space all the particular applications naturally awaiting them,
that they pretend to refer here to the British private soldier
only--generalisation about his officers would take us so considerably
further and so much enlarge our view. The high average of the beauty and
modesty of these, in the stricken state, causes them to affect me, I
frankly confess, as probably the very flower of the human race. One’s
apprehension of “Tommy”--and I scarce know whether more to dislike the
liberty this mode of reference takes with him, or to incline to retain
it for the tenderness really latent in it--is in itself a theme for fine
notation, but it has brought me thus only to the door of the boundless
hospital ward in which, these many months, I have seen the successive
and the so strangely quiet tides of his presence ebb and flow, and it
stays me there before the incalculable vista. The perspective stretches
away, in its mild order, after the fashion of a tunnel boring into the
very character of the people, and so going on forever--never arriving or
coming out, that is, at anything in the nature of a station, a junction
or a terminus. So it draws off through the infinite of the common
personal life, but planted and bordered, all along its passage, with the
thick-growing flower of the individual illustration, this sometimes
vivid enough and sometimes pathetically pale. The great fact, to my now
so informed vision, is that it undiscourageably continues and that an
unceasing repetition of its testifying particulars seems never either to
exhaust its sense or to satisfy that of the beholder. Its sense indeed,
if I may so far simplify, is pretty well always the same, that of the
jolly fatalism above-mentioned, a state of moral hospitality to the
practices of fortune, however outrageous, that may at times fairly be
felt as providing amusement, providing a new and thereby a refreshing
turn of the personal situation, for the most interested party. It is
true that one may be sometimes moved to wonder which _is_ the most
interested party, the stricken subject in his numbered bed or the
friendly, the unsated inquirer who has tried to forearm himself against
such a measure of the “criticism of life” as might well be expected to
break upon him from the couch in question, and who yet, a thousand
occasions for it having been, all round him, inevitably neglected, finds
this ingenious provision quite left on his hands. He may well ask
himself what he is to do with people who so consistently and so
comfortably content themselves with _being_--being for the most part
incuriously and instinctively admirable--that nothing whatever is left
of them for reflection as distinguished from their own practice; but the
only answer that comes is the reproduction of the note. He may, in the
interest of appreciation, try the experiment of lending them some scrap
of a complaint or a curse in order that they shall meet him on congruous
ground, the ground of encouragement to his own participating impulse.
They are imaged, under that possibility, after the manner of those
unfortunates, the very poor, the victims of a fire or shipwreck, to
whom you have to lend something to wear before they can come to thank
you for helping them. The inmates of the long wards, however, have no
use for any imputed or derivative sentiments or reasons; they feel in
their own way, they feel a great deal, they don’t at all conceal from
you that to have seen what they have seen is to have seen things
horrible and monstrous--but there is no estimate of them for which they
seek to be indebted to you, and nothing they less invite from you than
to show them that such visions must have poisoned their world. Their
world isn’t in the least poisoned: they have assimilated their
experience by a process scarce at all to be distinguished from their
having healthily got rid of it.
The case thus becomes for you that they consist wholly of their applied
virtue, which is accompanied with no waste of consciousness whatever.
The virtue may strike you as having been, and as still being, greater in
some examples than others, but it has throughout the same sign of
differing at almost no point from a supreme amiability. How can
creatures so amiable, you allow yourself vaguely to wonder, have
welcomed even for five minutes the stress of carnage? and how can the
stress of carnage, the murderous impulse at the highest pitch, have left
so little distortion of the moral nature? It has left none at all that
one has at the end of many months been able to discover; so that perhaps
the most steadying and refreshing effect of intercourse with these
hospital friends is through the almost complete rest from the facing of
generalisations to which it treats you. One would even like perhaps, as
a stimulus to talk, more generalisation; but one gets enough of that out
in the world, and one doesn’t get there nearly so much of what one gets
in this perspective, the particular perfect sufficiency of the
extraordinary principle, whatever it is, which makes the practical
answer so supersede any question or any argument that it seems fairly to
have acted by chronic instinctive anticipation, the habit of freely
throwing the personal weight into any obvious opening. The personal
weight, in its various forms and degrees, is what lies there with a head
on the pillow and whatever wise bandages thereabout or elsewhere, and
it becomes interesting in itself, and just in proportion, I think, to
its having had all its history after the fact. All its history is that
of the particular application which has brought it to the pass at which
you find it, and is a stream roundabout which you have to press a little
hard to make it flow clear. Then, in many a case, it does flow,
certainly, as clear as one could wish, and with the strain that it is
always somehow English history and illustrates afresh the English way of
doing things and regarding them, of feeling and naming them. The sketch
extracted is apt to be least coloured when the prostrate historian, as I
may call him, is an Englishman of the English; it has more point, though
not perhaps more essential tone, when he is a Scot of the Scots, and has
most when he is an Irishman of the Irish; but there is absolutely no
difference, in the light of race and save as by inevitable variation
from individual to individual, about the really constant and precious
matter, the attested possession on the part of the contributor of a free
loose undisciplined quantity of being to contribute.
This is the palpable and ponderable, the admirably appreciable,
residuum--as to which if I be asked just how it is that I pluck the
flower of amiability from the bramble of an individualism so bristling
with accents, I am afraid I can only say that the accents would seem by
the mercy of chance to fall together in the very sense that permits us
to detach the rose with the fewest scratches. The rose of active
goodnature, irreducible, incurable, or in other words all irreflective,
_that_ is the variety which the individualistic tradition happens, up
and down these islands, to wear upon its ample breast--even it may be
with a considerable effect of monotony. There it is, for what it is, and
the very simplest summary of one’s poor bedside practice is perhaps to
confess that one has most of all kept one’s nose buried in it. There
hangs about the poor practitioner by that fact, I profess, an aroma not
doubtless at all mixed or in the least mystical, but so unpervertedly
wholesome that what can I pronounce it with any sort of conscience but
sweet? That is the rough, unless I rather say the smooth, report of it;
which covers of course, I hasten to add, a constant shift of impression
within the happy limits. Did I not, by way of introduction to these
awaiters of articulate acknowledgment, find myself first of all, early
in the autumn, in presence of the first aligned rows of lacerated
Belgians?--the eloquence of whose mere mute expression of their state,
and thereby of their cause, remains to me a vision unforgettable
forever, and this even though I may not here stretch my scale to make
them, Flemings of Flanders though they were, fit into my remarks with
the English of the English and the Scotch of the Scotch. If other
witnesses might indeed here fit in they would decidedly come nearest,
for there were aspects under which one might almost have taken them
simply for Britons comparatively starved of sport and, to make up for
that, on straighter and homelier terms with their other senses and
appetites. But their effect, thanks to their being so seated in
everything that their ripe and rounded temperament had done for them,
was to make their English entertainers, and their successors in the long
wards especially, seem ever so much more complicated--besides making of
what had happened to themselves, for that matter, an enormity of outrage
beyond all thought and all pity. Their fate had cut into their spirit to
a peculiar degree through their flesh, as if they had had an unusual
thickness of this, so to speak--which up to that time had protected
while it now but the more exposed and, collectively, entrapped them; so
that the ravaged and plundered domesticity that one felt in them, which
was mainly what they had to oppose, made the terms of their exile and
their suffering an extension of the possible and the dreadful. But all
that vision is a chapter by itself--the essence of which is perhaps that
it has been the privilege of this placid and sturdy people to show the
world a new shade and measure of the tragic and the horrific. The first
wash of the great Flemish tide ebbed at any rate from the
hospitals--creating moreover the vast needs that were to be so
unprecedentedly met, and the native procession which has prompted these
remarks set steadily in. I have played too uncertain a light, I am well
aware, not arresting it at half the possible points, yet with one aspect
of the case staring out so straight as to form the vivid moral that
asks to be drawn. The deepest impression from the sore human stuff with
which such observation deals is that of its being strong and sound in an
extraordinary degree for the conditions producing it. These conditions
represent, one feels at the best, the crude and the waste, the ignored
and neglected state; and under the sense of the small care and scant
provision that have attended such hearty and happy growths, struggling
into life and air with no furtherance to speak of, the question comes
pressingly home of what a better economy might, or verily mightn’t,
result in. If this abundance all slighted and unencouraged can still
comfort us, what wouldn’t it do for us tended and fostered and
cultivated? That is my moral, for I believe in Culture--speaking
strictly now of the honest and of our own congruous kind.
HENRY JAMES
[Illustration: _LÉON BAKST_
MÉNADE
FROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH]
_MAURICE MAETERLINCK_
NOTRE HÉRITAGE
Si l’on pouvait suivre des yeux ce qui se passe dans le monde idéal qui
nous domine de toutes parts, on constaterait sans nul doute que rien ne
se perd sur les champs de bataille. Ce que nos admirables morts
abandonnent, c’est à nous qu’ils le lèguent; et quand ils périssent pour
nous, ce n’est pas métaphoriquement et d’une manière détournée, mais
très réellement et d’une façon directe qu’ils nous laissent leur vie.
Tout homme qui succombe dans un acte de gloire émet une vertu qui
redescend sur nous, et dans la violence d’une fin prématurée, rien ne
s’égare et rien ne s’évapore. Il donne en grand et d’un seul coup ce
qu’il eût donné dans une longue existence de devoir et d’amour. La mort
n’entame pas la vie; elle ne peut rien contre elle. Le total de celle-ci
demeure toujours pareil. Ce qu’elle enlève à ceux qui tombent passe en
ceux qui restent debout. La mort ne gagne rien tant qu’il y a des
vivants. Plus elle exerce ses ravages, plus elle augmente l’intensité de
ce qu’elle n’atteint point; plus elle poursuit ses victoires illusoires,
mieux elle nous prouve que l’humanité finira par la vaincre.
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
OUR INHERITANCE
[TRANSLATION]
If our vision could open on that unseen world which dominates us from
all sides, we should unquestionably learn that on the battlefields there
can be no loss. The heritage which our splendid soldiers yield up in
dying is bequeathed to us; and when they perish for our sakes, they give
us their lives in no metaphoric, roundabout sense, but really and
directly. From every man who meets death gloriously there goes forth a
virtue which enters into us, and even in the violence of an untimely
end nothing goes astray or vanishes. In one short moment the soldier
gives open-handed the offering of an entire lifetime of love and duty.
Death is powerless to prevail over Life. Its total remains forever
unchanged. That which is taken from the fallen passes on to those left
standing. While men still live, Death can win nothing. The more
desperate its efforts, the brighter burns the flame it would fain
extinguish; the more cruelly it pursues its phantom victories, the
clearer is it proven that in the end Humanity must surely vanquish.
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
_Translated by J. G. D. Paul_
_EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN_
WE WHO SIT AFAR OFF
“I, skeptic though I am, am, like every Englishman, a mystic. I see in
this war almost literally a fight between God and the Devil.... With all
my soul I believe that the ideal of pity is the noblest thing we have,
and that its denial which waves on every German flag is the denial of
all that the greatest men have striven for for centuries.... I feel that
the two enormous spirits that move this world are showing their weapons
almost visibly, and that never was the garment of the living world so
thin over the gods that it conceals.
“I am not much elated by the thought. I have little opinion of
Providence as an ally, and I am surprised at the weakness the Kaiser
shows for his pocket deity. What we have to do, in my opinion, we do
ourselves, and our task is none the lighter that we defend the right.
But I am hardened and set by the thing I believe. We feel that we are
fighting for the life of England--yes, for the safety of France--yes,
for the sanctity of treaties--yes, but behind these secondary and
comparatively material issues, for something far deeper, far greater,
for something so great and deep that if our efforts fail I pray God I
may die before I see it.”
These are words from a letter of an English physician with the British
expeditionary force to an American physician who had sent him Dr.
Eliot’s war-book. He, in the war, disclosing how he feels about it, has
described also how it seems to thousands of us who are looking on. We
too are mystics in our feelings about this war. We too have, and have
had almost from the first, this profound sense of a fundamental conflict
between the powers of good and evil, the soul of the world at grips with
its body.
And while we feel so profoundly that the Allies are on the Lord’s side,
a good many of us at least prefer the English doctor’s small reliance on
Providence as an ally to the Kaiser’s proprietary confidence in the
Almighty’s backing. It is not safe to count on Providence to win for
us. He knows us much better than we know ourselves, and may have views
for our improvement and the world’s which our minds do not fathom and
which do not match our plans. Nevertheless, in a vast crisis to feel
one’s self on the Lord’s side, there to fight, win or lose, there to
stay, alive or dead, is an enormous stay to the spirit. “I am hardened
and set,” says the English doctor, “by the thing I believe.” Then truly
is Providence his ally.
To work is to pray; to fight is to pray; to tend the wounded in
hospitals and avert disease is to pray. The people in action are
quickened and sustained in their faith by their exertions, but what of
us who sit afar off in safety and look on at Armageddon?
Our case is pretty trying. When the war first came it was hard for the
thousands of us who cared, to sleep in our beds. We felt it was our war,
too, and it was, for we too are Europeans, and have besides as great a
stake in civilization as any one has. We have kept up our habit of
sleeping in our beds because that was more convenient and there was no
advantage to any one in our doing otherwise. And we have gone on without
much outward change in our work and our habits of life. And we have
grown a little callous, and doubtless a little torpid, and lost some of
the ardor that came with the first shock. Nevertheless, hundreds of
thousands of Americans have had one continuing, underlying thought for a
year and a quarter--the war, the great conflict between good and evil,
and what to do about it.
There never has been a moment’s doubt about which side would be ours if
we went in. But how get in? Where lies duty? By what course may we best
help? Is it our war? When and how will the mandate come to us, too, to
resist the crushing of civilization under the Prussian jack-boot? There
are millions of Americans who want to get into the war, but there are
more millions who want to keep out. Our English doctor appreciates the
predicament of neutral countries, and this is what he says about it:
“War being what it is, it is hopeless to expect that any nation will
engage in it who does not fear great loss or hope great gain. Nations
will always be swayed by the influences which are now swaying Italy,
Greece, Bulgaria and Rumania. No desire of justice would lead those
countries to join us. I doubt if it would justify their rulers in
declaring war.”
Perhaps that is another way of saying that no country will get into the
war that dares to stay out. Nations, especially democratic nations, are
not much like men. They may not say, “I will fight for you; I will spend
my strength and treasure for you; I will die for you and your cause.”
Individuals may feel, say, do all that, but individuals are not nations.
A nation says: “The laws of my being must determine my conduct. I must
go my own gait according to those rules. But if war stretches across my
path I need not turn out for it.”
How far this war has still to go, no one knows. It may still, any day,
stretch across the path of the United States, so that the natural drive
of our procedure will carry us into it.
EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN
[Illustration: _JOHN SINGER SARGENT, R.A._
TWO HEADS
FROM A PENCIL DRAWING]
_PAUL ELMER MORE_
A MOMENT OF TRAGIC PURGATION
Let me say forthwith that this is a book which I shall read with deep
interest, but to which I contribute reluctantly. There is gloom enough
in the air, and I see no profit in adding the scruples and doubts of my
troubled mind to the general sum. For I can find little reason for hope
in the evils that have fallen upon the world; and where are the signs of
the wisdom that is to be born of these calamitous times? When all is
over and in the hush of desolation we have leisure to reckon up the cost
of our madness, will it appear that we have learned the meaning of the
sentimental shirking of realities? Or shall we continue, as we have done
for a century and more, to place sympathy above justice, and to forget
the responsibility of the individual in our insistence on the
obligations of society; inflaming the passions of men by rebellious
outcries against the unequal dealings of Fate, relaxing the immediate
bonds of duty by vague dreams of the brotherhood of man, weakening
character by reluctance to pursue crime with punishment, preparing the
way for outbursts of hatred by fostering the emotions at the expense of
reason; and then, in alarm at our effeminacy, rushing to the opposite
glorification of sheer force and efficiency? One naturally hesitates to
add this note of discouragement to a book in which others of clearer
vision will no doubt record the signs of returning balance and sanity
among men.
Meanwhile, I have found, if not hope, at least moments of tragic
purgation in another sort of reading. By chance I have been going
through some of the plays of Euripides this summer, particularly those
that deal with the disasters of Troy and Troy’s besiegers, and the
pathos of these scenes has blended strangely with the news that reaches
me once a day from the city. Inevitably the imagination turns to
comparisons between the present and the remote past. So, for instance,
the very day that brought me the request to contribute to the Belgian
relief I was reading the story of Iphigenia, sacrificed in order that
the Greek army might sail from Aulis and reach its destination:
O father! were the tongue of Orpheus mine,
To charm the stones with song to follow me,
And throw the spell of words on whom I would,
So should I speak. But now, as I am wise
In tears, and only tears, I speak through these.
This body which my mother bore to thee,
Low at thy knees I lay, imploring thus
To spare my unripe youth. Sweet is the light
To human eyes; oh! force me not to see
Those dark things under earth! I first of all
Called thee by name of “father”; heard “my child”;
I first here on thy knees gave and received
The little, dear, caressing joys of love.
And I recall thy words: “O girl,” thou saidst,
“Shall ever I behold thee in thy home
Happy and prosperous as becomes thy sire?”
And my words too, while then my tiny hand
Clung to thy beard, as now I cling: “And I,
Some day when thou art old, within my halls,
Dearer for this, shall I receive thee, father;
And with such love repay thy fostering care?”
These words still in my memory lodge; but thou
Must have forgotten, willing now my death.
By Pelops and thy father Atreus, oh,
And by my mother, who a second time
Must travail for my life, oh, hear my prayer!
Why should the wrongs of Helen fall on me,
Or why came Paris for my evil fate?
Yet turn thine eyes upon me, look and kiss,
That dying I at least may have of thee
This pledge of memory, if my prayer is vain.
O brother, little and of little aid,
Yet add thy tears to mine, and with them plead
To save thy sister. For in children still
Some sense of coming evil moves the heart.
See, father, how he pleads who cannot speak;
Thou wilt have mercy and regard my youth.
From this passage, which furnished Landor with the theme of one of the
most beautiful, in some respects the most classical, of modern poems, it
is natural to turn to the still more exquisite account of the death of
Polyxena, the youngest daughter of Hecuba, slain as a peace-offering to
the shade of Achilles. The brave words and self-surrender of the girl
are related to the stricken mother by the herald Talthybius:
“O Argives, ye have brought my city low,
And I will die; yet, for I bare my throat,
Myself unflinching, touch me not at all.
As ye would please your gods, let me die free
Who have lived free; and slay me as ye will.
For I am queenly born, and would not go
As a slave goes to be among the dead.”
Then all the people shouted, and the king
Called to the youths to set the maiden free;
And at the sheer command the young men heard,
And drew their hands away, and touched her not.
And she too heard the cry and the command;
Then straightway grasped her mantle at the knot,
And rent it downwards to the middle waist,
So standing like a statue, with her breast
And bosom bared, most beautiful, a moment;
Then kneeling spoke her last heroic words:
“This is my breast, O youth, if here the blow
Must fall; or if thou choose my neck,
Strike; it is ready.”
And Achilles’ son,
Willing and willing not, for very ruth,
Cleft with his iron blade the slender throat,
And let the life out there. And this is true,
That even in death she kept her maiden shame,
And falling drew her robe against men’s eyes.
These pathetic scenes, we should remember, were enacted before the
people of Athens at a time when the lust of empire and the greed of
expanding commerce had thrown Greece into a war which was to leave the
land distracted and impoverished of its men, to be a prey to the
ambitions of Alexander and the armies of Rome. What deep and poignant
emotions Euripides stirred in the breasts of the spectators those can
guess who have seen his _Iphigenia_ and _Trojan Women_ acted in English
in these similar days of trial. And the _catharsis_, or tragic
purgation, was the same then as now, only more perfect, no doubt, and
purer. By these echoes of cruel deeds, ancient even in the years of the
Peloponnesian war, the mind is turned from immediate calamities and
apprehensions to reflecting on the fatality of sin and madness that
rests on mankind, not now alone but at all times. With the tears shed
for strange, far-off things, some part of the bitterness of our personal
grief is carried away; the constriction of resentment, as if somehow
Fate were our special enemy, is loosened, and the hatred of cruel men
that clutches the heart is relaxed in pity for the everlasting tragedy
of human life. Instead of rebellion we learn resignation. When at last
Iphigenia surrenders herself to be a victim for the host, the chorus
commend her act and draw this moral:
Noble and well, it is with thee, O child;
The will of fortune and the god is sick.
In later times Lucretius was to take up this thought, and in repeating
the story of Iphigenia was to denounce the very notion of divine
interference in perhaps the most terrible line that ever poet wrote:
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.