instinctive kindliness and whose Tails is stupidity and instinctive cruelty. So much for the last consolation of philosophy. We are left with reality. My office in Gog’s Court is situated, I repeat, at the very heart of it, the palpitating heart. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER II Gog’s Court, the navel of reality! Repeating those verses of mine in the silence, I intimately felt the truth of it. For if of old the sons of squires And livery stable keepers turned To flowers and hope, to Greece and God, We, in our later age have learned That we are native where we walk. My voice boomed out oracularly across the flat sea. Nothing so richly increases the significance of a statement as to hear it uttered by one’s own voice, in solitude. “Resolved, so help me God, never to touch another drop!” Those solemn words, breathed out in a mist of whiskey—how often, in dark nights, on icy mornings, how often have they been uttered! And the portentous imprecation seems to engage the whole universe to do battle on behalf of the Better Self against its besetting vice. Thrilling and awful moment! Merely for the sake of living through it again, for the sake of once more breaking the empty silence with the reverberating Stygian oath, it is well worth neglecting the good resolution. I say nothing of the pleasures of inebriation. My own brief recital served to confirm for me the truth of my speculations. For not only was I uttering the substance of my thoughts aloud; I was voicing it in terms of a formula that had an element, I flatter myself, of magic about it. What is the secret of these verbal felicities? How does it come about that a commonplace thought embodied by a poet in some abracadabrical form seems bottomlessly profound, while a positively false and stupid notion may be made by its expression to seem true? Frankly, I don’t know. And what is more, I have never found any one who could give an answer to the riddle. What is it that makes the two words “defunctive music” as moving as the dead march out of the _Eroica_ and the close of _Coriolan_? Why should it be somehow more profoundly comic to “call Tullia’s ape a marmosite” than to write a whole play of Congreve? And the line, “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”—why should it in effect lie where it does? Mystery. This game of art strangely resembles conjuring. The quickness of the tongue deceives the brain. It has happened, after all, often enough. Old Shakespeare, for example. How many critical brains have been deceived by the quickness of _his_ tongue! Because he can say “Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves,” and “defunctive music,” and “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame” and all the rest of it, we credit him with philosophy, a moral purpose and the most penetrating psychology. Whereas his