Page:The American Essay in War Time, Agnes Repplier, 1918.pdf/1

 THE AMERICAN ESSAY IN WAR TIME

By

PROFESSOR in an American college bewailed the fact that he had sold an essay on Sir Thomas Browne to an English review in the spring of 1914, and that it had never been printed. His words affected his hearers more profoundly than he had anticipated. They glanced back briefly and tragically upon a half-forgotten world in which people really did write about Sir Thomas Browne, and even read Sir Thomas Browne; a world in which literature pleased, and art was safe, and hearts were strangely at peace. They felt like the little group of urchins who, in "Punch's" pathetic picture, gather gaping around Billy Smith—" 'im wot remembers when there wasn't no war."

To write essays in these flaming years, one must have a greater power of detachment than had Montaigne or Lamb. Montaigne's troubles during the civil wars of the League were singularly vexatious, and one of his precious volumes came near being lost to the world. But he was a high-hearted gentleman, living on his own estate, safe from a morning post, and deeming religion the last thing in the world to fight about. A great deal was happening in Europe when Lamb wrote his unagitated studies of beggars, and chimney-sweepers, and poor relations; but amid all the turmoil he witnessed with seeming unconcern there was no plunge into barbarism, nothing to take him by the throat, and strangle his serenity. The poet is, and has always been, entitled to live in his own world—if he can. Herrick published his "Hesperides" a few months before Charles the First was beheaded, and awakened to the full significance of Puritanism only when the Puritans, who had scant regard for Corinna's May-flowers, or for Julia's pretty