irst time in his life takes an
interest in the sunset; in those of the young middle-class Parisian who
had seemed incapable of speech save in terms of unbelief and burlesque;
in those of the artist who utters his emotion in poetry and lifts it up
to the heights of stoical philosophy. Through all unlikenesses, in the
hearts of all--peasant, citizen, soldier, German schoolmaster--one
prevailing thought is revealed; the living man, passing away, feels, at
the approach of eternal night, an exaltation of his sense of the
splendour of the world. O miracle of things! O divine peace of this
plain, of these trees, of these hillsides! And how keenly does the ear
listen for this infinite silence! Or we hear of the immensities of night
where nothing remains except light and flame: far off, the smouldering
of fires; far up, the sparkle of stars, the shapes of constellations,
the august order of the universe. Very soon the rattle of machine-guns,
the thunder of explosives, the clamour of attack will begin anew; there
will again be killing and dying. What a contrast of human fury and
eternal serenity! More or less vaguely, and for a brief moment, there
comes into passing life a glimpse of the profound relation of the simple
things of heaven and earth with the mind of him who contemplates them.
Does man then guess that all these things are indeed himself, that his
little life and the life of the tree yonder, thrilling in the shiver of
dawn, and beckoning to him, are bound together in the flood of universal
life?

* * * * *

For the artist of whom we are now reading, such intuitions and such
visions were the delight of long months in the trenches. Under the free
sky, in contact with the earth, in face of the peril and the sight of
death, life seemed to him to take a sudden and strange expansion. 'From
our life in the open air we have gained a freedom of conception, an
amplitude of thought, which will for ever make cities horrible to those
who survive the war.' Death itself had become a more beautiful and a
more simple thing; the death of soldiers on whose dumb shapes he looked
with pious eyes, as Nature took them back into her maternal care and
mingled them with her earth. Day by day he lived in the thought of
eternity. True, he kept a feeling heart for all the horror, and
compassion for all the pain; as to his duty, the reader will know how he
did that. But, suffering 'all the same,' he took refuge in 't