OUR LITERARY WAR-LOSSES

Thoughts upon Moral Exaltation and Literary Decay

FRANK MOORE COLBY

PEOPLE foresaw in a general way the literary effects of the war. They knew that it was likely to devastate light literature in the fighting nations, but they could not have anticipated the startling concrete results. They knew, of course, that an essayist hit by a bomb would cease writing, but they could have had no idea that the essayists who were not hit would be so strangely altered. There is no external scar on the persons of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Mr. G. B. Shaw, Mr. H. G. Wells, and a dozen other eminent English writers, who have presumably remained in perfectly safe places and have suffered none of the privations of war; yet from the reader's point of view they are hardly recognizable. •

Before the war it was generally supposed that the effect of a strong feeling upon a light literary character was on the whole beneficial, and there are many to this day who argue that the reason why American light literature is usually so very light that no one can feel it, is because there are no strong, high,'noble feelings in the writers themselves.

I HAVE heard it suggested that Mr. Robert W. Chambers, had he been borne aloft on some great tempest of emotion, would have been George Meredith—or just as remarkable —and that if the inner life of Mr. Gouverneur Morris were disturbed a real epic would emerge.

But what was the result of shaking up Mr. Chesterton? Simply, that soon after August 4, 1914, he became almost completely unreadable, and has remained so ever since. The war has made Mr. Wells hysterical; Mr. Shaw incoherent; but it has fairly blasted Mr. Chesterton.

This is not said in an unfriendly spirit, or from a desire to parry any blow directed against the German Empire. The cause of these writers is my own; nor do I respect them any less as men for their having rather gone to pieces as writers. Indeed, they may be regarded as sufferers from internal injuries honorably sustained; for the casualties of war are subtle and various.

The bomb that takes off a private's leg may render a good poet perfectly useless for several months. Down go thousands of stout British seamen in the Battle of Jutland and away goes Mr. Chesterton's commonsense, as he argues with some equally stricken German that the fight was not really a German Salamis, but, on the contrary, a British Waterloo. While lives are nobly lost at the front, wits are lost as nobly in the magazines, and after a battle there are always many miscarriages among minor verse writers, as among mothers.

TO the right-feeling reader, the foolish thing he now encounters on the formerly intelligent page will seem a sort of literary lesion, patriotically incurred.

But he is under no obligation whatever to go on reading the page. The healthy inner violence of the writers has thus far taken no adequate outward form, and the fact that their hearts are eminently in the right place, affords a moral, not a literary, gratification. It shows how vain are the current recipes for the amelioration of belles-lettres. Passion and a high purpose, and freedom from the least taint of commercialism, a great subject and a stirring time — all the ingredients recommended by American magazine critics for twenty years in the reconstitution of the world's literature— have gone to the making of the very worst volumes that these authors have as yet achieved.

Scorn has been highly valued as a literary motive, but the scorn of Mr. H. G. Wells is no longer beautiful in the contempt and anger of his lip, and when Mr. Chesterton dips his pen in gall—a proceeding also much esteemed by literary commentators—the gall turns out to be the very thinnest of writing fluids. Consecrate a littérateur and to your astonishment you cannot read him. Put him in a battle mood and he gives you nothing to think about, no exploding thought of any use whatever, except perhaps to throw at some German, whom probably it would not hurt. The lesson of the war seems to be adverse to all the current theories of inspiration in literature. If you inspire light literature too much, apparently, it bursts.

THIS, by the way, must dishearten the group of critics and novelists who, in the Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere, have been telling other critics and novelists what is the matter with them. The amount of disagreeable contemporary reading Mr. Edward Garnett, Mr. Owen Wister, Mr. James Stephens, and those other devoted men have forced themselves to do for this purpose is prodigious. Mr. James Stephens said that after having gone through all the contemporary writings of France, Russia and Germany, and found them rather bad, he read everything at all noteworthy in America, and found it worse yet. Mr. Edward Garnett, not only knows the exact difference between Mr. Winston Churchill and Mr. James Lane Allen—which of itself is rather a subtle matter—but he can tell to a dot why and how they fall short as artists.

Mr. Owen Wister says the novels of Mr. Harold Bell Wright are "shams:" mere "puddles of words," "stale, distorted" and full of "mildewed pap," but he can pass the stiffest sort of examination in them all, and will quote you page after page of the longest, evidently having learned them by heart. He knows why Mr. Booth Tarkington is so much worse than Mr. Meredith Nicholson—he even knows why each of them exists—and he has solved a hundred other just.such knotty problems. You cannot help admiring these conscientious, indefatigable men, going on and on against their wills, borrowing novels from the cook; following up the elevator boy and becoming learned in the subject of his literary contemplations.

NOW, the result of all this hard labor and literary anguish may be summed up quite simply. The faults of the American novel, according to these critics, all arise from the lack of proper motives in the writer.

They do not say it in so many words, but they plainly imply a genuine belief that if they could substitute some of their own better moral and artistic purposes for the present motives of any novelist, however silly, that novelist would soon become quite sensible.

Mr. James Stephens is certain that if the American novelist would stop caring so much about old women and small boys he would surely be considered much better off as an artist.

Mr. Edward Garnett believes that if authors would be less anxious to appear orthodox and cease conspiring to suppress all mention of the sexual relation they would improve. Mr. Owen Wister thinks inner freedom is the certain cure. And one thing follows from the arguments of all of them as absolutely certain: Extract the commercial motive from any author, however bad, and he will be bettered.

NOT the slightest foundation for any one of these beliefs, as the lesson of the war reminds us. Too many gifted contemporary authors are, with a lofty purpose for a splendid cause, writing complete nonsense. Too plain is it, even among writers at one time quite remarkable, that moral exaltation is often followed by literary decay. As to the harmless, ordinary American author, over whom the critics above cited have toiled so hard, there is no help for him from their methods. On the contrary, if they had their way with him, they would simply make him uncomfortable without benefiting the reading public in the least. Why free the inner life of Mr. Robert W. Chambers, when in all aesthetic probability none of it could escape ? Suppose Mr. Harold Bell Wright gave himself up utterly to Mr. Owen Wister; went to a lonely place with him and listened every day, and Mr. Wister really interested him in Shakespeare, and "Lady Bah timore," and Dante, and "The Virginian," and tugged and heaved him toward the higher plane, Mr. Wright in no wise resisting; suppose finally that the white flame of Mr. Wister actually passed over into Mr. Wright; Mr. Wright's artistic substance being the same, there would be no change in his manner of writing, and the small, discerning class of readers whom Mr. Wister has in mind would probably never know that Mr. Wright was burning bright inside. It simply would cost Mr. Wright five million readers and fill him with a violent emotion which he lacked completely the ability to express.

IN fact, it is a rash man who will recommend

any definite external or internal crisis for the amelioration of any author—good or bad. The most agreeable French authors have gonemonotonously mad under conditions which, on the principle of a great body of current literary comment, should have improved them.

With M. Donnay, in France, robbed.of every grace and writing like any other portion of the newspaper; with M. Barres wholly indistinguishable, and MM. Anatole France, Hanotaux, Reinach, and a dozen charming persons, become suddenly all of a piece; with M. Le Ben, critic of crowd-suggestion, just finishing a long book wherein from one end to the other he himself is completely at the mercy of it— and every one of them filled with motives just as high as those of Mr. Owen Wister—one cannot help doubting the artistic efficacy of a great purpose.

And, since this happens to writers with real powers of expression, it seems improbable that the strongest and noblest feeling in the world, if implanted in the bosom of any successful American novelist of the last few years, would ever find its way out into literature.