READING IN WAR TIME By M. E. SADLER, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. ATIONAL HOME- READING UNION, 12 York Buildings, Adelphi, London, W.C. Price 2d. (post free, 2|d.). N.H.R.U. The National Home-Reading Union exists to direct readers of all ages and classes in the choice and wise use of books. MEMBERSHIP FEES (entitling to Book Lists and Magazine). s. d. Special Course 4 0 General Course 2 6 Introductory Course ... 1 0 Young People's Section ... 1 6 A reduction of fees is made for Reading Circles of not less than five members. Special arrangements for Young People's Circles. For full information in regard to member- ship and courses of reading apply (enclosing reply postage)— The Secretary, N.H.R.U., 12 York Buildings, Adelphi, London, W.C. READING IN WAR TIME An Address delivered at the Annual Meeting of the National Home - Reading Union on November 5th, 1914. E are passing through a stern and has not befallen our country for many gener- ations. For the first time since science gave us commerce and manufacture on a gigantic scale and multiplied our means of swift communica- tion, Great Britain is at war for her life, and, indeed, for what concerns us even more than life itself — for her ideals and for the principles upon which are founded her best hopes for the future of the world. A hundred years ago our forefathers fought for the same cause. But it is for a new Britain, a new Empire, that we are fighting now ; for an Empire which has already entered upon part of the responsibilities of free government and of universal education. In this, the fourteenth, week of the war it is solemn experience, the like of which already possible to record some of the effects of the experience which is testing our powers of tranquility and self-control. Of one or two of these effects, as bearing- on the object of our meeting this afternoon, I propose to speak. I have never in my life heard such good reading aloud as since the war began, or better speaking. The reason, I suppose, is that every- one is deeply stirred and also that people are less self-conscious and shy than in ordinary times, and therefore express themselves more naturally and fully and with freer modulation of voice and tone. England at this time (Britain we ought to say) is as Emerson saw her when he wrote the words which Sir William Osier recalled a fortnight ago. "I see her not dis- pirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has seen dark days before ; indeed, with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that in storm of battle and calamity she has a secret vigour and a pulse like cannon. I see her in her old age, not decrepit, but young, and still daring to believe in her power of endurance and expansion. See- ing this, I say, All hail ! Mother of nations, Mother of heroes, with strength still equal to the time ; still wise to entertain and swift to 2 execute the policy which the mind and heart of mankind require at the present hour. So be it ! So let it be !" The deeper places of the heart and mind are moved by the stress of strong emotion. A great many people, for example, who do not in ordinary circumstances write poetry, have broken out in verse. Editors of newspapers and other confidants of the public must have had a good deal of it sent to them. I know a cook who now writes so much poetry in pencil by the kitchen fire that she gets into difficulties with her dinner. And in the military hospitals, many of the convalescent soldiers versify at length. To relieve their full hearts, people turn to rhythm and to metrical incantation. Musi- cians tell me that, after getting over the first shock of the new experience of war, they have found their love of music raised to a higher power, both in feeling and expression. The painters whom I have asked tell rather a differ- ent story. They have found it hard to concen- trate on their work since the excitement of the war began. The strain has been too severe, fatal indeed, to at least one young painter of genius. But perhaps they will shortly find their minds becoming composed from agitation, and 3 their creative gift once more steady and strong. By writers many memorable things have been done in words during the last three months. So far as my own limited experience goes, I should be inclined to put highest among them some of the first page essays in the Literary Supplement of The Times; some despatches in the British White Papers ; two speeches by Mr. Asquith; Lord Kitchener's letter to the soldiers ; the Archbishop of Canterbury's sermon in Westminster Abbey on the outbreak of the war; one of the prayers in the Form of Inter- cession on behalf of His Majesty's Naval and Military Forces issued by the authorities of the Church of England ; some of the leading articles in the Manchester Guardian; two or three es- says by Mr. Spenser Wilkinson in the Morning- Post; Mr. Hilaire Belloc's narrative of the campaign in The World's War by Land and Water; and some of Mr. H. G. Wells's articles in The Nation. Each of those to whom I speak may feel good reason for adding to this imperfect list, but there is one piece of writing which we should all wish to include, written in Washing- ton on September 8 by the President of the United States of America. " I, Woodrow Wilson, 4 President of the United States of America, do designate Sunday, the 4th day of October next, a day of prayer and supplication, and do request all God-fearing persons to repair on that day to their places of worship there to unite their petitions to Almighty God that, overruling the counsel of men, setting straight the things they cannot govern or alter, taking pity on the nations now in the throes of conflict, in His mercy and goodness showing a way where men can see none, He vouchsafe His children healing peace again, and restore once more that concord among men and nations without which there can be neither happiness nor true friend- ship nor any wholesome fruit of toil or thought in the world ; praying also to this end that He forgive us our sins, our ignorance of His holy will, our wilfulness and many errors, and lead us in the paths of obedience to places of vision and to thoughts and counsels that purge and make wise." We all feel the preoccupation of the war. And yet, as we grow somehat accustomed to the terrible strain of it, we find relief in what for a time fixes the mind on other thoughts. " I find that, while I am awake, I can some- times not think of it for an hour," said a great 5 scholar to me the other day, " and I have found it a great relief to lecture on Homer." We do not wish to forget the war. Our thoughts, our hopes are with those who are in danger for their country. But in order that we may help them to the best of our strength and wisdom, we must keep our minds fresh and sane. And this rest from useless worry we may find in reading something which is remote from the associations of the war. Jane Austen wrote her novels during a period of critical struggle in Europe. But, with one or two trifling excep- tions, there is no trace of war in what she wrote. I think she did it on purpose. The late Lord Carlisle, who was in South Africa for a winter during the closing months of the Boer War, said that, until he read her then, he had never really enjoyed Jane Austen. In her de- tachment there was something which, amidst all the excitement and distractions of the poli- tical situation, he found a great relief. Good fiction, taken sparingly, is a refreshment at this time, both the classics like Sir Walter Scott, and the ultra-moderns like Mr. Wells who puts into words our sinuous and conflicting thoughts. Yet the more the mind is weighted with anxious responsibilities, the more necessary is 6 it that, if it be a strong mind, the reading which it takes by way of refreshment and rest should in itself call for great concentration and focus- ing of the thoughts. General Smuts, who led the daring raid into Cape Colony during the Boer War, told my friend Mr. Herbert Fisher, of Sheffield, that, during the campaign, he read Kant's " Critique of Pure Reason." He found it a great help to have a task which needed concentration of mind and took his thoughts from strategy and tactics. But General Smuts is a man of very powerful mind, and Professor Maitland used to say that he was the best law student he ever had at Cambridge. I suppose it was this same desire for relief from other thoughts that made Dion and his friends talk philosophy on their way from Athens to Syra- cuse, and perhaps it was in the same mood that Archimedes was sitting in the public square at Syracuse, lost in thought, with geometrical figures traced in the sand before him, when the Roman soldier in the surprise attack slew him with his sword. Aubrey tells the tale that William Harvey, the famous physician who discovered the circu- lation of the blood, read a book during the battle of Edge Hill. As Aubrey was a gossip, 7 the critics sniff at his authority, but I am in- clined to think, Harvey's temperament being taken into account, that the story may be true. Professor Gilbert Murray's brother, who is now Governor of New Guinea, took with him on active service during the Boer War the poems of Pindar and read them through five times. He says that he took the volume partly because it was small and hard. Beaupuis, the friend whom Wordsworth speaks of affectionately in "The Prelude," held with him " many a long discourse on thoughts absttuse " during the most stirring days of the French Revolution. And a well known Wykehamist, who during the Boer War was eighty times under fire, read "Paradise Lost" and "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" while serving on the campaign. After the battle of Magersfontein, an English officer found the Boer trenches littered with books -Tennyson, Shakespeare, and Milton, especially Milton. And the reading of poetry was not all on one side, as an English- man, who was then a private in the C.I.V., and is now in a great engineering firm in this coun- try, took with him a selection of Keats and read the book in the trenches at Colenso, when his regiment had to wait a long time under fire. It may be noticed how many people have become more deeply interested in philosophy, and especially in ethics, since the war began. Perhaps it is because the conflict of ideals be- tween the opposing forces raises fundamental questions of conduct and of duty. But few would have foreseen that Nietzsche would be- come a household word in the English press. In many of the soldiers' letters written at the front, there is, as Professor Murray has pointed out, a noble Stoicism. Possibly one of the greatest of Stoics, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, wrote part of the book which he entitled " To Himself," in camp during warfare. But this is not certain : there is no proof of it in the text. It is a little more certain than another great piece of literature — Julius Caesar's Comment- aries — W as written during the excitement at the outbreak of war. The famous nephew of Con- stantine the Great, Julian the Apostate, cer- tainly wrote much when he was on campaign, and he kept himself awake at night by holding his arm out of the bedclothes so that if he fell asleep he would drop a silver ball into a brazen bowl. At this time, the greatest things, those which are truest to spiritual experience, have the surest 9 power of consolation and encouragement. The Psalms speak our inmost thoughts : there is new meaning in the morning and evening prayers for peace. And there are parts of Wordsworth's poetry which glow as newly written. It is these, the greatest things, that touch us most deeply and give the fullest relief. It is these which, in the words of the Report of the National Home-Reading Union, " heighten and steady " our thoughts. Plato had this in mind when he decided what, in their training, the future guardians of the State should hear and read. The leaders of his civilization of the future were to be men trained under a stern discipline and, in order that they might grow up to be brave guardians of the people, he would have them know no literature but what was noble, no art but what was austere. Along with the hellish horror of it, the war has raised the good things also to new heights of power. We see that "he That every man in arms should wish to be ; Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, And Fear and Bloodshed, miserable train, Turns his necessity to glorious gain ; In face of these doth exercise a power Which is our human nature's highest dower; Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves 10 Of their bad influence, and their good receives ; Is placable — because occasions rise So often that demand such sacrifice ; More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure As tempted more ; more able to endure, As more exposed to suffering and distress ; Thence, also, more alive to tenderness." It was in the anxieties of war, a war in which were raised great issues for the future welfare of the world, that Abraham Lincoln, a plain man of the people but, like Wordsworth's Happy Warrior, " a man inspired," spoke the words of commemoration over those who had fallen along the escarpment at Gettysburg. " We are met on a great battlefield of the war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that a nation might live. It is alto- gether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion ; that we here highly re- solve that these dead shall not have died in vain ; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Printed by C. F. Hodgson & Son, 2 Newton Street Kingsway, W.C. 12