ck
to Poland, and he is free to return to the ships whenever the spirit
moves him. I see no reason for looking in such directions for his view
of the world, nor even in the direction of his nationality. We detect
certain curious qualities in every Slav simply because he is more given
than we are to revealing the qualities that are in all of us.
Introspection and self-revelation are his habit; he carries the study of
man and fate to a point that seems morbid to westerners; he is forever
gabbling about what he finds in his own soul. But in the last analysis
his verdicts are the immemorial and almost universal ones. Surely his
resignationism is not a Slavic copyright; all human philosophies and
religions seem doomed to come to it at last. Once it takes shape as the
concept of Nirvana, the desire for nothingness, the will to not-will.
Again, it is fatalism in this form or that--Mohammedanism, Agnosticism
... Calvinism! Yet again, it is the "Out, out, brief candle!" of
Shakespeare, the "_Eheu fugaces_" of Horace, the "_Vanitas vanitatum;
omnia vanitas!_" of the Preacher. Or, to make an end, it is
millenarianism, the theory that the world is going to blow up tomorrow,
or the day after, or two weeks hence, and that all sweating and striving
are thus useless. Search where you will, near or far, in ancient or
modern times, and you will never find a first-rate race or an
enlightened age, in its moments of highest reflection, that ever gave
more than a passing bow to optimism. Even Christianity, starting out as
"glad tidings," has had to take on protective coloration to survive, and
today its chief professors moan and blubber like Johann in Herod's
rain-barrel. The sanctified are few and far between. The vast majority
of us must suffer in hell, just as we suffer on earth. The divine grace,
so omnipotent to save, is withheld from us. Why? There, alas, is your
insoluble mystery, your riddle of the universe!...

This conviction that human life is a seeking without a finding, that its
purpose is impenetrable, that joy and sorrow are alike meaningless, you
will see written largely in the work of most great creative artists. It
is obviously the final message, if any message is genuinely to be found
there, of the nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven, or, at any rate,
of the three which show any intellectual content at all. Mark Twain,
superficially a humourist and hence an optimist, was haunted by it in
secret, as Nietzsche was by the