ll
serious speech of men, as that of Seventeenth-Century Puritans,
Twelfth-Century Catholics, German Poets of this Century, has
become jargon, more or less insane. Cromwell was mad and a
quack; Anselm, Becket, Goethe, _ditto ditto._

Perhaps few narratives in History or Mythology are more
significant than that Moslem one, of Moses and the Dwellers by
the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same
Asphaltic Lake; and having forgotten, as we are all too prone to
do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the falsities
and outer semblances of it, were fallen into sad conditions,--
verging indeed towards a certain far deeper Lake. Whereupon it
pleased kind Heaven to send them the Prophet Moses, with an
instructive word of warning, out of which might have sprung
'remedial measures' not a few. But no: the men of the Dead Sea
discovered, as the valet-species always does in heroes or
prophets, no comeliness in Moses; listened with real tedium to
Moses, with light grinning, or with splenetic sniffs and sneers,
affecting even to yawn; and signified, in short, that they found
him a humbug, and even a bore. Such was the candid theory these
men of the Asphalt Lake formed to themselves of Moses, That
probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore.

Moses withdrew; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not
withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit
them, were all 'changed into Apes;'* sitting on the trees there,
grinning now in the most _un_affected manner; gibbering and
chattering _complete_ nonsense; finding the whole Universe now a
most indisputable Humbug! The Universe has _become_ a Humbug to
these Apes who thought it one! There they sit and chatter, to
this hour: only, I think, every Sabbath there returns to them a
bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence; and they sit,
with their wizened smoke-dried visages, and such an air of
supreme tragicality as Apes may; looking out, through those
blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest
universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered Dusk of
Things; wholly an Uncertainty, Unintelligibility, they and it;
and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmusical chatter
or mew:--truest, tragicalest Humbug conceivable by the mind of
man or ape! They made no use of their souls; and so have lost
them. Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with
unmusical screeches, a