War and the Arts 

Arthur Marwick

Literature and the arts can be used as evidence for these various, and sometimes contradictory, reactions. The 'disenchantment' of the war poets is much cited by historians: and reference can readily be made to the bitter irony in such paintings as Paul Nash's rendering of the havoc and desolation of war, entitled 'We are making a New World'. The mood of social upheaval and change is plain enough in plenty of novels, particularly lesser novels. The strengthening of national loyalties can be seen in official patronage of the arts, and in the growing interest in the home-bred arts, apparent, though unevenly, in all the belligerent countries. All countries wished to demonstrate that they were fighting for culture against its deadliest enemies. Isolated instances of the solidarity and developing sense of identity of particular groups within the wider national communities can be seen in the products of the Harlem Renaissance and, indeed, in the products of the coeval 'Scottish Renaissance'. The sense of the group solidarity of a squad of fighting men forms the underlying motif of Henri Barbusse's great novel of 1915, Le Feu (Under Fire). 

Nash's commitment, as well as his bitterness, comes through in a letter from the front line to his wife, written in 1917: 'I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls'.

 Historians often, and legitimately, use art itself, the statements of writers and artists, and the manner in which art is organised as a social institution, in order to illustrate reactions and tendencies they believe to be prevalent in the wider society. At a more profound, though potentially riskier, level, the historian can also attempt to use the artist's insights into social behaviour in formulating his own interpretations of historical situations. Thus there is much to be gleaned on the whole nature of war from creative writers. Naturally, the very fact of the war - especially on this horrific scale - stimulated imaginative thought on all the greater issues involved. Or did it? That question must be taken with another, still bigger one.

 Leaving aside the nature of war, did the nature of the arts change because of the war? The notion of artistic styles, and of the possibility of chopping these styles up into chronological periods, is well established. To come straight to the point: did the war bring to an end one period in the arts, replacing it by another one, which could be called the period of 'modernism'? A brief glance at artistic trends since the late nineteenth century would immediately show this not to be so: Stravinsky, Joyce, the Post-Impressionists, were all carrying through their major innovations in the years before the war. Yet the notion of the war as some sort of dividing line is not a totally erroneous one for two reasons. The horrific experience of war gave a new validity to the dischords and extreme percussive effects (as they seemed to many contemporaries) of Stravinsky and the new generation of musicians, and to the new modes of literary and artistic expression. Wilfred Owen, as is often said, was no great technical innovator, yet he created for himself a jagged personal style to deal with the pity, and the ghastliness, of war: For of my glee might many men have laughed, And of my weeping something had been left, Which must die now. I mean the truth untold, The pity of war, the pity war distilled. The English art critic, P. G. Konody expressed, better than I can, the relationship between the war and the new techniques of the artist:

It is fairly obvious that the ordinary representational manner of painting is wholly inadequate for the interpretation of this tremendous conflict in which all the forces of nature have to be conquered and pressed into service against the opposing enemy. A more synthetic method is needed to express the essential character of this cataclysmic war, in which the very earth is disembowelled and rocky mountain summits are blown sky-high to bury all life under the falling debris. How could even a faint echo of such things find its way into that species of enlarged and coloured newspaper illustration that continues to represent the art of the battle painter on the walls of the Royal Academy? 

It is not in the nature of war to create new ideas or new modes of expression. But the very situation of war itself was a new situation, in which the calamitous novelty was unprecendented in scale and impact. Just as this new situation brought new economic and social organizations into being, so too artists wishing to cope with the reality of war had to stretch to the limit every available new technique.

 But the audience was affected as well as the artist. There was a new receptivity to new styles and techniques. We must get our numbers right, of course. Only a tiny minority before the war had any kind of view on the arts, whether modernist or traditionalist. But within that tiny circle one can see that up to 1914 the innovators continued to be met by hostility and outrage. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring roused the first-night Paris audience in May 1913 to violence; characteristically it only aroused the British to contempt: 'such stuff should be played on primeval instruments - or, better, not played at all. When Roger Fry attempted to mount Post-Impressionist exhibitions in London in 1910 and 1912 they were greeted with derision. The tiny minority widened slightly over the war period, and more important, within that minority there was a swing towards accepting that the traditional representational modes could not begin to express the truth about the war. 

These are the broad and, I think, important matters, concerning change in the arts as a whole rather than changes in the arts studied only as a reflection of the war experience or as conveying a message about the nature of war. There is much that is interesting and informative to be gleaned from a study directed simply towards war paintings, war novels and war poetry as such. It says something about the different impact of the war on different countries, and about the different reactions to war, that the greatest number of direct statements in paint about the war emanated from Britain, and the least from Germany. But even that has to be balanced by the fact that the most powerful retrospective literary statement was Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front, first published in 1929). But rather than detail the various works that speak directly of war, and the differences in treatment, it is more important for the historian of society to note the manner in which the experience of war hangs broodingly over so many of the works of the twenties and thirties whose overt subject is not war. This, I am sure, is true of the great artists of the Weimar republic - Kandinsky, Klee, Beckmann - who in so many ways gave a lead to artistic developments throughout Europe. It is true of Hemingway, and it is true of Scott Fitzgerald.

In the end one has to return to an obvious point I made earlier, and a question I coupled with it. It was difficult for anyone - least of all some-one with the sensibility of a creative artist - to live through the First World War and not be affected by it. Total war had entered the artist's 'agenda'. Dozens of novels and poems of minor literary interest make this clear enough. But is it worth dragging in Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot? In their works there is nothing remotely approaching a one-to-one relationship with the war. From great writers we learn, if anything, something of the nature of man himself, and the relationships he has created. From the great writers of  the twentieth century we learn  more about the humanity which let the war happen than about the humanity which emerged from the war. We learn about twentieth-century man in his various aspects, rather than about one twentieth-century war. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924) can be taken as showing allegorically the nature of the Europe which went to war in 1914. But what an inadequate comment that would be.

 The single-minded message that does come through in all the overt treatments of war from the watershed marked by the publication of Barbusse's Under Fire onwards is that war is no longer something to be glorified retrospectively nor to be imagined enthusiastically in the future. Thirty years before it became a cliche for the man in the street living in the atomic era, the insistent theme was being developed: any future war will destroy mankind. In 1921, in the capital of the newly established state of Czechoslovakia, Karel Capek staged the play R. U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). But the indictment again was not just of war, but of industrial civilization itself, which had already produced one catastrophic war and which, if not controlled, would easily produce another, even more catastrophic.

From:  Arthur Marwick, War and Social Change in the Twentieth Century (Macmillan: Houndmills, 1986), pp.83-86.