grandfathers and symptoms, has a right to be respectfully heard. The tendency to depreciate men like Tschaïkowsky and Schopenhauer generally rests on a confusion between what may be called sentimental and rational pessimism. The sentimental pessimist, the weak malcontent, who sees everything through the blue spectacles of egotism, or, like the cuttlefish, muddies his world with a black humor of his own, deserves indeed nothing better than a shrug. Like all other forms of sentimentality, his pessimism is based on selfishness. It is an emanation, not an insight. It is that form of colic, to use the figure of Thoreau, which makes him discover that the world has been eating green apples. Quite different from such a sentimentalist, however, is the sensitive man who feels impersonally the real evils of life. Such a man's experience is viewed by him, not as the end, but as the means, of insight. His own pains, however keen, appear to him but as symbols of the universal suffering of humanity, and however much his view may be subjectively jaundiced, it does not terminate in, but only begins with, the petty self. He is not a devotee of the luxury of woe. «A very noble character,» says Schopenhauer, «we always conceive with a certain tinge of melancholy in it--a melancholy that is anything but a continual peevishness in view of the daily vexations of life (for such peevishness is an ignoble trait, and arouses suspicions of maliciousness), but rather a melancholy that comes from an insight into the vanity of all joys, and the sorrowfulness of all living, not alone of one's own fortune.» And Tschaïkowsky, in describing Beethoven's Choral Symphony, writes, one can see, from precisely the same standpoint: «Such joy is not of this earth. It is something ideal and unrealizable; it has nothing in common with this life, but is only a momentary aspiration of humanity towards the holiness which exists only in the world of art and beauty; afterwards, this vale of earth, with its endless sorrow, its agony of doubt and unsatisfied hopes, seems still more gloomy and without issue. In the Ninth Symphony we hear the despairing cry of a great genius who, having irrevocably lost faith in happiness, escapes for a time into the world of unrealizable hopes, into the realm of broken-winged ideals.» Now undoubtedly these passages, especially the latter, are guilty of false emphasis; undoubtedly one can truly reply to Tschaïkowsky that the ideal is necessarily fairer than reality, as the flower is fairer than the soil from which it springs, that «this vale of earth» is not «without issue,» however gloomy, since it does in fact produce the ideal world of art and beauty, and that it is precisely the glory of hopes that they are unrealizable, and of happiness that it exists only on a level higher than that of finite life. But, however one-sided may be the opinions expressed, the attitude of mind is free from the taint of petty selfishness; it is frank, open-eyed, and manly.