Page:The American Essay in War Time, Agnes Repplier, 1918.pdf/6

254 to have always with us, and to school-girls who interest him because he was born a boy. He professes a veritable curiosity concerning these transparent young creatures who hold back no shreds of their souls from inspection. But the price he pays for his steadfastness is that his words, whether grave or gay, seem to his readers to have been written in some unstirred, prehistoric days with which we have lost connection. When he counsels us to exclude the newspaper from our morning meal because it arouses our "sectarian emotions, our prejudices, our annoyances," and so is not fitted "to bring out the best in breakfast," we cannot without conscious effort follow his fancy back to those forgotten mornings when we had room in our souls for prejudices and annoyances, when we picked up our morning paper without a pang of apprehension, and read it without sharp pain or sacrificial joy.

Even Mr. Sedgwick's admirable essay on Goethe, who is as permanent as breakfast, seems inconceivably remote. We read the opening paragraph in which he speaks of Mr. Lowes Dickinson as embodying in the eyes of Americans the spirit of Oxford and of Cambridge, and his words sound like the echo of a dream—a dream from which we have awakened to know of what mettle the Universities are made. If Goethe could now bring serenity to our souls, we should have no right to admit it. There is unlovely work to be done. Saint George doubtless had his serene moments, but not when he was battling in the dragon's coils. Devotion is to war what temperance is to peace. An emancipated spirit is a divine spirit only when it is resolute to brook no evil willingly.

The humors of war are the humors of humanity. They have a body and a substance as real as are the fighting men who jest before they die. They bring relief to our spirits, because they savor of nature's "indefatigable renewals." The callous levity of the trenches never offends us when we remember that the jokers are pledged to the great sacrifice.