"At least the Germans stand for something. It may be brutal, stupid, intolerable, but there it is--a definite intention, a scheme of living, an order, Germanic Kultur. But what the devil do _we_ stand for? Was there anything that amounted to an intellectual life at all in all our beastly welter of writing, of nice-young-man poetry, of stylish fiction and fiction without style, of lazy history, popular philosophy, slobbering criticism, Academic civilities? Is there anything here to hold a people together? Is there anything to make a new world? A literature ought to dominate the mind of its people. Yet here comes the gale, and all we have to show for our racial thought, all the fastness we have made for our souls, is a flying scud of paper scraps, poems, such poems! casual articles, whirling headlong in the air, a few novels drowning in the floods...." § 5 There were times during his illness and depression when we sat about Boon very much after the fashion of Job's Comforters. And I remember an occasion when Wilkins took upon himself the responsibility for a hopeful view. There was about Wilkins's realistic sentimentality something at once akin and repugnant to Boon's intellectual mysticism, so that for a time Boon listened resentfully, and then was moved to spirited contradiction. Wilkins declared that the war was like one of those great illnesses that purge the system of a multitude of minor ills. It was changing the spirit of life about us; it would end a vast amount of mere pleasure-seeking and aimless extravagance; it was giving people a sterner sense of duty and a more vivid apprehension of human brotherhood. This ineffective triviality in so much of our literary life of which Boon complained would give place to a sense of urgent purpose.... "War," said Boon, turning his face towards Wilkins, "does nothing but destroy." "All making is destructive," said Wilkins, while Boon moved impatiently; "the sculptor destroys a block of marble, the painter scatters a tube of paint...." Boon's eye had something of the expression of a man who watches another ride his favourite horse. "See already the new gravity in people's faces, the generosities, the pacification of a thousand stupid squabbles----" "If you mean Carsonism," said Boon, "it's only sulking until it can cut in again." "I deny it," said Wilkins, warming to his faith. "This is the firing of the clay of Western European life. It stops our little arts perhaps--but see the new beauty that comes.... We can well spare our professional books and professional writing for a time to get such humour and wonder as one can find in the soldiers' letters from the front. Think of all the people whose lives would have been slack and ignoble from the cradle to the grave, who are being twisted up now to the stern question of enlistment; think of the tragedies of separation and danger and suffering that are throwing a stern bright light upon ten thousand obscure existences...."