laugh at human life. Its
title might properly be 'Is Life a Failure?' and leave the five acts
to play with the answer. I am not at all sure that the author meant to
laugh at life. I only notice that he has done it. Without putting into
words any ungracious or discourteous things about life, the episodes in
the piece seem to be saying all the time, inarticulately: 'Note what
a silly poor thing human life is; how childish its ambitions, how
ridiculous its pomps, how trivial its dignities, how cheap its
heroisms, how capricious its course, how brief its flight, how stingy
in happinesses, how opulent in miseries, how few its prides, how
multitudinous its humiliations, how comic its tragedies, how tragic
its comedies, how wearisome and monotonous its repetition of its stupid
history through the ages, with never the introduction of a new detail;
how hard it has tried, from the Creation down, to play itself upon its
possessor as a boon and has never proved its case in a single instance!'

Take note of some of the details of the piece. Each of the five acts
contains an independent tragedy of its own. In each act someone's
edifice of hope, or of ambition, or of happiness, goes down in ruins.
Even Appelles' perennial youth is only a long tragedy, and his life a
failure. There are two martyrdoms in the piece; and they are curiously
and sarcastically contrasted. In the first act the pagans persecute Zoe,
the Christian girl, and a pagan mob slaughters her. In the fourth act
those same pagans--now very old and zealous--are become Christians, and
they persecute the pagans; a mob of them slaughters the pagan youth,
Nymphas, who is standing up for the old gods of his fathers. No remark
is made about this picturesque failure of civilisation; but there
it stands, as an unworded suggestion that civilisation, even when
Christianised, was not able wholly to subdue the natural man in that
old day--just as in our day the spectacle of a shipwrecked French
crew clubbing women and children who tried to climb into the lifeboats
suggests that civilisation has not succeeded in entirely obliterating
the natural man even yet. Common sailors a year ago, in Paris, at a
fire, the aristocracy of the same nation clubbed girls and women out of
the way to save themselves. Civilisation tested at top and bottom both,
you see. And in still another panic of fright we have this same
tough civilisation saving its honour by condemning an innocent man to
multiform