434 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION a Frankenstein guilty of having been the author of this German monster's being. There, in this monstrous exhibition of a Germany running amok, went France, England, and America likewise, but for the Grace of God —and not one of them could be sure of being saved when their sister Germany had been lost. Thus already in AJ>. 1922, and a fortiori in A.D. 1952, when the paroxysm by which the West had been seized in A.D. 1914 was another thirty years older, it was manifest that the West's direst malady was Sin and not Mortality* 'On peut dire que toutes les choses essentielles de ce monde ont ete affectees par la guerre. . . . L'usure a devore quelque. chose de plus pro- fond que les parties renouvables de 1'etre. Vous savez quel trouble est celui de Feconomie generate, celui de la politique des litats, celui de la vie meme des individus: la gŁne, Thesitation, Tapprehension universelles. Maisparnd toutesces choses bless&s est I'esprit. L'Esprit est en verite cruelle- ment atteint; il se plaint dans le coeur des hornmes de 1'esprit et se juge tristement. II doute profondement de soi-meme.1 „ . . L'oscillation du navire a ete si forte que les lampes les mieux suspendues se sont a la fin renversees.3 'Ainsi la Persepolis spirituelle n'est pas moins ravage"e que la Suse materielle. Tout ne s'est pas perdu, mais tout s'est senti p6rir.'3 This note of interrogation, on which a French man of letters con- cluded an inquiry into the prospects of the Western Civilization on the morrow of the first of the general wars that a Westernizing World in- flicted on itself in its post-Modem Age, was presented in a challenging visual form by a contemporary English caricaturist whose sardonic pictorial treatment of the same theme was not less effective than Paul Valery's elegiac prose in bringing out an inherent tragedy. In a serial triptych exhibited in London early in the inter-war period A.D. 1919-39, Max Beerbohm depicted, in his inimitable style, his notion of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries' divers con- ceptions of their approaching successors. In the first cartoon in the series, the Eighteenth Century, in the guise of a faultlessly frizzed and powdered man of the world, is looking down quizzically at the Nineteenth Century in the guise of a raw young man who is unable to hide his embarrassment under his disdainful senior's disgusted scrutiny. According to the Eighteenth Century's Gibbonian philosophy. History ought, of course, to have culminated in this Golden Age's unsurpassable self. The very suggestion that this definitive century might have a successor is a most offensive imputation upon its claim to Have found and quaffed the elixir of immortality; and the present young pretender to a no longer open succession has added insult to injury by presenting himself as a figure of fun whose uncouthness is not a good joke when judged by eighteenth-century standards of good taste. In terms of Sinic imagery with which we have made ourselves familiar in this Study, the Eighteenth Century is striking in this first cartoon the wry attitude of a complacently established Yin-state towards a diffidently * Val&y, Paul: lecture of the I5th November, 1932, in Varttt&> p. 34. 2 Val&y, Paul: *La Crise de 1'Esprit', in Vartitt, p. 16. ^ Ibid., p. 13.