Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/40

You Gentiles The efflorescence of our life, given free room, is profoundly different. We have none of this joyous gamesomeness. We fight and suffer and die, even as we labor and create, not in sport and not under the rules of sport, but in the feeling and belief that we are part of an eternal process. We cannot have art such as you have, a free and careless lyrical beauty, songs and epics. Our sense of beauty springs from immersion in the universe, from a gloomy desire to see justice done in the name of God. Morality itself we take simply and seriously: we have none of your arbitrary regulations, your fine flourishes and disciplined gallantries: we only know right or wrong: all the rest seems to us childish irrelevance. When God speaks in us, when his overwhelming will drives us to utterance we are great: otherwise we are futile. With you there cannot be a question of futility. We belong to the One mastering God: you belong to the republic of playful gods.

These are two ways of life, each utterly alien to the other. Each has its place in the 36