Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/766

648 short the stormiest of experiences have set the national mind in a keyed-up state such as it had not known for a long time. The general spiritual situation of the world increases this tension. Everything is in a condition of flux. The natural sciences which, it seemed at the turn of the century, had nothing left to do but certify and elaborate what was already discovered, stand in all points at the beginnings of something new; their revolutionary fantastics must make it hard indeed for the investigator to remain cold-blooded, and they produce a popular repercussion far and wide among the laity. The arts are lying at a complete crisis which sometimes threatens to lead towards extinction and at other times lets us look to the possible creation of new forms. Problems flow into one another; we cannot keep them apart, cannot exist simply as politicians without knowing something about things of the mind, nor as aesthetes, as "pure artists," content to let all matters of social consciousness go hang. The question of man himself, of which all the others are merely facets and side-issues, never stood more ominously, more imperatively, before the eyes of those who take life earnestly. And is it any wonder that the afflicted defeated peoples, upon whom the consciousness of a transition has forced itself so immediately, should be the most heavily conscience-stricken and be the most sharply incited to active thinking? In Germany since the beginning of the war there has been much thinking and much discussion, discussion of a kind which is almost Russian in its boundlessness. And if that statesman was right who declared that democracy is discussion, then we to-day are a democracy indeed. We may now even call ourselves republicans, in a deeper and weightier sense than the constitutional one, provided that republicanism signify a feeling of responsibility and accountability—for this feeling also has spread and deepened here with us, despite the deceptive superficial evidence of a shabby frivolity.

Reading has become a passion. And it is not done to amuse or to lull, but in the search for spiritual weapons and in the interest of truth. Belles lettres, in the more restricted sense, fall noticeably behind the critico-philosophical or intellectual essay. More accurately: an extensive fusion had been enacted between the spheres of criticism and poetry. It was already begun by our Romantics, and was greatly accelerated by the phenomenon of Nietzsche's lyrical treatment of knowledge. This procedure destroys the boundaries between art and science, imbues ideas with the blood of life, spirit-