leaders. I hate the aristocrats, yet I love the lilies that toil not,
neither do they spin, and sometimes bring their perfume and their
white robes into a sick man's chamber. Who would harden with work the
white fingers of Corysande, or sacrifice one rustle of Lalage's silken
skirts? Let the poor starve; I'll have no potatoes on Parnassus. My
socialism is not barracks and brown bread, but purple robes, music,
and comedies.

"Yes, I was born for Paradox. A German Parisian, a Jewish German, a
hated political exile who yearns for dear homely old Germany, a
sceptical sufferer with a Christian patience, a romantic poet
expressing in classic form the modern spirit, a Jew and poor--think
you I do not see myself as lucidly as I see the world? 'My mind to me
a kingdom is' sang your old poet. Mine is a republic, and all moods
are free, equal and fraternal, as befits a child of light. Or if there
_is_ a despot, 'tis the king's jester, who laughs at the king as well
as all his subjects. But am I not nearer Truth for not being caged in
a creed or a clan? Who dares to think Truth frozen--on this
phantasmagorical planet, that whirls in beginningless time through
endless space! Let us trust, for the honor of God, that the
contradictory creeds for which men have died are all true. Perhaps
humor--your right Hegelian touchstone to which everything yields up
its latent negation, passing on to its own contradiction--gives truer
lights and shades than your pedantic Philistinism. Is Truth really in
the cold white light, or in the shimmering interplay of the rainbow
tints that fuse in it? Bah! Your Philistine critic will sum me up
after I am dead in a phrase; or he will take my character to pieces
and show how they contradict each other, and adjudge me, like a
schoolmaster, so many good marks for this quality, and so many bad
marks for that. Biographers will weigh me grocerwise, as Kant weighed
the Deity. Ugh! You can only be judged by your peers or by your
superiors, by the minds that circumscribe yours, not by those that are
smaller than yours. I tell you that when they have written three tons
about me, they shall as little understand me as the Cosmos I reflect.
Does the pine contradict the rose or the lotusland the iceberg? I am
Spain, I am Persia, I am the North Sea, I am the beautiful gods of old
Greece, I am Brahma brooding over the sun-lands, I am Egypt, I am the
Sphinx. But oh, dear Lucy, the tragedy of the modern, all-mirroring
con