tiles. We were now to form little pools of workers and appreciators of similar temperaments and tastes. The little magazines that were starting up became voices for these new communities of sentiment. Miro thought that perhaps at first it was right to adopt a tentative superciliousness towards the rest of the world, so that both Mr. Mencken with his shudders at the vulgar Demos and Mr. Sherman with his obsession with the sanely and wholesomely American might be shut out from influence. Instead of fighting the Philistine in the name of freedom, or fighting the vulgar iconoclast in the name of wholesome human notions, it might be better to write for one's own band of comprehenders, in order that one might have something genuine with which to appeal to both the mob of the "bourgeois" and the ferocious vandals who have been dividing the field among them. Far better a quarrel among these intensely self-conscious groups than the issues that have filled "The Atlantic" and "The Nation" with their dreary obsolescence. Far better for the mind that aspired towards "culture" to be told not to conform or worship, but to search out its group, its own temperamental community of sentiment, and there deepen appreciations through sympathetic contact.

It was no longer a question of being hospitable towards the work of other countries. Miro found the whole world open to him, in these days, through the enterprise of publishers. He and his friends felt more sympathetic with certain groups in France and Russia than they did with the variegated "prominent authors" of their own land. Winston Churchill as a novelist came to seem more of an alien than Artzybachev. The fact of culture being international had been followed by a sense of its being. The old cultural attitude had been hospitable enough, but it imported its alien culture in the form of "comparative literature." It was hospitable only in trying to mould its own taste to the orthodox canons abroad. The older American critic was mostly interested in getting the proper rank and reverence for what

he borrowed. The new critic will take what suits his community of sentiment. He will want to link up not with the foreign canon, but with that group which is nearest in spirit with the effort he and his friends are making. The American has to work to interpret and portray the life he knows. He cannot be international in the sense that anything but the life in which he is soaked, with its questions and its colors, can be the material for his art. But he can be international-and must be in the sense that he works with a certain hopeful vision of a "young world," and with certain ideal values upon which the younger men, stained and revolted by war, in all countries are agreeing.

Miro wonders sometimes whether the direction in which he is tending will not bring him around the circle again to a new classicism. The last stage in the history of the man of culture will be that "classic" which he did not understand and which his mind spent its youth in overthrowing. But it will be a classicism far different from that which was so unintelligently handed down to him in the American world. It will be something worked out and lived into. Looking into the future he will have to do what Van Wyck Brooks calls "invent a usable past.' Finding little in the American tradition that is not tainted with sweetness and light and burdened with the terrible patronage of bourgeois society, the new classicist will yet rescue Thoreau and Whitman and Mark Twain and try to tap through them a certain eternal human tradition of abounding vitality and moral freedom, and so build out the future. If the classic means power with restraint, vitality with harmony, a fusion of intellect and feeling, and a keen sense of the artistic conscience, then the revolutionary world is coming out into the classic. When Miro sees behind the minds of "The Masses" group a desire for form and for expressive beauty, and sees the radicals following Jacques Copeau and reading Chekov, he smiles at the thought of the American critics, young and old, who do not know yet that they are dead.

I

WAR'S ENDING

BY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

CLIMBED in 1918 the hill of Douamont beyond Ver

dun, a hill torn, swept, and harrowed by shrapnel and high explosive into a ghastly paysage de lune, where the tread was always among pits of dead green water, and the foot stumbled upon shell fragments, rusted wire, rifle butts, or broken bone, and the eye saw other hills cut to the sand, and the puff of shells exploding. At the top was what once had been a famous fort of concrete, now blown to bits except for a ruined core behind which a few poilus were sheltered in patched dugouts, waiting for the enemy-a lonely, silent group in a lonely wilderness of desolation.

"Stoop and enter," said our Colonel. We bent to enter a crumbling hole in the wall, struck our helmets on beams of a dark tunnel, then felt it widen and lift, until suddenly a door swung open and we looked blinking into a great hall full of light and the sound of whirring engines. Soldiers were everywhere, great guns ready to rise and do execution, vast piles of munitions; and beyond, a honeycomb of chambers and corridors in which were assembled all the paraphernalia of defensive war, even a "Salle de President Wilson,' where in the heart of the hill poilus were writing and reading. In the dripping semi-gloom was the organization of a city underground, garrisoned, equipped, ready for siege or attack. Above, crumbling ruins beyond repair; beneath, a new creation of energy and purpose. This is no parable; it was a real fort, with very real soldiers, and the Germans never took it; but if there is not a useful parallel here with life as it is at the ending of war, then similes have lost their power. I am weary of reading accounts of how the war has ennobled sordid human nature. Not that they are untrue,

On the contrary, the half has not been told, and before I finish this writing I shall hope to add my little testimony of a great awakening in a world grown commonplace. But if we are to estimate our benefits we must be more frank than the correspondents and more sober than the soldier writers aflame with their own moral victories. We must look squarely at the ruins of the old order, and then search for new life. We must take a dose of stern pessimism; face the facts; acknowledge our casualties of life and will and virtue; and then go after the rewards still unsecured which belong to those who have fought for a good ideal against a bad one.

Inescapable are the material losses of the war, and most of all in men. The wounded, the sick, the maimed, and the dead make a sad human parallel to the broken pile on the hilltop. With the living there is new life and hope stirring beneath the surface. The sap runs strong in the youthful wounded. Seldom do they admit pessimism, and then it is because their nerves are still twanging, or, now that the war is over, because they have passed beyond the flush of sacrifice. Shattered bodies are perhaps the least of the evils we have to fear for the future, except when the mind shatters too. But it is different with the dead. Death is loss. They will not come back. They will not do what we hoped of them; they will not be there to help when we need them; a longing memory does not atone for a smile or a kiss or the hand of a friend. They may do much for us spiritually; nothing more in the flesh.

It is different too with the unborn. The birthrate has been dropping with frightful rapidity. In 1917, the births in England and Wales fell to the lowest level since 1858. Every day that the war continued, so the British RegistrarGeneral estimated, meant a loss of 7,000 potential lives to Europe. "While the war has filled the graves, it has emptied the cradles." The separations of war were partly responsible, and these have largely ended. But the effect of

strain and stress and labor upon women, the effect of wounds and hardship upon men-these will not quickly pass. Life is cheap at present; it will be dear in the future, especially among our best. We shall have to make it more worth living than ever before.

We can face with more equanimity our other material losses. Scientific activity has been so enormously quickened by the necessities of war that our credit with nature has been turned into cash a generation before its normal time of maturity. The air is ours, and much of underseas. Nevertheless, we have been "digging in," not advancing in our conquest of earth. Creative science has been diverted almost entirely from research and devoted to an intensive application of principles already known.

These brains turned to the immediately practical need not be too loudly bewailed, for our control of nature had already far out-distanced control of ourselves. But there will be a sad accounting in the future for the war's destruction of capital, wealth, food, ships, clothing, and all the paraphernalia of civilization to an amount which no one yet dares calculate. One cannot, it is true, be pessimistic over the mere waste of goods. We have learned that our wealth is subject to the welfare of the community, and though we shall all be poorer in the years to come, even, one hopes, the profiteers, it will not hurt us much, if distribution becomes more equitable. Nevertheless, the war must be paid for. It must be paid for by the inevitable cession, at least for a time, of many great and hopeful movements for education and reform which capital, now lost or diverted, made possible. We need not be troubled because in the next generation Adam must delve and Eve spin; but men have lost part of their reserves of power, even as they have destroyed irretrievably a hundred monuments of irreplaceable art built when the imagination worked itself into stone.

There is nothing in these material losses (at least in Great Britain and America) that the sturdy-hearted may not