entury and are possibly "for all
time" or for a more or less certainly not inconsiderable period of
time.' That is finely said. But I myself go somewhat further. I say that
Kolniyatsch's message has drowned all previous messages and will
drown any that may be uttered in the remotest future. You ask me what,
precisely, that message was? Well, it is too elemental, too near to the
very heart of naked Nature, for exact definition. Can you describe the
message of an angry python more satisfactorily than as S-s-s-s? Or
that of an infuriated bull better than as Moo? That of Kolniyatsch lies
somewhere between these two. Indeed, at whatever point we take him, we
find him hard to fit into any single category. Was he a realist or a
romantic? He was neither, and he was both. By more than one critic
he has been called a pessimist, and it is true that a part of
his achievement may be gauged by the lengths to which he carried
pessimism--railing and raging, not, in the manner of his tame
forerunners, merely at things in general, or at women, or at himself,
but lavishing an equally fierce scorn and hatred on children, on
trees and flowers and the moon, and indeed on everything that the
sentimentalists have endeavoured to force into favour. On the other
hand, his burning faith in a personal Devil, his frank delight in
earthquakes and pestilences, and his belief that every one but himself
will be brought back to life in time to be frozen to death in the next
glacial epoch, seem rather to stamp him as an optimist. By birth
and training a man of the people, he was yet an aristocrat to the
finger-tips, and Byron would have called him brother, though one
trembles to think what he would have called Byron. First and last, he
was an artist, and it is by reason of his technical mastery that he most
of all outstands. Whether in prose or in verse, he compasses a broken
rhythm that is as the very rhythm of life itself, and a cadence that
catches you by the throat, as a terrier catches a rat, and wrings from
you the last drop of pity and awe. His skill in avoiding 'the inevitable
word' is simply miraculous. He is the despair of the translator. Far
be it from me to belittle the devoted labours of Mr. and Mrs. Pegaway,
whose monumental translation of the Master's complete works is now
drawing to its splendid close. Their promised biography of the murdered
grandmother is awaited eagerly by all who take--and which of us does
not take?--a breathless intere