August 2, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
37 
Art and War : A False Comparison 
By Charles Marriott 
Uy Gtorye CUxiuea 
from a pholv Ou Meiar*. Dixou 
Renaissance 
THE deeper effect of war upon art is not to be learnt 
from its direct expression in painting. Leaving 
out the question of opportunity, it does not follow 
that the artist most strongly moved by the war will 
piint war pictures. Rather the contrary. Military and 
aggressively patriotic poetry is generally written by senti- 
mental civilians. When the fighting man writes poetry, he 
writes about green fields. Exactly the same thing happens 
in painting ; and if we could follow the deeper reactions of 
the human spirit, we should find, probably, that the pictures 
of the last three years most truly " inspired" by the war 
were flower studies and pastoral landscapes. 
The cosmic reason underlying these truisms is fullv dis- 
cussed in Emerson's Essay on " Compensation," and it will 
be enough here to glance at the relationship between art and 
war. Thoughtless people try to make it a co.Tiparison, and 
solemnly debate which is the more important of the two. 
You might as well ask whether cooking is more or less im- 
portant than a thunderstorm, or " Paradise Lost " than six 
<j'clock. The two things are not comparable. Art is a con- 
stant activity of the human mind, and war is em emergency. 
This should help us to answer the question, proceeding from 
the false comparison, whether or not great artists ought to 
be exempted from serving in war. If Shakespeare were 
writing The Tempest, and the room above caught fire, so that 
a child's life was in danger, we should expect him to drop 
rhe Tempest and risk his own life to save the child's. We 
should be disappointed if he didn't. But we should not 
proceed to argue that The Tempest was less important than 
a fire in a three-pair back. True, the war is bigger than a fire 
in a three-pair back, and more is at stake than the life of 
ime child ; but the size of the occasion does not affect the 
urgency of the duty or the quality of the sacrifice. A man 
c\n do no more than give, or risk, his life for another; and 
any Englishman who dies for another, equally dies lur Eng- 
land. The moment you think of war as an emergency a 
dozen doubts are cleared up. Was Rupert Brooke " wasted ? " 
As much and as little as if he had died in the attempt to save 
a guttersnipe from the Regent's Canal. 
At the very beginning of the war, long before they were 
obliged by Act of Parliament, artists in general responded 
so fully and freely to the call that the question can be touched 
upon without embarrassment. As commonly debated it 
throws an interesting light on popular misunderstandings of 
both art and war. Proceeding from a false comparison — of 
the relative importance of art and war — the moment the 
question is asked it is swamped in irrelevancies. The other 
day somebody dragged in Leonardo da Vinci. But Leonardo 
da Vinci was " called up " because, rightly or wrongly, he 
was beUeved to be the greatest gunnery expert in the whole 
world. With every admiration for the living artist whose 
case was being debated. I should doubt if his military value 
were equal to that of Generals Haig and Petain combined — 
which would be an understatement of the military value, 
real or supposed, of Leonardo da Vinci to the Florentines. 
The morbid desire to compare art and war really proceeds 
from sentimentality ; the same sort of sentimentality that 
prompts people to neglect flowers instead of growing potatoes. 
Cracking up war by crying down the amenities of life may be 
a satisfying emotional exercise, but it does not cut much ice 
from a military point of view. The war will not be won by 
not painting and not looking at pictures or by neglecting 
flowers ; it will be won by fighting and by growing potatoes. 
Soldiers and artists, the only really practical people in 
the world, feel this in their bones ; and in the intervals of 
hard fighting they turn to flowers and pictures quite shame- 
lessly. All the soldier-artists who have spoken to me on 
the subject, and they included three at least who have die'l 
