They left their creative work to
drudge at destruction, exactly as they would have left it to take
their turn at the pumps in a sinking ship. They did not, like
some of the conscientious objectors, hold back because the ship
had been neglected by its officers and scuttled by its wreckers.
The ship had to be saved, even if Newton had to leave his
fluxions and Michael Angelo his marbles to save it; so they threw
away the tools of their beneficent and ennobling trades, and took
up the blood-stained bayonet and the murderous bomb, forcing
themselves to pervert their divine instinct for perfect artistic
execution to the effective handling of these diabolical things,
and their economic faculty for organization to the contriving of
ruin and slaughter. For it gave an ironic edge to their tragedy
that the very talents they were forced to prostitute made the
prostitution not only effective, but even interesting; so that
some of them were rapidly promoted, and found themselves actually
becoming artists in wax, with a growing relish for it, like
Napoleon and all the other scourges of mankind, in spite of
themselves. For many of them there was not even this consolation.
They "stuck it," and hated it, to the end.
Evil in the Throne of Good
This distress of the gentle was so acute that those who shared it
in civil life, without having to shed blood with their own hands,
or witness destruction with their own eyes, hardly care to
obtrude their own woes.
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