Of wounds and sore defeat I made my battle stay; Wingéd sandals for my feet I wove of my delay; Of weariness and fear I made my shouting spear; Of loss, and doubt, and dread, And swift oncoming doom I made a helmet for my head And a floating plume. From the shutting mist of death, From the failure of the breath, I made a battle-horn to blow Across the vales of overthrow. O hearken, love, the battle-horn! The triumph clear, the silver scorn! O hearken where the echoes bring, Down the grey disastrous morn, Laughter and rallying! If they (men) were books, I would not read them.—_Goethe._ My Friend, the Incurable II. On Germanophobia; on the perils of Monomania; on Raskolnikov and Alexander Berkman; on surrogates and sundry subtleties Ἑυρηκα!—shouted the Incurable, when I came on my monthly call. I have solved the mystery that has baffled your idealists since the outbreak of the War. The puerile effusions of Hardy, Galsworthy, and other Olympians who in the mist of international hostilities confused Nietzsche with Bernhardi, are quite explainable. It is well known that our successful writers have no time or inclination to read other fellows’ books: they leave this task to journalists and book-reviewers. Hence their splendid ignorance of Nietzsche. The advent of great events showered upon the innocent laymen problems, names, and terms that have been a _terra incognita_ to most of them, and justly so: for what has the artist to do with facts and theories,—what is Hecuba to him? But of late it has become “stylish” for men of letters to declare their opinions on all sorts of questions, regardless of the fact that they have as much right to judge those problems as the cobbler has the right to judge pastry. To the aid of the English novelists who wanted to say “something about the war,” but whose information on the subject was zero, came the dear professor Cramb. A quick perusal of his short work[1] supplied the students with an outlook and a view-point, and out came the patriotic cookies to the astonishment of the world. Such, at least, is my interpretation of the mystery. [1] _Germany and England_, by J. A. Cramb. [E. P. Dutton and Company, New York.]