The New War Book
The New War Book is an article published in The New-York Times on 9 june 1918.
Editorial about Arthur Conan Doyle's essay: The New Revelation (1918).
Conan Doyle War Prophet
In England, as we noted recently, they are not — speaking comparatively — reading war books. For the first two years of the war there was little else that was read. But now, it is reported, adventure and mystery stories are in the ascendant among books — these and works that deal with the problem of a future life. Psychical research is, in a way, furnishing us with a new type of war book. The reason for this is well expressed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his book, "The New Revelation," reviewed at length in this number of The New York Times Book Review. In describing the growth of his interest in psychical research Sir Arthur tells us:
- I might have drifted on for my whole life as a psychical researcher, showing a sympathetic but more or less dilettante attitude toward the whole subject, as if we were arguing about some impersonal thing, such as the existence of Atlantis or the Baconian controversy. But the war came, and when the war came it brought earnestness into all our souls and made us look more closely at our own beliefs and reassess their values. In the presence of an agonized world. hearing every day of the deaths of the flower of our race in the first promise of their unfulfilled youth, seeing around one the wives and mothers who had no clear conception whither their loved ones had gone to. I seemed suddenly to see that this subject with which I had so long dallied was not merely a study of a force outside the rules of science, but that it was really something tremendous, a breaking down of the walls between two worlds, a direct undeniable message from beyond, a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's statement of his "conversion" and the causes leading up to it forms a striking refutation of some of the views of the probable effects of the war as these views were expressed three years or more ago. In those days it was hold that the war would make itself felt as a sort of final negation of religion, and that it meant the ultimate disappearance of the religious spirit and the churches by which that spirit is fostered. The very reverse of this has taken place. We have seen, during the last poor years, a steady increase in the number and popularity of religious books, and in this connection it is worth noting that the character of these books has undergone a change from the controversial, doctrinal kind of work, current a generation ago, to a work of a much wider and more vital appeal. For one thing, religious books today are not confined in authorship to the professed students of theology. That two of the foremost writers of contemporary fiction — H. G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — should become the authors of books on exclusively religious subjects is a fact that, in itself, is highly significant of the present tendency. The particular line of religious inquiry taken up in Conan Doyle's "The New Revelation" was started, in a way, in the early days of the war by the stories and investigations growing out of the so-called "Vision at Mons." Then came the phenomena recorded by Sir Oliver Lodge in connection with the death of his son, Raymond. But the Raymond phenomena, the Mons vision, are not sufficiently distinct from other experiences of the kind that fill the annals of psychical research. More than anything intrinsically important in themselves, it is the war that has given them prominence. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle says: "When the war came it brought earnestness into all our souls and made us look more closely at our own beliefs and reassess their values." It is the war, indeed, that has produced such books as "The New Revelation" and "God the Invisible King" quite as directly and logically as it has produced the latest "eyewitness" books from the battlefields of the Somme or the Marne or of Picardy.
