nd any longer. It came out in the
thirteenth month of the war, and my conscience was troubled by the awful
incongruity of throwing this bit of imagined drama into the welter of
reality, tragic enough in all conscience but even more cruel than tragic
and more inspiring than cruel. It seemed awfully presumptuous to think
there would be eyes to spare for those pages in a community which in the
crash of the big guns and in the din of brave words expressing the
truth of an indomitable faith could not but feel the edge of a sharp
knife at its throat.

The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable both by his power
of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems to be
that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too
mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgment to
sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on
with his performance of Beethoven's Sonata and the cobbler at his stall
stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the
leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be
disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too
awful for our terrors? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly by
the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book
pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of
detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and which is
yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods.

It is only when the catastrophe matches the natural obscurity of our
fate that even the best representative of the race is liable to lose his
detachment. It is very obvious that on the arrival of the gentlemanly
Mr. Jones, the single-minded Ricardo and the faithful Pedro, Heyst, the
man of universal detachment, loses his mental self-possession, that fine
attitude before the universally irremediable which wears the name of
stoicism. It is all a matter of proportion. There should have been a
remedy for that sort of thing. And yet there is no remedy. Behind this
minute instance of life's hazards Heyst sees the power of blind destiny.
Besides, Heyst in his fine detachment had lost the habit of asserting
himself. I don't mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or
physical, but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the readiness
of mind and the turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead
the