FROM A BERKSHIRE CABIN 177 



people make them, after all. Why have the Japan- 

 ese not carried their sense of beauty into the ma- 

 chinery of their civic life? A happy populace is 

 more important in the end than a Hiroshige print. 

 What does it avail that Germany could give the 

 world "Die Nussbaum" and "Der Mtiller und der 

 Bach" when she also set the match to the present 

 conflagration? We must, we are told, "face facts." 

 Well, one fact certainly is that man loves beauty, 

 knowledge, those spiritual adventures in which the 

 imagination plays a part and the world is helped, 

 not hurt. This is as much a fact as the present 

 conflict and the present inescapable need for bearing 

 arms against the universal foe. What puzzles me, 

 as I sit in my cabin, is how to reconcile these irrec- 

 oncilable facts. That there is at present a uni- 

 versal foe and a foe who produced Schumann and 

 Schubert, that the greatest of all wars is possible 

 in the latest of centuries, is due, of course, to the 

 fact that mankind as a whole has never really made 

 an honest, sincere, enthusiastic effort to prevent 

 wars. That he has not done so is no less certainly 

 due to the fact that he has either secretly approved 

 of them or else that he has seen no way to avoid 

 them without a measure of personal and national 

 self-sacrifice. Either explanation is not flattering 

 to the creature who can imprison perfection in a 

 song or fix forever upon a square of paper the loveli- 

 ness of a brooding mountain-top, or merely sit in the 

 woods and thrill to the call of a hermit-thrush. It 

 argues a strange, perverse duality in his nature. . . . 

 I have just left my veranda and picked a smooth 

 false foxglove which I hold in my hand, admiring 



