“No more tickets downstairs; here’s one to the smoking gallery.”

You hesitate.  You beat back your suspicions.  After all, a cigarette with Charlie Chaplin—­then a white man pushes by—­

“Three in the orchestra.”

“Yes, sir.”  And in he goes.

Suddenly your heart chills.  You turn yourself away toward the golden twinkle of the purple night and hesitate again.  What’s the use?  Why not always yield—­always take what’s offered,—­always bow to force, whether of cannon or dislike?  Then the great fear surges in your soul, the real fear—­the fear beside which other fears are vain imaginings; the fear lest right there and then you are losing your own soul; that you are losing your own soul and the soul of a people; that millions of unborn children, black and gold and mauve, are being there and then despoiled by you because you are a coward and dare not fight!

Suddenly that silly orchestra seat and the cavorting of a comedian with funny feet become matters of life, death, and immortality; you grasp the pillars of the universe and strain as you sway back to that befrilled ticket girl.  You grip your soul for riot and murder.  You choke and sputter, and she seeing that you are about to make a “fuss” obeys her orders and throws the tickets at you in contempt.  Then you slink to your seat and crouch in the darkness before the film, with every tissue burning!  The miserable wave of reaction engulfs you.  To think of compelling puppies to take your hard-earned money; fattening hogs to hate you and yours; forcing your way among cheap and tawdry idiots—­God!  What a night of pleasure!

* * * * *

Here, then, is beauty and ugliness, a wide vision of world-sacrifice, a fierce gleam of world-hate.  Which is life and what is death and how shall we face so tantalizing a contradiction?  Any explanation must necessarily be subtle and involved.  No pert and easy word of encouragement, no merely dark despair, can lay hold of the roots of these things.  And first and before all, we cannot forget that this world is beautiful.  Grant all its ugliness and sin—­the petty, horrible snarl of its putrid threads, which few have seen more near or more often than I—­notwithstanding all this, the beauty of this world is not to be denied.

Casting my eyes about I dare not let them rest on the beauty of Love and Friend, for even if my tongue were cunning enough to sing this, the revelation of reality here is too sacred and the fancy too untrue.  Of one world-beauty alone may we at once be brutally frank and that is the glory of physical nature; this, though the last of beauties, is divine!

And so, too, there are depths of human degradation which it is not fair for us to probe.  With all their horrible prevalence, we cannot call them natural.  But may we not compare the least of the world’s beauty with the least of its ugliness—­not murder, starvation, and rapine, with love and friendship and creation—­but the glory of sea and sky and city, with the little hatefulnesses and thoughtfulnesses of race prejudice, that out of such juxtaposition we may, perhaps, deduce some rule of beauty and life—­or death?