res of eternity in his eyes, or an Iowa right-thinker with
his hold full of Bibles and breakfast food?

XVI

THE JOCOSE GODS

What humor could be wilder than that of life itself? Franz Schubert, on
his deathbed, read the complete works of J. Fenimore Cooper. John
Millington Synge wrote "Riders to the Sea" on a second-hand $40
typewriter, and wore a celluloid collar. Richard Wagner made a living,
during four lean years, arranging Italian opera arias for the cornet.
Herbert Spencer sang bass in a barber-shop quartette and was in love
with George Eliot. William Shakespeare was a social pusher and bought
him a bogus coat-of-arms. Martin Luther suffered from the jim-jams. One
of the greatest soldiers in Hungarian history was named Hunjadi
Janos....

XVII

WAR

Superficially, war seems inordinately cruel and wasteful, and yet it
must be plain on reflection that the natural evolutionary process is
quite as cruel and even more wasteful. Man's chief efforts in times of
peace are devoted to making that process less violent and sanguinary.
Civilization, indeed, may be defined as a constructive criticism of
nature, and Huxley even called it a conspiracy against nature. Man tries
to remedy what must inevitably seem the mistakes and to check what must
inevitably seem the wanton cruelty of the Creator. In war man abandons
these efforts, and so becomes more jovian. The Greeks never represented
the inhabitants of Olympus as succoring and protecting one another, but
always as fighting and attempting to destroy one another.

No form of death inflicted by war is one-half so cruel as certain forms
of death that are seen in hospitals every day. Besides, these forms of
death have the further disadvantage of being inglorious. The average
man, dying in bed, not only has to stand the pains and terrors of death;
he must also, if he can bring himself to think of it at all, stand the
notion that he is ridiculous.... The soldier is at least not laughed at.
Even his enemies treat his agonies with respect.

XVIII

MORALIST AND ARTIST

I dredge up the following from an essay on George Bernard Shaw by Robert
Blatchford, the English Socialist: "Shaw is something much better than a
wit, much better than an artist, much better than a politician or a
dramatist; he is a moralist, a teacher of ethics, austere, relentless,
fiercely earnest."

What could be more idiotic? Then Cotton Mather was a greater man than
Johann Se