Agnes Repplier

“ God will not sell us safety. We learned this much in the winter of 1917, when we dug our mail out of an American steamer, and asked Britain—Britain burdened with debt and bleeding at every pore—to carry it over the sea. For our own sake, no less than for the world’s sake, we must show that we coin money in no base spirit, that we cherish it with no base passion. ”

“ This simple, undisguised barbarity lacks one element, intensely displeasing to the modern mind,—the element of bad taste. Imperial Rome had no conception of a slave or a criminal as a being whose sensations counted, save as they affected others, save as they afforded, or failed to afford, a pleasurable experience to Romans. Human rights were as remote from its cognizance as animal rights were remote from the cognizance of the Middle Ages. The survival of savagery in man’s heart is terrifying rather than repellent; it humiliates more than it affronts. Whatever is natural is likely to be bad ”

“ To withhold from a child some knowledge—apportioned to his understanding—of the world’s sorrows and wrongs is to cheat him of his kinship with humanity. We would not, if we could, bruise his soul as our souls are bruised; but we would save him from a callous content which is alien to his immaturity. The little American, like the little Austrian and the little Serb, is a son of the sorrowing earth. His security—of which no man can forecast the future—is a legacy bequeathed him by predecessors who bought it with sweat and with blood ”

“ For this is the ebb and flow of American wealth. It is heaped up with resistless energy and concentration; it is dissipated in broken and purposeless profusion. Every class resents the extravagance of every other class; but none will practise denial. The millionaire who plays with a yacht and decks his wife with pearls looks askance upon the motor and silk shirt of the artisan. The artisan, with impulses and ambitions as ignoble and as unintelligent as the millionaire's, is sullenly aware that, waste as he may, the rich can waste more, and he is still dissatisfied. ”

“ Henry James once told me that the only reading of which he never tired was history. “The least significant footnote of history,” he said, “stirs me more than the most thrilling and passionate fiction. Nothing that has ever happened to the world finds me indifferent.” I used to think that ignorance of history meant only a lack of cultivation and a loss of pleasure. Now I am sure that such ignorance impairs our judgment by impairing our understanding, by depriving us of standards, of the power to contrast, and the right to estimate. We can know nothing of any nation unless we know its history ”

“ NOW that the Great War is a thing of the past, there is no longer any need to be cheerful. For years a valorous gaiety has been the rôle assigned us. For years we struck a hopeful note, whether it rang true or false. For years the plight of the world was so desperate that we dared not look straight ahead, lest the spectre of a triumphant Germany smite us blind. Confronted with a ruthlessness which threatened to extinguish the liberties and decencies of civilization, we simply had to cast about us for a wan smile to hide from apprehensive eyes the trouble of our souls. ”

“ It is painful to record this lack of healthy humour on the part of political offenders. Ordinary criminals are as a rule neat hands at a joke, a practical joke especially, and convicts respond alacritously to all intelligent efforts to amuse them. Comedians, who from time to time have offered their services to relieve the sad monotony of prison life, have found their audiences alert and responsive. Not a joke is lost, not a song or a skit but wins its way to favour. It is this engaging receptiveness which has made our captive thieves and cut-throats so dear to the public heart. ”

“ But if George Sand perceived a growing candour in the deference paid to wealth, to wealth as an abstraction rather than to its possessor, a dropping of the old hypocrisies which made a pretence of doubt and disapproval, a development of honoured and authorized avarice, she was a close observer as well as a caustic commentator.
The artlessness of our American attitude might disarm criticism were anything less than public sanity at stake. We appeal simply and robustly to the love of gain, and we seldom appeal in vain. ”

“ Always the emphasis upon that powerful voice which is so mute and inglorious without the compelling mind of man. When President Cleveland said that if it took every dollar in the Treasury, and every soldier in the United States army, to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that postal card should be delivered, he was perhaps glad to think that the nation's wealth, like the nation's force, could be used to fulfil the nation's obligations. But back of wealth, and back of force, was purpose. When man lays hand upon the "hilt of action," money stops talking and obeys. ”

“ Temperamental conservatism is the dower (not to be coveted) of men in whom delight and doubt—I had almost said delight and despair—contend for mastery; whose enjoyment of colour, light, atmosphere, tradition, language and literature is balanced by chilling apprehensiveness; whose easily won pardon for the shameless revelations of an historic past brings with it no healing belief in the triumphant virtues of the future.
The conservative is not an idealist, any more than he is an optimist. Idealism has worn thin in these days of colossal violence and colossal cupidity. ”

“ But though England will doubtless fight like a lion for her tea, as for her cakes and ale, when bidden to purify herself of these indulgences, yet it is the ale, and not the tea, which has coloured her masterful literature. There are phrases so inevitable that they defy monotony. Such are the "wine-dark sea" of Greece, and the "nut-brown ale" of England. Even Lavengro, though he shared Isopel's tea, gave ale, "the true and proper drink of Englishmen," to the wandering tinker and his family. ”

“ None of us are prepared to say that a doctor and a nurse who perform their perilous duties in an epidemic are not as heroic as a doctor and a nurse who perform their perilous duties in war. There is glory enough to go around. Only he that loveth his life shall lose it. But to put a flower on a soldier's grave is a not too exuberant recognition of his service, for he, too, in his humble way made the great sacrifice.
As for the brutalities of war, who can charge that history smooths them over? ”

“ It may perhaps be trusted to make a good husband or a good vestryman, but not a good human being.
A highly rational optimist, determined to be logical at any cost, observed recently in a British review that sympathy was an invasion of liberty. “If I must sorrow because another is sorrowing, I am a slave to my feelings, and it is best that I shall be slave to nothing. Perfect freedom means that I am able to follow my own will, and my will is to be happy rather than to be sad. I love pleasure rather than pain. Therefore if I am moved to sorrow against my will, I am enslaved by my sympathy.” ”

“ No great human purpose is involved on either side, no great principle is at stake." If the spiritual fatigue of the looker-on had found an echo in the souls of those who were bearing the burden and heat of the day, the world would have sunk to destruction. "The moral triumph of Belgium," said Cardinal Mercier, when his country had been conquered and despoiled, "is an ever memorable fact for history and civilization." ”

“ Now the beast of militarism has been chained, and until it is strong enough to break its fetters (which should be a matter of years) , we can breathe freely, and try and heal our hurt. True, there is trouble enough on every side to stock a dozen worlds. The beauty of France has been unspeakably defiled. The butcheries in Belgium scarred the nation's soul. The flower of British youth have perished. Italy's gaping wounds have festered under a grievous sense of wrong. Russia seethes with hatred and strife. In the United States we see on one hand a mad welter of lawlessness, idleness, and greed ”

“ For the friend whom we love is the friend who gets wet when he is rained on, who is candid enough to admit failure, and courageous enough to mock at it. When Jane Austen wrote to her sister that she did not have a very good time at a party, because men were disposed not to ask her to dance until they could not help it, she did more than make Cassandra smile; she won her way into the hearts of readers for whom that letter was not meant. We know the "radiant" people to whom all occasions are enjoyable, who intimate—with some skill, I confess—that they carry mirth and gaiety in their wake. ”

“ The German soldiers who ravaged Belgium outraged the sentiments [Pg 269] of humanity; but the German professors who sat at their desks, alternately defending and denying these ravages, outraged, not merely humanity, but the taste and intelligence of the world. Theirs was the unpardonable sin.
Cruelty is as old as life, and will cease only when life ceases. It has passed its candid stage long, long ago. It must now be condoned for its utility, or laughed at for its fun. Our comic sense, if less full-blown than of yore, still relishes its measure of brutality. ”

“ War will pass when injustice passes. Never before, unless hope leaves the world.
That any civilized people should bar women from the practice of law is to the last degree absurd and unreasonable. There never can be an adequate cause for such an injurious exclusion. There is, in fact, no cause at all, only an arbitrary decision on the part of those who have the authority to decide. Yet nothing is less worth while than to speculate dizzily on the part women are going to play in any field from which they are at present debarred. ”

“ If belief in the perfectibility of man—and not of man only, but of governments—is the inspiration of liberalism, of radicalism, of the spirit that calls clamorously for change, and that has requisitioned the words reform and progression, sympathy with man and with his work, with the beautiful and imperfect things he has made of the chequered centuries, is the keynote of conservatism. The temperamental conservative is a type vulnerable to ridicule, yet not more innately ridiculous than his neighbours. ”

“ John D. Rockefeller's income is one hundred dollars a minute, and that his yearly income exceeds the lifetime earnings of two thousand average American citizens, and is equivalent to the income of fifty average American citizens sustained throughout the entire Christian era. It sounds more bewildering than seductive, and the breathless rush of a hundred dollars a minute is a little like the seven dinners a day which Alice in Wonderland stands ready to forego as a welcome punishment for misbehaviour. But who shall say that a hundred dollars a minute is beyond the "order of reason"? ”

“ The people of Europe want to go on living, not to be destroyed. To live is to pursue the activities proper to one's nature, to be unhindered and unthwarted in their exercise. It is not too much to say that the life of Europe is something which has persisted in spite of the history of Europe. There is nothing happy or fruitful anywhere but witnesses to the triumph of life over history."
Presuming that we are able to disentangle life from history, to sever the inseverable, is this a true statement, or merely the expression of mental and spiritual fatigue? ”

“ These qualities have lifted mankind out of many a rut, and are all we shall have to depend on while the world rolls on its way. When Aristotle said that money was barren, he did not mean that it was barren of delights; but that it had no power to get us to any place worth reaching, no power to quicken the intellectual and spiritual potencies of the soul.
The love of gold, the craving for wealth, has not lain dormant for ages in the human heart, waiting for the twentieth century to call it into being. ”

“ If a bit of flawless criticism from an expert’s lips be not educational, then there is nothing to be taught or learned in the world. Of the making of books there is no end; but now as ever the talker strikes the light, now as ever conversation is the appointed medium of intelligence and taste.
It is well that the past yields some solace to the temperamental conservative, for the present is his only on terms he cannot easily fulfil. ”

“ No man saw more clearly, or recognized more justly, the art with which his countrywomen have cemented and upheld a social state at once flexible and orderly, enjoyable and inspiriting. That they have been the allies, and not the rulers, of men in building this fine fabric of civilization was also plain to his mind. Allies and equals he held them, but nothing more. “La femme est parfaitement l’égale de l’homme, mais elle n’est que son égale.” ”

“ The rapid changes wrought by the twentieth century are less disconcerting to the temperamental conservative, who is proverbially slow, than movements which take time to be persuasive. For one thing, the vast spiral along which the world spins brings him face to face with new friends before he loses sight of the old. The revolutionary of yesterday is the reactionary of to-day, and the conservative finds himself hob-nobbing with men and women whom he had thought remote as the Poles. ”

“ Collective criticism is a fair antidote for collective despotism, and robs it of its terrors.
If we were less incorrigibly sentimental, we should be more nobly kind. Sentimentalism is, and has always been, virgin of standards. It is, and it has always been, insensible to facts. The moralists who, in the first years of the war, protested against American munitions because they were fresh-made for purposes of destruction, would have flung the victory into Germany’s hands because her vast stores of munitions had been prepared in times of peace. ”