I do not recall whether I was the one who introduced the painter Stöwing to the Nietzsche home, when he told me how he longed to paint Nietzsche. In any case, he had his wish; for the patient was temporarily better, and used to sit for long periods on the cottage verandah, in the shade of a green grape-arbor. It is thus that Stöwing painted him, the verdant shadows playing over the haggard countenance, lending to the latter a corpselike pallor. I saw the portrait in the artist's studio in Berlin, and was much affected by it. But Stöwing was not the man to catch and fix on canvas the ultimate, the overpowering forces, which slumbered in the background of this sick man's countenance. Neither Nietzsche's mother nor his sister was satisfied with the portrait. The mother said to me indignantly one day, when I was calling, that her son looked in his picture like a pale man at the point of death, although in truth he had a glowing, healthy complexion, and no one would suspect his malady from his appearance. I was to judge this for myself. She would take me to her son, in order that I might form my own opinion. I was startled and shocked. No visitor was ever allowed to see the invalid. If Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche had been present, I am certain it would not have happened this time. But she was away, and did not return till later. I followed old Mrs. Nietzsche upstairs to the second story-I confess with trembling knees. The mother opened a door and entering the room called back to me: 'Come closer. He will not notice you.' Opposite me, lying in a reclining chair, facing the door, so that I looked directly into his face, was Friedrich Nietzsche. I regarded for a moment the remarkably delicate and yet powerful, sun-browned features which rose above his immense beard, his sensitive, finely chiseled nose, his glorious forehead. His large eyes were fixed upon me with a fearfully intent, serious, penetrating glance. His pale, wonderfully modeled hands lay crossed upon his breast, like those of the carved figures on ancient tombs. I stood there trembling under his piercing gaze, which was riveted upon me as if flashing forth from some fathomless abysm of suffering. A moment later his eyes sank, half closed, and only their whites were visible, rolling blindly and horribly under the fallen lids. 'Come right in,' said his mother, who stood by his side. A tremor of distress flashed across the corpselike countenance. 'No, no, mother. Enough, enough!' I heard a voice murmur, as if from the grave. No power in the world could have prevailed upon me at that moment to disturb the peace of this slowly dying fighter for truth. I drew back, and it was some time before I could master myself enough to speak to his mother. His sister thought later that the reason he looked at me so intently was because it was the hour she usually visited him, and he was expecting her. To me his mind seemed infinitely remote from all human things, withdrawn into the depths of a fathomless solitude. Who will dare to say how much of the great unhappy soul still tenanted its decaying tabernacle? That was the last time I visited the little home in Naumburg. I removed almost immediately thereafter to Munich; and for some years the circumstances of our lives separated me from many former acquaintances including Mrs. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. BY FREDERIC HARRISON [The second Congress of the universities of the British Empire, held at Oxford early in July, gives special timeliness to Mr. Harrison's account of the changes that time has made in Oxford since he knew it as an undergraduate, seventy years ago.] From The Times, July 5 IN June, 1848, - die Joan: Bapt., — I was elected scholar of Wadham; and in June, 1921, I came again to look at my old college, university, and city, and to meditate on the changes which more than seventy years have brought to all. Are they all changed so much? To the eye-in form in rule materially - yes! the change is, indeed, startling. Is it so in substancemorally intellectually spiritually? I am not so sure. Seventy years ago, Oxford was a petty, quiet, beautiful city of the cathedral and historic order, the market town of a rich agricultural county. It has grown immensely doubled itself rather in area than in population; has lost the air of a rural market town; has grown to be a big residential modern kind of villadom. When I first saw Oxford in 1848, there was really very little of new habitations outside the limits, say, of Hollar's sketch of 1643little of recent work outside of St. Giles, or of Magdalen bridge, or of the Castle remains. From Wadham there were open fields. Neither Parks, nor Keble, nor Manchester Colleges, nor Museum, nor Library. It was all country down to the Cherwell: no school buildings in the High-street- no Gothic or Tudor new buildings to the colleges. All additions to the colleges since my undergraduate days have greatly changed the look of Central Oxford. New College, Balliol, Christ Church, have thrown out vast new buildings, which will not amalgamate with the tone of the original for a century at least. When I first saw Wadham, it looked what it really was one of the later foundations, added on to antique Oxford outside the early wall. Now Wadham is almost the only college which still looks as it was founded and built by Dorothy Wadham three centuries and ten years ago. Almost every other college shows signs of enlargement, restoration, and modernity. And the vast new world of villas, halls, schools, and playgrounds, which encircle Oxford now, just as Hampstead, St. John's Wood, Battersea, and Wandsworth encircle the City of London, have, to the eye at least, entirely destroyed the tone of the old-world collegiate town we loved seventy years ago. It was then a city of reformed monasteries. It is become an expanse of agreeable villas. Where, oh! where is that sweet city with its dreaming spires? It is there still much changed by new Gothic enlargements, and quite engulfed in commodious residential avenues, such as we find in Cheltenham and Clifton. There is little dreaming in Oxford now. Men retired from Army or Civil Service, or busy with colleges, usually do themselves very well. This huge growth of the city area, with its new population and business, with all the appliances of our up-todate habits, has wonderfully increased the life of Oxford. In my time students worked within their own colleges; when they went out, it was in cap and gown, at least until afternoon. We went down to the barges to row in morning coat and hat, and put on flannels down there. For cricket we went to Bullingdon and Cowley in horse-breaks. Lawn tennis, of course, was not invented; the only parks were the grounds of Christ Church, Magdalen, and New College. On Sundays we walked 'in beaver' along the open roads to Headington, Hinksey, or Cumnor. To cross the Bodleian quad without cap and gown was to be fined. Our dinner-hour was 5 P.M., and we had to attend Chapel eight times in the week. Examinations for degrees were in classics and mathematics only. The Freshman to-day will say, 'Why! what smugs and mugs you must have been!' Well! I don't know. There were some good men who lived through it, and came out of it. What a different Oxford does a college Rip van Winkle find to-day! The streets of the old city and the broad avenues for miles round it are whirling with cars, motor-cycles, and thousands of 'bikes,' whereon youths and girls, in most dégagé clothes, without hats and with more or less bare legs, rush from college to hall, from hall to school, club, union, or playground. The cycles are thousands: every college gateway, every lane or free space, is stacked with 'bikes' in serried ranks. One of the new by-laws for men and women is to go on wheels-even if only from Balliol to Christ Church. Hatless and capless, with salamandered necks, with flannel 'knicks,' or jumpers streaming in the wind, youth and maid rattle up and down, as if the University were a racing-track. Time was when Oxford called a man on a cycle ‘a cad on cas tors.' To-day Oxford, male or female, lives on wheels. Alma Mater has joined the Rotarian Society. At first sight the great change is that the University is no longer a monastery of unmarried men. In the streets the women seem almost as numerous, and quite as busy, as the men. In 1850 there were no married tutors and few married residents at all. Until the summer term one rarely saw, and almost never met, a lady. In 1921, to the eye, the University might be almost a bisexual mixed American college. It is not so in reality. The coeducation system is only in germ perhaps only on trial. I offer no opinion about its success. Everyone must feel how greatly the colleges have gained by the marriage of tutors, by the various openings to the education of women, and by the complete elimination of the monastic ideals and formulas. The new learning, the new ways, the new dress, or undress, the new athletics, are no doubt all to the good. But is it necessary for youths and maids to tear about with bare heads, to be such hustlers, to be so very 'mixed,' to display so much of gastrocnemius muscle? All this, however, is only as to externals. What is the real substantial change within? Without doubt, in seventy years the University as a centre of education has developed, expanded, modernized. In 1851 the official teaching was almost limited to the 'humanities,' the classics, philosophy, and a modicum of mathematics. In 1921 there is hardly a subject of human knowledge, hardly a single language of articulate and inarticulate men on this earth, which has not its own school, professor, and students. The Indian scholars, the Rhodes scholars, the women's halls, the non-university students, the intercollegiate system of lecturing, the great extension of outcollege students, the infiltration of the modern-world life into Oxford, have created a profound revolution. Almost every term, now for years past, has seen a new statute, new rules of examinations, new professoriates, new languages, new degrees, so that the University is an organism in universal flux. Its curriculum has gone back to Heraclitus's 'All is flux.' Many think this organic evolution is being overdone. But in any case, no Continental, no American university can now boast of being more up-to-date than Oxford. A hoary visitor who finds himself plunged into the whirl of young postbellum Oxford, who reads through the University Gazette, with its incessant amendments to old statutes, with its new schools of science, English literature, modern languages, natural history, law, modern history, chemistry, medicine, music, poetry, agriculture, forestry, Indian and Oriental scholarships, and now Rhodes and Zaharoff traveling scholarships - after all this, he might think that Greek and Latin, the humanities, were snowed under and had been buried under indiscriminate neologies. It is not so really — at least as yet. Oxford may become what universities are abroad, but the old heart of the place remains much as it was with the humanities, antique tradition, the culture, the moral, the Church, still dominant. Old Oxford may be said to have taken to itself a new partner perhaps we ought to say a young wife. But as the central pulse of the higher English thought, manners, and ideals, it remains still the true nursing-ground. And it will so remain until English society is very much more democratized -and until Labor recognizes as education nothing but what will pay in material things. It was a touching occasion to me the other day, at the Entente Encania of June 22, when I took my seat among the doctors, and compared the scene with what I remember of the Encania of 1852, when Lord Derby, being both Prime Minister and Chancellor of the University, presided at the ceremony which gave D.C.L. degrees to Disraeli, Lord Stanley, and half the Cabinet. Though that was almost seventy years ago it seemed to me but yesterday, as in a dream. The same secular Latin formulas, except that Lord Derby addressed his son as Fili mi dilectissime! —instead of Vir egregie, præstantissime; the same D.C.L. robes, with 'the hideous clash of colors,' crimson and rose, as BurneJones said when he had to walk about the town in his new disguise; the same crowd, the same gracious ladies, the same shouts, and the same inaudible prize compositions! Ah! I was an undergraduate then, up in the gallery: we were a noisy lot, and bawled out rude jokes at the Doctors and rude compliments to the ladies' frocks. Last June, at any rate, the boys were well-behaved and silent. I came away, tired and rather bored. But I said: 'No! Oxford is not really changed. It is as ever the link between the old world and the new!' The ceremony of this year was a rivet for our French alliance for of the six Doctors, three were French — the first being Georges Clemenceau. He was hearty, jovial, and full of his fun. At the Vice-Chancellor's house I saw a good deal of him, and had the great pleasure of a quiet talk with him before the crowd began. I had known him in Paris in the old days, when J. Chamberlain, John Morley, and I met there, and were hot fighters for the struggling Republic. 'The Tiger' was quite himself at Oxford - without his claws, and beaming about his welcome from Leo Britannicus. Not only in the Sheldon Theatre was he received with roars of hearty applause; but as the traditional procession of the Doctors wound round from Exeter, through the Broad, to the Old Schools, the great French patriot was warmly cheered by the crowds which lined the streets. Really the G.O.M. of France quite enjoyed himself. He is wonderful, even with a bullet in his shoulder one would take him to be hardly sixty. One new development of the University is entirely approved by all. In my day, the theatre was taboo; everything dramatic was verboten; Thackeray was vetoed by the Vice-Chancellor as an 'entertainer.' Now drama is very much alive; and the serious study of presenting masterpieces, ancient and modern, is practically part of the training. I enjoyed Twelfth Night, played in the beautiful garden of the Warden of Wadham in the afternoon, under the trees, without scenery, stage, or orchestra a true masque danced out in shrubberies and lawns. I never enjoyed it more than I did in sight of a college that was building in the lifetime of Shakespeare, with the entire scene as it were a madcap frolic in the household of a great Elizabethan noble. Oxford may begin an era of hope for the British stage. RUSSIA'S CULTURE UNDER THE SOVIETS BY A. F. DAMANSKY [The following sketches are taken from a pamphlet entitled, ‘The Houses of Cards Built by the Soviets,' just published in Berlin in the Russian language. Its author is a well-known Russian woman writer. She is a recent refugee from Petrograd, where she taught in Soviet schools and worked in various public institutions.] "THE Unified Labor School' that is what the Bolsheviki proudly call the system of education they have established in Russia. This new type of school is a sort of amalgam, a welding together of all the types of schools that existed before. All the gymnasiums, the realschule, the institutes, all the private, municipal, and elementary schools, have been abolished, and their place has been taken by 'unified labor schools,' which are divided into the elementary classes, known as the first stage, and the more advanced classes, known as the second stage. The former teaching personnel has thinned out very considerably. Many have died, many have been executed, many have fled to the villages and abroad. Of course, the number of pupils has also decreased. The population of Petrograd, for example, is now officially put at 800,000, and according to unofficial, and probably more correct, information, it is only about half a million. Nevertheless, there is an appreciable shortage of teachers, which has to be made up in every possible way. Usually those who have nothing else to do go into teaching. Women preponderate in the profession. The main idea of the new schools is to bring up children in the spirit of proletarian class-consciousness, and to inculcate in them a proletarian ideology. The immediate object of education is to rid the younger generation of the bourgeois spirit. For this purpose great care is taken to mingle children from various |