in us will be not interest but a kind of
wondering weariness--weariness at the weary fate of men who could
'_think so brainsickly of things_.' So in like manner will all the
emphasis and elaboration in the literature of sensuality become a
weariness without meaning, also. Congreve's caustic wit will turn to
spasmodic truism; and Theophile Gautier's excess of erotic ardour, into
prolix and fantastic affectation. All its sublimity, its brilliance, and
a large part of its interest, depend in art on the existence of the
moral sense, and would in its absence be absolutely unproducible. The
reason of this is plain. The natural pains and pleasures of life,
merely manipulated by the imagination and the memory, have too little
variety or magnitude in them without further aid. Art without the moral
sense to play upon, is like a pianist whose keyboard is reduced to a
single octave.

And exactly the same will be the case with life. Life will lose just the
same qualities that art will--neither more nor less. There will be no
introduction of any new interests, but merely the elimination of certain
existing ones. The subtraction of the moral sense will not revolutionise
human purposes, but simply make them listless. It will reduce to a
parti-coloured level the whole field of pains and pleasures. The moral
element gives this level a new dimension. Working underneath it as a
subterranean force, it convulses and divides its surface. Here vast
areas subside into valleys and deep abysses; there mountain peaks shoot
up heavenwards. Mysterious shadows begin to throng the hollows; new
tints and half-tints flicker and shift everywhere; mists hang floating
over ravines and precipices; the vegetation grows more various, here
slenderer, there richer and more luxuriant; whilst high over all, bright
on the topmost summits, is a new strange something--the white snows of
purity, catching the morning streaks on them of a brighter day, that has
never as yet risen upon the world below.

With the subtraction, or nullifying, of the moral force, all this will
go. The mountains will sink, the valleys be filled up; all will be once
more dead level--still indeed parti-coloured, but without light and
shadow, and with the colours reduced in number, and robbed of all their
vividness. The chiaro-oscuro will have gone from life; the moral
landscape, whose beauty and grandeur is at present so much extolled,
will have dissolved like an insubstantial pageant. Vice a