BOOKS
471
to the worth of the whole Living Philosophers project. Yet the series
would be worthwhile even if each volume were nothing more than an in–
teresting event among the dry bones of academic philosophy. Anything
else the series achieves in the way of understanding and clarification is
so much to the good.
HEROIC VITALISTS
A CENTURY OF HERO-WORSHIP.
By Eric Russell Bentley.]. B. Lippincott.
$3.50.
M
R. BENTLEY's purpose is to sift out of the Romantic-Heroic Move–
ment those attitudes and emotions which are usable today. He
writes as a Jamesian: pragmatist, and he analyzes and dramatizes the at–
titudes of the Romantic hero-worshippers in order to show that when
they were right, they were pragmatists. Mr. Bentley vigorously calls the
intellectual "aristocracy" of our day to arms-pragmatic, "militant-demo–
cratic" arms. It will be cmcial, then, to find out whether the author is
in the best sense pragmatic.
Mr. Bentley examines those Romantics who were most concerned
with the function in the modern world of the superior man: the artist,
the political genius-in short, the H ero. He gives us substantial studies
of Carlyle and Nietzsche, and slighter ones of Wagner, Shaw, Spengler,
Stefan George (the George chapter appeared in this magazine), and
D. H. Lawrence. His method is biographical. Mr. Bentley is a very good
biographer, a determined and perceptive psychologist. We feel that we
have caught the tone of Carlyle's cosmic pronouncements about Niggers,
Slaves, and Heroes when we have read that his first victory was his vic–
tory "over the spirit of Jane Welsh Carlyle." Mr. Bentley is very good
too in describing Nietzsche's complicated and pathetic relationship with
Wagner and Cosima: Wotan-Wagner, Briinnhilde-Cosima, Siegfried–
Nietzsche-a hopeless company. Bentley puzzles intelligently over
Wagner's final failure to accept Siegfried as a Hero. He sets forth the
monstrous metaphors of Spengler with unrelaxing cogency. And he very
J
sensibly considers Lawrence as a great artist-personality haunted by his
early life.
These hero-worshippers-Heroic Vitalists, Bentley calls them-were
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all tragi-comic, ambivalent men trying to resolve ambivalences. They
lived and suffered in a . world of bewildering contradictions. They were
unbelievers, yet religion haunted them to the grave; they were all anar-
chists and all authoritarians; Nietzsche longed for both immortality and
worldly success, he loved both Apollo and Dionysus, both Cesare Borgia
L.
and Buddha ; Wagner was a democrat and a spiritual fascist; Lawrence
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