; but it came to a natural end and was not cut short by the influence or opinion of any individual or group; no one has the power, perhaps no one has the desire to set and to insist on a standard of seemly conduct.

A drawback more serious in the eyes of those who think that life should go with a swing is that the democratisation of society tends to suppress all individuality. There is probably as much wit, charm and wisdom in London to-day as at any time, but over the new vast area it is spread so thin that it is almost imperceptible. The strident egotism and resounding, inverted platitudes with which Oscar Wilde once held dinner-tables in marvelling subjection would now be drowned in the more strident babel of clichÉ patter and the stolen humour of public comedians. The intelligent foreigner, revisiting London after twenty years, would find difficulty in discovering the new great hostesses, the new great conversationalists, the wits, the beauties, even the eccentrics. The most famous Duchess of Devonshire is dead; Stafford House is a museum; where are the new stars shining? Who are the successors to the "Souls"? Among the authors and statesmen, the artists and actors, the soldiers and musicians, the journalists and financiers of the day there is abundant wisdom and wit, their women are sometimes radiantly beautiful; but it would be difficult to name more than six of the younger generation whose force of personality or strength of lung could prevail over the clatter of a society wherein a machine-gun-fire of colloquialisms, Robeyisms and the signs and countersigns of an exotic group do duty for intellect. Not until society has subdivided into manageable groups will a single weak human voice be able to make itself heard; and, until it is less blatantly vulgar, it would be surprising if a voice worth hearing cared to try.

III

After five years of food-shortage and servant-problems, the country-houses were, in 1919, beginning to open their doors. Everywhere the first year of peace was one of interlude and experiment; as the war was being wound up and the war-machine dismantled, thousands of officers, hundreds of thousands of men were being demobilised; the government-offices, the factories and hospitals were pouring forth their supernumeraries; every one explored cautiously to see how far the old life could be resumed; no one could forecast the condition of public finance, wages, prices or labour a twelve-month ahead nor predict whether he would be able to keep his house open in a year's time.

Fortunate, in those days, were the few to whom demobilisation meant leisure to continue long-interrupted work; more fortunate the yet smaller company of those who were financially independent of the necessity to join in the hunt for paid appointments. The doctrine that a man's best work is done at the spurring of poverty has lost its former popularity: those to whom creation is a fiercely urgent need will express themselves in sickness and in health, at leisure and in the brief intervals of annihilating labour, when they have to beg for food and to borrow for ink and paper; those who are enervated by comfort and made slothful by luxury have not been impelled by love of creation for its own sake but by creation as a means to soft living and easy applause. The true artist works in spite of himself, the quality of his work is conditioned not by the public market but by his private conscience; and poverty is not so much a spur to his spiritual ambition as a thorn in his material flesh, distracting his mind with squalid cares when he would fain keep it serene and tempting him to youthful prostitution that he may later have the means of living in virtue. "Pot-boiling," writing to order and self-advertising are more commonly the fruit of poverty than is the accomplishment of a masterpiece.

For even the most conscientious, some degree of independence is essential for the free development and play of their genius. Not only must they be secured freedom from interruption and from competing demands on their energy, but they must enjoy full liberty to work as they choose without regarding the blandishments of publishers or the exhortations of critics: the one would restrict them to working a single rich vein until it was exhausted, the other would lop or lengthen them until they fitted the Procrustean bed of the day's fashion. Rightly or wrongly, the creative artist claims to choose his own theme and to treat it in his own way; sooner or later the veering standards of criticism will concentrate upon him a massed attack to resist which he needs the fortitude of independence. At one moment the long novel, pardoned in Dickens, is condemned in De Morgan; at another the novel-sequence, praised in Balzac, is deplored in Compton Mackenzie; at another, again, the social and political world which Thackeray and Disraeli painted is put out of bounds for Galsworthy. In some years the drab life of grey skies and mean streets is commended as the novelist's single hope of salvation; in others he is urged to study Conrad and the Russians, as Prince Florizel advised the young men in holy orders to study Gaboriau. This urgency the novelist withstands at his peril, for his impenitence is likely to be rebuked with a magisterial reminder that the critics have spoken about this sort of thing before.

The happiest moment in the existence of all who live by their pens must surely be that in which they attain sufficient independence of position, temperament or pocket to write without regarding too much the jeremiads of a publisher or the cautioning of a reviewer; and this happy moment comes earlier and more often into the life of the novelist to-day than at any time since novels were first written. In spite of enhanced cost for producers and of diminished incomes for consumers, the prospects of the novel have never been more bright; the number of those who before the age of thirty enjoy an honourable reputation all over the world has never been higher; and the deference paid in private to the novelist and in public to his opinions has become so great that some may think it exaggerated and undeserved. The columns of the press lie open to him when he wishes to air an opinion of his own subject; and hardly a week passes without bringing him a prepaid telegram in which he is invited to enrich the common stock of thought on any theme from "youth" to "the future of the cinematograph industry." During the war he was the supreme court of appeal in strategy and politics; he is regarded no less seriously than was the musical-comedy actress of ten years ago; and, when his books are used as the basis of a film scenario, his name is quite frequently printed in company with those of the adapter, the producer and the chief actors.

This last is perhaps a chivalrous concession by the victor to one who continues to put up a game fight. As time and money are limited, it is probable that, when film dramas have worked through their present ingenuous crudity, they will develop at the expense of the novel and of the stage; at present they have much progress to make and, even in their highest imaginable perfection, they will only compete with that novel in which every other ingredient is subordinated to action. At present they are for many novelists a source of unearned increment.

Though the practice of their craft bring, at least to the more fortunate of story-tellers, honour, affluence and friendships more precious than either, most of them find their richest reward in the results of their creative energy. This does not mean the elation which comes to a man when he feels that he can call his work good: such gratification he shares with the painter and the sculptor, the poet and the dramatist; nor does it mean the sensation that, after working at what he loves best and perhaps winning honour and riches from it, he is possibly leaving behind him something that may endure when the tongue of the statesman is silent and when the hand of the surgeon is cold; alone in all the world of art, the novelist, working in rivalry to the first creator, fashions men and women in whosesoever image he pleases and sets them in a garden of his own planning, where with the knowledge of good and evil and with the power of life and death he controls their destinies and makes the span of their existence long or short. It is impossible for a man to love Balzac or Dickens, Thackeray or Stevenson without taking up his abode in their company: Paris becomes a city wherein he may at any moment encounter Vautrin, Nucingen and Lucien de RubemprÉ on one night and in one setting of streets and clothes, Pinkerton and Loudon Dodd on another; the infinite spaces of London are star-spangled with the cigar-divan in which the former prince of Bohemia led his Olympian if sedentary existence, with the Goswell Street lodgings from which Mr. Pickwick set out on his journey to Rochester and with the academy in Chiswick at which Becky Sharp, already a lost soul, hurled her copy of Dr. Johnson's "Dixonary." To the novelist of imagination these people and places are more real than the usurpers whom he finds in their stead.

Much more real, however puny the imagination, are the men and women whom he carries so long in the womb of his own fancy. Their features and their clothes, their speech and their mannerisms, the greatness and the meanness of their characters are better known to him than is the single thought of a child to its mother. In their company he withdraws from what others would call "the real world," forgetting alike its general ugliness and its occasional flashes of startling beauty; when he walks abroad and rubs shoulders with the passers-by, he is still in their company, their shadows are more potent than the clumsy substances among which he dodges in and out, their voices ring clear above the drone of traffic and the broken mutter of the street. London, if they were born there, is different from any London that other eyes have seen: an hotel in Piccadilly, crowded with officers in uniform, is for him the place where before the war the transparent shade of a girl stood at the foot of the stairs to receive the guests at her coming-out ball; a shuttered house in Curzon Street, under renovation for a rich American, is the scene in which an engagement was made or broken off; Pall Mall is overlaid, as in a palimpsest, with imaginary clubs; and the narrow, silent streets behind the Abbey are roused to life by the hoot or jingle of phantom cabs on their way to a political dinner.

It is a world complete in all its generations, all its social grades. They are born and educated, these dream-children; they love and quarrel, marry and separate, make money and lose it, live and die. Another generation presses upward to take their place; but, if, as in life, they are forgotten by the newcomers, they can never be forgotten by the parent who gave them life and who lives among them so continuously that he can shed tears of pity for their imaginary sorrows, while the "real world" of which others speak becomes shrouded in twilight unreality.

Any one who holds that a book—like a picture or a statue—should be its own explanation, grows quickly suspicious of introductions and footnotes; but a defence or even a postulate may be allowed against a school of criticism which threatens the former, late-won freedom of artistic choice. If it be granted that a story-teller may take what theme he likes, it must be granted also that he may tell the story of an epoch as freely as of an episode, the story of a class or nation as freely as of an individual; he may select as his model War and Peace, in which Tolstoi chose for subject the life of all Russia under the cloud of the Napoleonic wars; he may copy Romain Rolland in describing the intellectual history of two generations; he may bow his knee to Balzac, who with superlative genius and daring planned his human comedy to cover no less a subject than the whole of French life under the restored Bourbons. An English author is entitled, if he have the presumption, to write in ten or in fifty volumes, each linked to its predecessor, of the whole English world as it existed before the war and as the war transmuted it; if he make it unreadable, it is his fault; if no one read it, his misfortune; but, so long as ambition remain obdurate, he is unlikely to be persuaded into other paths. If he be independent of sales, he is beyond the reach of fear; if the world into which he withdraws be real to him, he needs no other than this, the story-teller's, reward.

IV

The period of demobilisation, that twelve months' interlude between war and peace, is a convenient time for pausing to take stock of English literary and artistic development since the end of 1914. The Æsthetic lives of those who were born in the eighties fall naturally into three divisions; there is first the period in which the Indian summer of Victorian literature paled before the new suns of the nineties; there is then the period in which a quieter and more reasoned revolt against the self-imposed limitations of Victorianism expressed itself in a mood of universal experiment among writers and of universal receptivity among readers; before the second phase had worked to a natural end by discarding novelty for its own sake and by choosing among the new forms and methods those which yielded the most fruitful results, the third period crashed into existence at the impulse of a war which upset all orderly progress.

It may not be superfluous to recall the names of at least a few of those who occupied the forefront of the stage in 1914. Conrad, after long neglect by all but a tiny intelligenzia, had lately come into his own; Galsworthy continued to break new hearts with the exquisite tenderness and beauty of each new book; Wells, no less prolific than versatile, was pouring out an astounding profusion of challenges to religion, official politics, conventional morals, accepted economics and established education, with an occasional glorious lapse into such skylarking as Boon and into such immortal comedy as Mr. Polly; Bennett, most expert of craftsmen, was completing his great series of giant miniatures and taking an occasional holiday with The Card and The Regent. At long intervals there came a new volume of Kipling stories, more restrained than of old and lacking the early generous fire. Moore and James had foregone novel-writing for autobiography and the retouching of their earlier work.

It would not be difficult to make a longer list of men with settled and deserved reputations who at this time were continuing to produce work of first-rate technique and achievement; but in 1914, as in 1921, the public was less interested in reading catalogues of names than in looking at the men who had won chief place of honour and in asking who would reign in their stead when they were gone. In a famous article which he contributed before the war to the literary supplement of The Times, Henry James discussed the form of some half-dozen of the younger novelists; and, since that date, there has raged without intermission an informal competition to name the winners among the writers of the future. How far this usurpation of posterity's prerogative diverts a living writer from the unembarrassed prosecution of his work might be argued at length; some may feel that no critic, breathing the same intellectual atmosphere, can pass more than ephemeral judgements on the writers of his generation; the game continues, however, despite the awful example of those who, forty or fifty years ago, tried to place the fame of their own contemporaries beyond challenge, and, if it be regarded as no more than a game in which no finality is possible, it is a harmless intellectual pastime.

In 1914 the younger novelists of promise included Compton Mackenzie and D. H. Lawrence, J. D. Beresford and Hugh Walpole, Gilbert Cannan and W. L. George. The poets received less attention, in part because there were fewer of them and in part because poetry was less read before the war, though Masefield in his narrative poems enjoyed a greater popularity than had befallen any one since Kipling. The younger dramatists were generally ignored: apart from Houghton, Brighouse and Knobloch, few had succeeded in making their names known; and the stage was the almost unraided preserve of Barrie and Shaw, Pinero, Barker, Bennett and Maugham, Sutro and Jones, Carton and Chambers.

The impact of the war, unexpected and incomprehensible, beggaring the resources of language and yet demanding that it should be described and expressed even as it was felt, urged to write those who had not written before and urged those who had written before to write differently. It is not to be expected that the permanent literary fruits of the war will be seen for another ten years in the work of the younger and more impressionable writers.[48] Young authors of either sex were for the most part engaged in grimmer business than that of writing; and, alike among old and young, balance and perspective are not to be found in a time of dazing shock, of fierce indignation and of numbing grief; the repose in which great work is planned and executed was shattered by the noise of war; calm vision was disturbed by the vivid blaze of sudden contrasts; and, though inspiration has charged the atmosphere, the form in which it will materialise has not yet been revealed. The literature of the last six years should be regarded as contemporary documents to illuminate the psychology of a war in progress rather than as the considered and definite contribution made by the creative artists of a generation which had been shaken by war from the seating of tradition.

Among these contemporary documents many are of the highest quality.[49] Mr. Britling Sees It Through, Peter Jackson: Cigar Merchant, The Dark Forest, The Pretty Lady, Saint's Progress and Naval Occasions each commemorate, in a way that has not yet been excelled, a phase of experience, an attitude of mind towards the war, a mood of hysteria, a changing ethical standard or an unchanging spirit first interpreted and proclaimed. The authors of these documents were for the most part well known before the war; but the last six years have seen emerging the less familiar names of E. M. Delafield and Clemence Dane, Stella Benson and Enid Bagnold, Rebecca West and Dorothy Richardson, Frank Swinnerton, St. John Ervine and Eimar O'Duffy. While it is not surprising that war should give an unequalled opportunity to women writers, it is remarkable that in half-a-dozen years six young women of individuality so strong and so distinctive should all have made good their claim to a place in the sun; it is encouraging for the future free development of the English novel.

And individuality is sorely needed at a time when so many writers shelter themselves behind an illustrious model or conceal their native talent by using eccentric tools. In novel-writing the worst original is usually more valuable than the best copy; but the atmospheric effects of Dostoevski and Conrad, the exhaustive analysis of James and the sweeping abruptness of Wells prove too strong a fascination for many young writers. Of late, the study of psycho-analysis has obsessed more than one brain and distorted more than one novel. If a criticism may be ventured on the present phase of novel-writing, it would be that the whole is subordinated to one overgrown part: much is heard of "the novel of realism," "the novel of manners," "the novel of atmosphere," "the novel of psychology"; less of "the novel of perspective." In the hands of the great masters, realism and romance, manners and atmosphere, psychology and discussion had each its allotted place and proportion. It would have been as inconceivable for Thackeray to write a "novel of psychology"—so proclaimed—as for Vardon to play a championship round with a putter. This preoccupation with a single tool has injured the story-teller's art to the extent that the younger generation is less concerned than were the great masters with the business of telling a story.

If poetry be the highest form of literary expression and lyrical poetry the immediate response to the keenest stimulus, it might be expected that the war would have effected a rich output of the most precious material and that we should not have to wait ten years while the shock of war was absorbed. Although, once again, the judgement of a contemporary is impotent to predict what posterity will or should admire, there is a present test by which the poetry of the last six years must be regarded as disappointing: though its technical excellence has seldom been higher and never more widely diffused, it has not been assimilated into the thought, the language or the life of its own generation. While the novels of the war were read, discussed and quoted, while a passage from this one or that may seem the classic description of an episode or the flawless expression of a mood, the poems of the war have seldom caught and held an emotion so inevitably as to pass into the currency of a plain man's daily reflections. Two poems by Rupert Brooke and one by Masefield fix the mingled anguish, wonder and elation of the early days when the world was wrenched from the security of peace; they indeed register a frame of mind as clearly and finally as did The Loss of the Birkenhead and may become as much a part of the common stock as did The Charge of the Light Brigade. It is difficult to recall another of which the same can be said.

That modern poetry should remain so obstinately divorced from modern sentiment and modern life is the more disappointing in that it has never enjoyed more generous opportunities of making itself heard and accepted. Poetry is more read and bought than at any time within living memory; its single blossoms, too fragile to burgeon alone, are gathered into yearly anthologies; it is coaxed with prizes and encouraged with unprecedented space in weekly reviews and monthly magazines; but almost always it fades in the season that gave it birth.

The fault does not lie wholly at the door of an unappreciative public, for, though the English submit with incredible docility to the tenth-rate, they welcome the first-rate when they can get it. Within the last six years the normal conservatism of the London stage has been assailed by new writers, new plays and new modes of production. Drinkwater and St. John Ervine have established themselves; the long rule of inanity has been overthrown in places by The Lost Leader and Abraham Lincoln, by The Skin Game and John Ferguson, by The White-headed Boy and by the revival of The Beggars' Opera, all of which reflected as much credit on the audiences as on the authors.

Genius works at unexpected times and in unexplained ways: there is no obvious reason why the last months of the war should have been chosen for an experiment in biography which has upset the old-fashioned biographer's every standard. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians occupies a place by itself in the literature of any period. Its wit and irony, its learning and lightness, its humour and mischief make of it a unique literary sport; its appearance at the close of an epoch encourages the hope that, in the new epoch, it will be the model for future biography.

How, then, should this stock-taking at the end of the war be summarised? Among old and young there was much activity; the former never fell below their standard, the latter gave promise of a standard not less high. The enthusiasm, the conscientiousness, the efficiency and versatility of those who stand in the front rank of contemporary literature are hopeful portents for the future. Into the Jellaby and Postlethwaite game of awarding premature immortality it is foolish to be drawn.