ctuating and as dimly wavering as this modern scepticism
would make it. Life is at once more beautiful and far more tragic.
Though surrounded by mystery the grand outlines of the world
remain austerely and sternly the same. The sun rises and sets. The
moon draws the tides. Man goes forth to his work and his labour
until the evening. Man is born; man loves and hates; man dies.
And over him the same unfathomable spaces yawn. And under
him the same unfathomable spaces yawn. Time, with its seasons,
passes him in unalterable procession. From birth to death his soul
wrestles with the universe; and the drama of which he is the
protagonist lifts the sublime monotony of its scenery from the
zenith to the nadir.

Let any man ask himself what it is that hurts him most in life and
yet seems most real to him. He will be compelled to answer . . .
"the atrocious regularity of things and their obscene necessity."
The very persons who talk so glibly about the "fluidity" and
"evasiveness" of life are persons in whose own flesh the
wedge-like granite of fate has lodged itself with crushing finality.
Life has indeed been too rigid and too stark for them; and in
place of seizing it in an embrace as formidable as its own, they go
aside muttering, "life is evasive; life is fluid; life brims over."

This sceptical dogma of "evasiveness" is generally found in
alliance with some vague modern "religion" whose chief object is
to strip the world of the dignity of its real tragedy and endow it
with the indignity of some pretended assurance. This is the role of
that superficial optimism so inherently repugnant to the aesthetic
sense.

Such apologists for a shallow and ignoble idealism are in the habit
of declaring that "the tendency of modern thought" is to render
"materialism" unthinkable; but when these people speak of
materialism they are thinking of the austere limits of that vast
objective spectacle into which we are all born. This spectacle is
indeed mysterious. It is indeed staggering and awful. But it is
irrevocably _there_. And no vague talk about the "evasiveness"
and "over-brimmingness" of life can alter one jot or tittle of its
eternal outlines.

From the sublime terror of this extraordinary drama such persons
are anxious to escape, because the iron of it has entered into their
souls. They do not see that the only "escape" offered by the reality
of things is a change of attitude towards this spectacle, not an
assertion that the for