less, it remains a very personal book. With the keenness of youth the author saw perfectly just how peculiar and how isolated his spiritual position in Central Europe was at that time. He recognized that he could not move in complete harmony with any group or spiritual type of our times. But he also knew that the Platonists of the ancient world, the sceptics at the close of the Renaissance, and the moralists of the eighteenth century were his spiritual forbears; and in a preface which has remained as brilliant to this day as it seemed then, he circumscribes his function—that of the "critic"—and his spiritual position with an incomparable keenness:
"He [the critic] is the philosopher without a system, the poet without rhyme, the society man in seclusion, the aristocrat without an escutcheon, the Bohemian without an adventure. He possesses much love and little power, great pride and no servants. He has the most delicate ear, but cannot strike a note. His knowledge is unlimited, but his sway is usually nil. He is without talent and remains essentially without response. He is defined by that which he does not possess, and he always finds the extent of himself in others. He is a Hamlet whose father was never murdered. Others can make nothing of his happiness; his misery seems to them lacking in utility—but he loves life in the art of others, and he loves their art in his own life. Their thoughts and their themes are of no moment; he has eyes only for the play and the movement of it all. To him the world is one great form for which he in his own thoughts supplies the substance. In his most felicitous moments it seems to him as though the life-forms of others were tossing on his thoughts, like boats on the waves of the sea."
This was both a self-portrait and a programme, the announcement of a personality and the prospectus of a life work. To-day this work lies before us; perhaps it is not completely rounded off, yet it is organic and significant. Kassner has remained indubitably in the highest field of criticism; he announced himself as a "Platonic" critic, and such he has remained. He always aimed at discovering the identity or co-ordination of every productive agent; he sought the absolute unity between the innermost essence of the artist and the technical methods employed in its expression, or the unity between the artist's proclivities and his place in history—a unity which might also be called the style, or the spiritual physiognomy,
