Page:The American Essay in War Time, Agnes Repplier, 1918.pdf/10

258 their tranquil and unfathomable selfishness. If the intrusion of a friend into their vast empty house affects them as an unwarranted eruption of Vesuvius might affect a careless dweller on its crest, if they feel that the universe is out of gear when an expressman has left their daily box of flowers at the wrong house, it is because they have come to believe that making themselves superlatively and harmoniously comfortable justifies existence. Moving as smoothly in their orbit as do the "formal stars," they feel they are part of the well-ordered scheme of creation, and they have said to their souls, "Take thine ease"!

The wind of war has winnowed the chaff from the wheat, and the pleasantness of life is not, at the last analysis, the gift most deeply prized. We have let it go, and gathered to our hearts impelling duties and austerities. In one of the best of American essays, written nearly thirty years ago, Mr. Henry James says of London, which he loved, but never idealized: "It is not to be denied that the heart tends to grow hard in her company; but she is a capital antidote to the morbid, and to live with her successfully is an education of the temper, a consecration of one's private philosophy."

"One's private philosophy." This is the essayist's birth-right. This is his inheritance from Montaigne, who turned a deaf ear to religious strife, and from Lamb, who looked with seeming unconcern upon Napoleon's downfall. And who so upheld by philosophy as Mr. James; who so unmoved a spectator of the intricate game of life; who so well fitted to escape from the agony of nations to the impregnable world of the intellect? Yet the invasion of France, the rape of Belgium gave him his death-blow. The grossness of Germany's treachery and violence wounded his honor, his man-hood, and his heart, which was not cold. Never for one moment were his eyes withdrawn from the strife until death kindly closed them. He died in a year of shattered hopes and profound depression. It was not for him to hear the great profession of faith in which Mr. Wilson asked for war;