FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE prophesied in his posthumous work, The Will to Power, that the next two centuries of European history would be characterized by 'the rise of nihilism'; the depreciation and dishonoring of the highest values, especially the highest moral values, and the glorification of immorality; that existence would be increasingly interpreted as an irrational and aimless experience; that the hopeless cry 'God is dead!' would resound through the world and find general credence. When we study the changes which have occurred since the late years of the War, and particularly since the Revolution, both in the attitude toward life and the conduct of the German people, it seems that Nietzsche was at least partly right in the prophecy he made in 1888. For on every hand, in morals, politics, art, and religion, - evidences of disintegration and degeneration manifest themselves, until we may justly fear lest we fall into utter nihilistic chaos.

Ought we give way to this paralyzing pessimism? Is it right to await in helpless apathy or terror this chaos of nihilism? Are there not positive forces working to check the malady which has attacked our highest ideals - forces with which we may ally ourselves in faith and confidence? Is there not something in the essence of the human spirit sure to manifest itself the more powerfully

when the need is greatest? Will not our German idealism, as revealed to us in the creations of our poets and thinkers, reassert itself with renewed youth?

Let us confine our present inquiry to the field of art, where the forces of degeneration are particularly obvious. A striving to liberate itself from form dominates most unwholesomely the art movement of the present. Form in the sense here indicated is an imprint, shaped in harmony with the innermost nature of the object, the agency by which the true character and significance of an object is visibly expressed. That itself is a sufficient reason why modern artists should be impatient of form. They are fighting against form as against a law which sets bounds to the artist's individuality, which hampers his absolute freedom. Subservience to form is revolting to those who conceive the artist's imagination as something under no circumstances to be humbled or restrained. Form demands renunciation of one's own will, of one's chance moods. It demands the discipline of the fancy and imagination. In the highest sense, form receives its full due only when the artist is profoundly conscious of the objective aspects of existence. That attitude is in the eyes of the modern artist a symptom of stupid docility, or an out-of-date bourgeois quality of mind. Therefore, the old artistic forms

have been shattered and cast aside. But that which has taken their place bears the stamp of restless, neurotic caprice. Its features are chaos and revolt. We have the best example of this in expressionist art. To represent things as they are is regarded by the expressionist as slavery. He considers all natural forms as outside the realm of art, as imposing fetters which his free creative spirit spurns. Therefore he forswears allegiance to things that exist -plants, animals, and human beings. He believes it is his right to crush, distort, and mutilate them. Nature is no longer to the expressionist a lovely, loyal, warm home. Expressionism presents the intimidating spectacle of an art which has utterly lost consciousness of unity with pulsating all-nourishing, allsupporting nature. Instead, it regards nature with a cold, skeptical, sarcastic air, as if she were a tedious and presumptuous stranger.

In poetry the expressionist's hatred of form expresses itself in rebellion against the natural structure of language. To be sure a genius appears occasionally who possesses the power of creating speech, who coins words which permanently enrich his mother tongue. To-day, however, immature apprentice rhymesmiths think they can play with linguistic forms whose roots strike deep down into the profoundest recesses of the nation's soul, and treat them like ordinary raw materials. They handle language as if there were no language sentiment, no innate linguistic norms. When our German expressionists appeal to the precedent of our'storm and stress era,' they overlook very important differences; the revolutionists of that earlier day merely recognized the influence of primitive natural forces upon language, while the expressionist poetry of the present is a self-conscious chasing after linguistic novelties, a forced, affected, painful effort to be original.

But the poets have gone farther than that. They renounce the traditional harmonious arrangements of words in rhyme and meter as unworthy tyranny. They go to the greatest lengths to devise far-fetched associations between an adjective or verb and its proper substantive, so as to conceal as far as possible any rational meaning which a sentence may contain. To be lucid, is to be trite. Countless modern efforts at poetry illustrate this idea. A senseless conglomeration of words is sought after as an end in itself.

I do not believe that the denial of form is the last word in the evolution of art. It seems to me that the demand for form is a necessary demand of the spirit, particularly, perhaps, of the German spirit. It expresses freedom combined with power; boldness tempered by selfrestraint. It is a product, not of trivial caprice, but of a genius saturated with objective content. The great German masters paid reverence to form in this sense, and their art is so interwoven with the art instincts of our nation that a final break with their standards is impossible. The present demoralization and anarchy of form cannot possibly survive in a mental world where Goethe and Schiller and their successors are still great living powers. Certainly, a nation like our own, which possesses men like Leibnitz and Hegel, Kant and Fichte, great constructors of systems, and which is devoting its mental energy to-day to an endeavor to harmonize and bring into order the world-thought of the present, will not long rest content with the current petty impatience with all artistic forms and standards.

I believe, further, that at least the German mind will not consent in the long run to that extreme self-glorification of the individual which denies every tradition and rule as an unworthy limitation. Some individuals may be captivated for the moment with impulse

and caprice, with raggedness and irrationality, with paradox and ecstasy. Soon, however, we shall experience a revival of the demand for the objective, - for the things which have final and eternal value. We shall go back to an art which derives its nourishment from nature and from life, from history and from humanity. Our people will not follow Reinhold Lenz or Maximilian Klinger, but Goethe and Schiller. They may recognize a touch of genius in George Büchner, but they will find their permanent satisfaction in men like Hebbel.

We must bear in mind, furthermore, that in the case of our own country the recent World War and the Revolution have done more to wreck old forms of German culture than any other event since the 'Thirty Years War.' Life on the fighting front was absolutely bereft of even the simplest and most universally accepted forms of culture. On the heels of this followed the Revolution, revengefully eager to destroy every historically consecrated form and tradition of our national life. For form itself is something aristocratic, something respectable, reserved, and aloof. That explains the instinctive effort of the Revolution to sweep it away. Consequently it is not surprising that artists, especially those who fought and suffered at the front, should have allowed hatred of form to become part of their very flesh and blood. At the same time we may hope, that as we get farther away from the World War and the Revolution, and as normal conditions are reestablished, this malady of form degeneration now creeping over art may be checked and conquered.

But the demoralization of our attitude and sentiment toward life itself, is even more portentous than our declining recognition of artistic form. It is a mutilated, deformed, moron humanity which glowers or drivels at us

through expressionist pictures. All they suggest is profound morbidity. Their jaded, unhealthy mood is relieved only by absurdities, and where these cast a ray of light into their rudimentary composition, it is only a broken and joyless one. Likewise, that which repels us most in the poetry of our younger school, is its scornful stigmatizing of the past, without giving us anything posi tive in its place; its pathetic groping in its own self-wreckage, its confused helpless seeking after some steadfast ideal. The soul is exhausted by its ceaseless chasing after nothing. Is life a shallow joke? A crazy dream? A terrifying chaos? Is there no longer sense in talking of an ideal? Is every ideal self-illusion? These are the questions which drive the soul of to-day aimlessly hither and thither. Calm consciousness of power and mastery, the unaffected glow of health, threaten to become lost sensations. Over-alert self-consciousness associated with a mysterious revival of atavistic bestiality, and extreme overrefinement hand in hand with a slothful love of indolence, characterize the dis cord which clouds the artistic mind of the period.

Will the German soul prove strong enough to fight its way out of this condition? We must make allowance for the fact that it is a task of extreme difficulty for even the most firmly grounded, most mature and best disciplined mind to find room for the fearful experiences of the World War and Revolution in an idealist conception of the world. How are we to reconcile what we have lived through during the past few years with rational design in hu man history? It is the very man who addresses himself most seriously to this question who finds it easiest to become a doubter and a pessimist. Therefore, we can well understand how hard it is for the youthful generation, just getting its first grasp on a philosophy of life and

history, to find a firm anchorage in the torrent of impressions received from the War and Revolution. Yet, we must hope that a nation with the profound religious and philosophical spirit of our own nation, will succeed ultimately in finding a place for the horrible and apparently irrational occurrences of the last few years in some ordered scheme of things; and must trust that an idealism, whether it be only moral or like wise religious and metaphysical, will eventually resume its sway.

This hope grows stronger when we see that expressionism is already drawing toward the mystical and metaphysical. Even though this expressionist impulse betrays itself in morbid ways, it still voices the imperative call to found our philosophy of life on something absolute and, in its last analysis, meaningful. We should also bear in mind that the young men of to-day already begin to manifest a gratifying recognition of the necessity of such a philosophy, of a theory of life and world history; and that they are taking the great German idealists as their leaders.

If art, and the art of Germany in particular, continues to pursue the course which it has recently entered, we shall lose things of priceless value for our æsthetic progress. Take fiction, for example; our art of narrative has lost immeasurably. To-day it is considered trivial, and incompatible with true inspiration, for the author to marshal before the imagination of the reader the incidents and experiences which form the background and the explanation of the inner life of the characters he portrays. It is thought to indicate inferior ability for an author to show the effect of the actions which his characters perform upon their persons and things about them. The writer must confine himself exclusively to the profoundest recesses of his hero's subjective life. So our modern story-teller, if we are

allowed to use that name, carefully avoids utilizing the rich human material which is inextricably interwoven with the concrete surroundings of his characters. Only an occasional echo of the outer world pierces his sanctuary. Stress is laid upon picturing the self-absorbed inner man, upon lyric outbursts, upon empty unreal dreams, upon morbid introspection, upon visionary ecstasy, so that when real events are described, they are so filled with mystery, so wrapped up in the incomprehensible that the reader does not know what actually occurs. A reader who demands some sound appreciation for reality in an author, who wants to be entertained by images of the writer's imagination, who seeks to be introduced by the narrator into the every-varying, entrancing, constantly surprising world of human experience, will find nothing worthy of his attention in the novels and romances of the present. For my own part, I infinitely prefer to the feverish, oracular, ecstatic, esotericism of our modern writers, such authors as Willibald Alexis, Louise François, or Ebner-Eschenbach. And what a relief Stifter, Keller, and Storm are after the seething, sulphuric soulcraters of our modern romances and novels!

I cannot convince myself that the demand for an art which can unroll before our eyes a living drama, which can elaborate a plot and actually entertain us with a novel has ceased to exist. Formless ebullitions of temperament, shot through here and there by a flash of hideous reality, cannot permanently satisfy the literary taste of the world. We may look forward confidently to the rise of a new story-telling art. It will doubtless receive some enrichment from the extreme subjectivity of the novels and romances of the present. Even to-day this new tendency is apparent. I believe I detect it in Jacob

mann Hesse's Demian.

Neither do I wish to be understood as denying all merit to our contemporary lyric-contemplative soul romances. I recognize them as a class by themselves, with their peculiar excellences. I merely protest against their being accounted the only real form of romance.

Likewise, the carefully constructed architectonic drama of the past threatens to disappear. A conviction has gained vogue that strict unity and consistency hamper the freedom of the dramatist, and are an insult to his genius. To be truly artistic characters must be thrown in hodge-podge and sketchily developed. This makes the drama a loosely connected series of scenes, not a plot developed step by step to a logical and necessary climax. To be sure many dramatic writers even to-day stick to the old standards. I need only mention Paul Ernst, Wilhelm von Scholz, Ernst Hardt and Stephan Zweig. Gerhart Hauptmann has merely given us a loose series of unconnected scenes in his Winter Ballad; but he has returned to a formal plot in his Indipohdi. Strindberg's beguiling influence manifests itself here; his dramatic style is characterized by accidental juxtapositions rather than by the logical relationships of a plot. Ibsen's more systematic, unified, selfconsistent dramas, have been almost pushed into the background by Strindberg. So at the present time we see the cruder agglutinative drama taking precedence of the synthetic drama.

But in spite of this threatened retrogression, I am confident that we shall witness a speedy protest against the growing disregard of form upon the stage. The slovenly, discontinuous, picture-gallery type of play cannot possibly hold its place permanently as the highest expression of dramatic art. The latter will return to its strict standards

inner impulse. The same thing will occur which happened in case of the cult of exaggeration in the eighteenth century, a classic type of drama will develop from to-day's art wreckage.

When the drama recovers its poise and returns to well-ordered standards, the historical play, now fallen into com. plete disrepute, will revive. To-day our playwrights try to transcend time, to express themselves in universal symbols. As a veteran metaphysician I am the last person in the world to protest against this effort to evolve a type of drama superior to mere temporal and historical limitations. I am merely saying that this type cannot monopolize the field. The historical drama, portraying the relentless laws of fate in human affairs, picturing the power of human will and the tragedy of human defeat, occupies a permanent field peculiar to itself.

How many other æsthetic attainments will grow dim and lustreless if the present rage for expressionism continues long enough! At present, comedy has almost vanished from the stage. Its place has been taken by grotesque burlesque and cynical satire. The unanticipated outcome of men's scheming, the comi cal surprises of clever intrigue, the halfjoking, half-serious portrayal of the alltoo-human, good-humored caprice and unlabored merriment, lie as far beyond the ability as they do beyond the interest of the present generation of poetic weaklings. weaklings. Even a recently revived comedy by Bauernfeld, in spite of its exaggerated nonsense and coarseness, has come as a welcome relief.

Turning to the realm of tragedy, we find our plays to-day merely dully depressing. The tragedy that exalts the sentiment and liberates the spectator from the trivialties of life is no longer good form. Tragedy which challenges and defies fate violates the fundamental