No More Learning

Where it has tended to glorify war
in itself, it is chiefly because war has released those qualities, so to
speak, in stirring and spectacular ways; and where it has chosen to
round upon war and to upbraid it, it is because war has slain ardent and
lovable youths and has brought misery and despair to women and old
people. But the war poet has left the mere arguments to others. For
himself, he has seen and felt. Envisaging war from various angles, now
romantically, now realistically, now as the celebrating chronicler, now
as the contemplative interpreter, but always in a spirit of catholic
curiosity, he has sung, the fall of Troy, the Roman adventures, the
mediaeval battles and crusades, the fields of Agincourt and Waterloo,
and the more modern revolutions. Since Homer, he has spoken with martial
eloquence through, the voices of Drayton, Spenser, Marlowe, Webster,
Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Scott, Burns, Campbell, Tennyson, Browning,
the New England group, and Walt Whitman,--to mention only a few of the
British and American names,--and he speaks sincerely and powerfully
to-day in the writings of Kipling. Hardy, Masefield, Binyon, Newbolt,
Watson, Rupert Brooke, and the two young soldiers--the one English, the
other American--who have lately lost their lives while on active
service: Captain Charles Hamilton Sorley, who was killed at Hulluch,
October 18, 1915; and Alan Seeger, who fell, mortally wounded, during
the charge on Belloy-en-Santerre, July 4, 1916.

There can be little doubt that these several minds and spirits, stirred
by the passion and energy of war, and reacting sensitively both to its
cruelties and to its pities, have experienced the kinship of quickened
insight and finer unselfishness in the face of wide-ranging death. They
have silently compared, perhaps, the normal materialistic conventions in
business, politics, education, and religion, with the relief from those
conventions that nearly all soldiers and many civilians experience in
time of war; for although war has its too gross and ugly side, it has
not dared to learn that inflexibility of custom and conduct that deadens
the spirit into a tame submission. This strange rebound and exaltation
would seem to be due less to the physical realities of war--which must
in many ways cramp and constrain the individual--than to the relative
spiritual freedom engendered by the needs of war, if they are to be
successfully met. The man of war has an altogether unusual opportunity
to realize himself, to cleanse and heal himself through the mastering of
his physical fears; through the facing of his moral doubts; through the
reexamination of whatever thoughts he may have possessed, theretofore,
about life and death and the universe; and through the quietly unselfish
devotion he owes to the welfare of his fellows and to the cause of his
native land.

Into the stuff of his thought and utterance, whether he be on active
service or not, the poet-interpreter of war weaves these intentions, and
cooperates with his fellows in building up a little higher and better,
from time to time, that edifice of truth for whose completion can be
spared no human experience, no human hope.

As already suggested, English and American literatures have both
received genuine accessions, even thus early, arising out of the present
great conflict, and we may be sure that other equally notable
contributions will be made. The present Anthology contains a number of
representative poems produced by English-speaking men and women. The
editorial policy has been humanly hospitable, rather than academically
critical, especially in the case of some of the verses written by
soldiers at the Front, which, however slight in certain instances their
technical merit may be, are yet psychologically interesting as sincere
transcripts of personal experience, and will, it is thought, for that
very reason, peculiarly attract and interest the reader. It goes without
saying that there are several poems in this group which conspicuously
succeed also as works of art.
For the rest, the attempt has been made,
within such limitations as have been experienced, to present pretty
freely the best of what has been found available in contemporary British
and American war verse. It must speak for itself, and the reader will
find that in not a few instances it does so with sensitive sympathy and
with living power; sometimes, too, with that quietly intimate
companionableness which we find in Gray's _Elegy_, and which John
Masefield, while lecturing in America in 1916, so often indicated as a
prime quality in English poetry. But if this quality appears in Chaucer
and the pre-Romantics and Wordsworth, it appears also in Longfellow and
Lowell, in Emerson and Lanier, and in William Vaughn Moody; for American
poetry is, after all, as English poetry,--"with a difference,"--sprung
from the same sources, and coursing along similar channels.

The new fellowship of the two great Anglo-Saxon nations which a book of
this character may, to a degree, illustrate, is filled with such high
promise for both of them, and for all civilization, that it is perhaps
hardly too much to say, with Ambassador Walter H. Page, in his address
at the Pilgrims' Dinner in London, April 12, 1917: "We shall get out of
this association an indissoluble companionship, and we shall henceforth
have indissoluble mutual duties for mankind. I doubt if there could be
another international event comparable in large value and in long
consequences to this closer association. " Mr. Balfour struck the same
note when, during his mission to the United States, he expressed himself
in these words: "That this great people should throw themselves whole-
heartedly into this mighty struggle, prepared for all efforts and
sacrifices that may be required to win success for this most righteous
cause, is an event at once so happy and so momentous that only the
historian of the future will be able, as I believe, to measure its true
proportions. "

The words of these eminent men ratify in the field of international
politics the hopeful anticipation which Tennyson expressed in his poem,
_Hands all Round_, as it appeared in the London _Examiner_, February 7,
1852:--

"Gigantic daughter of the West,
We drink to thee across the flood,
We know thee most, we love thee best,
For art thou not of British blood?
Should war's mad blast again be blown,
Permit not thou the tyrant powers
To fight thy mother here alone,
But let thy broadsides roar with ours.
Hands all round!
God the tyrant's cause confound!
To our great kinsmen of the West, my friends,
And the great name of England, round and round.

"O rise, our strong Atlantic sons,
When war against our freedom springs!
O speak to Europe through your guns!
They can be understood by kings.