THE SLUMP IN POETRY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16026, 18 September 1915, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE SLUMP IN POETRY.

BY FRANK MORTON. It is a curious thing, a very curious thing indeed. This war has produced a big new crop of verse writers, and brought about an absolute slump in poetry. The patriotic verse is, on the whole, much" poorer than that the Boer War called out. It. has the factory mark all over it. It is turned out to order by smart journalists who rejoice in the advertisement, and earnest novelists who think 'that in these dull.times the advertisement will do them no harm. We have had " The Day," which is attributed to a railway porter at Bath, which is clever bombastic, shallow footle, and which is, therefore, eminently suited for recitation by the sort of people who commonly do recite. We have had an amazing lot of brisk, crisp lifeless verses. But Ave have had nothing hot with ishouting blood, like the German "Hymn of Hate," for instance. We havs had nothing that will live. Why is it? I think the one and only reason is that the romance has gone out of war. There is no individual dash left in it, and so the glory is dimmed., 'Huge guns are set up on concrete emplacements, and they bellow in chorus with the smaller pieces. Then the soldiers, buried to the eyes in muddy trenches, fire their rifles continuously at a foe they can seldom see. Fights in the open," when they occur, are butcheries at close quarters. Men are brave, as they have always been brave, but much of the exultation has gone out of their courage. Neither their own lives nor their ultimate victory depend on their personal courage. The army who can pour out most blood, who can mass most guns and produce most ammunition, wins. Thick clouds of .poisonous gas creep down, and men die hideously, suffocated like earwigs in a smoke. -I here is in all this nothing to stimulate the poetic impulse. One can sing of a cavalry charge or a wild dash for * breach: but- how shall one sing of foul trenches and storms of shell that tears out men's eyes and stomachs ? "How shall one hymn the glory of meeting a foe that murders old people and ravishes ' women and little children? You can't make poetry _ about a disinfecting plant. Of some incidents at the Dardanelles one might sing, as of rare incidents in France and elsewhere; but of the war as a whole one cannot sing, one can only curse and mutter.

r If .the fight on land and eea were con- | ducted in the spirit of the battles of old I time it still might fruit in imperishable song. - But "what shall be said when the foe sticks at no crime or bestiality and resolutely refuses to play the game? But all this is desirable in a sense. It tends to inspire in us "a- bitter hatred of war, it strengthens the hope that we are now suffering the last inhuman orgie of this sort. The influence of great armies tends to dehumanise a nation; Our men. citizens volunteering in the hour of the Empire's peril, are ennobled by their own sacrifice and valour. But when a man becomes a 'soldier as a matter of settled profession in times of peace, he loses value as a citizen, and he • loses value as a man. ' The soldier is now essentially a "machine. His will is constantly in abeyance. And. thus relieved from the necessity of thinking while he is on the field, lie soon learns to avoid thinking when he is off the field. It is apposite' to remark that the men who behaved like fiends during the period of the Belgian outrages were men of the "flower of Germany's army" — men, that is to say, long habituated to the practice and profession of arms. The .British , want no great army in that sense. Our soldiers .are free men, and not brutallsed precise units. The great virtue of out. territorial system :: lie* in ithe . fact that it gives our youths'; the benefit :of military training, without reducing them to the level of men, who make soldiering their trade. * Some measure 4of f conscription may yet be forced on us by* the dire necessities of this war that found us so largely unprepared; hut no measure of conscription that exceeded ,that of our territorial system will ever be tolerated by men of British blood in times of peace. War was different in the old times, when war shook the poets to a flam© of song. The Roman wars extended civilisation ; modern wars destroy it. Ancientwars depended" largely on individual heroism. Individual heroism is • one of the things that the modern general does not take into his reckoning when he forms his plans. However it be, our poets are silent. This waT has little glamour. It is in the most important sense a matter of machinery. It will be won by the side that first establishes its mechanical or scientific superiority. Every man adds a bullet to the shower, a bayonet to the rush, and the army with most men, most bullets, most- bayonets, "will win : but if it were possible to put in the field perfect machines to hail bullets and carry bayonets, the result would be the same.

Here, then, is the call to the bravery and high courage of recruits. They go to meet a foe who is, in subtlety and lack of scruple, like a pestilence. They have to be prepared to stand for weeks together, helpless as individuals, strong as units, to stand with patience and hobnob familiarly with Death. They go into a war where personal valour may be of no avail. They go to face greater risks of death or dreadful injury than were ever before faced by any army under the sun. They go to a war shorn of all its traditional panoplies and decorations, all its historic thrill. And they do this for the sake of their homes and their race, for the sake of humanity and the freedom of the world. Of that high courage the pqgts well might sing, but just now it seems that they haven't the heart. They can only look on and sigh as our young men go to meet the hosts of a nation which has made war its God.

Let me, at all risk of wearying you, strive to give you an idea of how this unceasing lust of soldiering and conquest has debased the German character. Let me remind you of.-»what the Germans were when Tacitus saw them. As to what they are now, I am content to leave you to make the comparison. " The people, who first crossed the Rhine and, expelled the Gauls, and are now called Tungri, were then called Germans ; which appellation of a particular tribe, not of a whole people, gradually prevailed ; so that the title of Germans, first assumed by the victors in order to strike terror, was afterwards adopted by the nation in general. ... $ "In the election of kings they have regard to birth; in that of generals, to valour. . Their kings have not an absolute or unlimited power; and their generals command less through the- force of authority than of example. . . None, however, but the priests are permitted to judge offenders, to inflict bonds or stripes ; so that chastisement appears not as an act of military discipline, but as an instigation of the god whom they suppose present with warriors. . . ! " Lending money upon interest, and increasing it by usury, is unknown among them.

"Their funerals are without" parade. the only circumstance to which they attend is to burn the bodies of eminent persons s with some particular kinds of wood. Neither vestments nor perfumes are heaped upon the pile. . . . ''They condemn the elaborate and costly honours of monumental structures, as mere burdens to the dead. . . .

"Without ambition, without ungoverned desires, quiet and retired, they provoke no wars, they are guilty of no rapine or plunder ; and it is a principal argument of their power and bravery that the superiority they possess has not been acquired by injuries." ... The Character of the Germans has certainlv changed, and it has not changed for the better. But it did change for the better during the period just prior to the. emergence of the. arrogant Prussian spirit. That spirit the Allies have to defeat and smash down before we can look for any wise and lasting peace*