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,
and what may quiet us in a death so noble.'
Was Kolniyatsch mad? It depends on what we mean by that word. If we
mean, as the bureaucrats of Ellis Island and, to their lasting shame,
his friends and relations presumably meant, that he did not share our
own smug and timid philosophy of life, then indeed was Kolniyatsch not
sane. Granting for sake of argument that he was mad in a wider sense
than that, we do but oppose an insuperable stumbling-block to the
Eugenists . Imagine what Europe would be to-day, had Kolniyatsch not
been! As one of the critics avers, `It is hardly too much to say that
a time may be not far distant, and may indeed be nearer than many of
us suppose, when Luntic Kolniyatsch will, rightly or wrongly, be
reckoned by some of us as not the least of those writers who are
especially symptomatic of the early twentieth century and are possibly
"for all time" or for a more or less certainly not inconsiderable
period of time.' That is finely said. But I myself go somewhat
further.
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