Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/98

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Masefield's Gallipoli. But it takes you overseas and puts you where you can see what went on here and there. Not the whole story but a part of it that you are inclined to blink at. Furthermore, it's literature; it has a personality of its own with a peculiar humor, blending irony, tenderness, grimness, resignation—faithfully expressing the mixture of astonishment, curiosity, and dismay with which the average man in the years of our Lord 1914-1917 dumbly assisted the lords of the earth in consigning civilization temporarily—I said 'temporarily'—to the devil."

"I have read the book," I said, "but with rather less enthusiasm. I must say it affected me very much as certain chapters in the modern novels do, chapters that I should like to tear out, chapters considering with a morbid and unholy curiosity and publicity the physiological processes attendant on an event which in the older fiction was smilingly reported by physician or nurse to a man 'pacing restlessly back and forth in the room below.' I object to these chapters because they tend to produce extravagant and unnecessary terror before an event which really must be faced if the agreeable race to which we belong is to increase and multiply and spread the blessings of civilization among