Wairarapa Daily Times [Established 45 Years.] FRIDAY, MAY 28, 1920. LITERATURE AND THE WAR.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 46, Issue 14128, 28 May 1920, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times [Established 45 Years.] FRIDAY, MAY 28, 1920. LITERATURE AND THE WAR.

It is, of course, a commonplace that fashions in literature change. An age that delighted in the prim periods of a Coventry Patmore was followed by one which preferred the more piquant fare of “The Yellow Book” and its imitators; a generation that was scandalised by Grant Allan’s “Woman Who Did” produced one which does,not turn a hair at the most “advanced” examples of the neo-realistic school of fiction. Usually, however, the transition has been gradual. It would be difficult, for instance, to say exactly when verse narrative in the style of Scott or Byron began to lose its appeal, or the “three-decker” to fall out of favour. But during tlie last few years the changes in popular taste have been bo many and so swift that publishers and authors alike have been hard put to it to meet them. The time immediately antecedent to the war was one of prodigious activity in the publishing world. As a result of compulsory education there has grown up a huge class which, once content with newspapers, has now been taught to find enjoyment in cheap books. Production was cheap and the presses poured out a veritable flood of literature, good, bad and indifferent, which presumably was read, or it would not have been printed. Then came the war, and with it a revolution in taste. Gone was the interest, in the memoirs, biographies and travel notes which had formerly attracted the serious reader, while the mimic wars of Ruritania left people cold. Everyone wanted the real thing; there was an insatiable demand for “war books,” and for a time at least the publishers reaped a golden harvest. Old stock which happened to deal with one or other of the belligerent countries went off like hot cakes. This plethora of war literature has produced yet another revulsion of taste. The public declares that it is surfeited with “war stuff, ”, and, according to the evidence of the libraries. seeks its diversion in other fields.

relative. People are still eager to hear what the leaders, Allied and enemy, have to say about their part of the war, and the war reminiscences of lesser luminaries will still be read bv tbeir comrades-in-arms and their friends. But in fiction, it is said, the war is “played 001.’ ’ It still brings its aftermath, but a large proportion of new novels avoid it altogether, and the publishers' announcements indicate that that proportion will soon be very much greater. The future student of literature will note these fluctuations of taste and the response which writers made to them. He will observe that for five ygars our literature was almost wholly preoccupied with the war —the greatest war in history, which should surely be the supreme inspiration to genius. What have we to show for it? Very little. It is astonishing how few of the innumerable books which those years produced have any pretensions to Our poets have confessedly failed; they felt themselves inarticulate before so tremendous a theme. Even Mr Rudyard Kipling’s patriotism and pride in Britain did not avail him. He'turned propagandist—an admirable propagandist he was —but apart from some fine epigrams he has written little on the war that will live as poetry. The poet-lau-reate found his classic music unequal to the occasion; indeed, his silence on the coming of peace earned him a rebuke from a member , of --Parliament,,,- who naively imagined that poetry is made to order}’fin’d'- accused,l3r.,.BridgeS of “ca’canny.” The younger school of poets, where they avoided the shoals of vers libre and vorticism, fared better, Julian Grenfell and Rupert Brooke gave their lives for their country, but have left a monument more enduring than bronze. “Before Battle,” by the formeT, and three sonnets by the latter, are perhaps the noblest poetry that the war has inspired in Britain; these, at least have some claim to immortality. But the novelists, like the older poets, have not risen to the occasion. “Mr Britling,” Barbusse’s “Le Feu,” Ibanez’s “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” and other novels by writers British and Continental have deservedly many admirers, but who would say that any of them is the great novel of the Avar. That has still to be written.