Inadequate, I say,
because what had to be reproduced is beyond the common experience of war,
and our imagination, luckily for our peace of mind, has remained a
slumbering faculty, notwithstanding the din of humanitarian talk and the
real progress of humanitarian ideas. Direct vision of the fact, or the
stimulus of a great art, can alone make it turn and open its eyes heavy
with blessed sleep; and even there, as against the testimony of the
senses and the stirring up of emotion, that saving callousness which
reconciles us to the conditions of our existence, will assert itself
under the guise of assent to fatal necessity, or in the enthusiasm of a
purely aesthetic admiration of the rendering. In this age of knowledge
our sympathetic imagination, to which alone we can look for the ultimate
triumph of concord and justice, remains strangely impervious to
information, however correctly and even picturesquely conveyed. As to
the vaunted eloquence of a serried array of figures, it has all the
futility of precision without force. It is the exploded superstition of
enthusiastic statisticians. An over-worked horse falling in front of our
windows, a man writhing under a cart-wheel in the streets awaken more
genuine emotion, more horror, pity, and indignation than the stream of
reports, appalling in their monotony, of tens of thousands of decaying
bodies tainting the air of the Manchurian plains, of other tens of
thousands of maimed bodies groaning in ditches, crawling on the frozen
ground, filling the field hospitals; of the hundreds of thousands of
survivors no less pathetic and even more tragic in being left alive by
fate to the wretched exhaustion of their pitiful toil.
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