THE HEROIC SPIRIT IN LIFE AND LETTERS. [To THE EDITOE
os THE "Srruraroa."] Sxa,—In the midst of one of the most titanic conflicts the world has ever known, the voice of the Times critic is raised in scorn against that section of the British public which very reasonably believes the war will have an elevating effect upon our art and literature.• War, he tells us, is a mere brutal "excrescence," from which "the real artist" averts his sensitive eyes, his " temperament " being concerned primarily with his own emotions. Far from being inspired or uplifted by the devotion and self-sacrifice of those who fight and die that European civilization may live, the " imaginative" writer is represented as finding that such actions "grate on the nerves and jar the hearing "! True, it is a "sacred duty" for soldiers and sailors to fight and bleed, but let them not presume to think their gallant deeds are to find any place in literature ! On this point our mentor is explicit:— "The very glut of heroism" (he announces) "is likely, as it were, to put the poet's fastidious nature off, to blunt the edge of perceptions that are always groping after fresh sensation, that 74115i be always groping, in order that expression may be of something really felt—for novelty is, of all, the greatest spur to sharp feeling."
(This would seem to mean that the unfortunate poet, having nothing to say, and being too egotistical to lose his petty per- sonality in the sufferings and triumphs of better men, is obliged to lash himself into a state of self-induced emotion for the sake of having something to write about. A pitiable definition, if it were a true one.) Without commenting too severely upon the ungraceful colloquialisms of the Times advocate of sensation versus heroism, it suffices to say that, had he dipped his pen in vitriol he could scarcely have written a more scathing condemnation of the artistic temperament. When he further adds that "frontal attacks to capture heroism and imprison it in art are almost always failures. Few of the great imagined figures of literary art are heroic," we can only conclude that Homer's and Shakespeare's works do not come within his arbitrary and exclusive conception of literary art, and that he has entirely forgotten the ancient but ever- living national epic of our French allies, the Chanson its Boland.
"Nietzsche in his deadly sickness" may be of pathological interest to those who confound decadence with progress; but considering that in times such as the present it is more profit- able to study moral health than mental distortion, would it not be better to leave Nietzsche on the shelf and turn back to Roland, who, as a great modern scholar justly declares, is "ideal and universal; the story of his defeat, of the blast of his born, and the last stroke of Durant's], is a kind of funeral march or heroic, symphony, into which a meaning may be read for every new hero until the end of the world" P
If literary men had no other aim than to analyse their own emotions, if they systematically ignored or disdained all vigorous achievements which they were themselves incapable of emulating, if to have the "artistic temperament" were necessarily to be a complacent egoist drifting in the shallows of personal sensation, and grasping at "novelty" as the savage might grasp at beads or toys from Birmingham—then to brand a man "artistic" would be tantamount to con- demning him as incapable of patriotism, faith, honour, or consistent fidelity to any principle of truth or justice. Bet, fortunately for human nature and for art, the facts are other- wise; and it was a great and popular poet who said: "If a man is merely to be a bundle of sensations, be had better not exist at alL" It has never been the giants but only the banditti of literature who have enviously tried to snatch the laurels from the hero's brow; rather it is the greatest among imaginative artists who have the most sympathetically understood and • ••Oar Literature and the War,.• Tim., lanerw Supplenrat, Hey 13tba deeply valued the creative genius which finds expression not in ink or on canvas, but in action or self-sacrifice. From the days of Homer down to the present moment—when the air is vibrating with echoes of heroic deeds which it would need a modern Homer fittingly to enshrine—the true literary genius is not he who site gazing at himself, Narcissus-like, but he who loves to interpret and commemorate the exalted spiritual beauty of genius in action—genius incarnate in the soldier, the prophet, the pioneer, and the martyr. So little is mere self-expression apparent in Shakespeare's plays that "Shake- speare the man" remains an enigma, except to those who say (with admirable common-sense) that "Shakespeare the man" presumably was the man capable of writing Shakespeare's plays—capable of feeling and expressing the profoundest and most far-reaching human sympathy, and of penetrating to the utmost heights and depths of the eternal tragedy of life.
The Times critic concludes by threatening ns with internal upheavals after the war, and these internal upheavals (these commotions sound the parish pump) are to influence our "literature" more than the war itself. Woe, he cries, to the authors who write of the war ("whether serving it wholesale," as he flippantly specifies, "in eight courses, or merely using it as sauce to the customary meat and fish"), they shall not enter the portals of the temple of modern literature I They are to be excluded, it would seem, not for writing awkwardly or stupidly, but because they choose an outworn and barbaric subject (the eternal heroic) instead of questing progressively for the latest novelty on which to sharpen their languid sensations.
Yet with Homer and Shakespeare on their bookshelves, and in their hearts the memory of the valiant dead, those other authors who prefer to write of men of action will never be in need of pity. Rather should we pity the so-called "in- tellectuals" whose inverted sensibilities and arrogant callous- ness masquerading as " humanity " prompt them to avert their eyes from the bright light of inextinguishable heroism—the noblest theme which can inspire an artist, the highest motive which can purify man's mortal life or sanctify his death. " Greater love bath no man than this, that a man lay down his
life for hie friends."—I am, Sir, &e., E. M. T.
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