In regard to humbler citizens they are apt to carry charity to great lengths. In addition to the incident recorded by Andersen they cherish another legend about the child. According to the tradition, he wrote a will just before he died in which he said, "Thank heaven I leave not a single adjective to any of my descendants. I have spent them all."
The clan is notoriously extravagant. They live for all the world like Bedouins of the Sahara without thought of the possibility of a rainy day. Their gaudiest years come early in life. Middle age and beyond is apt to be tragic. Almost nothing in the experience of mankind is quite so heartrending as the spectacle of one of these young critics, grown gray, coming face to face in his declining years with a masterpiece. At such times he is apt to be seized with a tremor and stricken dumb. Undoubtedly he is tormented with the memory of all the adjectives which he flung away in his youth. They are gone beyond recall. He fumbles in his purse and finds nothing except small change worn smooth. The best he can do is to fling out a "highly creditable piece of work" and go on his way.
Still he has had fun for his adjectives for all that. There is a compensating glow in the heart of the young critic when he remembers the day an obscure author came to him asking bread, though rather expecting a stone, and he with a flourish reached down into the breadbox and gave the poor man layer cake.
"After all," one of the young critics told me in justifying his mode of life, "it may be just as tragic as you say to be caught late in life with a masterpiece in front of you and not a single adequate adjective left in your purse. Yes, I'll grant you that it's unfortunate. But there's still another contingency which I mean to avoid. Wouldn't it be a rotten sell to die with half your adjectives still unused? You know you can't take them with you to heaven. Of what possible use would they be up there? Even the bravest superlatives would seem pretty mean and petty in that land. Think of being blessed with milk and honey for the first time and trying to express your gratitude and wonder with, 'The best I ever tasted.' No, sir. I'm going to get ready for the new eternal words by using up all the old ones before I die."
XX
THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER
They call him "the unknown hero." It is enough, it is better that we should know him as "the unknown soldier." "Hero" suggests a superman and implies somebody exalted above his fellows. This man was one of many. We do not know what was in his heart when he died. It is entirely possible that he was a fearful man. He may even have gone unwillingly into the fight. That does not matter now. The important thing is that he was alive and is dead.
He was drawn from a far edge of the world by the war and in it he lost even his identity. War may have been well enough in the days when it was a game for heroes, but now it sweeps into the combat everything and every man within a nation. The unknown soldier stands for us as symbol of this blind and far-reaching fury of modern conflict. His death was in vain unless it helps us to see that the whole world is our business. No one is too great to be concerned with the affairs of mankind, and no one too humble.
The unknown soldier was a typical American and it is probable that once upon a time he used to speak of faraway folk as "those foreigners." He thought they were no kin of his, but he died in one of the distant lands. His blood and the blood of all the world mingled in a common stream.
The body of the unknown soldier has come home, but his spirit will wander with his brothers. There will be no rest for his soul until the great democracy of death has been translated into the unity of life.