It was a little before five when the trio reached the Metropole. A suite of rooms had been chartered by the Hungarian capitalist, and there he had already established a secretary and a clerk or two to look after his affairs. He was seated in his shirtsleeves, with a big black cigar in his mouth, when his visitors entered. He extended two fingers to Isidore, to the others he merely bowed.
A good many refugees were on their way to The Netherlands, but the bulk of the crowd had passed before my visit along the long road which I walked now in the opposite direction. I did not arrive in210 Antwerp before nightfall and was then very tired. The town was dark, dismal, and deserted, and only German soldiers went about in the streets, apparently looking in vain for a shop or caf where they might find some diversion. I myself, exhausted by a walk of twenty-five miles, sauntered along, constantly looking for some place or other to pass the night. Not a shop or hotel was open, and yet my stomach was craving for food, my body for rest. At last I met a policeman and told him of my difficulty.But it was not merely in the writings of professed philosophers that the new aspect of Platonism found expression. All great art embodies in one form or another the leading conceptions of its age; and the latter half of the seventeenth century found such a manifestation in the comedies of Molire. If these works stand at the head of French literature, they owe their position not more to their authors brilliant wit than to his profound philosophy of life; or rather, we should say that with him wit and philosophy are one. The comic power of Shakespeare was shown by resolving the outward appearances of this world into a series of dissolving illusions. Like Spinoza and Malebranche, Molire turns the illusion in, showing what perverted opinions men form of themselves and others, through misconceptions and passions either of spontaneous growth or sedulously fostered by designing hands. Society, with him, seems almost entirely made up of pretenders and their dupes, both characters being not unfrequently combined in the same person, who is made a victim through his desire to pass for what he is not and cannot be. And this is what essentially distinguishes the art of Molire from the New Comedy of Athens, which he, like other moderns, had at first felt inclined to imitate until the success of the Prcieuses Ridicules showed him where his true opportunities lay. For the New Comedy was Aristotelian where it was not simply humanist; that is415 to say, it was an exhibition of types like those sketched by Aristotles disciple, Theophrastus, and already prefigured in the masters own Ethics. These were the perennial forms in a world of infinite and perishing individual existences, not concealed behind phenomena, but incorporated in them and constituting their essential truth. The Old Comedy is something different again; it is pre-philosophic, and may be characterised as an attempt to describe great political interests and tendencies through the medium of myths and fables and familiar domesticities, just as the old theories of Nature, the old lessons of practical wisdom, and the first great national chronicles had been thrown into the same homely form.572In the case of tools composed partly of iron and partly of steel, steel laid as it is called, the tendency to crack in hardening may be avoided in most cases by hammering the steel edge at a low temperature until it is so expanded that when cooled in hardening it will only contract to a state of rest and correspond to the iron part; the same result may be produced by curving a piece, giving convexity to the steel side before hardening.Dick located the crack-up, Sandy indicated the spot and the pilot dropped so low that his trucks almost grazed the waving eel-grass.Later on I heard the same story from several other inhabitants.I succeeded in laying my hands on an original copy of a proclamation that ought not to have been posted before the following day. I took the document with me to The Netherlands, and it is of special interest, because in it the Germans admit to have tyrannised the people, and to have not only burned Louvain, but also ransacked the town. The proclamation had been drawn up in concert with the German authorities and was approved by them. It was in French and in Flemish, and read as follows:
