is that there is nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting and degradingly inane." "But are there no great conceptions, no great words of consolation: patriotism, right, freedom, humanity, art? Yes, those words there are and many men live by them and for them. And yet it seems to me that if Shakespeare could be born again he would have no cause to retract his Hamlet, his Lear. His searching glance would discover nothing new in human life: still the same motley picture--in reality so little complex--would unroll beside him in its terrifying sameness. The same credulity and the same cruelty, the same lust of blood, of gold, of filth, the same vulgar pleasures, the same senseless sufferings in the name ... why in the name of the very same shams that Aristophanes jeered at two thousand years ago, the same coarse snares in which the many-headed beast, the multitude, is caught so easily, the same workings of power, the same traditions of slavishness, the same innateness of falsehood--in a word, the same busy squirrel's turning in the old, unchanged wheel...." With this passage of weary disillusionment and disgust of life we may compare one in _Phantoms_, written a year earlier: "These human flies, a thousand times paltrier than flies; their dwellings glued together with filth, the pitiful traces of their tiny, monotonous bustle, of their comic struggle with the unchanging and inevitable, how revolting it all suddenly was to me"; and one, no less significant, in the opening pages of _The Torrents of Spring_: "He thought of the vanity, the uselessness, the vulgar falsity of all things human.... Everywhere the same everlasting pouring of water into a sieve, the everlasting beating of the air, everywhere the same self-deception--half in good faith, half conscious--any toy to amuse the child, so long as it keeps him from crying. And then all of a sudden old age drops down like snow on the head, and with it the ever-growing, ever-growing and devouring dread of death ... and the plunge into the abyss."