Older men who had never tried to understand them, stood amazed; they
remembered their own commonplace, bungling youth, full of petty
egotisms, small ambitions, and mean pleasures. As they could not
recognise themselves in their children they attributed to the war this
flowering of virtues which had been growing up for twenty years around
their indifference and which the war was about to reap. Even near
a father as large-minded as Clerambault, Maxime was blighted.
Clerambault was interested in spreading his own overflowing diffuse
nature, too much so to see clearly and aid those whom he loved: he
brought to them the warm shadow of his thought, but he stood between
them and the sun.
These young people sought employment for their strength which really
embarrassed them, but they did not find it in the ideals of the
noblest among their elders; the humanitarianism of a Clerambault was
too vague, it contented itself with pleasant hopes, without risk or
vigour, which the quietude of a generation grown old in the talkative
peace of Parliaments and Academies, alone could have permitted. Except
as an oratorical exercise it had never tried to foresee the perils of
the future, still less had it thought to determine its attitude in the
day when the danger should be near.
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