The appeal goes on to explain what the league was to aim at and what were to be its methods.
On my return I found awaiting me the proof sheets of my book Das Maschinenzeitalter (“The Age of Machinery”). I added in the chapter entitled “Zukunftsausblicke” (“Glimpses into the Future”) an account of the London League. Just as I had previously known nothing about it, I took it for granted that my readers also were unacquainted with this phenomenon of the times. For in that thing called “Publicity,” the endeavors of a few hundred men—even of a few thousand—disappear like so many drops of carmine in an arm of the sea.
When the book came out, shortly afterward, I had the satisfaction that not a single one of the very numerous critics who devoted whole columns to their reviews of it ever suspected that “Jemand”—Some One—could possibly belong to “the weak-minded sex.” Doctor Moritz Necker, the well-known literary editor of the Vienna Tagblatt, in writing to me about another matter, mentioned that he had recently been reading an anonymous book called Das Maschinenzeitalter; in his mind there was no doubt that the author was Max Nordau. Cherbuliez was of the same opinion, and in a sixteen-page article in the Revue des deux mondes designated Max Nordau as the author of the work he was reviewing. Max Nordau met this with a published declaration that he did not know the book, and that he was in the habit of signing what he wrote.
For some time I had been in correspondence with the philosopher Bartholomäus von Carneri, to whom, after reading his Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus (“Morality and Darwinism”), I had written a letter expressing my admiration; he had replied that he knew and prized my Inventarium, and a regular correspondence had ensued. I had not revealed to him anything about my anonymous book; I was all the more pleasingly surprised when in the newspaper report of the parliamentary proceedings I found a speech of Carneri’s, delivered in the Austrian Reichsrat the day before, in which he mentioned Das Maschinenzeitalter. Thereupon I asked him what kind of a book it was, and who was the author. To this he replied that the author was not named, but he had guessed who it was—Karl Vogt; he had instantly recognized him by his style. Many, however, believed that he himself, Carneri, had written the book. Then I confessed to him that I was the guilty one, but begged him to keep the secret, and this he agreed to do.
At the beginning of the next autumn we had gone to Vienna for a fortnight, as we often did. At the hotel at which we put up we learned that the member of the Reichsrat from Styria, B. von Carneri, was in the same house. The prospect of becoming personally acquainted with my famous correspondent was extremely tempting to me, and we sent in our names to him. The savant received us with alacrity. An old man, a sick man,—almost a cripple,—and yet what gayety and freshness! Carneri had never been well in his life. His head was all the time bent over to his right shoulder, he could walk only with difficulty, and since his early youth he had not spent a day without agonizing pain. And he called himself a happy man; he not only called himself so, he was. His intellectual labors, his political activities, the possession of a beloved daughter and a beloved son-in-law, the high regard which he had won in the learned world and among his parliamentary associates, may well have been the basis of his enjoyment of life; but the real secret was doubtless that he not only dealt in philosophy but actually was a philosopher, that is to say, a man who can pass beyond the miseries of life and thankfully enjoy its beauty.
We spent some exhilarating hours in Carneri’s company; all the themes which we had broached in our correspondence were discussed, and the friendship which had begun through our letters was only confirmed by this personal association. That same evening we met again. When the member from Marburg-an-der-Drau stayed in Vienna during the sessions of the parliament, he was accustomed to take his supper at a certain long table in the hotel dining-room, and at that table a number of his colleagues and other prominent personages from the political, literary, and learned circles of Vienna used to gather. The “Carneri table” at the Hotel Meissl was a sort of salon of wit and talent. That evening we also took our places at this table, and listened with interest to the lively conversation, the center of which was our friend Carneri, at whose right hand I sat. I can remember one episode. My neighbor on the right suddenly spoke past me to my neighbor on the left, and said to him:
“Say, I have bought the book you quoted in your speech lately. Do you still not know who ‘Jemand’ is?”
“No, I have not a suspicion,” replied Carneri, and exchanged a smiling glance with me. “And what do you say to it?”
My right-hand neighbor began a long dissertation on Das Maschinenzeitalter, and another man who had also read it joined in the conversation. What was said I no longer recall; I only know that it was not disagreeable to me, but amused me immensely, especially when I threw in the remark, “I shall have to get that myself,” and some one cried, “Oh, that is not a book for ladies!”