Alike in victory and in defeat this ecstasy includes a hunger to play a part in the drama of existence with vigour and delicacy, yet it holds spiritually aloof from every cause which it champions. We give ear, so to speak, not merely to the theme of human striving, or life's evolution, but to that celestial music in which our planet's whole story is a passing melody serving an end beyond itself. We are tempted to say that our attention is directed on the form of the universe as a whole. But so bold a claim should be made only with qualification, since, after all, we experience the universe only as fragments, not as an aesthetic unity. Nevertheless it is essential to this mood that in it we do seem in some sense to glimpse a supreme form in which man is contributory, not final.

I would hazard the guess that the work of Mr. T. S. Eliot is inspired by this admiration of an objective world whose form involves both good and evil. Mr. I. A. Richards, I know, argues that such writing is concerned solely to make a "music of ideas"; but in this view he is perhaps prejudiced by his own theory of value and of the nature of art in general. It would seem more true to say that Mr. Eliot calls forth or indicates a music of objective characters. Or perhaps with more strictness we should say that he constructs symbols which are indeed themselves "music of ideas," but in their music they purport to symbolise or epitomise the music of the spheres. This is perhaps the nerve of the matter. In disillusion, we may sometimes discover, or seem to ourselves to discover, an unlooked-for music of facts. And whatever be the true epistemology of value it is very important to inspect clearly the deliverance of such experiences.

There are times in the lives of most men when they wake from the game of private living, and even from the more enthralling intricacy of public service, to see themselves and the whole race of men as dust in a far mightier sport. Some, perhaps, are wholly exempt from such moments; while others, when the blue or grey sky of their world is ripped away like a tent, bury their heads. But some, even while they resent and fear the star's sudden intrusion, are stung into a strange clarity of mind. Even while they see their comforts and defences scattered, and their most admired ends snuffed into irrelevance, even while perhaps they are dissolved in fright, they are thrust into a new and splendid view of things; so that if they were not all the while paralysed with terror they could shout in the zest of amazed admiration. Unlike hares, they crouch before the serpent of eternity not in horror merely, but in ecstasy. After cursing the universe for its seeming mental deficiency, suddenly they recognise that the gods are playing a game very different from man's game, and playing it brilliantly.

Not that they merely swing from pessimism to optimism about their private fortune or their nation's welfare or the future of man; for it must be insisted that this unique enlightenment may occur in the very agony of private defeat or public calamity, even in the terror of death, even in pain, even while they watch the sufferings of their beloveds, or the downfall of their society. Not that their agony is diminished or evaded, but rather that its very intensity wakens them to an aspect hitherto ignored. Not that with the mystics they pierce the veil of sorry phantoms and stand face to face with reality itself in all its reputed benignity. No, they see the very same world that they saw before, but they unexpectedly exult in it. They judge it to be, in some sense which cannot yet be defined, intrinsically excellent or "worthwhile." Having long lived in intimacy with the world, and having ever condemned it for not conforming to their ideal, they suddenly fall in love with it, fall into worship of it, admire in it a severity incomparably more desirable than the sweetness they had demanded of it. And as an actor may enter into the hopes and strivings of his part the more sympathetically just because he appreciates to the full the aesthetic character of the drama, so they now champion the more earnestly the very causes from which they now hold themselves spiritually aloof.

Indeed, so well schooled are they in detachment from all that they take most seriously, that their reaction even to the inhuman excellence of the cosmos is not incompatible with laughter. In mere disillusion we laugh at the hollowness of fallen idols; and our laughter is bitter. But in this other mood, so well have we learned the virtue of laughter, that humour is surprisingly infused throughout our admiration.