answer with somewhat bitter humour in that he requested the editor to hold off the obituary of the Dane until the long-delayed obituary of his collaborator of many years, K. E. Neumann, had been published.
Such an enormous degree of neglect as K. E. Neumann received during his lifetime is more than a match for Rudolf Kassner's obscurity. This acute and unusual philosopher—the word is taken here in its broader sense, as the eighteenth century and the ancients used it—can always count on a very faithful, although somewhat limited, group of readers who would not let a single one of his books pass unread. His books are permeated with an elegance which is in a way reminiscent of the ancients: they are small, succinct volumes, apparently written in a facile, mundane style; but if one knows how to read them fully, or down to their depths, they will be found to offer an extraordinary substance out of which a highly significant and important work is constructed.
Nearly twenty-five years ago Kassner began with a book of essays on the English poets and artists of the nineteenth century. Blake, Shelley, Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne, and Browning were each allotted a chapter. One chapter took up William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, and in another chapter the author had assembled everything which fell in with his formulation of the "Dream of the Middle Ages." This book was a thorough and ingenious monograph; but it was also more than that. It was the sketching of an entirely new universal aesthetic, a powerful link in that chain of European understanding and mutual attraction—I am discussing the life of the spirit, and not politics—which characterizes the last ten years of the nineteenth century. The book was also the first harbinger of a new literary personality. It was evident from the start that this personality would be hard to classify and pigeon-hole; and perhaps it was this very difficulty among others which has kept Kassner a writer of extraordinary unpopularity in spite of his quite extensive reputation.
The book was unusually spirited, just such a book as a young and promising man should write. At that time Kassner was not much over twenty-five. The influence of several great Englishmen, Irishmen, and Americans is plainly felt: one can note the effect of Walter Pater as well as of Oscar Wilde; Emerson's contribution is unmistakable, also De Quincey's and Landor's; but above all, and almost inevitably, Plato predominates. Neverthe-
