Poets are proverbially bad politicians.
It was a reply to "_The Appeal to the Dead_," that Barres, like an owl
perched on a cypress in a graveyard, had wailed forth.
_TO THE LIVING_
_Death rules the world. You that are living, rise and shake off the
yoke! It is not enough that the nations are destroyed. They are bidden
to glorify Death, to march towards it with songs; they are expected to
admire their own sacrifice ... to call it the "most glorious, the most
enviable fate" ... but how untrue this is! Life is the great, the holy
thing, and love of life is the first of virtues. The men of today have
it no longer; this war has shown that, and even worse. It has proved
that during the last fifteen years, many have hoped for these horrible
upheavals--you cannot deny it! No man loves life who has no better use
for it than to throw it into the jaws of Death. Life is a burden to
many--to you rich of the middle-class, reactionary conservatives,
whose moral dyspepsia takes away your appetite, everything tastes flat
and bitter. Everything bores you. It is a heavy burden also to you
proletarians, poor, unhappy, discouraged by your hard lot. In the dull
obscurity of your lives, hopeless of any change for the better,--Oh,
Ye of little faith!--your only chance of escape seems to be through
an act of violence which lifts you out of the mire for one moment at
least, even if it be the last.
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