makes a point of killing and otherwise persecuting all
those who first try to get him to move on; and when he has moved
a step farther he foolishly confers post-mortem deification on his
victims. He exactly repeats the process with all who want to move a
step yet farther."[22]

[Footnote 22: "Agnosticism," the _Nineteenth Century_, February,
1889.]

And no less does the artist, the man of high and correct feeling,
perceive the immeasurable distance between uncaring nature and
suffering men and women. There is, for instance, the passage in _The
Education of Henry Adams_, in which Adams speaks of the death of
his sister at Bagni di Lucca. "In the singular color of the Tuscan
atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting
with midsummer blood. The sick room itself glowed with the Italian joy
of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft
shadows; even the dying woman shared the sense of the Italian summer,
the soft velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fullness of
Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even
gayly, racked slowly to unconsciousness but yielding only to violence,
as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these
hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the
same air of sensual pleasure.

"Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued in the mind;
they are felt as a part of violent emotion; and the mind that feels
them is a different one from that which reasons; it is thought
of a different power and a different person. The first serious
consciousness of Nature's gesture--her attitude toward life--took form
then as a phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of force. For the first
time the stage scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt
itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies,
with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting and destroying what
these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect."

Here is a vivid interpretation of a universal human experience.
Might not any one of us who had endured it turn upon the pagan and
sentimentalist, crying in the mood of a Swift or a Voltaire, "_Ca vous
amuse, la vie_"? The abstract natural rights of the eighteenth century
smack of academic complacency before this. The indignation we feel
against the insolent individualism of a Louis XIV who cried "_L'etat
c'est moi_!" or against the i