Page:The American Essay in War Time, Agnes Repplier, 1918.pdf/7

Rh The determined and not too easy cheerfulness of the warring nations is a miracle of courage. We shall have plenty of chance to be courageous along these lines. But the mirth of neutrals is apt to be distasteful when it mocks at the things of war. There is no kindlier essayist than Mr. Simeon Strunsky, no one closer than he to the "simple, humorous, average American man." Yet when he ventured in the early days of our neutrality to voice a thought which, in one form or another, has intruded itself into every mind, and to smile at the people of Europe clamoring in divers tongues to the Almighty, and all "calling for victory which is the code word for slaughter," we listened, chilled and affronted, to this embodiment of a universal jest. Perhaps there swept across our minds a vision of the Belgian woman who sees her man standing up to be shot against the old church wall, who knows herself to be the destined spoil of battle, and whose inarticulate cry to Heaven is the call of all suffering creatures to the Creator. Our fallibility does not release us from the obligation of severing right from wrong—an obligation which is the converging point of Christianity and civilization. In one of the most charming and intimate of early English essays, Cowley speaks this word of wisdom: "God laughs at a man who says to his soul, 'Take thine ease.' "

When a habitually sober thinker dallies with a playful mood, his frivolity is apt to be weighted; but when a habitually humorous thinker grows grave under the stress of a great emotion, his gravity is pointed with wit. Mr. Crothers is an essayist who has seemed to court vivacity rather than yield to it. He admits himself to be a leisure-loving man, whose pleasure it has been to escape from the clamorous present to the peaceful past, to dig into old books, to peer into old churches and school-rooms, to ponder over old theologies. He remarks with illuminating candor that the drawback of living with our contemporaries is that they are forever standing around, waiting to do something for us, or