The Great War and Modern Literature

World War I marks the beginning of the modem era but, like the death of Queen Victoria, the war is a marker more useful in histori­cal than literary terms. For example, the literary movement now commonly referred to as «Modernism» was well underway by the last decade of the nineteenth century. In the minds of those British writers who survived the conflict, the World War was more than a military and political event that changed the map of Europe. Be­ginning with the war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and others, modem English literature took on pervasive tones of irony and intensity, and expressed moods of sobriety and pathos that writers believed were intrinsic to the human condition in the modern world. It would be incorrect to think of these qualities as uniquely modem, of course, but their increasing importance in lit­erature suggests the movement away from the relatively self-confi­dent view of the world that was characteristic of the nineteenth century.

For the «war poets» themselves, and for those who read their po­etry, the harrowing experiences in the trenches of Europe marked the end of idealism and the stubborn faith in altruistic action which in­spired much of the best work of the nineteenth century. For many writ­ers it was simply the treacherous, crippling war, and the promises it did not fulfill, which defined «modern». «There is simply no poetry in war», wrote Wilfred Owen shortly before he himself was killed in the war. «The poetry is in the pity». In the end there were victors and vanquished, of course, but principally victims; some nations won, but individuals always lost. More than one reader has observed that Kathcrine Mansfield's stories of loneliness, deprivation, and injustice reflect the fact of her brother's death in the war as much as her aware­ness of the long illness which was to end her own life in 1923. Modern modes of expression might still be sensitive, and even tender, as Mansfield's own prose style shows, but in any case literature was obliged to reflect the harsher qualities of modem life.

It was undoubtedly perceptions akin to those of Mansfield and Owen which brought Virginia Woolf, granddaughter of the great Victorian novelist Thackeray, to argue that the primary responsibil­ity of fiction was «to express character — not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire».