_London, September 29th._ Enough of war poetry. An industrious statistician has calculated that three thousand pieces have been printed since the beginning of August. When our poets are unanimous in the choice of a subject, their unanimity is horrible. We have had lyrical outrages from railway porters, dairymen, postmen, road scavengers, and what not, with their names and professions duly appended, in the delectable fashion set some time ago by _The English Review_. Meanwhile, in France, young poets are killing one another. We must arrange a balance-sheet of gains and losses when the war is done. M. Charles Péguy is gone already; that is a loss which makes one fear for Jules Romains and the rest who must be at the front in one army or the other. The French and German casualty lists are not published in the English papers: when the smoke clears off again the arts of the continent will show a different complexion. Meanwhile we are beginning to ask, prematurely of course, what effect the war will have indirectly on our own arts. The war of ’70 caused an epoch of literary ferment in Germany and was at the back of much good poetry. To that war we owe Detter von Liliencron, Richard Dehmel, and Gerhart Hauptmann, who is, I freely admit, a great dramatist, though I cannot abide him. In France it produced the tired subtleties of Kahn, Régnier, and the other Symbolists. In Austria, a century of humiliation, which has become almost a national habit, has evolved the tired elegance of Hofmannsthal and the weary tenderness of Schnitzler who is so obviously so sorry for all his characters as almost to make the reader weep with him. If we win this war, what may we expect? We can be certain that the English arts will react to the strain: the reaction will not necessarily be a good one, unless the efforts of those who sit about at home and vulgarize war are neutralized or ignored. The tone of our newspapers—and these mould our minds, whether we like it or not—is now most insufferably ugly. And as a result of victory, I fear a blatant hollow tone of exultation in our poetry that—from a literary and social standpoint—is almost worse than the languors of defeat. It will be well if we achieve victory when every person in the country has been made to feel the cost of it. Three days knee-deep in flooded trenches—our arts must draw strength from that dreadful experience. It is true perhaps that we do wish to feel the cost. We are supposed to live in fear of a Zeppelin raid. In my opinion, half the inhabitants of London constantly though secretly hope it. We feel that with a bomb or two tumbling about our heads we shall be “in it.” To read the newspapers is like having a surfeit of the kind of book which is called “The Great War of 19—.” I have read dozens of them and they move my imagination almost as much as the reports—some of them, such as are well-written, like Mr. Wells’s _War in the Air_, even more.