be published at a
price which placed it within reach of popular purchase. What profits
still accrued to him, and these were considerable, he devoted to
institutes for the wounded and to the maintenance of Hatton Towers as an
officers' convalescent home.
Because he did not seek to depict a modern battlefield, knowing that
Shakespeare himself must have waxed trite upon such a theme, the
hell-pit of Flanders and the agony of France were draped behind his
drama like a curtain. No man had come so near to the truth in naked
words. His silence was the silence of genius. The tears of the world
flowed through his work, yet no weeping woman was depicted. The word of
Christ and the message of Mohammed alike were respected and upheld, but
priest and _imam_ conspired to denounce him. Rebirth in the flesh he
offered as a substitute for heaven and hell. Love and reunion were
synonymous. Not for ages unimaginable could man hope to gain that final
state which is variously known as Heaven, Paradise and Nirvana; only by
the doing of such evil as rarely lies within human compass could he be
judged worthy of that extinction which is Hell. No soul could sink thus
low whilst another mourned it; and was there a man so vile that no woman
loved him? Whilst there was love there could be no Hell, for in Hell
there was no reunion. Pestilence and war on earth corresponded with
undivinable upheavals on another planet. "Ere a man's body has grown
cold on earth he has stirred again in the womb of his mother."
Only by means of certain perversions of natural law, of which suicide
was one, could man evade rebirth, and even thus only for a time. Sorrow
was not a punishment but merely a consequence. Punishment was man-made
and had no place in the wider scheme, could have no place in a universe
where all things were self-inflicted. Germany symbolised the culmination
of materialism, "the triumph of the Bull." To Germany had been attracted
all those entities, converging through the ages, whose progress had been
retarded by abandonment to materialism. "Caligula and Nero defile the
earth to-day, and others even mightier in evil. A Messalina and a Poppae
do not survive individually, for such as these are not human in the
strictest sense, in that they lack what is called a soul which is a
property common to humanity. The parable of the woman of Corinth who
seduced Menippus, a disciple of Apollonius, is misunderstood. We have
come to regard all mortal bodies as
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