William Dean Howells was the third writer to whom was put the question, "What effect will the Great War have on literature?" And he was the first to give a direct answer.
A famous French dramatist replied: "I am not a prophet. I have enough to do to understand the present and the past; I cannot concern myself with the future." A famous English short-story writer said, "The war has already inspired some splendid poetry; it may also inspire great plays and novels, but, of course, we cannot tell as yet."
But Mr. Howells said, quite simply, "War stops literature." He said it as unemotionally as if he were stating a familiar axiom.
He does not consider it an axiom, however, for he supplied proof.
"I have never believed," he said, "that great events produced great literature. They seldom call forth the great creative powers of man. In poetry it is not the poems of occasion that endure, but the poems that have come into being independently, not as the result of momentous happenings.
"This war does not furnish the poet, the novelist, and the dramatist with the material of literature. For instance, the Germans, as every one will admit, have shown extraordinary valor. But we do not think of celebrating that valor in poetry; it does not thrill the modern writers as such valor thrilled the writers of bygone centuries. When we think of the valor of the Germans, our emotion is not admiration but pity.
"And the reason for this is that fighting is no longer our ideal. Fighting was not a great ideal, and therefore it is no longer our ideal. All that old material of literature—the clashing of swords, the thunder of shot and shell, the great clouds of smoke, the blood and fury—all this has gone out from literature. It is an anachronism."
"But the American Civil War produced literature, did it not?" I asked.
"What great literature did it produce?" asked Mr. Howells in turn. "As I look back over my life and recall to mind the great number of books that the Civil War inspired I find that I am thinking of things that the American people have forgotten. They did not become literature, these poems and stories that came in such quantities and seemed so important in the sixties.
"There were the novels of J. W. De Forest, for instance. They were well written, they were interesting, they described some phases of the Civil War truthfully and vividly. We read them when they were written—but you probably have never heard of them. No one reads them now. They were literature, but that about which they were written has ceased to be of literary interest.
"Of course, the Civil War, because of its peculiar nature, was followed by an expansion, intellectual as well as social and economic. And this expansion undoubtedly had its beneficial effect on literature. But the Civil War itself did not have, could not have, literary expression.
"Of all the writings which the Civil War directly inspired I can think of only one that has endured to be called literature. That is Lowell's 'Commemoration Ode.'
"War stops literature. It is an upheaval of civilization, a return to barbarism; it means death to all the arts. Even the preparation for war stops literature. It stopped it in Germany years ago. A little anecdote is significant.
"I was in Florence about 1883, long after the Franco-Prussian War, and there I met the editor of a great German literary weekly—I will not tell you its name or his. He was a man of refinement and education, and I have not forgotten his great kindness to my own fiction. One day I asked him about the German novelists of the day.
"He said: 'There are no longer any German novelists worthy of the name. Our new ideal has stopped all that. Militarism is our new ideal—the ideal of Duty—and it has killed our imagination. So the German novel is dead.'"
"Why is it, then," I asked, "that Russia, a nation of militaristic ideals, has produced so many great novels during the past century?"
"Russia is not Germany," answered the man who taught Americans to read Turgenieff. "The people of Russia are not militaristic as the people of Germany are militaristic. In Germany war has for a generation been the chief idea of every one. The nation has had a militaristic obsession. And this, naturally, has stifled the imagination.
"But in Russia nothing of the sort has happened. Whatever the designs of the ruling classes may be, the people of Russia keep their simplicity, their large intellectuality and spirituality. And, therefore, their imagination and other great intellectual and spiritual gifts find expression in their great novels and plays.
"I well remember how the Russian novelists impressed me when I was a young man. They opened to me what seemed to be a new world—and it was only the real world. There is Tcheckoff—have you read his Orchard? What life, what color, what beauty of truth are in that book!
"Then there is Turgenieff—how grateful I am for his books! It must be thirty years since I first read him. Thomas Sargent Perry, of Boston, a man of the greatest culture, was almost the first American to read Turgenieff. Stedman read Turgenieff in those days, too. Soon all of the younger writers were reading him.
"I remember very well a dinner at Whitelaw Reid's house in Lexington Avenue, when some of us young men were enthusiastic over the Russian novel, and the author we mentioned most frequently was Turgenieff.
"Dr. J. G. Holland, the poet who edited The Century, lived across the street from Mr. Reid, and during the evening he came over and joined us. He listened to us for a long time in silence, hardly speaking a word. When he rose to go, he said: 'I have been listening to the conversation of these young men for over an hour. They have been talking about books. And I have never before heard the names of any of the authors they have mentioned.'"
"Were those the days," I asked, "in which you first read Tolstoy?"
"That was long before the time," answered Mr. Howells. "Tolstoy afterward meant everything to me—his philosophy as well as his art—far more than Turgenieff. Tolstoy did not love all his writing. He loved the thing that he wrote about, the thing that he lived and taught—equality. And equality is the best thing in the world. It is the thing for which the Best of Men lived and died.
"I never met Tolstoy," said Mr. Howells. "But I once sent him a message of appreciation after he had sent a message to me. Tolstoy was great in the way he wrote as well as in what he wrote. Tolstoy's force is a moral force. His great art is as simple as nature."
"Do you think that the Russian novelists have influenced your work?" I asked.
"I think," Mr. Howells replied, "that I had determined what I was to do before I read any Russian novels. I first thought that it was necessary to write only about things that I knew had already been written about. Certain things had already been in books; therefore, I thought, they legitimately were literary subjects and I might write about them.
"But soon I knew that this idea was wrong, that I must get my material, not out of books, but out of life. And I also knew that it was not necessary for me to look at life through English spectacles. Most of our writers had been looking at life through English spectacles; they had been closely following in the footsteps of English novelists. I saw that around me were the materials for my work. I saw around me life—wholesome, natural, human.
"I saw a young, free, energetic society. I saw a society in which love—the greatest and most beautiful thing in the world—was innocent; a society in which the relation between man and woman was simple and pure. Here, I thought, are the materials for novels. Why should I go back to the people of bygone ages and of lands not my own?"
"Do you think," I asked, "that romanticism has lost its hold on the novelists?"
Mr. Howells smiled. "When realism," he said, "is once in a novelist's blood he never can degenerate into romanticism. Romanticism is no longer a literary force among English-speaking authors. Romanticism belongs to the days in which war was an aim, an ideal, instead of a tragic accident. It is something foreign to us. And literature must be native to the soil, affected, of course, by the culture of other lands and ages, but essentially of the people of the land and time in which it is produced. Realism is the material of democracy. And no great literature or art can arise outside of the democracy."