nd playing with his humours
and his dreams to soften the sting of that brutish reality which he
was doomed to unmask. The best way of indicating the personal
mood which emerges as his final attitude is to describe it as that of
the perfectly natural man confronting the universe. Of course, there
is no such "perfectly natural man," but he is a legitimate lay-figure,
and we all approximate to him at times. The natural man, in his
unsophisticated hours, takes the Universe at its surface value, neither
rejecting the delicate compensations, nor mitigating the cruelty of
the grotesque farce. The natural man accepts _what is given._ He
swallows the chaotic surprises, the extravagant accidents, the whole
fantastic "pell-mell." He accepts, too, the traditional pieties of his
race, their "hope against hope," their gracious ceremonial, their
consecration of birth and death. He accepts these, not because he is
confident of their "truth" but because _they are there;_ because they
have been there so long, and have interwoven themselves with the
chances and changes of the whole dramatic spectacle.

He accepts them spontaneously, humorously, affectionately; not
anxious to improve them--what would be the object of that?--and
certainly not seeking to controvert them. He reverences this Religion
of his Race not only because it has its own sad, pathetic beauty, but
because it has got itself involved in the common burden; lightening
such a burden here, making it, perhaps, a little heavier there, but
lending it a richer tone, a subtler colour, a more significant shape. It
does not trouble the natural man that Religion should deal with "the
Impossible." Where, in such a world as this, does _that_ begin? He
has no agitating desire to reconcile it with reason.

At the bottom of his soul he has a shrewd suspicion that it rather
grew out of the earth than fell from the sky, but that does not
concern him. It may be based upon no eternal verity. It may lead to
no certain issue. It may be neither very "useful" or very "moral." But
it is, at any rate, a beautiful work of imaginative art, and it lends life
a certain dignity that nothing can quite replace. As a matter of fact,
the natural man's attitude to these things does not differ much from
the attitude of the great artists. It is only that a certain lust for
creation, and a certain demonic curiosity, scourge these latter on to
something beyond passive resignation.

A Da Vinci or a Goethe accept