He is so much of a voice that, for him,
silence is like death; and the postulate was, that there is a group
alive, clustered on his threshold to watch the last flicker of light on a
black sky, to hear the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the
earth. It is safe to affirm that, if anybody, it will be the imaginative
man who would be moved to speak on the eve of that day without
to-morrow--whether in austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic
comment, who can guess?
For my own part, from a short and cursory acquaintance with my kind, I am
inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate, strange as it
may appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable. For mankind is
delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity. It
will sleep on the battlefield among its own dead, in the manner of an
army having won a barren victory. It will not know when it is beaten.
And perhaps it is right in that quality. The victories are not, perhaps,
so barren as it may appear from a purely strategical, utilitarian point
of view. Mr. Henry James seems to hold that belief. Nobody has rendered
better, perhaps, the tenacity of temper, or known how to drape the robe
of spiritual honour about the drooping form of a victor in a barren
strife.
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