For the particular situation which the Englishman has now to face, he is terribly well adapted. Because he has so little imagination, so little power of expression, he is saving nerve all the time. Because he never goes to extremes he is saving energy of body and spirit. That the men of all nations are about equally endowed with courage and self-sacrifice, has been proved in these last six months; it is to other qualities that one must look for final victory in a war of exhaustion. The Englishman does not look into himself; he does not brood; he sees no further forward than is necessary; and he must have his joke. These are fearful and wonderful advantages. Examine the letters and diaries of the various combatants, and you will see how far less imaginative and reflecting (though often shrewd, practical, and humorous) the English are than any others; you will gain, too, a deep, a deadly conviction that behind them is a fibre like rubber, that may be frayed and bent a little this way and that, but can neither be permeated nor broken. When this war began, the Englishman rubbed his eyes steeped in peace, he is still rubbing them just a little, but less and less every day. A profound lover of peace by habit and tradition, he has actually realized by now that he is “in for it” up to the neck. To any one who really knows him—that is a portent! Let it be freely confessed that from an æsthetic point of view the Englishman, devoid of high lights and shadows, coated with drab, and superhumanly steady on his feet, is not too attractive. But for the wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business of this war, the Englishman—fighting of his own free will, unimaginative, humorous, competitive, practical, never in extremes, a dumb, inveterate optimist, and terribly tenacious—is equipped with victory. OUR LITERATURE AND THE WAR (From _The Times_ Literary Supplement, 1915.) For the purpose of the following speculations the word Literature is used to describe the imaginative work of artists and thinkers—that is, of writers who have had, and will have, something to say of more or less lasting value; it leaves out the work of those who, for various reasons, such as patriotic sentiment, or the supplying of the Public with what it may be supposed to want, will, no doubt, dish up the war as a matter of necessity, whether serving it wholesale in eight courses, or merely using it as sauce to the customary meat and fish. How will our literature, thus defined, be affected by the war? Will it be affected at all? One must first remember that to practically all imaginative writers of any quality war is an excrescence on human life, a monstrous calamity and evil. The fact that they recognize the gruesome inevitability of _this_ war, in so far as the intervention of our country is concerned, does not in any way lessen their temperamental horror of war in itself, of the waste and the misery, and the sheer stupid brutality thereof.