commodity has had a bracing effect on our national character. We used
to be rather phlegmatic, used we not? We have learnt to be vibrant.

Of Kolniyatsch, as of all authentic master-spirits in literature, it
is true that he must be judged rather by what he wrote than by what he
was. But the quality of his genius, albeit nothing if not national and
also universal, is at the same time so deeply personal that we cannot
afford to close our eyes on his life--a life happily not void of those
sensational details which are what we all really care about.

`If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.' Kolniyatsch was born,
last of a long line of rag-pickers, in 1886. At the age of nine he had
already acquired that passionate alcoholism which was to have so great
an influence in the moulding of his character and on the trend of his
thought. Otherwise he does not seem to have shown in childhood any
exceptional promise. It was not before his eighteenth birthday that he
murdered his grandmother and was sent to that asylum in which he wrote
the poems and plays belonging to what we now call his earlier manner.
In 1907 he escaped from his sanctum, or chuzketc (cell) as he
sardonically called it, and, having acquired some money by an act of
violence, gave, by sailing for America, early proof that his genius
was of the kind that crosses frontiers and seas. Unfortunately, it was
not of the kind that passes Ellis Island. America, to her lasting
shame, turned him back. Early in 1908 we find him once more in his old
quarters, working at those novels and confessions on which, in the
opinion of some, his fame will ultimately rest. Alas, we don't find
him there now. It will be a fortnight ago to-morrow that Luntic
Kolniyatsch passed peacefully away, in the twenty-eighth year of his
age. He would have been the last to wish us to indulge in any sickly
sentimentality. `Nothing is here for tears, nothing but well and fair,