Spengler Speaks

THE HOUR OF DECISION--Oswald Spengler--Knopf ($2.50).

When Oswald Spengler speaks, many a Western Worldling stops to listen. His monumental Decline of the West galvanized the attention of European and U. S. intellectuals, caused a hopeful pricking-up of Asiatic ears. Uncompromising pessimist, Spengler sounded the knell of Western civilization, which he said had passed maturity, was beginning a swift senescence. No defeatist, in The Hour of Decision he rings a tocsin.

Spengler believes that today we are in history's grandest age but sees no reason for individuals to be happy about it. "Greatness and happiness are incompatible and we are given no choice. No one living in any part of the world today will be happy. . . ." Conscious of his prophet's mantle, he says: "I see further than others ... I write not for a few months ahead or for next year, but for the future. . . . Among the few genuine historians of standing, none was ever popular. . . ." The old idealistic order is nearly over; the new day will be realistic. "The dreary train of world-improvers has now come to an end of its amble through these centuries, leaving behind it, as sole monument of its existence, mountains of printed paper. The Caesars will now take its place. High policy, the art of the possible, will again enter upon its eternal heritage, free from all systems and theories, itself the judge of the facts by which it rules, and gripping the world between its knees like a good horseman."

Pacifists will find scant comfort in Spengler's pages : "We have entered upon the age of world wars. It began in the 19th Century and will outlast the present and probably the next." Economists will not agree with his derogatory attitude towards economics, which he makes subservient to politics: "This whole crushing depression is purely and simply the result of the decline of State power." Marxists will be enraged at Spengler's flat statement that the World Revolution "has reached its goal," is an accomplished fact. They may regard as an undeserved compliment his charge that "the world-economic crisis of this year and a good many next years is not, as the world supposes, the temporary consequence of war, revolution, inflation, and payment of debts. It has been willed. In all essentials it is the product of the deliberate work of the leaders of the proletariat." Laborers will not like his diagnosis of the cause of unemployment: "Unemployment stands everywhere in exact proportion to the height of the political wage-tariffs. . . . In Russia, Japan. China, and India there is no lack of work, because there are no luxury wages." Many a disputatious citizen will take umbrage at: "One has only to glance at the figures in meetings, public-houses, processions, and riots; one way or another they are all abortions, men who, instead of having healthy instincts in their body, have only heads full of disputatiousness and revenge for their wasted life, and mouths as their most important organ. ... It is from the intellectual 'mob,' with the failures from all academic professions, the spiritually unfit and the morally inhibited, at its head, that the gangsters of Liberal and Bolshevist risings are recruited."

But readers who enjoy vigorous writing will be glad to be rubbed the wrong way by Spengler's harsh aphorisms: "If few can stand long war without deterioration of soul, none can stand a long peace. . . . The individual's life is of importance to none besides himself: the point is whether he wishes to escape from history or give his life for it. ... Let it for once be said outright, though it is a slap in the face for the vulgarity of the age: property is not a vice, but a gift, and a gift such as few possess. . . . Liberty has always been the liberty of those who wish to obtain the power, not to abolish it. ... Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism . . . Christian morality is, like every morality, renunciation and nothing else. . . . Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes. . . . Finance-Socialists and trust magnates like Morgan and Kreuger correspond absolutely to the mass-leaders of Labour parties and the Russian economic commissars: dealer-natures with the same parvenu tastes. . . . All really great leaders in history go 'Right' however low the depths from which they have climbed."

Spengler describes himself as a "strong" pessimist. Though he considers the World War "a defeat of the white races, and the Peace of 1918 . . . the first great triumph of the coloured world," he holds out a small hope, no bigger than Hitler's hand, for the salvation of Western civilization. "There remains as a formative power only the warlike, 'Prussian' spirit--everywhere and not in Germany alone. . . . He whose sword compels victory here will be lord of the world. The dice are there ready for this stupendous game. Who dares to throw them?"

The Author. Oswald Spengler chose Germany (Blankenburg im Harz) as his birthplace, history as his province. He studied mathematics, philosophy, art and history in Munich and Berlin, wrote his doctor's thesis on Heraclitus, then subsided into the anonymity of a pedagog. When the first version of Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) was finished, he could find no German publisher, brought it out in Vienna. By 1923 it had become a world affair, reached the U. S. in 1926. No longer hidden under a bushel of schoolboys' papers, Spengler's threatening light shines now from a huge-roomed Munich apartment overlooking the Isar. He has collected many a painting and objet d'art, a library of several thousand volumes. Said he once: "There are two more works that I have to write. When they are done, I am going to throw my library into the Isar." Though he is German to the marrow, Spengler has a passion for Italy, visits it whenever he can. Heavyset, strong-featured, with big ears and an impressively high bald head, Spengler at 53 still has great physical vigor, delights in tireless mountaineering and long hikes, likes to converse with peasants, whose quips and saws he collects with fervor, repeats with gusto.

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