This unconcern, which is the balance wheel of comedy, has tempered the American mind to an easy acceptance of chance. Its enthusiasms are modified, its censures are softened by a restraining humour which is rooted deeply in indifference. We recognize the sanity of our mental attitude, but not its incompleteness. Understanding and sympathy are products of civilized life, as clarifying in their way as tolerance and a quick perception of the ludicrous. An American newspaper printed recently a photograph entitled “Smilin’ Through,” which showed two American girls peering through two holes in a shell-torn wall of Verdun, and laughing broadly at their sport. The names and addresses of these frolicsome young women were given, and their enjoyment of their own drollery was emphasized for the diversion of other young women at home. Now granted that every nation, like every man, bears the burden of its own grief. Granted also that every woman, like every man, has her own conception of the humorous, and that we cannot reasonably take umbrage because we fail to see the fun. Nevertheless the memories of Verdun do not make for laughter. There is that in its story which sobers the world it has ennobled. Four hundred thousand French soldiers gave their lives for that battered fortress which saved Paris and France. Mr. Brownell reminds us that there is such a thing as rectitude outside the sphere of morals, and that it is precisely this austere element in taste which assures our self-respect. We cannot analyze, and therefore cannot criticize, that frothy fun which Bergson has likened to the foam which the receding waves leave on the ocean sands; but we know, as he knows, that the substance is scanty, and the after-taste is bitter in our mouths. We are tethered to our kind, and it is the sureness of our reaction to the great and appealing facts of history which makes us inheritors of a hard-won civilization, and qualified citizens of the world. The Idolatrous Dog We shall never know why a feeling of shame attends certain harmless sensations, certain profoundly innocent tastes and distastes. Why, for example, are we abashed when we are cold, and boastful when we are not? There is no merit or distinction in being insensitive to cold, or in wearing thinner clothing than one’s neighbour. And what strange impulse is it which induces otherwise truthful people to say they like music when they do not, and thus expose themselves to hours of boredom? We are not necessarily morons or moral lepers because we have no ear for harmony. It is a significant circumstance that Shakespeare puts his intolerant lines, “The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils. * * * * * Let no such man be trusted”--