With joyous pride he glanced around and summed up in his mind the valuation of the intellects there assembled. In fact, he had good reason to be proud, for among the great men who had come to Lucerne at his invitation were.... Yet, the form in which this story is told, allowing events to be projected into the future, precludes calling the Knights of the Rose Order by name.... So, then, no names—only a few incomplete data:—
A French author, regarded by his countrymen as the greatest of the living authors. No longer young, he has an enormous list of books to his credit; all brilliantly worked out with historical, prehistoric, and imaginary background, full of irony and full of wrath against social follies and absurdities, upright, bold, a warm worshiper before the altar of beauty.
A young Russian poet. The events of the Manchurian War, the horrors of the succeeding revolution, and of the still more horrible counter-revolution still played on his soul, just as the tempest plays on the strings of an æolian harp, enticing forth the most magical tones. He is waging a fierce, relentless war against society’s most arrant enemy: against stupidity in all its forms; especially in the form of superstition and in that of the criminal folly which impels men to enthrall, to persecute, and to tear one another to pieces. His eyes are unspeakably sad, but resolution speaks from his features. He wields his lash savagely and pitilessly, not because he hates or despises mankind—on the contrary, he sees in it a temple from which he will drive the profaners in holy wrath.
A great tragédienne of the Latin stock. When she plays, she appears to express the lament of her own sorrow. Seeing her you involuntarily think of what some artless Madonna paintings show; a bleeding heart surrounded with a wreath of thorns. All the majesty that halos misfortune is expressed in her carriage, in the accent of her voice. She is beautiful, but her beauty is as it were veiled behind a dark crape. Truly her art is many-sided and she plays even gay parts; but what especially characterizes her is the reflection of human suffering which seems rather the exposure of her own. You cannot be a spectator of her acting and fail to be deeply moved, and a soul subjected to such emotion is a soul ennobled at least during the time while the emotion lasts.
A German writer; a deep student of natural sciences. A prophet of an infinitely poetic natural philosophy, thereby exposed to the scornful and supercilious arrogance of technical and special scientists. Not for him, to pigeonhole, to ticket, and to number; his outlook embraces the wide, all-circling horizon; his spirit penetrates into the All-Spirit; his knowledge and love of Nature soar up into worship; his books are literary masterpieces. And for this reason pedants are quivering with scorn, so that their very souls, being so dry, crack if his name is mentioned.
A French statesman and politician, a senator, and experienced diplomat: a man of the world to his finger-tips; full of witty turns and repartees in conversation; full of clear, conclusive logic in public speech; one of the most consistent and fearless speakers in the Senate. Fearlessness characterizes his eloquence, for he speaks against the tendencies of the day, against the chauvinistic-patriotic majority, against the proposals of his personal friend, the Minister of the Navy. In matters of international arbitration he is not only quick to support and suggest, but moreover to accomplish. To him are due agreements, compromises, treaties; many a web of ancient misunderstandings and jealousies has been obliterated from the world through his agency, and on this account the fanatical supporters of nationalism have even threatened his life.
An American inventor—one might rather say a wholesale inventor. People call him the wizard. He conducts his experiments en gros, by the bushel! The number of marvelous works for which his contemporaries and those to come have to thank him, the things which lift men up to higher levels of life, are beyond reckoning; and what is finest about them is that not one of his instruments and pieces of apparatus is designed or fitted to serve purposes of destruction. The Mecca of all those who register patents—the ministries of war—is closed to his inventions. What he has elaborated and accomplished serves not for making human bodies into pulp; it has the modest aim of making life easier, more beautiful, and more enjoyable, and of enriching human society. One of his latest “trouvailles”—that of casting houses out of cement—had, at the time of the last Rose-Week at Lucerne, already found so much popular acceptance that quite commonly these cheap, quickly erected, and at the same time æsthetic and hygienic domiciles were being built,—that is to say, cast,—and simultaneously an end was put to one of the greatest of evils—the wretched housing of the poor, from which a third of the prevalent vice and illness springs.
A dramatic author from England; sparkling with wit and intellect, who writes the bitterest satires, but with a background of tenderness; also an ameliorator of the world and mankind, not, indeed, by saying to men, “Become better,” but by endeavoring, by his ridicule, to exterminate whatever makes them bad. He tears off hypocritical masks and shows the ugly grimaces behind them; on the other hand, he has the knack of entwining a gentle halo around poor and humble forms, around the oppressed, the misunderstood, the mistaken. Humor has been defined as a smile and a tear; in his humor the contrast is much stronger: it is the sobbing laughter of scorn.
A Scandinavian woman devoted to philosophy, full of the profound gentle wisdom of experience: an aged woman, who had never married or borne children, but who speaks with the tongue of angels about the sacredness of marriage and the rights of His Majesty the Child: a champion of free, proud individuality—that is to say, pretty much the same thing as Goethe called personality and designated as the loftiest happiness.
An American statesman: the man whose motto runs: “The same moral law that holds among individuals must also prevail among nations”; a motto which is diametrically opposed to the principles on which hitherto the “classical polities” of the most celebrated European statesmen have been founded. Our American looks back on a long, beneficent career. Peaceful victories, positive, not negative, peaceful victories, have been won by him. His great work has been the successful bringing together of the two halves of America into one great Union. Moreover, during his administration he has concluded a large number of permanent arbitration treaties with the States of Europe. Practically unknown to the general European public, he has cultivated a large part of that soil which modern culture has won away from the ancient dominion of War. Toker had a high regard for this man, who of all his guests stood nearest to him.