WAR AND LITERATURE.


It would be a task worthy of a volume, and requiring that space in order
to be creditably performed, to show how war affects literature, at what
points they meet, where they are at variance, if any wars stimulate, and
what kinds depress the intellectual life of nations. The subject is very
wide. It would embrace a discussion of the effects of war when it occurs
during a period of great literary and artistic splendor, as in Athens
and in the Italian Republics; whether intellectual decline is postponed
or accelerated by the interests and passions of the strife; whether the
preliminary concentration of the popular heart may claim the merit of
adding either power or beauty to the intellectual forms which bloom
together with the war.

These things are not entirely clear, and the experience of different
countries is conflicting. The Thirty Years' War, though it commenced
with the inspiration of great political and religious ideas, did not
lift the German mind to any new demonstrations of truth or impassioned
utterances of the imagination. The nation sank away from it into a
barren and trivial life, although the war itself occasioned a multitude
of poems, songs, hymns, and political disquisitions. The hymns of this
period, which are filled with a sense of dependence, of the greatness
and awfulness of an invisible eternity, and breathe a desire for the
peaceful traits of a remote religious life, are at once a confession of
the weariness of the best minds at the turmoil and uncertainty of the