82 



DISCOVERY 



side to the confession of failure ; it is the most valid of 

 reasons why the future should be faced with hopefulness. 

 The War has been to many the end of an old bad 

 period. Does not, indeed, Professor Babbitt, in his 

 latest book, Rousseau and Romanticism, even hint 

 that it was a kind of Nemesis upon us for not having 

 got rid of our romantic ideas long ago ? 



What has history to tell us of the effect of national 

 wars on literature ? The generation of to-day, schooled 

 in a more critical scepticism, cannot answer this 

 question with the same easy confidence as their 

 Victorian predecessors ; it used to be a commonplace 

 to say that periods of expanding national life, of great 

 wars and great victories, inspire great literatures. We 

 talked with full conviction of a Periclean Age and an 

 Elizabethan Age and all that such phrases implied. 

 But the study of the psychology of nations has tended 

 to discredit such simple theories ; the relationship 

 between hterature and national life is a more subtle 

 and complicated thing than was once believed ; we 

 are not now so sure that Elizabethan poetic greatness 

 had much to do with the Spanish Armada. The role 

 of literature seems, in fact, rather to be prophetic, a 

 foreshadowing rather than a consequence of political 

 and social movements. Take, for instance, the litera- 

 ture of Germany in the generation that precipitated 

 the catastrophe ; it did not exactly predict the War, 

 but it displayed, for those who saw beneath the surface, 

 the kind of mentality which made the War possible 

 and even probable. Moreover, the foreshadowing of 

 coming events is to be found not so much in literature 

 itself as in the interpretation a people puts upon its 

 literature ; it is rarely due, unless in quite minor 

 manifestations, to any conscious collusion on the part 

 of the poets with the spokesmen of national aspiration. 

 One thinks of Nietzsche, whose whole systcmof thought, 

 essentially anti-Prussian and even anti-German, became 

 f)erverted in the imagination of his countrymen to 

 provide a justification for aggressive Prussianism. And 

 most revolutionary dramas are not discovered to be 

 revolutionary until they are performed in the theatre. 



Of the aloofness of literature from great political 

 cataclysms there is no lack of striking illustration. 

 Can one honestly say, for instance, that the reflex of 

 the French Revolution in literature is even remotely 

 commensurate with the significance of that upheaval ? 

 Here, again, there is more French Revolution in the 

 literature of Europe before 1789 than after that year. 

 And how little can we point to in English literature 

 as the poetic sublimate of the Napoleonic Wars ? 

 Political poetry is notoriously an inferior brand ; it 

 does not stand the test of time. Thus we are not at 

 all sure that the literature of the future, either amongst 

 the victorious nations or with the Germans — and it 

 is by no means a matter of course that the advantage 



in these things lies with the victor — will bear upon it 

 signs of regeneration directly traceable to the struggle. 

 The real business of literature — pace the school of 

 critics which holds that the vitality of literature con- 

 sists in its capacity for bringing problems under debate 

 — is with matters foreign to the clash of political ideas. 

 Indications are not wanting, indeed, that the new 

 literature may even begin by setting itself resolutely 

 to ignore the War ; and will rather seek in remote, 

 imagined worlds, a relaxation from the strain of the 

 intolerable five years. 



But to the literary historian the vital question is : 

 Will literature succeed in disengaging itself from the 

 catchwords and coterie-spirit of the past ; will it escape 

 from the eternal see-saw of classicism and romanticism, 

 which has dominated literary evolution since the 

 Renaissance ? Can the circle of necessity, the " ewige 

 Wiederkehr " of the Nietzschian philosophy, be broken? 

 Or are we doomed to go on through another century 

 helplessly oscillating between the old opposites of 

 individualism and collectivism, realism and idealism ? 

 Bearing in mind the ineradicable romanticism of the 

 nineteenth century, we may reasonably look to the 

 future for a reversion to collectivism — and in literature 

 collectivism is usually synonymous with classicism — 

 look for greater hterary solidarity among the nations. 

 Twice, and twice only, in the past, has all Europe 

 been inspired by the same ideals, has thought and 

 felt as one great nation ; the first time was in the 

 epoch of the Crusades, the second in the eighteenth 

 century. It surely does not savour too much of 

 prophecy to say that the twentieth century will 

 probably resemble the eighteenth rather than the 

 nineteenth. But the solidarity of the future must 

 not mean, as too often in ages of classicism, the negation 

 of individualism. It has been decreed that the rights — 

 and these surely include the thought and literature — of 

 the little nations are to be henceforth held sacrosanct ; 

 individualism must be a factor in the new solidarity ; 

 in any case, it is inconceivable that Europe should 

 ever again resign itself to the grip of an ice-age like 

 that of pseudo-classicism. Thus the problem of the 

 immediate future will be, it seems to us, to find a 

 formula that will reconcile the collective and the 

 individualistic spirit in literature. And if we are not 

 mistaken, there are some signs of a development of 

 this kind in the smaller nations themselves ; we are 

 thinking more particularly of Scandinavia. The mere 

 desire on their part to be known sympathetically to 

 the great world outside brings w-ith it an ambition to 

 speak a common language of thought and emotion ; 

 to set forth their individual contributions to thought, 

 not in the old, aggressively national spirit of the 

 romanticists, but in an honest effort to win under- 

 standing for them. 



