Meanwhile our friends at home, very sincere and gifted men, but mistaken, I believe, in their attitude toward nationality, are summoning America to an artistic rebirth, so that "the new forces in our arts may advance." They write: "The soldier falls under the compulsion of the herd-instinct and is devoted by his passion to a vision out of which destruction and death are wrought." To one who has heard the guns of Verdun, this piping is somewhat scrannel. Art is not something that exists in a vacuum beyond space and time, and good and evil. Art is the expression of a belief in life, and that belief takes varying forms, according to the place and age in which it falls. It may be the expression of a surge of national feeling, as in Russian music. It may be the response to a rediscovery of ancient beauty, as in the Renaissance. It may be the quickening received from fresh discoveries of territory and strange horizons, such as touched the Elizabethans. In America we have long tried by artificial stimulants to revive art. We have omitted the one sure way, which is a deep nationality, achieved by sacrifice, a reassertion of national idealism. Out of that soil will spring worthy growths, which the thin surface of modern fashionable cosmopolitanism can never nourish. The sense of the true America has laid hold of these young men of ours in France. By living well they create the conditions of art. The things they do underlie all great expression. Already they are writing with a tone and accent which have long gone unheard in our America. My lot has cast me with young men at their heroic moment. For the first months of the war it was with Belgian boys, later with French sailors, finally with these young Americans. They have made me impatient of our modern cosmopolitan American who, in the words of Dostoievski, "Can be carried off his feet, positively carried off his feet, by noble ideals, but only if they come of themselves, if they fall from heaven for him, if they need not be paid for."