The war brings up with ever greater insistence the two antagonistic feelings of which one was always conscious: That men are radically alike. And that there are two kinds of men, subtly but hopelessly divided from each other.

Men are radically alike in the way they meet danger and death, in their sentiment and in their laughter, in their endurance, their passions, their self-sacrifice, their selfishness, their superstitions, and their gratitude. They are radically divided by possession, or not, of that extra sensitiveness to proportion, form, colour, sound, which we call the sense of beauty. Would there still be war in a world the most of whose dwellers had the sense of beauty? I think not. And they who have it, so few by comparison, are tragically compelled to live and bear their part in this hell, created by a world of which they are not.

These two kinds of men shade subtly the one into the other; but the division is real, for all that—the bristles on the backs of each true specimen on either side of the line rise at sight of the other sort.

And the war with its toil and hardships, its common humanity, deaths and dangers and sacrifices shared, will not bring them one jot nearer one to the other. Is there evidence for thinking that a sense of beauty is more common than it was? I am not sure. But there is certainly no chance that the sense of beauty can increase within measurable time, so as to give its possessors a majority. No chance that wars will cease from that reason. The little world of beauty-lovers will for many ages yet, perhaps always, be pitifully in tow, half-drowned by the following surge of the big insensitive world when it loses for a time what little feeling for harmony it has, and goes full speed ahead.