Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/93



"If the world," said Thorpe in his usual ponderous manner of deepening a light chat by the fireside, "if the world possessed a livelier realistic imagination, it could dispense to advantage with a great part of its idealism." Thorpe is one of the intellectual amphibians developed by the unsettled environment of thought in our times. You know the sort. You can never tell where to have him, for he is always stoutly denying that he is what a moment before you thought he obviously was. "No, no, I'm not a pacifist. Don't class me with the Radicals. Why should you think I'm opposed to universal military service?" That sort of man.

We had been speaking of the nervous unrest and a kind of mild epidemic hypochondria which were more noticeable through the period of negotiations for peace than they were in the course of the war. "The trouble is," I had suggested, "that we are all suffering from exacerbated imaginations. It is impossible to be cheerful in a constant sense that each one of us