As nobody can prove that I
wasn't, I claim now that I was the first to gauge the magnitude of
this star and to predict the ascendant course which it has in fact
triumphantly taken. That was in the days when Kolniyatsch was still
alive. His recent death gives the cue for the boom. Out of that boom
I, for one, will not be left. I rush to scrawl my name, large, on the
tombstone of Kolniyatsch.
These foreign fellows always are especially to be commended. By the
mere mention of their names you evoke in reader or hearer a vague
sense of your superiority and his. Thank heaven, we are no longer
insular. I don't say we have no native talent. We have heaps of it,
pyramids of it, all around. But where, for the genuine thrill, would
England be but for her good fortune in being able to draw on a
seemingly inexhaustible supply of anguished souls from the Continent--
infantile wide-eyed Slavs, Titan Teutons, greatly blighted
Scandinavians, all of them different, but all of them raving in one
common darkness and with one common gesture plucking out their vitals
for exportation? There is no doubt that our continuous receipt of this
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.
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