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before they served under Cæsar. The two sons of Crassus (the triumvir') and Q. Cicero are exceptions that prove the rule; there were special family circumstances to associate all three with Cæsar. And it is significant that Cæsar's own personal friends belong largely to the middle class of Rome. His financial agents, Oppius and Balbus, were naturally drawn from it; but no such business connexion can be traced in the case of Matius, the wealthy eques, whose letters on the death of Cæsar show a real feeling, which few or none of the 'noble' politicians display.

Everything points to the fact that Rome's greatest conquest was the work of the classes which found in the Empire a new opportunity. It is true that 'liberty' at home was sacrificed for development abroad; perhaps Rome herself lost by the change, but certainly Europe and the world gained by it. Cæsar founded the Empire in more senses than one. He not only broke down the power of the senatorial families; he introduced into political life, and provided careers for, the new citizens whom Rome had taken to herself; this was the consistent policy of most of the rulers who succeeded him. Gaul as a province was especially connected with the Roman democratic party; its conquest was completed by the man in whose work Roman democratic principles were carried to their full conclusion and finally absorbed ; Gaul was the field in which their contributions to civilisation were most strikingly developed.

J. WELLS.

Art. 7.-WAR POETRY (1914-1918).

1. The Muse in Arms. Edited by E. B. Osborn. John Murray, 1917.

2. Philip the King, and Other Poems. By John Masefield. Heinemann, 1914.

3. The Winnowing Fan. By Laurence Binyon. Elkin Mathews, 1915.

4. Battle. By W. W. Gibson. Elkin Mathews, 1916. 5. Children of Love. By Harold Monro.

Bookshop, 1915.

The Poetry

6. A Highland Regiment. By E. A. Mackintosh. John Lane, 1916.

7. Marlborough, and Other Poems.

Cambridge University Press, 1916.

By C. H. Sorley.

8. Georgian Poetry (1916-1917). Edited by E. M. The Poetry Bookshop, 1917.

9. Fairies and Fusiliers. By R. Graves. Heinemann, 1917. 10. The Lily of Malud, and Other Poems. By J. C. Squire. Martin Secker, 1917.

11. Ardours and Endurances.

Chatto & Windus, 1917.

By Robert Nichols.

12. The City of Fear. By Gilbert Frankau. Chatto & Windus, 1917.

13. The Old Huntsman, and Other Poems. Counter-Attack, and Other Poems. By Siegfried Sassoon. Heinemann, 1917, 1918.

And other works.

THE experience of the present war ought surely to have taught believers in prophecy a trenchant lesson. Never in the history of the world can there have been a time when the prophets have proved more consistently wrong; and nowhere have they wandered further astray than in those doleful predictions which foretold the temporary overthrow of literature and literary interests. In the first months of the war it seemed generally agreed by critics and creative artists alike that the genius of expression itself was doomed to disappear in the immediate future. Works of imagination, we were assured, must cease to trouble the mind of man; no poetry worthy of the name was likely to be written during the next twenty years. It was a depressing prospect; but

fortunately the prophecy was no sooner uttered than the event asserted its fallacy. A torrent of poetry began at once to pour from the press; and the voice of criticism found itself obliged to swing round to the opposite pole. The war, we were then told, had become a very forcingground of poetry; it was recreating the poet's heart out of its own fires; we were face to face with an almost miraculous renaissance of the poetic spirit. This access of enthusiasm has also faded in its turn; and its wild confidence is shown to have been no less deceptive than the vain depression which preceded it. We are beginning, in short, to arrive at a more equable condition of judgment, and to see things in more accurate perspective.

The time therefore appears propitious for taking stock of the influence which the war has exercised upon contemporary poetry, and, conversely, for considering the contribution which this poetry has of its own initiative made towards an understanding of the true meaning and significance of War. Of the two considerations, the second is likely to prove the more fruitful. For it would seem to be not so much a fact that the war has made poetry, as that poetry has, now for the first time, made War-made it in its own image, with all the tinsel and gaud of tradition stripped away from it; and so made it perhaps that no sincere artist will ever venture again to represent War in those delusive colours with which Art has been too often content to disguise it in the past. From that dual point of view, at any rate, it is proposed in the following pages to consider the best of the war poetry of the last four years, and to attempt to estimate its spiritual effect upon the character of the nation.

It has been widely argued that the war must have been an inspirer of poetry because so many volumes of verse have been published during the last three years, written by young officers who have fallen in active service. It is the war alone, we are asked to assume, that has of its own creative power forced these otherwise 'mute, inglorious Miltons' into song. But every one who has owned friends among publicschool and University men must know that the impulse to record emotion in verse is one of the commonest attributes of educated adolescence.

As a

rule these youthful exercises languish in the privacy of the author's bureau; and it is only the perfectly worthy ambition of bereaved parents, to raise some personal memorial to a dead son, that has recently haled so many of these manly tributes into the light of publicity. Many of them bear witness to very creditable metrical proficiency; most of them are distinguished by highly meritorious sentiment. But it would be the falsest of compliments to pretend that they make any real addition to the poetry of War. For the most part they record pleasant memories of school and college, breathe a boyish loyalty to grey cloisters and green glades, but touch the essence of life no deeper than is possible to the soldier's honest determination to go out and do his best. Their mental and spiritual attitude to war, in short, is radically conventional; and they are thus entirely separated from the really significant poetry of the present war, of which the outstanding characteristic is its absolute freedom from convention, demonstrated in an eager, almost passionate determination to picture War as it reveals itself, not to the outsider, but to the enlightened combatant himself.

And here, at the outset, we find ourselves face to face with the differentiating quality of the best new poetry of War. It is written, not by lookers-on, but by the soldiers themselves. The relation between war and poetry, of course, is as old as either war or poetry itself; and we stand in no need of the picturesque pastiches of Sir Walter Scott to remind us of those wandering minstrels who strayed from castle to castle, singing by the fireside of the doughty deeds of dead heroes, to the end that the young men might be stirred to go out and fight, and the maidens' hearts preserved from breaking while their lovers were away. Most of the war poetry of the past has been the legitimate descendant of these glib eulogists, of whom the first thing to remember is that their whole business is to encourage and to praise, to set romance twittering among the leaves-in short, to tell noble lies about War, that the purpose of the country may be served. Poetry, in fact, has to plead guilty to misrepresenting War, in the cause either of politics or of art-of misrepresenting it as something intrinsically splendid, beautiful, and inspiring. It has persistently

confused the issue with the process. Splendid things are done in war, of course; but they are the issue of war, not its process.

For the mere process of warfare is indisputably a vile, inhuman, devilish abomination, plunged in squalor and filth. It is approached through seas of mud, and pursued amid vermin and all uncleanness. It degrades the body of man; more than that, it would destroy his very soul itself, were it not for the divine fre that burns at the heart of humanity, and consumes even the weapons of war in the white heat of its truth. And in the present war, when, for the first time since the nation became articulate, fighting has ceased to be the business of a professional class, and has become perforce the bitter duty of the whole manhood of the race, we have had something approaching its true meaning revealed to us in poetry; not because war had any virtue in it that would make a poet out of a man,' but simply because the poet has himself turned soldier, and concentrated upon the ugly and monotonous business of war the keen searchlight of interpretation. The professional soldier is inevitably an unimaginative product; of all classes of the community, he is, perhaps, most completely the victim of tradition. His not to reason why'; his, in the very nature of things, to do what he is told, and to do it as quickly and as effectually as possible. But, now that war has ceased to be the concern of a professional class, its secrets have been revealed to the world at large. And so, for the first time, we have had the clear lights of intellect and interpretation playing upon the battlefield; and, whatever may be thought of the gain or loss to poetry, there can at least be no question about the extraordinary actuality of this new presentment, about its sincerity, or about the arresting revelation which it affords of the evil and the horror of modern warfare between civilised communities.

The contrast is the more vivid because of the high ideals and the exalted purpose with which the yoke of battle was at first accepted by the nation at large. It has been repeated so often as to have grown tedious that no nation ever entered upon war with a cleaner conscience than Britain in the summer of 1914. And repetition does not dull the edge of that truth; it is

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