WAR A-ND LETTERS. T HE war, besides ;11;111'1,1g new literature, is
testing the old, not only as an incentive to valour and to endurance, but as a sedative, an anodyne, and a distraction. The greatest writers stand the test triumphantly. Shakespeare is enthroned more securely than ever in that peculiar supremacy described by Carlyle in his glowing rhapsody on the Hero as Poet. The trumpet tones of Milton stir us as never before when he says:
" When God wants a hard thing done in the world, He tells it to His Englishmen" ; or condemns the " fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." And so is it with Johnson, Burke, Scott, Tennyson, and Browning : the lessons and discipline and trials of the war lend a new magic to their noblest words. But perhaps of all our great poets none has gained more in authority than Wordsworth. One of the most
acute and sympathetic of Victorian critics published a study of Wordsworth in which from beginning to end there is not a
word about his patriotic poems. An industrious American Professor has recently brought out a huge Life of Wordsworth, the aim of which is to represent his early poems, written in sympathy with the Revolution in France, as his true and abiding message to humanity, and to relegate his patriotic and later verse to the background as retrograde and reactionary. The war will not affect Wordsworth's claim to be held in high esteem as the interpreter of Nature, but it has added fresh lustre to the splendid series of sonnets prompted by the Napoleonic War, while " The Happy Warrior," inspired by the career and death of Nelson, finds con- firmation and illustration in every line from the example of our heroic youth of a hundred years later. They would be—they would have been—the last to use the Homeric vaunt of themselves, but their fathers may well adapt it to express a pride that is greater than their pain :—
Zan)! Kai cbOipevot WCI.Tcr p0.71, pt./ d celvoves EOTe.
While some writers have been invested with a greater influence and majesty by the war, so there are others who, failing to answer the needs of the hour, have for the time being lost their hold on the reading public. This remark does not apply only to the satirists and pessimists of the past—to Pope and Swift—but to those modern writers who have given .utterance to the ma ladle de sikle, to the singers of elegy and regret, to those who, in their fastidious resent- meat at the encroachments of commercialism, have found refuge in a dignified and austere resignation. If Matthew Arnold had been born forty years later, no one would have welcomed the exploits of our heroic youth with greater zest. In years which have brought about the fusion of classes and the solidarity of decent humanity, we find his autumnal magic depressing, mid resent the plaintive cry, " We mortal millions live alone." In a day when there is such constant inspiration for the Muse of heroic elegy, we are less able to appreciate one who, without such prompting, was nearly always elegiac in his mood. The intolerance of Carlyle, the spirit that found vent in such sayings as " twenty-seven millions, mostly fools," coupled with his exalta- tion of Frederick the Great, has affected his prestige ; and the needs of a great national ordeal, calling for self-restraint, self-denial, and self-sacrifice, are hard to reconcile with the undisciplined ardours of Swinburne. Lord Bryce in a recent address to the Classical Association spoke finely of the consolations to be derived from the study of the great literature of Greece and Rome. There was no better patriotic maxim, he pointed out, than the line in Homer :—
Eir °iambs dpurros oitthvcotkc infraes•
Stoicism, fortitude, filial affection, and many other high qualities of " man's unconquerable mind " are nobly illustrated in the classics. But there are limitations even in the greatest of these. As Mr. Simpson remarks in his admirable edition of Catullus, " Chivalry was a flame that never burned in classic Greece or classic Rome. Its first spark was struck when the spirit of Christianity met the Northern spirit in the West." The lack of chivalry in Aeneas can never be forgiven by the modern reader. We admit his filial piety, but cannot accept him as a " Happy Warrior." One sometimes wonders when the world began to admire Hector and Tumus more than their conquerors, and whether Homer and Virgil had any inkling that the rotes would be inverted.
The great difficulty of the moment is that a very large proportion of those who need the consolations and distractions of reading are only intermittently able to avail themselves of them. Most of our fighters and workers—those who are training, or in the battle line, or employed in munition factories—are too weary when they are off duty to read anything but the lightest literature. The number of highly educated young men in the commissioned and non-commissioned ranks of our new armies is large, but not relatively to the total. We know from letters, from privately printed memorials, and from the books actually written on active service that many of them win solace in the trenches from the companionship of their favourite authors, ancient and modern, and find time to read as well as write poetry. But many again, even of literary tastes, are so absorbed in the vigilant pursuit of their duties that they deliberately put aside these leanings as calculated to deflect their energies from the grim business of the moment. When they are in-billets they are more in need of bodily than mental relaxation. Others, if they read at all, turn to short, amusing stories, and even the frivolous journalism which dis- concerts non-combatant elders at home by its levity.
Generalizations are hazardous, in view of varying local conditions and the wide intellectual range covered by an Army which represents every class in the community. But one is tolerably safe iii coming to the commonplace conclusion that cheerful writers are more in request than the diffusers of gloom. Some months ago the Sixth Form at a Public School were asked to state the three authors whose works they would choose if marooned on a desert island, and to give reasons for their choice. The selection showed consider- able divergence of opinion, but Dickens was easily first favourite.
And the reasons given were essentially sound. Even those who did not rank him absolutely in the van of English writers admitted
that, for a desert island, he would prove the best company—in virtue of the amount of reading he provided, the range of subject, and the vivacity, cheerfulness, and humour of its treatment. The result of the inquiry confirms the impression derived from other evidences of the revival of interest in Dickens among the younger generation. It was the fashion amongst the younger intellectuals of some forty years ago to depreciate him on the score of his exaggera- tion and his sentimentality. Some fastidious critics went so far as to say that he could not draw a gentleman or a lady, and at school debating societies this was made the basis of invidious compari- sons between him and Thackeray. It is worth recalling in this context that when Calverley was a boy at Harrow his favourite books were Virgil and The Pickwick Papers, and that his devotion to the latter work, shown by the famous Examination Paper which ho set at Cambridge, was compatible with an equal admiration for the author of Vanity Fair. But perhaps the best answer to the fastidious critics of Dickens is to be found in the unuttered comment of Nicholas Nickleby at the dinner given by the Cheeryblo Brothers to Tim Linkinwater on his birthday. It was also the anniversary of their mother's death—to which one of the brothers made a touching reference. " Good Lord ! ' thought Nicholas, ' and there are scores of people of their own station, knowing all this, and twenty thousand times more, who wouldn't ask these men to dinner, because they eat with their knives, and never went to school ! ' " As for Dickens's profuse indulgence in domestic sentiment, our soldiers will find it no drawback to their enjoyment. But when criticism has done its worst in castigating his faults— his tricks and extravagances of style, his tendency to caricature, his fondness for dwelling on Gargantuan repasts (somewhat trying in these days of food economy)—" Good Lord ! " we may say, echoing Nicholas Nickleby, what a prodigal genius was his, and how generously and nobly inspired to plead the cause of the humble, the oppressed, and the afflicted ! There is a wealth of material in any one of his novels to furnish twenty average romances. Re- reading Bleak House in a recent week of storm and snow, we were more than ever impressed by the richness and variety as well as the originality of his characterization. The dramatis personae run into scores, but who is there that we could wish away ? Not Mrs. Jellyby, who of late years has been more active and assiduous in her Ramifications than in Dickens's own time. Not Harold Skimpole or Mr. Turveydrop, both in their different ways perfect types of complacent egotism. Not Mr. Tulkinghorn, that finely and consistently drawn portrait of the professional blackmailer, who exacts his blackmail not in money but in influence and power. Certainly not Boythorn, with his copious but innocuous discharges of ferocious invective, or Inspector Bucket (whom students of criminology will like to compare with the Scotland Yard official in Mr. Conrad's The Secret Agent), or Bagnet and his " old gal," or the impayable Chadband, prince of " wrong Reverends." And least of all could we spare Miss Elite, that most pathetic victim of the Law's delays, semi-conscious of her infirmity, whose conversation is such a wonderful mixture of courtesy and delicacy and insanity. For their purely sedative quality there is perhaps no more restful war-reading than the novels of Trollope, to whom, by the way, the cleverest of living American novelists, Mrs. Wharton, pays a charm- ing though indirect compliment in her last volume of short stories. But old and young alike may turn to the pages of " the good and generous Dickens " with a greater certainty of finding refreshment, recreation, and distraction than to any other modern writer of fiction.
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