Part 9

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.

That is one way of regarding the evils of human destiny, as if they were the work of blind chance, but not the wise way; for at the end of such atheism only madness lies. The truer counsel is in that humility which faces the facts, yet acknowledges the impotence of man’s reason to act as judge in these high matters. Christianity and paganism come close together in the lesson taught by Euripides:

O daughter, God is strange and all his ways Past finding out. So for his own good will He turns the fortunes of mankind about, And hither thither moves.

That is the element of religious purgation which Euripides brought to the people of Athens when their whole horizon was darkened by war. But this is not all. Indeed, were this all, we should reject such consolation indignantly, as being akin to that form of humanitarianism which has been disintegrating modern society by throwing the responsibility for crime anywhere except on the individual delinquent. Euripides may have found alleviation in the universal mystery of evil, but neither he, in his better moments, nor any other of the true Greeks turned consolation into license, or doubted that a sure nemesis followed the infractions of justice, or the insolence of pride, or the errors of guilty ignorance:

Strong are the gods, and stronger yet the law That sways them; even as by the law we know The gods exist, and in our life divide The bounds of right and wrong.

The madness of Troy and the Achaean army may have been the work of heaven, but no small part of Greek tragedy, from the _Agamemnon_ of Aeschylus to the _Hecuba_ of Euripides, is taken up with the tale of retribution that came to this man and that for his arrogance or folly. So are consolation and admonition bound together. If their union in ancient ethics seems paradoxical, or even contradictory, it is nevertheless confirmed by the teaching of Christianity: For evil must come into the world, but woe unto him through whom it comes.

It is a curious and disquieting fact that the poet who was able to compress the moral of Greek tragedy into a single memorable stanza, belongs to the people who, if there is any truth in that moral, must shortly reckon with the nemesis appointed for sins of presumption and cruelty.

Ihr zieht ins Leben uns hinein; Ihr lasst den armen schuldig werden; Dann überlasst ihr ihn der Pein; Denn alle Schuld rächt sich auf Erden. PAUL ELMER MORE

[Illustration: _JACQUES-ÉMILE BLANCHE_

PORTRAIT OF GEORGE MOORE

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE ORIGINAL PAINTING]

_AGNES REPPLIER_

THE RUSSIAN BOGYMAN