The World’s Tragedy

XXXIV PREFACE. it seems to me important to explain the form to a reader before he begins. For the work so transcends my own critical faculties that I am sure others will find difficulty in getting my point of view without very serious attention. In the first place, my predecessor Shelley was so natu- rally gentle that his Prometheus can be read to-day by our young ladies without their ever suspecting that he was getting at God. Nietzsche on the other hand is very obscure, very super- ficial, very philosophical, and he did not write English. I have been trained in a harder school than Shelley ; and so my little finger is thicker than my father’s loins. He went and “ trod the glaciers of the Alps ” — the Mer de Glace ; I broke the record by my 68 days on the Baltoro glacier. He went out in a boat, and got drowned at that ; I have travelled on the Bralduh in a Zak. He shrank from the sight of a butcher’s shop ; I followed wounded buffalo into the jungle on foot. He thought Indians were “ mild ” ; I shot two Bengalis. He never had such a galaxy of imbe- cility before him as R. J. Campbell, Winnington-Ingram, Tolstoï, Bernard Vaughan, Torrey, Dowie, Bernard Shaw, Booth, Father Ignatius, and my Uncle Tom. He had not read the Encyclical against Modernism ; the religious essays of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, and the preposterous Balfour. He was unfamiliar with the spermatorrhoea of Tennyson’s thought, and the diarrhoea of its simulacrum in G. K. Chesterton. This explains why Shelley’s wholesome indignation