It was a quite, quite dreadful jolt that shook the John Cowper Powys cult on the night of the debate between the master and Maurice Browne of the Little Theatre. The great one, appearing robed in black, through his Delphic, released, blinding vapor clouds of infallible utterance, was to devastate the suggestion that war is evil, avoidable, and should not be prepared for by military methods. Maurice Browne was to defend the suggestion. Scarce half a moon before had the first murmuring of discontent arisen among the worshipers of the temple, when their idol, beautiful, mordant, flaming, strode forth in flapping black garments and proclaimed that in this great war of many nations “the gall and vitriol and wormwood and uncleanness of mankind are burned, purged from the purified flesh of humanity; that then humanity is transformed, until the passion of hate is hardly distinguishable from the passion of love.” The master himself was the glorious vulture of war. Looming there on the stage of the Little Theatre, black, huge, alone under a vast orange sky heavily streaked with black, a violet light from somewhere touching the crimson of his face—and beside him in that great lonely cosmos an iridescent emerald bowl upon a high ivory pedestal. That little, little iridescent bowl, the ivory, the vast peace of a universe, no coagulating clots hanging from the shreds of bodies torn and entangled in the barbed wire meshes of the trenches, no cries—only one huge black moving thing there. “War a great evil and an unmitigated wrong? I cannot see it. A pacifist struggle for existence is only a meaner struggle. They are fools who think it advisable or possible to stamp out war; they are knaves if, thinking this possible or advisable, they still go on a pacifist crusade.” Followed then the picture of a well-managed nation during war, a regime of exalted socialism—the pooling of all moneys, the raising of the income tax, the rich paying for the needs of the poor; she who was once thought a bedraggled hussy of London’s east end now become a savior of her country, in her potential gift of a son to the recruiting office of her country; the high price now set on flesh and blood, even that of the most humble. Well, all this heroic joy and thin-ice socialism—it was announced at the end of the evening that the week after the subject would be Walt Whitman. Thank heaven! Let his people listen to John Cowper Powys on Walt Whitman. Of these he should speak—of Walt Whitman, of Oscar Wilde, of Huysmans and Richepin and Milton and Ficke and Baudelaire and Goethe and Shakespeare. On these he speaks divinely. Peace and war indeed!