THE INCONCLUSIVENESS OF FEELINGS 435
approaching Yang-activity. In the second cartoon the Nineteenth
Century—here portrayed as a portly business man in Victorian dress
whose rotundity and rubicundity give the measure of his prosperity—is
shown beaming with a fatuous confidence as he pats on the back a still
more rotund and rubicund reproduction of himself, attired in the self-
same Victorian trousers, frock coat, and top hat; and hi this mid-way
tableau of the three a Sinic eye would no doubt see a picture of the Yang-
activity no longer diffident and apologetic but flushed with an exhilarat-
ing sense of boundless achievement. The crack-brained inventor of a
chimaerical steam-engine has justified his hopes, beyond his own
wildest dreams, by getting up a hitherto unimaginably powerful head of
steam. He has exploded a wizened Eighteenth Century's illusion of an
already attained static perfection in order to substitute for this a dynamic
ideal of perfectibility to be approached through a perhaps endless
number of bigger and better editions of the sanguine Nineteenth
Century itself.

In the third of the three cartoons, by contrast with the other two,
there is only one figure on the stage on which the tragedy of Western
history is being played out; and this solitary actor is an emaciated young
man in a twentieth-century suit of clothes and with one arm in a sling.
His clothes are of so dark a hue that you would take "him, to be in mourn-
ing, and the sombreness of his dress is matched by the obscurity of the
prospect ahead of him. He is facing a curtain of night whose blackness is
relieved only by the pale glimmer of an enormous question-mark; and
this symbol of uncertainty, on which the wistful young man's appre-
hensive eyes are riveted, occupies the place where the spectator's eye
looks to find the missing second living performer.

What is the question that is tormenting this tragic Twentieth Century
that has just come through the shattering experience of being blown up
in early manhood by a terrific explosion of the Nineteenth Century's
recklessly over-heated boilers ? Is he saying to himself that he, for his
part, cannot even profess to have any notion of what a Twenty-First
Century is going to be like? Or is he, perhaps, wondering whether he
can even look forward to having any successor of any kind ? A prospect
which a Gibbonian Eighteenth Century has taken as an insufferable in-
sult would be taken by a Valerian Twentieth Century as a comforting
assurance; but, in venturing to consider thia reassuring possibility, is
not he (the unhappy questioner asks himself) indulging in a vice of
'wishful thinking' which has coine to be rated a mortal sin in a dis-
illusioned century's recension of the Decalogue? Is it not far more
probable that a second and a third explosion will have blown the coffin-
ship Hesperus and all her crew to pieces long before the arrival of New
Year's Day, A.D. 2001, can give the signal for the next change of the
watch?

In these two identical portrayals of a Western World's outlook on the
morrow of the War of A JX 1914-18, Max Beerbohm and Paul Valery are
giving as faithfully accurate a picture of the same world's outlook on the
morrow of the War of A.D. 1939-45 *& if the draughtsman had reined in
his pencil, and the writer his pen, till he had lived through a second