queer non- (or
super-) aesthetic grounds of which we have spoken:--

'There is much in B. I like. But my feeling towards him has (ever
since I read his life) been that of his to the "Lost Leader." I
cannot understand him consenting to live a purely literary life in
Italy, or (worse still) consenting to be lionised by fashionable
London society. And then I always feel that if less people read
Browning, more would read Meredith (his poetry, I mean.)'

Then, while he was walking in the Moselle Valley, came the war. He had
loved Germany, and the force of his love kept him strangely free from
illusions; he was not the stuff that "our modern Elizabethans" are made
of. The keen candour of spiritual innocence is in what he wrote while
training at Shorncliffe:--

'For the joke of seeing an obviously just cause defeated, I hope
Germany will win. It would do the world good, and show that real
faith is not that which says "we _must_ win for our cause is just,"
but that which says "our cause is just: therefore we can disregard
defeat."'...

'England--I am sick of the sound of the word. In training to fight
for England, I am training to fight for that deliberate hypocrisy,
that terrible middle-class sloth of outlook and appalling
"imaginative indolence" that has marked us out from generation to
generation.... And yet we have the impudence to write down Germany
(who with all their bigotry are at least seekers) as "Huns," because
they are doing what every brave man ought to do and making
experiments in morality. Not that I approve of the experiment in
this particular case. Indeed I think that after the war all brave
men will renounce their country and confess that they are strangers
and pilgrims on the earth. "For they that say such things declare
plainly that they seek a country." But all these convictions are
useless for me to state since I have not had the courage of them.
What a worm one is under the cart-wheels--big, clumsy, careless,
lumbering cart-wheels--of public opinion. I might have been giving
my mind to fight against Sloth and Stupidity: instead, I am giving
my body (by a refinement of cowardice) to fight against the most
enterprising nation in the world.'

The wise arm-chair patriots will shake their heads; but there is more
wisdom of spirit in these words than in all the newspaper leaders
written thr