Points of friction

BY AGNES REPPLIER, Litt.D. AUTHOR OF “BOOKS AND MEN,” “ESSAYS IN IDLENESS,” “COUNTER-CURRENTS,” ETC., ETC.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY AGNES REPPLIER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Six of the ten essays in this volume—“Living in History,” “Dead Authors,” “Consolations of the Conservative,” “The Cheerful Clan,” “Woman Enthroned,” and “Money”—are reprinted through the courtesy of The Atlantic Monthly ; “The Beloved Sinner” and “The Strayed Prohibitionist” through the courtesy of The Century Magazine ; “Cruelty and Humour” through the courtesy of The Yale Review ; “The Virtuous Victorian” through the courtesy of The Nation .
POINTS OF FRICTION
When Mr. Bagehot spoke his luminous words about “a fatigued way of looking at great subjects,” he gave us the key to a mental attitude which perhaps is not the modern thing it seems. There were, no doubt, Greeks and Romans in plenty to whom the “glory” and the “grandeur” of Greece and Rome were less exhilarating than they were to Edgar Poe,—Greeks and Romans who were spiritually palsied by the great emotions which presumably accompany great events. They may have been philosophers, or humanitarians, or academists. They may have been conscientious objectors, or conscienceless shirkers, or perhaps plain men and women with a natural gift of indecision, a natural taste for compromise and awaiting developments. In the absence of newspapers and pamphlets, these peaceful pagans were compelled to express their sense of fatigue to their neighbours at the games or in the market-place; and their neighbours—if well chosen—sighed with them over the intensity of life, the formidable happenings of history.
Since August, 1914, the turmoil and anguish incidental to the world’s greatest war have accentuated every human type,—heroic, base, keen, and evasive. The strain of five years’ fighting was borne with astounding fortitude, and Allied statesmen and publicists saw to it that the clear outline of events should not be blurred by ignorance or misrepresentation. If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes. Men, “living between two eternities, and warring against oblivion,” make their indelible record on its pages; and other men receive these pages as their best inheritance, their avenue to understanding, their key to life.