the pages of Troilus and
Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Timon of Athens. What we
guessed as we read Hamlet and Lear grows a certainty as we read
these plays.

Here the "gentle Shakespeare" does the three things that are most
unpardonable. He unmasks virtue; he betrays Woman; and he curses
the gods. The most intransigent of modern revolutionaries might
learn a trick or two from this sacred poet. In Lear he puts the very
voice of Anarchy into the mouth of the King--"Die for adultery?
No!" "Handy-dandy, which is the Magistrate and which is the
Thief?" "A dog's obeyed in office."

Have I succeeded in making clear what I feel about the
Shakespearean attitude? At bottom, it is absolutely sceptical. Deep
yawns below Deep; and if we cannot read "the writing upon the
wall," the reason may be that there is no writing there. Having lifted
a corner of the Veil of Isis, having glanced once into that
Death-Kingdom where grope the roots of the Ash-Tree whose name is
Fear, we return to the surface, from Nadir to Zenith, and become
"superficial"--"out of profundity."

The infinite spaces, as Pascal said, are "frightful." That way
madness lies. And those who would be sane upon earth must drug
themselves with the experience, or with the spectacle of the
experience, of human passion. Within this charmed circle, and here
alone, they may be permitted to forget the Outer Terror.

The noble spirit is not the spirit that condescends to pamper in itself
those inflated moods of false optimistic hope, which, springing from
mere physiological well-being, send us leaping and bounding, with
such boisterous assurance, along the sunny road. Such pragmatic
self-deception is an impertinence in the presence of a world like this.

It is a sign of what one might call a philosophically ill-bred nature. It
is the indecent "gratitude" of the pig over his trough. It is the little
yellow eye of sanctified bliss turned up to the God who _"must_ be
in His Heaven" if _we_ are so privileged. This "never doubting
good will triumph" is really, when one examines it, nothing but the
inverted prostration of the helot-slave, glad to have been allowed to
get so totally drunk! It blusters and swaggers, but at heart it is base
and ignoble. For it is not sensitive enough to feel that the Universe
_cannot be pardoned_ for the cry of one tortured creature, and that
all "the worlds we shall traverse" cannot make up for the despair of
one human child.

To be "cheerfu