OUNDED in 1892, The Sewanee Review has steadily and consistently maintained its policy, announced in the first issue, of being a serious literary and critical journal. Avoiding all temptation to court wider popularity through mere timeliness in its articles, it has ever sought to serve as a repository of the literary essay and the critical review.

For the past ten years the magazine has drawn its contributions from a wide extent of country, representing thirty-eight states of the Union as well as England and Japan. New York leads with a total of thirty-three contributions out of a total of two hundred and sixtyfour; but nearly forty-five per cent have come from the South, so that the magazine has contributed its share towards helping to encourage and develop independence of thought, to mould public opinion, to raise the standards of taste and literary expression, and to reflect the best tendencies in the culture and the life of the Southern people. Though not unnaturally a large majority of the contributors have come from the colleges, The Review has not been merely an academic organ, but has covered a broad field of literature, art, history, economics, theology, and current questions, and has always tried to approach these subjects in a dignified manner, free from prejudice and undue partisanship.

The Sewanee Review is conducted by members of the Faculties of the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, but has no official connection with the University.

The

South Atlantic Quarterly

The War and Pot-Boilers

H. HOUSTON PECKHAM

Purdue University

An ambitious young poet-not a war-poet-recently complained to his literary agent that none of his work had sold for more than a year. "I'm sorry," replied the agent, "but everything now is WAR, WAR, WAR!"

This is a very obvious fact. The best-sellers are no longer novels; and poetry, unless it deal with the stirring scenes "over there," is now almost unread. Book-store windows, which, four short years ago, displayed new novels by the dozen and the gross, are now so filled with "Over the Top," "Private Peat," and "My Four Years in Germany," that one never notices the fiction. Frequenters of libraries no longer call for the latest novel by Mr. Churchill or the latest poems by Mr. Masefield; but for "Germany, the Next Republic," "The First Hundred Thousand," or "I Accuse."

This new situation, naturally enough, has set the producers of mere literature to working in unwonted channels; for novelists and poets, like other human beings, must have their bread and butter. The motor-car craze turns wagon-works and bicycle-factories into automobile plants; converts blacksmith shops into garages. When a state goes "dry," the brewers turn to making near-beer. And when the public deserts the muses of song and story, the bards and the chroniclers must needs shift from real literature to the particular kind of "near" literature which the times demand.

A few of the novelists, such as Gertrude Atherton and W. J. Locke, are writing war novels; but most of them have, for the time being, discarded fiction altogether, and taken up the writing of contemporary history. The English novelists,

of course, started this business long ago. H. G. Wells now writes such books as "Italy, France, and Britain at War." Hugh Walpole tells us of conditions he has seen in Russian hospitals. John Galsworthy dabbles in the only kind of journalism now in vogue. And as for Arnold Bennett,-I suppose his numerous war articles in the weekly papers have won him thousands of readers who do not even know him as the delightful chronicler of life in the Five Towns.

Most of the American novelists were a little later in taking up the game, although Owen Wister started it early with "The Pentecost of Calamity"; and the world disaster was not many weeks old when war-articles from the pen of Robert Herrick began to appear regularly in a leading Chicago daily. As time has gone on, of course, it has become quite the expected thing to find Margaret Deland sagely discussing the question, "What, Really, Is Patriotism?"; Ernest Poole writing one week on Hoover, and the next on the "dark" people of Russia; Booth Tarkington analyzing-and deploring-Middle Western Anglophobia; and Edith Wharton depicting scenes in bleeding, heroic France.

Upon the poets the effect of the great conflict has been even more striking than upon the novelists. John Masefield, consummate poet that he is, is no longer content with the muse ; but feels obliged to give us prose books on the Dardanelles campaign, and articles on ambulance in France. Alfred Noyes-alas!-is inditing a few mediocre verses and pouring forth a veritable deluge of war articles and stories so obviously ephemeral in character that we have been almost constrained to forget that considerably less than a decade ago he was writing some of the greatest poetry that has appeared in the present century. William Watson is content to let prose and journalism religiously alone, but he too is so obsessed with the war that during the past four years we have found him mainly busied in stridently scolding a tardy America or hurling melodramatic invectives at the Arch Hun, Wilhelm the Hated.

With the essayists, the transition from peace interests to those of war has been easier, more simple. Agnes Repplier, H. D. Sedgwick, and Samuel M. Crothers, who once were

fond of such subjects as "The Spinster," "The Mob Spirit in Literature," and "The Hundred Worst Books," now turn with almost equal facility, if with less charm, to "War and the Child," "Women and Preparedness," and "The Rising Tide of Democracy in Germany."

The playwrights have found it more difficult to adjust themselves to the new situation. True, Bernard Shaw, that garrulously impudent Irishman, directs his sprightly pen toward the writing of more or less pertinent articles on the affairs of the day. But the other leading dramatists-the ones who do not choose to work outside their sphere-are almost silent now. Pinero and Jones and Yeats have given us nothing of any consequence these four years. Indeed, the war period has brought forth in the English-speaking world only about one notable play from the pen of a first-rate dramatist: "A Kiss for Cinderella," by Sir James M. Barrie. Ephemeral war dramas, intended to remind us more poignantly of the great world struggle; or frothy musical comedies, concocted to make us forget the universal tragedy for a few frivolous hours, hold the stage these days. All of them, probably, will be forgotten five years hence.

I have said nothing of the present literary situation in Continental Europe. A short investigation, however, will show that the Continent does not differ greatly from the Englishspeaking nations. Verhearen, Jean Richepin, Maeterlinck, Lavedan, and Anatole France, forsaking their several crafts for the time being, have kept the presses warm printing war documents. Of the situation in Germany, Amelia von Ende says, in the New International Year Book for 1916: "It cannot be denied that the general standard of literary production is lower than it was before the war. The patriotic enthusiasm has so far not inspired a single work of such power that it would convincingly carry its message across the political boundary-lines."

To be sure, this tremendous international upheaval has produced a few things which are better than mere pot-boilers. It has brought forth "Mr. Britling," which is, in some respects, Mr. Wells's best novel. And by such wonderful lyrics as, "If I Should Die," "I Have a Rendezvous with Death,"