The answer proposed by one of our brilliant essayists in the first months of the war was nothing more or less than “the lack of a saving sense of humour.” It is only a partial answer, perhaps, but it is surely true as far as it goes. The want of “the power to see ourselves as others see us,” the power to put ourselves in another’s place and see how our actions would look to him, would affect him, is very close to that tragic blindness—blindness to the fact that others have a like claim with ourselves to just and reverent treatment, a like right to peace and prosperity, to self-government and self-determination. These, who would set the world right by violently upsetting it and forcibly conforming it to their own pattern, have not the grace to see how ugly and ungainly that pattern looks to other eyes. Indeed, self looms so large with them that it fills the entire foreground, and even obliterates all trace of background and middle distance. Life, as its Creator clearly intended it to be, with all the rich variety and diversity in which alone its unity can find adequate expression, is impossible on such terms. Freedom of self-development and self-expression, which is of the essence of true life, is as likely to flourish in such an atmosphere as is an “open-air” English girl in the atmosphere of a stuffy German Wohnzimmer. Civilisation, under such hegemony, would lose all the beauty of its spontaneity, all the romance and mystery of its movement; its expansive forces would be imprisoned in a minute and deadening code of regulations. It would be like a “corrected” river flowing evenly between straight banks of enforced concrete, with nothing except its sober, serious, and self-concentrated current to speak of the sinuous, sparkling, effervescent charm, the “careless rapture” of its native motion. If we are to substantiate our claim for Dante as the many-sided Apostle of Liberty, we must satisfy ourselves that he is at least not devoid of that foundation of the sense of humour which takes a man outside himself, makes possible to him something of a detached and external point of view, enables him, if need be, even to see the ridiculous side of his own earnest efforts. That Dante is in earnest, no one doubts. But does he, in his earnestness, “take himself so seriously” as to incapacitate himself from doing justice to other points of view?