in passing, how _Measure for Measure_ and _Faust_ would suffer in their
meaning and their interest, by the absence on our part of a certain
moral judgment. They would become like a person singing to a deaf
audience--a series of dumb grimaces with no meaning in them. The same
thing is equally true in all the other cases. Antigone's heroism will
evaporate;[25] she will be left obstinate only. The lives of Macbeth and
Hamlet will be tales of little meaning for us, though the words are
strong. They will be full of sound and fury, but they will signify
nothing. What they produce in us will be not interest but a kind of
wondering weariness--weariness at the weary fate of men who could
'_think so brainsickly of things_.' So in like manner will all the
emphasis and elaboration in the literature of sensuality become a
weariness without meaning, also. Congreve's caustic wit will turn to
spasmodic truism; and Théophile Gautier's excess of erotic ardour, into
prolix and fantastic affectation. All its sublimity, its brilliance, and
a large part of its interest, depend in art on the existence of the
moral sense, and would in its absence be absolutely unproducible. The
reason of this is plain. The natural pains and pleasures of life,
merely manipulated by the imagination and the memory, have too little
variety or magnitude in them without further aid. Art without the moral
sense to play upon, is like a pianist whose keyboard is reduced to a
single octave.

And exactly the same will be the case with life. Life will lose just the
same qualities that art will--neither more nor less. There will be no
introduction of any new interests, but merely the elimination of certain
existing ones. The subtraction of the moral sense will not revolutionise
human purposes, but simply make them listless. It will reduce to a
parti-coloured level the whole field of pains and pleasures. The moral
element gives this level a new dimension. Working underneath it as a