nius, albeit nothing if not national and also
universal, is at the same time so deeply personal that we cannot
afford to close our eyes on his life--a life happily not void of those
sensational details which are what we all really care about.

'If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.' Kolniyatsch was born,
last of a long line of rag-pickers, in 1886. At the age of nine he had
already acquired that passionate alcoholism which was to have so great
an influence in the moulding of his character and on the trend of his
thought. Otherwise he does not seem to have shown in childhood any
exceptional promise. It was not before his eighteenth birthday that he
murdered his grandmother and was sent to that asylum in which he wrote
the poems and plays belonging to what we now call his earlier manner. In
1907 he escaped from his sanctum, or chuzketc (cell) as he sardonically
called it, and, having acquired some money by an act of violence, gave,
by sailing for America, early proof that his genius was of the kind that
crosses frontiers and seas. Unfortunately, it was not of the kind that
passes Ellis Island. America, to her lasting shame, turned him back.
Early in 1908 we find him once more in his old quarters, working at
those novels and confessions on which, in the opinion of some, his fame
will ultimately rest. Alas, we don't find him there now. It will be a
fortnight ago to-morrow that Luntic Kolniyatsch passed peacefully away,
in the twenty-eighth year of his age. He would have been the last to
wish us to indulge in any sickly sentimentality. 'Nothing is here for
tears, nothing but well and fair, and what may quiet us in a death so
noble.'

Was Kolniyatsch mad? It depends on what we mean by that word. If we
mean, as the bureaucrats of Ellis Island and, to their lasting shame,
his friends and relations presumably meant, that he did not share our
own smug and timid philosophy of life, then indeed was Kolniyatsch not
sane. Granting for sake of argument that he was mad in a wider sense
than that, we do but oppose an insuperable stumbling-block to the
Eugenists. Imagine what Europe would be to-day, had Kolniyatsch not
been! As one of the critics avers, 'It is hardly too much to say that
a time may be not far distant, and may indeed be nearer than many of us
suppose, when Luntic Kolniyatsch will, rightly or wrongly, be reckoned
by some of us as not the least of those writers who are especially
symptomatic of the early twentieth c