Meanwhile, Mr. Muir cannot expect his ideas to get much attention. A gaudy parade is passing and the populace is busy cheering. Nevertheless, they were ideas worth playing with, and they are now worth printing and pondering. It seems to me that, in more than one way, they help to illuminate the central æsthetic question--the problem as to the nature and function of artistic representation. They start from Nietzschean beginnings, but they get further than Nietzsche ever got. His whole æsthetic was hampered by the backwardness of psychology in his time. He made many a brilliant guess, but more than once he was hauled up rather sharply by his ignorance of the machinery of thought. Mr. Muir not only has Nietzsche behind him; he also has Freud, as he shows, for example, in §145. Beyond him there is still a lot of room. He will not stop the parade--but he will help the next man. * * * * * Edwin Muir was born in the Orkney Islands in 1887. His father was a small crofter there. When he was fourteen years old the family moved to Glasgow. Within four years his father, his mother and two older brothers died, and he was forced to fend for himself. He became a clerk in a Glasgow office and remained there until very recently, when he moved to London. Like all other young men with the itch to write, he tried poetry before prose, and his first verses were printed in _The New Age._ But his discovery of Nietzsche, at the age of twenty-two, exerted such a powerful influence upon him that he soon turned to prose, and five or six years later his first philosophical speculations were printed, again in _The New Age._ They attracted attention and were republished in book-form, in 1918, as "We Moderns." At the last minute the author succumbed to modesty and put the _nom de plume_ of Edward Moore upon his book. But now, in this American edition (for which he has made certain revisions), he returns to his own name. H. L. MENCKEN. I THE OLD AGE 1 _The Advanced_ Among the advanced one observes a strange contradiction: the existence in one and the same person of confidence and enthusiasm about certain aspects of life along with diffidence and pessimism about life itself. The advanced have made up their minds about all the problems of existence but not about the problem of existence. In dealing with these problems they find their greatest happiness; they are there sure-footed, convinced and convincing. But brought face to face with that other problem, how helpless, vacillating and spiritless are they! What! are propaganda, reform, and even revolution, perchance, with many of them simply their escape from their problem? 2 _The Intellectual Coquettes_