it is not a solemnity. Rather it is a towering
levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt
when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as
run. To smatter the tongues of men and angels, to dabble in the dreadful
sciences, to juggle with pillars and pyramids and toss up the planets
like balls, this is that inner audacity and indifference which the human
soul, like a conjurer catching oranges, must keep up forever. This is
that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity. And the elegant female,
drooping her ringlets over her water-colors, knew it and acted on it.
She was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She was maintaining
the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the most mysterious of
superiorities and perhaps the most unattainable. She was maintaining
the prime truth of woman, the universal mother: that if a thing is worth
doing, it is worth doing badly.

PART FIVE. THE HOME OF MAN

I. THE EMPIRE OF THE INSECT

A cultivated Conservative friend of mine once exhibited great distress
because in a gay moment I once called Edmund Burke an atheist. I need
scarcely say that the remark lacked something of biographical precision;
it was meant to. Burke was certainly not an atheist in his conscious
cosmic theory, though he had not a special and flaming faith in God,
like Robespierre. Nevertheless, the remark had reference to a truth
which it is here relevant to repeat. I mean that in the quarrel over the
French Revolution, Burke did stand for the atheistic attitude and mode
of argument, as Robespierre stood for the theistic. The Revolution
appealed to the idea of an abstract and eternal justice, beyond all
local custom or convenience. If there are commands of God, then there
must be rights of man. Here Burke made his brilliant diversion; he did
not attack the Robespierre doctrine with the old mediaeval doctrine of
jus divinum (which, like the Robespierre doctrine, was theistic), he
attacked it with the modern argument of scientific relativity; in short,
the argument of evolution. He suggested that humanity was everywhere
molded by or fitted to its environment and institutions; in fact, that
each people practically got, not only the tyrant it deserved, but the
tyrant it ought to have. "I know nothing of the rights of men," he said,
"but I know something of the rights of Englishmen." There you have the
essential atheist. His argument is that we have got some