422 Close of 1913 f 1913 



in the so-called " Concert of Europe," armed to the teeth, under Grey's 

 un-armed leadership, in preventing the coming European war. It was 

 my last appearance in print, and I have remained silent since, notwith- 

 standing solicitations to speak not a few times during these astonishing 

 five years of fighting folly, and white man's suicide, knowing I should be 

 powerless while the war fever lasted, to obtain a hearing for a word 

 of truth in a world of illusion befooled, but happy in its patriotic 

 blindness. 



The year 1913 closes with this personal lament: "I am alone just 

 now here and in this dark world I am overwhelmed with woe. I see 

 myself as one sees the dead, a thing finished which has lost all its im- 

 portance, whatever it once had in the world. I realize how little I have 

 accomplished, how little I have affected the thought of my generation 

 in spite, as I am still convinced, of the soundness of my view of things, 

 and of some skill and courage in expounding it. I have made almost 

 no converts in Europe, and am without a single disciple at home to 

 continue my teaching after I am dead. Even in the East, though my 

 ideas are bearing fruit and will one day be justified in act, I have 

 founded no personal school where my name has authority. The con- 

 sciousness that it is so wounds me with a sense of failure and I despise 

 myself the more for feeling it as strongly as I do. Why should I mind ? 

 I ask myself, and I find no answer. Perhaps the immediate cause of 

 my gloom has been a life of Gobineau which has been sent me by a 

 Dr. Schemann. Gobineau was in some ways like myself, a man of 

 ideas opposed to those of his own people and his own generation, and 

 who, though his talent was recognized as a writer, failed to find dis- 

 ciples in France. He was an aristocrat in a democratic age, an oriental- 

 ist, out of harmony with received orientalist ideas, a poet who was 

 never popular, and an artist who was never more than an amateur. 

 It has been reserved for this little group of Germans to discover his 

 value twenty and more years after his death, a discovery due mainly to 

 the devotion of a single disciple, this good Schemann who has sent his 

 book to me. Gobineau, like me, had his romantic side. There are 

 many pieces of poetry inserted in their original French in it, of one of 

 which I made a translation this morning. It is called " Don Juan's 

 Good Night," a pleasant piece of cynical French wit which deserves to 

 live, perhaps, when the rest is forgotten. 



The Spring of the year 1914 found me, like the rest of our English 

 world, thinking more of Ireland than of the coming Armageddon. 

 Some of the vicissitudes of the Irish case are noted in my diary : 



" 28th March, 1914. — There has been an astonishing crisis in Parlia- 

 ment over the Ulster business. What has happened is this. Winston 

 and Seely, at the Admiralty and War Office respectively, seem to have 



