marred by the conception of culture that carries it; a flaw in that counts tenfold against it. Here is where Tolstoy is weakest, for as a social thinker he often lays himself open to the charge of being crude, rash, and narrow; he turns to large problems, looks at them intently, impatiently, but not always largely. One searches in vain for sound judgment of essentials and for a finely discriminative strain of thought: fitful flashes of truth in a Cimmerian darkness, that is all there is, instead of an even, luminous flooding of social problems. He demands that life swing back to simple archaic forms and that art express the strength, the directness, the simplicity of this genuine culture which amounts to casting aside intellectual achievements and forcing art to move within the confines of peasant thought and peasant feeling. There lies the damning fact, in this stultification of art, in the failure to see that art as well as life is constantly becoming a richer and a more subtle thing, and that with its ever increasing range of expressiveness it must find a place for the subjective, the complex, the elusive, the abnormal. It is all the richer for a Maeterlinck or a Baudelaire. Over against a fresh, simple, strong peasant art Tolstoy sets the danger of pose, affectation, and sickening self-exploitation; he has no eye for other possibilities. Peasant life may be simple and strong, but it is often dull or gross, and popular art often shares this dulness or grossness; Tolstoy himself became the victim of that

dulness when on reading one of the most touching scenes of his The Power of Darkness, a play based incident for incident on an actual criminal case among peasants, to a group of peasants, he was greeted with unexpected laughter. Again, artistic finesse need not mean a mannered or a sickish art.

But if Tolstoy's theory of art is disappointing in results, it is not disappointing as a problem. All sorts of questions spread from it like a fan. Does the Thinker crowd out the Maker? Can the philosophical impulse develop only at the expense of the artistic? Or if there is war between the two, is it not rather the direction taken by either that is responsible? That in Tolstoy the moral interest seriously endangered his art and his interest in art there can be no doubt. The philosophical tinge to his earlier work deepened to the problem, How ought I to live? What is the meaning of life? Questions like these ought to be an artistic asset; they ough to make art richer, more searching and they do it in Hardy, in Anatole France, in Gorky. What of Jude the Obscure and The Gods are Athirst? No one has seen more sharply than Gorky the tragedy of a soul lost in the tumult and social unreason of modern life. His characters, hungry for life and an understanding of it, but crippled, entangle themselves in their own thoughts and purposes or else face life with the dumb agony of an animal at bay. If in Hardy, Anatole France, and Gorky, why not in Tolstoy? Is it because he

puts the problem too reflectively, too self-consciously; because his philosophy is stark naked? Is it perhaps because a solved problem is artistically a dead problem? Or does the flaw lie in the nature of Tolstoy's solution? Are there greater possibilities for art in regarding life as a cruel joke or a senseless jumble than as a purposive, man-centered system? Is it because under Tolstoy's hands the problem shrinks from a cosmic to a moral one, leaving nature outside? Tolstoy was a keen observer of nature, but not a philosophical interpreter of her changes, laws, and moods. Hardy's cruel, blunt analysis and Anatole France's comments, at once sympathetic and caustic, run the problem of man into the problem of nature. Maeterlinck's art owes much to his interest in nature; the individual's life, steeped in mixture of the delicate, the smooth, the fantastic, turns to a richer, more aromatic blend of character and destiny. But Tolstoy destroys what color it has by washing it in moral brine.

There is much meat for argument in all these questions; and there is not a little that is perplexing in Tolstoy the Artist and the Thinker,

VII

NIETZSCHE

Auf jedem Gleichniss reitest du hier zu jeder Wahrheit. Hier springen dir alles Seins Worte und Wort-Schreine auf

-THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA.

THERE was a time when Nietzsche was thought of as the spirit of evil, the Antichrist who scoffed at the holiest of things, the Immoralist. His age disowned him; and the shadow of a great loneliness hung over him. During the last year of his sane life the clouds began to lift: Brandes lectured on him at the University of Copenhagen; letters from young and enthusiastic disciples arrived from Vienna. Then there came a time when every youth whose mind was in a ferment of social revolt saw in him the great Apostle of freedom; when students talked much and wildly of his Superman; and his doctrines, often strangely distorted, made their appearance in Italian, Norwegian, and Russian literature. Our interest is shifting considerably. We are, for one thing, in possession of new material: the Ecce Homo and the Letters; and they tell us much of the physical

disabilities of this Thinker, of his moods, of his spiritual struggles, of a heart heavy and chilled by the hugeness of his task and a spirit glorying in the contest; they reveal the sensitiveness of the man and his curious self-esteem. Much of this was to be had for the asking in his books. But best of all, they reveal the Artist in this Thinker. By furnishing us with bits of self-analysis, with observations on his style and on the way in which his imagination worked, Nietzsche has given us a new clue to his work. If followed out it will show clearly the æsthetic groundwork of his philosophy; it will reveal an imagination at once imperious and playful at work directing the drive of his thought. Few thinkers can boast of so rich an artistic endowment; none was so utterly mastered by it or so intensely interested in some of its problems.

To get nearer to Nietzsche the artist philosopher one must after a brief reference to some of his literary criticisms and opinions pass to his criticism of Wagner and consider all it implies; turn to his famous contrast of the Dionysian and Apollonian artist and his analysis of the artistic temperament; and one must then attempt some sort of an interpretation of his style and imagination, and of their influence on his thought.

Nietzsche's literary estimates are numerous. Some