Keyserling's Europe*

As the Summer tide of books recedes, these loom as foremost in significance:

Deliberately to hurt the serious reader, to lacerate his peace of mind--such is the present avowed purpose of Count Hermann Keyserling. "I hope," writes this big-boned Latvian Count, who has penned two U. S. best sellers,/- "I hope that all Pharisees, all Philistines, all nitwits, the bourgeois, the humorless, the thick-witted, will be deeply, thoroughly hurt. . . . [My purpose is] to demonstrate the absurdity of all nationalist self-glorification."

In a word, Count Keyserling scans the peoples of Europe, one by one, and seeks wittily to show that those are most nearly nitwits who are most ready to shout: "My country, may she ever be right! But my country, right or wrong!!"

Such a thesis, if tediously expounded a la Bolshevik, might indeed cause hurtful boredom. But as the smart and sprightly Count spurs across Europe, tilting at Nationalisms, he conjures much novelty and wisdom from successive countries with the talisman of sly philosophy. And his spurs, as a gentleman's should, wound not half so often as they stimulate.

To Latvia's Keyserling the Englishman seems an "animal-man," a creature in which instinct and will dwarf brain, nay he seems "a horseman, with corresponding equine features." His most ruthless acts are forgiven and forgotten, because no one can blame an animal for its instinctive acts of acquisitive ferocity.

France is an old-fashioned garden, defended to the Death by Frenchmen, whose chief aim is not progress but to enjoy what they deem attained perfection.

"... Greater Germany" [including Austria] "will once again become the determinant factor of history." But they will always be blamed for their conquests, because, unlike Englishmen, they are known to know when they have done wrong.

"The Italian sings like a bird in order to live himself out, he paints because he has to, he writes poetry or commits murder because he cannot help it. Finally he embraces Fascism, dazzled by its deification of heroism, and this principle is the highest by which nations can live at all."

Sweden: "In no other place in the world that I know of do people eat anything like as much--and digest it so well."

"The honor of the Spaniard is based on pure subjective passion, the pathos of the lone individual. ... Self-help alone appeals to him as being both sensible and justified. ... The impartial judge who in cold blood sentences to death ... must in the eyes of the Spaniard rank lower than the murderer. ... Spain belongs not to Europe but to Africa."

Europe: "We are now definitely in the age of the chauffeur and the Negro dance. ... The American ideal of service ... coincides, psychologically, with the norm of every negroid tribe. ... To Europe, and to Europe alone, has the task been entrusted to guard the sacred fire of the spirit from extinction during the long night of the spirit whicli now lies before mankind."

-EUROPE--Count Hermann Keyserling--Harcourt, Brace ($5).

/-The Travel Diary of a Philosopher and The Book of Marriage.