beholder with awe but does not warm or vivify. . . . Nietzsche's collapse was a sort of flame-death. His spirit was consumed on its own altar-fire.

Indeed, that soul had long quivered and shrunk from this excessive radiance; the magically knowing one was frightened by this flood of inner light, and the wild joyousness with which it thrilled him. "The intensity of my feelings makes me shudder and laugh.' But nothing could check this ecstatic current, this plunging down of thoughts like flights of falcons from heaven, enveloping him and hovering over him day and night, night and day, hour after hour, until his blood throbbed with their fever as he slept. Chloral helped at night, built a fragile shelter of sleep to shut out the constant flood of visions; but his nerves glowed like incandescent wires, his whole being was like an electric charge of darting, flashing, consuming light.

Is it strange that in this vortex of inspirational emotions, in this unceasing torrent of ideas, Nietzsche sometimes failed to kept his feet on the solid ground and, torn this way and that, no longer knew who he was or what his limitations were? For some time before the end he ceased to sign his letters by his own name, Friedrich Nietzsche. Probably he vaguely felt that one who had experienced such mighty things was no longer the little Protestant pastor's son from Naumburg, but some other being as yet unnamed, something exceptional and paramount, a new martyr of man. Therefore he signed his last messages with some symbolic word: 'The Monster,' 'The Crucified,' 'The Antichrist,' 'Dionysus.' Completely possessed by overmastering powers, he no longer felt himself a human being, but a focus, an instrument, of outside forces. He shouts with tremendous hybris into the fearful silence: 'I am no man; I am

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dynamite.' 'I am an historical event that divides human history into two parts.' As Napoleon in burning Moscow, faced by the endless Russian winter and surrounded by the miserable fragments of a once powerful army, continued to issue arrogant and threatening proclamations, presumptuous to the verge of the ridiculous, so Nietzsche in the burning Kremlin of his brain, powerless amid the ruined remnants of his thoughts, sent forth pamphlet after pamphlet of wild and exaggerated nonsense, bidding the German Kaiser come to Rome to be shot, calling upon the European Powers to make a united attack on Germany and bring her to reason. Thus his apocalyptic wrath struck wildly at shadows, beating vainly against all constituted things. He demanded that the calendar be revised and dated from the appearance of his Antichrist. Even in his madness Nietzsche was greater in his conceptions than any other madman.

Never did such a tidal wave of inspiration sweep over a creative man as that which surged through Nietzsche during this single autumn. 'Never before was there such poetry, such sensibility, such pain; thus suffers the god Dionysus'- these words on the eve of his madness are fearfully true. For that little fourth-story chamber and the caves of Sils-Maria sheltered, together with the sick, nerve-shaken man Friedrich Nietzsche, the boldest thoughts, the loftiest language, that his generation knew. The creative spirit had ensconced itself under the low, weather-beaten roof and emptied its whole treasury of gifts into the arms of a single poor, nameless, timid, lost immeasurably more than any single human being could receive and yet survive. And in this tiny room, stifled by infinity, the terrified, pitiful, earthly senses struggled and shriveled under the fury of these lightning flashes,

man

under those whiplike blows of revelation and prophecy. He felt that a divinity was stooping over him, a fiery divinity whose radiance his eyes could not bear and whose breath burned like fire. Every time the shrinking human lifted his eyes to scan the countenance of this presence his thoughts flew from him in a dazzling chaos. Is not he who feels these inexpressible things, who puts them into words, and suffers from them is not he himself God - a god of the world now that he has killed all other gods? Who, who is he? . . . Is he the Crucified, Is he the Crucified, the dead, or the living God, the god of his youth, Dionysus? Or is he both simultaneously, a crucified Dionysus? He grows ever more bewildered; the stream roars too loudly, with too much light. . . . Is it still light? Is it not music? The little fourth-story chamber in Via Alberto is filled with harmonies; the stars sing in their courses; the heavens are luminous. Oh, what music! Hot salt tears bedew his beard. What divine tenderness! What ineffable happiness! And nowhow luminous everything is - And all the while in the street below men smile at him, greet him, and the old apple-woman picks her fairest fruit from her basket for him. They all bow to him the murderer God.

of

Yes, he knows, he knows.

The Antichrist has appeared and they sing Hosanna! Hosanna! Everywhere melody, the universe melodious with music - And then sudden silence.

Something has fallen. It is himself, fallen in front of the house. Someone picks him up, and now he is back in his chamber. Has he slept long? It is so dark. There is the piano. Music! Music! And then, suddenly, people in the room. Is that not Overbeck? But Overbeck is surely in Basel; and he, where is he himself? He no longer knows. Why do they look at him so strangely, so solicitously? And then a car, a car. How the rails rattle, so strangely, as if they were trying to sing. Yes, they sing his gondola song, and he sings it with them, sings it into the endless darkness.

And later in a room somewhere else, with darkness, constant darkness. No more sun, no more light, either within or without. Somewhere around him people are talking. A woman - is it not his sister? But she is certainly far away in Lama Land. Yet she reads to him from books. Has he not also written books? Someone answers softly, but he does not understand. After such a tempest has once swept through the soul the victim is deaf to all human words. He into whose eyes the spirit has gazed too deeply is blind forever after.

[We print the following extracts from an alleged letter by Bukharin, one of the most brilliant and courageous theorists of the Communist Party, to an intimate friend in the opposite revolutionary camp, with some doubt as to its authenticity - at least in the entire form as published. But se non è vero è bene trovato; and there is good reason to infer the genuineness of the passages quoted. The entire 'letter,' of which approximately three-fifths is given here, has been printed privately at Berlin, as a booklet under the title Ibo ia bolshevik 'Since I am a Bolshevik.']

KREMLIN, Moscow (date illegible)

MY DEAREST EXILE!

You are quite incorrigible. Neither the threat of execution, nor a long exile in Siberia where we had put you regardless of your title of 'Member of the Moscow Soviet,' nor yet your final exile into 'the rotten West' and your homesickness for dear old Moscow, have made you sensible. On one hand, I admire your consistency, but I see clearly now that there is not room for both of us under the Russian sun. And yet do you remember how often we have had heart-to-heart talks together, although I knew that you were a counter-revolutionary and that my frankness toward you was a breach of Party discipline? Yet I could not help taking refuge occasionally in your little corner of another world, with the oil lamp before the sacred images and yourself poring over the mystical abracadabra of Vladimir Soloviov and Jacob Boehme, whom no one else will

give a glance in these days. Do you remember how I used to tell you anecdotes of Soviet and Communist Party real life incidents that unfortunately were no fairy tales, though they invariably sounded like the poorest sort of jokes? of jokes? . . . I often feared lest Cheka agents might come for you with a search warrant, as they often did, and find one of the 'leaders of the world revolution' at your apartment. Telephones would ring crazily all over Moscow trying to locate me so as to drag me to another night session of the Central Executive Committee; and Iliich [Lenin] would curse in true boatswain style when they reported to him that I was 'nowhere to be found.'

Obviously, these talking-spells were a mere human weakness of mine. But does not your Dostoevskii say, through the lips of his drunken Marmeladov: 'But, sir, everyone must be able to go away somewhere; because there are times when one must go away, at any cost, no matter where!'

Yes - we all are like Marmeladov, drunk, some with wine, others with illusions, and others with blood. So now that a mutual friend of ours is going abroad to recuperate after a few years of Soviet paradise, I long to go away' to you; and I beg him to take this letter probably the last I shall ever write you and to put it in your own hands. It must be done cautiously, so as to avoid the ubiquitous eye of Felix Dzerzhinskii, who, by the way, is now suffering from the deep Communist hypochondria that afflicts all of us since Lenin died.

How glad I am that you are not here! Nasty times: we are compelled to throw fat bones now and then to the insatiable 'lower strata' of the Party, who have been forced to fast severely since we started the 'New Economic Policy.' We cannot do otherwise, for if we did, all of this Communist scum would turn against the Communist system we have erected, and we should be thrown out, instead of fighting on for the world's social revolution - which, by the way, is coming confoundedly slow! We have 'done' in fine shape those simpletons or greedy gulls who trusted to our earnest professions of tolerating trade and speculation. Now we are tossing them to the Communist helots to be devoured, although we originally encouraged these speculators in order to exploit, and not to kill them. With one hand we beckon to foreign capital, with the other we strangle domestic capital; because, if we did otherwise, we should ourselves be strangled.

Nasty times! If Lenin himself, whose slow embalming has been such a bother to us and such a profitable enterprise for the embalmers, should rise again, I am sure he would only curse like a pirate, in the style of a ten-year-old boy from the League of Communist Youth, but would be helpless to remedy the situation.

Yet-who knows? Perhaps he would be the only man able to find a way out of this devilish cobweb. For it is all wrong for you to call him a thirdrate prophet. He was of course a homemade theorist, no question about that; and his Marxism, to-day called Leninism, was a poor mixture of Blanqui, Bakunin, Pugachov, and something borrowed from Fedjka, Dostoevskii's desperado. I grant you also that his philosophical processes were something to be laughed at, and that his book Materialism and Empirism is a masterpiece only of obtuse efforts to

think abstractly. It is also true that I frequently used to expose his ignorance of economics to the great terror of the Party Synod, and that only our bought and hired professors can write differently of him.

But on the other hand, have I not always insisted on other things, which even Zinoviev confirms-Zinoviev, with whom I refuse to shake hands in spite of all my Party discipline, and never will, even though they should threaten me with an 'indefinite leave of absence'?

Did I not tell you that in the summer of 1917, when many of us Bolsheviki were clamoring that we should surrender to Kerenskii, get arrested, publicly disclaim the story of our German espionage, and preach Bolshevist truths from the defendants' bench, it was Lenin who stopped us, called us fools, and predicted that power would be in our hands inside two or three months?

Have I not told you that when everyone, even Trotskii, insisted that the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was impossible, it was Lenin alone who forced us to sign 'the obscene peace,' predicting the downfall of Wilhelm and a revolution in Germany?

Remember! When all of us stuck, like a flock of sheep, to our 'war-time Communism,' and were for summarily executing any peasant who refused to give up all his grain, it was Lenin who saw that every sunrise was bringing us one day nearer our destruction, and compelled us to change our economic

course.

Who, if not he, dared to proclaim the New Economic Policy, to the utter terror of us pure Communists, and thereby saved the Party?

Who but Lenin, having gotten all the use he could out of our Social-Revolutionary and Menshevik opponents, knocked them on the heads, and discussed measures even with us Bolshe

viki only after he had already made his decisions? 'You don't want to?' he used to thunder. 'Good, go to the Devil. I'm tired of you, and I'm going away to the country.' This 'I'm going away to the country' was our worst bugbear worse than Denikin. And so we submitted in silence, — in spite of theory, Party programme, and the rest, - and the results were splendid!

Do you remember how you and I once met in a pitch-dark street?—those were days when even the Central Executive Committee held its sessions by the light of a single sixteen-candlepower lamp. Denikin was at Tula, only a hundred miles from Moscow. Our grips were packed and our pockets bulged with forged passports and traveling-funds. I, a great lover of birds, thought seriously of choosing Argentina as my future home, because of its abundance of parrots. Leninand he alone!- was perfectly calm, and said or rather prophesied: "The situation is-' he used words I cannot repeat. 'It has never been worse. But we have always been lucky, and we shall be lucky this time.'

And when the infernal ring of the blockade tightened so that we thought of capitulating and asking for mercy, who but Lenin kept saying that the blockade would soon burst asunder and in a short time he would be discussing the situation peacefully with European diplomats? His optimistic prophecies were without end, and from them we drew our strength and our faith, even when foolish facts knocked over all our plans twenty times a day.

Oh, yes! ... If only Lenin were with us! I have always said that the most terrible and the most counterrevolutionary thing in the worldmore counter-revolutionary even than yourself was Death. Unless a remedy is found for this pug-nosed Menshevik Death, there is little sense even in

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Rykov also a zero. He has even lost his gift of witticism, his only gift whether drunk or sober; which loss is much to the liking of Lunacharskii, whom he used to call Luna-Park-skii, and also something funnier and worse: or instead of calling him narkom ['people's commissioner' in Bolshevist jargon] he called him narkomik, or 'people's clownlet.'

Dzerzhinskii is a zero in everything except the Cheka or GPU, and so he converts anything that we entrust to him-railways and what not into departments of the GPU.

I myself? my dear friend, I, too, am a zero if you take me off the platform or away from the writing-desk and put me to real work. I know it, and therefore never accept any 'business posts' - the more so as I happen to have Spartan tastes and no liking for embezzlement.

I know, you are waiting for a word