Absolute, but to his intuitive sympathy with the whole of life, to his
impulses of love for the general soul of fruitfulness and for all its
single and multitudinous forms. 'Love'--this is one of the words most
often recurring in these letters. Love of the country of battle; love of
the plain over which the mornings and the evenings come and go as the
emotions come and go over a sensitive face; love of the trees with their
almost human gesture--of one tree, steadfast and patient in its wounds,
'like a soldier'; love of the beautiful little living creatures of the
fields which, in the silence of earliest morning, play on the edges of
the trench; love of all things in heaven and earth--of that tender sky,
of that French soil with its clear and severe outlines; love, above all,
of those whom he sees in sufferings and in death at his side; love of
the good peasants, the mothers who have given their sons, and who hold
their peace, dry their tears, and fulfil the tasks of the vineyard and
the field; love of those comrades whose misery 'never silenced laughter
and song'--'good men who would have found my fine artistic robes a bad
encumbrance in the way of their plain duty'; love of all those simple
ones who make up France, and among whom it is good to lose oneself; love
of all men living, for it is surely not possible to hate the enemy,
human flesh and blood bound to this earth and suffering as we too
suffer; love of the dead upon whom he looks, in the impassive beauty,
silence, and mystery revealed beneath his meditative eyes.

It is by his close attention to the interior and spiritual significance
of things that this painter is proved to be a poet, a religious poet who
has sight, in this world, of the essence of being, in ineffable
varieties: painter, and poet, and musician also, for in the trenches he
lives with Beethoven, Handel, Schumann, Berlioz, carrying in his mind
their imaginings and their rhythms, and conceiving also within himself
'the loveliest symphonies fully orchestrated.' Secret riches, intimate
powers of consolation and of joy, able, in the gloomiest hours, in the
dark and the mud of long nights on guard, to speak closely to the soul,
or snatch it suddenly and swiftly to distances and heights. Schumann,
Beethoven: between those two immortal spirits that made music for all
human ears, and the harsh pedants, the angry protagonists of Germanism,
who have succeeded in transforming a people into a war-machine, wha