t
likeness is there? Have we not made the genius of those two ours by
understanding them as we understand them, and by so taking them into our
hearts? Are they not friends of ours? Do they not walk with us in those
blessed solitudes wherein our truest self awakens, and where our
thoughts flow free?

It is the greatest of all whom a certain group of our soldiers invoke in
those days before the expected battle in which some of them are to fall.
They are in the depths of a dug-out. 'There, in complete darkness,
night was awaited for the chance to get out. But once my fellow
non-commissioned officers and I began humming the nine symphonies of
Beethoven. I cannot tell what great thrill woke those notes within us.'

That almost sacred song, those heroic inspirations at such a moment--how
do they not give the lie to German theories as to the limitations of
French sensibility! And what poet of any other race than ours has ever
looked upon Nature with more intimate eyes, with a heart more deeply
moved, than his whose inner soul is here expressed?

* * * * *

These letters, despatched day by day from the trench or the billet,
follow each other progressively as a poem does, or a song. A whole life
unfolds, the life of a soul which we may watch through the monotony of
its experiences, overcoming them all, or, again, rapt at the coming of
supreme trials (as in February and in April) into perfect peace. It is
well that we should trace the spiritual progress of such a dauntless
will. No history of an interior life was ever more touching. That will
is set to endurance, and terrible at times is the effort to endure; we
divine this beneath the simple everyday words of the narrative. Here is
an artist and a poet; he had chosen his life, he had planned it, by no
means as a life of action. His whole culture, his whole self-discipline,
had been directed to the further refining of a keen natural sensibility.
Necessarily and intentionally he had turned towards solitude and
contemplation. He had known himself to be purely a mirror for the world,
tarnishable under the breath of the crowd. But now it was for him to
lead a life opposed to his former law, contrary to his plan; and this
not of necessity but by a completely voluntary act. That _ego_ he had so
jealously sheltered, in face of the world yet out of the world, he was
now to yield up, to cast without hesitation or regret into the thick of
human wars; he w