England -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Drama; Upper class -- England -- Drama; World War, 1914-1918 -- Drama
even interesting; so that some of them were rapidly promoted, and found
themselves actually becoming artists in wax, with a growing relish for
it, like Napoleon and all the other scourges of mankind, in spite of
themselves. For many of them there was not even this consolation. They
"stuck it," and hated it, to the end.
Evil in the Throne of Good
This distress of the gentle was so acute that those who shared it
in civil life, without having to shed blood with their own hands, or
witness destruction with their own eyes, hardly care to obtrude their
own woes. Nevertheless, even when sitting at home in safety, it was not
easy for those who had to write and speak about the war to throw
away their highest conscience, and deliberately work to a standard of
inevitable evil instead of to the ideal of life more abundant. I can
answer for at least one person who found the change from the wisdom of
Jesus and St. Francis to the morals of Richard III and the madness of
Don Quixote extremely irksome. But that change had to be made; and we
are all the worse for it, except those for whom it was not really a
change at all, but only a relief from hypocrisy.
Think, too, of those who, though they had neither to write nor to fight,
and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the inestimable
loss to the world of four years of the life of a generation wasted on
destruction. Hardly one of the epoch-making works of the human mind
might not have been aborted or destroyed by taking their authors
away from their natural work for four critical years. Not only were
Shakespeares and Platos being killed outright; but many of the best
harvests of the survivors had to be sown in the barren soil of the
trenches. And this was no mere British consideration. To the truly
civilized man, to the good European, the slaughter of the German youth
was as disastrous as the slaughter of the English. Fools exulted in
"German losses." They were our losses as well. Imagine exulting in the
death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him his death blow!
Straining at the Gnat and swallowing the Camel
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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