Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/133

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IX
Mr. Brownell on the Quest of Perfection

IT is generally understood, without argument or illustration, that after the late war our morale, using the word in its most comprehensive sense, was "shot to pieces. "The task of gathering up the fragments and putting them together again has been undertaken by all sorts of people with various degrees of success or failure. The reconstructors have encountered some opposition from the small group of anarchical minds who really prefer their morale in pieces, and still more opposition from the large body of malcontented minds who would rather have morale remain shattered than see it reconstructed on the antebellum model.

Temperamental reactionaries react and are at peace. Some rest in the capacious old bosoms of Academic Orthodoxy, some in Business as Usual, some in Fundamentalism, some in the Ku-Klux Klan. But among the younger sort who have tasted the uncharted freedom of recent years there is a manifest disposition to say: "Yes, we, too, are a little weary of roaming like homeless winds. We, too, recognize in ourselves what you call the elementary human craving to be formed. But rather than submit to be shaped by such molds as you offer us we will shamelessly incur the reproach of aimlessness, futility and shapelessness."

The problem is to raise a flag from which every