14 
LAND es? WATER September 26, 1918 
The War and the Novelists : By Edward Shanks 
THE effect of the war upon poets and poetry has 
been examined at length and repeatedly. It has 
also been very much misinterpreted and very 
much exaggerated ; for up to now it has done 
little beyond bringing into prominence a move- 
ment that was preparing long before. But the effect — in 
some ways, the sinister effect — of the war on the profession 
and the art of novel-writing has not been analysed so often 
or with so much care and it deserves attention. The novel 
has never been fully mastered in England. Until quite 
recently, our writers of fiction have all been more or less 
gifted amateurs ; and the war came at the critical moment 
when it seemed that some of them might qualify for inclusion 
in a different class. For this reason, it meant more, immedi- 
ately — we do not know what will happen ultimately — to the 
novel than to poetry, in which it was too late for any merely 
.material upheaval to initiate or to destroy a movement. 
I must confess that it seems to me that the uncomfortable 
position in which our novelists at present find themselves 
has been engineered by a sort of poetic justice. Consider 
for a moment how they stood when the war first took them. 
It is a solemn thought that on every day of our hves some- 
where several novelists are sitting down to begin new novels. 
There are enough of them for that. And it follows, there- 
fore, that when the war broke out quite a considerable number 
of novelists in vari£)us parts of the country were about three- 
quarters of the way through with the books they had in hand 
— their fingers actually busy with the loosening of the knots. 
It was only human in them, of course, when that event 
found them despairing — as most of the trade do despair 
towards the end of the work, that they Should see in the 
rending of Europe a heaven-sent deliverance. The war 
was forthwith made to do duty in a variety of ways. It 
was only to be expected, of course, that it should kill off 
villains, heroes, and heroines in great numbers. C'Sfait son 
milier. But it soon rose to the level of more complicated 
functions than these. It threw separated husbands and wives 
precipitately into one another's arms or into the arms of 
other people, it redeemed black sheep, it rescued young men 
from undesirable entanglements, it removed parental opposi- 
tion to desirable betrothals, it restored broken friendships, 
it proved the hero a hero and the villain a poltroon, by the 
simplest of all tests, and — the most cynical touch — it restored 
family businesses which had been on their last legs through 
manj' chapters. It was not long before one began to recog- 
nise the marks of a novel which had been begun, say, in 
February and finished in November, 1914. One saw, when 
the middle of the book had been passed, feverish attempts 
on the part of the author to fix certain dates on the reader's 
attention. 
Fixing the Date 
As a rule, a novelist, unless he goes all out after 
atmosphere or is a specialist in, say, wild flowers, does not 
care much in what month his characters get themselves 
involved in the necessary entanglements. But in these books 
the authors took care to explain that the complicated emo- 
tional gyrations they were describing took place in July 
and at no other time of the year ; and the more cunning 
of them dropped hints about Ulster and the threat- of civil 
war. Some grew infinitely skilful in this matter, the most 
delicate of all being the writer who sent his hero to look 
at the Book Fair in Leipzig. TlVese were the first sprinklings 
from the storm-cloud. One knew that danger threatened 
when the author let fall such sentences as these : " Roderick 
took little heed when on Monday [observe the increasing 
exactitude, this being Monday, July 27th] old Quarles spoke 
to him in the club about the likelihood of the Balkan trouble 
involving the whole of Europe. 'What Balkan trouble?' 
Roderick wondered vaguely. He contented himself with 
the reflection that Quarles had always been a scaremonger ; 
and he went to meet Emily with a light heart." Then came 
August 4th, and Roderick either did or did not join the army, 
and his marriage to, or elopement with, or divorce from, 
Emily, was postponed or averted or precipitated, precisely 
as the author's peculiar requirements might dictate. 
A great deal of this sort of thing happened. Even a num- 
ber of distinguished artists fell victims to the temptation, 
so me of them, apparently,* under the delusion that the device 
was the product of their own genius and that it had not 
occurred to anyone else. But when these novels were finished 
and published, and still, contrary to all expectation, the war 
continued, the position seemed to them a little less delightful. 
But the war, though no longer merely an exciting topsy- 
turvy of all things, still held the first place in every man's 
thoughts. It seemed impossible to write about anything 
else ; and very few made the attempt. Mr. Wells, for exam- 
ple, produced Mr. BrUling Sees It Through as automatically 
as though Providence had dropped a world-conflict into his 
particular slot ; and, oddly enough, under the stress of power- 
ful excitement he wrote a very good book. Some authors, no 
doubt, were visited by what Mallarm6 called "the caressing 
dream," not, as in Mallarm6's case, of making a really good 
translation of Poe, but of writing the great war-novel. 
Three Ways of Writing 
It was not until 1916 or so that the novelists found that 
the duration of the struggle was dragging them into a very 
serious difficulty. They had themselves, by concentrating 
on contemporary events, helped to widen and emphasise 
the gulf which now separates us from all that happened 
before August, 1914. They had, therefore, three courses 
open to them. They could write a definitely historical 
novel of pre-war days, in which case they laid themselves 
open to the risk of forgetting, what the fashions were then 
and when taxis were introduced, or of making their heroes 
walk down Kingsway beforfe Kingsway was opened^his 
torical inaccuracies more easily corrected by critics than any 
little mistake about the court of Charles II. Or, if they 
liked, they could devote their ingenuity to devising reasons 
for the retention of their heroes in civilian life. 
It is not remarkable, perhaps, that this war should have 
obsessed the public imagination more than any other war 
recorded in history. It is equally not remarkable that this 
obsession should have shown itself with overwhelming force 
in contemporarj' literature. It is hard, indeed, to see how 
novelists could have had the strength of will to ignore the new 
factor in life which was turning all life's landmarks upside down- 
A novelist, like any other imaginative writer, uses his own ex- 
perience ; and it is no exaggeration to say, perhaps, that many 
who have remained in civil life have never experienced private 
emotions of an intensity equal to that of the public emotions 
which they have suffered since the end of July, 1914. For 
those who have passed through the army the impression 
has been, of course, even deeper. It is hard, therefore, to 
reproach such writers as, for example, Mr. Francis Brett 
Young, for dealing crudely and prematurely with material 
which has not presented itself to them with artistic necessity. 
The war does not come to us in such a way. It comes to us, 
whether we are bored or excited by it, as something that 
fills the world and forces itself on our attention at every 
turn. It is something we cannot avoid, since there is pro- 
bably no person in Europe whose actions and plans are not 
to some extent conditioneji by it. To demand of the artist 
that he shall ignore it is equivalent to demanding of him 
that he shall empty his work of all personality and of all that 
is the result of personal experiences in his capacity as a 
human being and that he shall replace these things by "pure 
art " — whatever that may be. 
It would be absurd, of course, to argue that the war has 
not yet produced any good novels. Mr. BritUng Sees It 
Through is a strong point to the contrary — though even this 
would have been, perhaps, a better book, less diffuse and more 
penetrating, if it had been written from memory instead 
of from the excitements of the moment. It would be equally 
absurd to lay it down as a rule that the war may not be in- 
voked to act as the machinery in a novel. In Miss Rebecca 
West's Return of the Soldier the war plays a perfectly appro- 
priate part in bringing about a psychological situation which 
could have been contrived, but much less conveniently, in 
some other way. It would be most absurd of all to pretend 
that we have no novelists who are capable of ignoring the 
war. Mr. Frank Swinnerton's Nocturne and Mr. J. D. 
Beresford's God's Counterpoint are distinct cases in contra- 
diction — not to mention Mr. Conrad. But, for all these 
entries on the credit side, the fact remains that the war 
intervened at a moment when a young school of English 
writers was just beginning to feel its way towards conscious 
manipulation of the novel as a form of art. They had learnt 
from innumerable sources, from Turgenev, from Flaubert, 
from Henry James, from Mr. Conrad ; and they seemed 
on the point of manifesting their own independent merit. 
Now they have been diverted from their true aim ; and it 
is not certain whether they will ever recover it. 
