ART FOR LIFE'S SAKE

At the beginning of the German War, which is known to people as the Great War or the Terrible War, according as they are influenced by its grandeur or its agony, it was freely prophesied that the world would see a renaissance of literature, and that poets, stirred on by magnificent deeds, would write this present age down to everlasting fame.

So far the only literature which has attracted notice has been the sparse poems of those few younger poets who have written as they fought. And their work is more notable in that it is a reflection of their accomplishments than in that it is stupendous.

The five continents are tossed in war. Does not this heroic age in which we live arouse some fire from an uninspired generation? Homer, as the legend goes, wrote the two great epics about the little feuds of a handful of half-barbaric and rather unhygienic Hellene chieftains. Their war was no more than a tribal war, yet the world for three thousand years has spoken, when it would speak of grand things, of Ilium.

Is it true that that accomplishment is far more splendid than the recounting? Was Achilles, Arcades, the ignorant, surly feller of men in battles, greater than Homer, who saw all of the known world, and beyond to the Pillars of Hercules, with a dreamer's eye? Was Henry the Fifth greater than Shakespeare, and Arthur greater than Tennyson?

If that is true, then surely even the least of those many valiant thousands of unknown men who die and who will die in battle, fighting to obliteration for an unselfish cause, is worth more to the world than the singer who will arise at some future day to tell in undying words of this huge war.