The nature of the imaginative artist is sensitive, impressionable; impatient of anything superimposed; thinking and feeling for itself; recoiling from conglomerate views and sentiment. It regards the whole affair as a dreadful though sacred necessity, to be got through somehow, lest there be lost that humane freedom which is the life-blood of any world where the creative imagination and other even more precious things can flourish. The point is that there is no glamour about the business—none whatever, for this particular sort of human being. Writers to whom war is glamorous (with the few exceptions that prove the rule) are not those who produce literature. We must therefore discount at once prophecies that the war will lift literature on to an epic plane, cause it to glow and blow with heroic deeds, and figures eight feet high. They come from those who do not know the temperament of the imaginative artist, his fundamental independence, and habit of revolting against what is expected of him. But the whole thing is much deeper than that. It seems to be forgotten by some who write on this matter that the producer of literature has been giving of his best in the past, and will be able to do no more in the future. The first thing that has mattered to him has been (in the words of de Maupassant, but which might have been those of any other first-rate writer) “to make something fine, in the form that shall best suit him according to his temperament.” No amount of wars can vary for the artist that ideal—as it was for him, so it will be. It seems also to be thought that the war has been a startling revelation to the imaginative writer of the heroism in human nature. This is giving him credit for very little imagination. The constant tragedies of peace—miners entombed, sinking liners, volcanic eruptions, outbreaks of pestilence, together with the long endurances of daily life, are always bringing home to any sensitive mind the inherent heroism of men and women. The very glut of heroism in this war is likely, as it were, to put an artist’s nature off, to blunt the edge of perceptions that are always groping after fresh sensation, that _must_ be always groping, in order that expression may be of something really felt—for novelty is, of all, the greatest spur to sharp feeling. The top notes of human life and conduct can be but sparingly sung, or they grate on the nerves, and jar the hearing of the singer, no less than of his listener. By some mysterious law frontal attacks to capture heroism and imprison it in art are almost always failures. Few of the great imagined figures of literature are heroic. Another thing is forgotten. The real artist does not anticipate and certainly cannot regulate the impulses that shall move his brain and heart and hand. What exactly starts him off, even he cannot tell. He will never write heroics to the order of the Public.