I say that Kolniyatsch's message has drowned all previous
messages and will drown any that may be uttered in the remotest
future. You ask me what, precisely, that message was? Well, it is too
elemental, too near to the very heart of naked Nature, for exact
definition. Can you describe the message of an angry python more
satisfactorily than as S-s-s-s? Or that of an infuriated bull better
than as Moo? That of Kolniyatsch lies somewhere between these two.
Indeed, at whatever point we take him, we find him hard to fit into
any single category. Was he a realist or a romantic? He was neither,
and he was both. By more than one critic he has been called a
pessimist, and it is true that a part of his achievement may be gauged
by the lengths to which he carried pessimism--railing and raging, not,
in the manner of his tame forerunners, merely at things in general, or
at women, or at himself, but lavishing an equally fierce scorn and
hatred on children, on trees and flowers and the moon, and indeed on
everything that the sentimentalists have endeavoured to force into
favour. On the other hand, his burning faith in a personal Devil, his
frank delight in earthquakes and pestilences, and his belief that
every one but himself will be brought back to life in time to be
frozen to death in the next glacial epoch, seem rather to stamp him as
an optimist.
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