Ah! but he will now be influenced unconsciously in the choice of subjects by sympathy with the fine deeds of the day, a lift will come into his work, his eyes will be raised to the stars! True, perhaps, for the moment; but, then, such times as these are in many ways unfavourable to the creative instinct; moreover they will leave in restless, sensitive natures lassitude, recoil, a sense of surfeit. Quite probably the war may produce a real masterpiece or two, formed out of its very stuff, by some eager mind innocent hitherto of creative powers, for whom actual experience of the sights and feelings of war may be a baptism into art. Almost certainly there will come of it a masterpiece or two of satire. But, generally speaking, this welter of sacrifice and suffering, the sublimity and horror of these days, their courage and their cruelty, are enveloping the writer like the breath of a sirocco, whirling his brain and heart around at the moment, but likely to leave him with an intense longing for a deep draught of peace, and quiet scented winds. On one whose whole natural life is woven, not of deeds, but of thoughts and visions, moods and dreams, all this intensely actual violence, product of utterly different natures from his own, offspring of men of action and affairs, cannot have the permanent, deepening, clarifying influence that long personal experience or suffering have had on some of the world’s greatest writers—on Milton in his blindness; on Dostoevsky, reprieved at the very moment of death, then long imprisoned; on de Maupassant in his fear of coming madness; on Tolstoi in the life-struggle of his dual nature; on Beethoven in his deafness, and Nietzsche in his deadly sickness. It is from the stuff of his own life that the creative writer moulds out for the world something fine, in the form that best suits him, following his own temperament. His momentary and, perhaps, intense identification with the struggle of this war has in it something spasmodic, feverish, and almost false; a kind of deep and tragic inconsistency. It is too foreign to the real self within him. At one time it was said of certain new troops: “They’re first-rate, except for one thing—they _will not_ bayonet the Germans.” It is like that in the artist writer’s soul—with the work of his hands, the words of his lips, his thoughts and the feelings of his heart, he identifies himself with this war drama, yet in the very depths of him he recoils. What would you have? The artist-man has but one nature.