I saw in one of the daily illustrated papers the other day a little picture—­a snapshot from the front—­which filled me with a curious emotion.  It was taken in some village behind the German lines.  A handsome, upright boy of about seventeen, holding an accordion under his arm—­a wandering Russian minstrel, says the comment—­has been brought before a fat, elderly, Landsturm officer to be interrogated.  The officer towers up, in a spiked helmet, holding his sword-hilt in one hand and field-glasses in the other, looking down at the boy truculently and fiercely.  Another officer stands by smiling.  The boy himself is gazing up, nervous and frightened, staring at his formidable captor, a peasant beside him, also looking agitated.  There is nothing to indicate what happened, but I hope they let the boy go!  The officer seemed to me to typify the tyranny of human aggressiveness, at its stupidest and ugliest.  The boy, graceful, appealing, harmless, appeared, I thought, to stand for the spirit of beauty, which wanders about the world, lost in its own dreams, and liable to be called sharply to account when it strays within the reach of human aggressiveness occupied in the congenial task of making havoc of the world’s peaceful labours.

The Landsturm officer in the picture had so obviously the best of it; he was thoroughly enjoying his own formidableness; while the boy had the look of an innocent, bright-eyed creature caught in a trap, and wondering miserably what harm it could have done.

Something of the same kind is always going on all the world over; the collision of the barbarous and disciplined forces of life with the beauty-loving, detached instinct of man.  The latter cannot give a reason for its existence, and yet I am by no means sure that it is not going to triumph in the end.

There is every reason to believe that within the last twenty years the sowing of education broadcast has had an effect upon the human outlook, rather than perhaps upon the human character, which has not been adequately estimated.  The crop is growing up all about us, and we hardly yet know what it is.  I am going to speak of one out of the many results of this upon one particular section of the community, because I have become personally aware of it in certain very definite ways.  It is easy to generalise about tendencies, but I am here speaking from actual evidence of an unmistakable kind.

The section of the community of which I speak is that which can be roughly described as the middle class—­homes, that is, which are removed from the urgent, daily pressure of wage-earning; homes where there is a certain security of outlook, of varying wealth, with professional occupation in the background; homes in which there is some leisure; and some possibility of stimulating, by reading, by talk, by societies, an interest in ideas.  It is not a tough, intellectual interest, but it ends in a very definite desire to idealise life a little, to harmonise it, to give colour to it, to speculate about it, to lift it out of the region of immediate, practical needs, to try experiments, to live on definite lines, with a definite aim in sight—­that aim being to enlarge, to adorn, to enrich life.