It is a peculiarity of Beethoven that he can use the words “best” and “noblest” without making an intelligent man laugh up his sleeve. If we do succeed in laughing it is with the wrong side of our mouths. The very words “good,” “noble,” “spiritual,” “sublime,” have all become in our time synonymous with humbug. In Beethoven’s music they take on a new and tremendous significance and not all the corrosive acid of the most powerful intellect and the profoundest scepticism can burn through them into any leaden substratum. They are gold throughout. Am I wrong in thinking this an achievement without parallel in the modern world? Point to me in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, _anywhere_, one other artist who has recreated (not paid lip-service to) the meaning of good and left to us the _imagination_ of a love transcending both the sacred and the profane. There is none. We cannot live without values and at present we cannot conceive a state when men would not ask themselves: “Why do I live?” “Is life worth living?” This is the theme which touches us to-day when we marry and settle down with our love, measure the spots on the Sun, and fear neither plagues, pirates, nor eclipses: “Here I am an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain Nor knee-deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by flies, fought. My house is a decayed house, And the jew squats on the window-sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. The goat coughs at night in the field overhead; Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds. The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea, Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter. I am an old man, A dull head among windy spaces.” The bravest, the most intelligent, the most sensitive are oppressed with that profound sense of the futility of life which Mr. Eliot expresses so admirably in the above lines. It is, indeed, the constant burden of the most characteristic of our modern poets: “This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.” Yes, we are convinced. This _is_ the way the world ends and we have no more faith in anything. Democracy, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, have all been added to the list of the Great Superstitions. Mussolini and Lenin have made moonshine of Socialism and Communism. God is a word used only in treatises on tribal magic, when it is spelt correctly as god. Love has been appropriated by the writers of silly magazine stories and even sillier novels. All honest men are reduced to silence before the daily avalanche of fraudulent lies from pulpit, printing press, parliament and platform. Everywhere men speak with the tongues of serpents and the minds of manufacturers of chewing gum. And deep in all men’s hearts there is only one thought: