judgment at least, not to name others, is before all things pre-supposed in us.  This is a hard and fixed judgment with regard to female chastity, and the supernatural value of it.  It is only because we assent to this judgment that Isabella is heroic to us; and primarily for the same reason that Margaret is unfortunate.  Let us suspend this judgment for a moment, and what will become of these two dramas?  The terror and the pity of them will vanish instantly like a dream.  The fittest name for both of them will be ‘Much Ado about Nothing.’

It will thus be seen, and the more we consider the matter the more plain will it become to us—­that in all such art as that which we have been now considering, the premiss on which all its power and greatness rests is this:  The grand relation of man is not first to his brother men, but to something else, that is beyond humanity—­that is at once without and also beyond himself; to this first, and to his brother men through this.  We are not our own; we are bought with a price.  Our bodies are God’s temples, and the joy and the terror of life depends on our keeping these temples pure, or defiling them.  Such are the solemn and profound beliefs, whether conscious or unconscious, on which all the higher art of the world has based itself.  All the profundity and solemnity of it is borrowed from these, and exists for us in exact proportion to the intensity with which we hold them.

Nor is this true of sublime and serious art only.  It is true of cynical, profligate, and concupiscent art as well.  It is true of Congreve as it is true of Sophocles; it is true of Mademoiselle de Maupin as it is true of Measure for Measure.  This art differs from the former in that the end presented in it as the object of struggle is not only not the morally right, but is also to a certain extent essentially the morally wrong.  In the case of cynical and profligate art this is obvious.  For such art does not so much depend on the substitution of some new object, as in putting insult on the present one.  It does not make right and wrong change places; on the contrary it carefully keeps them where they are; but it insults the former by transferring its insignia to the latter.  It is not the ignoring of the right, but the denial of it.  Cynicism and profligacy are essentially the spirits that deny, but they must retain the existing affirmations for their denial to prey upon.  Their function is not to destroy the good, but to keep it in lingering torture.  It is a kind of spiritual bear-baiting.  They hate the good, and its existence piques them; but they must know that the good exists none the less. ‘I’d no sooner,’ says one of Congreve’s characters, ’play with a man that slighted his ill-fortune, than I’d make love to a woman who undervalued the loss of her reputation.’  In this one sentence is contained the whole secret of profligacy; and profligacy is the same as cynicism, only it is cynicism sensualized.  Now we have in