"If you were to ask me what were the war's most conspicuous effects on literature just at present, I would say conviction of sin, repentance and turning to God. There can be no suggestion of Supermanism in our literature now. We have rediscovered the Christian Virtues. If a man writes something about blond-beasting through the world for his own good, all we have to do is to stick up in front of his eyes a crucifix. For the world has seen courage and self-abnegation of the kind that Christ taught--it has seen men throw their lives away. The war has shown the world that the man who will throw away his life is braver and stronger and greater than the man who plunges forward to safety over the lives of others. The world has learned that he who loses his life shall gain it. "The war has thrown a clear light upon Christianity, and now all the little apologetic 'progressive' Christians see that the world had never reacted against orthodox Christianity as such, but only against the bowelless unbelief which masqueraded as Christianity. We have had so many ministers who talked about Christ as they would have talked about kippered herrings--even with less enthusiasm. But now any one who speaks or writes about Christianity after this will have to know that he has to do with something terribly real. "Of course, during the war the only people who can write about it are those who are in the red-hot period of youth. Young men of genius write in times of stress. The war forces genius to flower prematurely--that is how we got the noble sonnets of Rupert Brooke. "And after the war will come to the making of literature the man who has conquered pain and agony. And that is the real Superman, the Christian Superman, the Superman who has always been the normal ideal of the world. Carlyle's Superman was nearer the truth than was Nietzsche's, for Carlyle's Superman idea was grounded in courage and sacrifice and love; his Superman was some one worth fighting for and dying for. And the war is showing us that this is the true Superman, if we want to save the world for nobler ends. "And the war, I believe, will do away with the tommy-rotten objection to 'message' in literature. Don't misunderstand me. Of course, we all object to the stupid 'story with a purpose' in the Sunday-school sense of that phrase. We don't want literature used as a sugar-coating around the illuminating lesson that God loves little Willie because he fed the dicky-birds and didn't say 'damn'! Yet we want literature to awake again and be as always in the great days--a message. Literature must be a direct message from the heart of the author to the heart of the world. The _Prometheus Vinctus_ was such a message. So also the _Antigone_. All Greek drama was.