ot a family where controversies did not rage about "l'affaire." The
caricature by Caran d'Ache representing at first a peaceful family
resolved to talk no more about Dreyfus, and then, like exasperated
furies, members of the same family fighting with each other, quite
correctly expressed the attitude of the whole of the reading world to
the question about Dreyfus. People of foreign nationalities, who could
not be interested in the question whether a French officer was a traitor
or not--people, moreover, who could know nothing of the development of
the case--all divided themselves for and against Dreyfus, and the moment
they met they talked and argued about Dreyfus, some asserting his guilt
with assurance, others denying it with equal assurance. Only after the
lapse of some years did people begin to awake from the "suggestion" and
to understand that they could not possibly know whether Dreyfus was
guilty or not, and that each one had thousands of subjects much more
near to him and interesting than the case of Dreyfus.

Such infatuations take place in all spheres, but they are especially
noticeable in the sphere of literature, as the press naturally occupies
itself the more keenly with the affairs of the press, and they are
particularly powerful in our time when the press has received such an
unnatural development. It continually happens that people suddenly begin
to extol some most insignificant works, in exaggerated language, and
then, if these works do not correspond to the prevailing view of life,
they suddenly become utterly indifferent to them, and forget both the
works themselves and their former attitude toward them.

So within my recollection, in the forties, there was in the sphere of
art the laudation and glorification of Eugene Sue, and Georges Sand; and
in the social sphere Fourier; in the philosophical sphere, Comte and
Hegel; in the scientific sphere, Darwin.

Sue is quite forgotten, Georges Sand is being forgotten and replaced by
the writings of Zola and the Decadents, Beaudelaire, Verlaine,
Maeterlinck, and others. Fourier with his phalansteries is quite
forgotten, his place being taken by Marx. Hegel, who justified the
existing order, and Comte, who denied the necessity of religious
activity in mankind, and Darwin with his law of struggle, still hold on,
but are beginning to be forgotten, being replaced by the teaching of
Nietzsche, which, altho utterly extravagant, unconsidered, misty, and
vicious in