I am reading Nietzsche and Tolstoï. Each tells me that the morality of the day is all wrong, and that he has discovered the one true way of salvation. Life, cries Nietzsche, strength, sunshine, beauty. Death, cries Tolstoï, abnegation, pity, holiness. 'T is all as old as the hills, and withal so simple that one wonders why Nietzsche should have needed eleven volumes to say it in and Tolstoï endless pamphlets. I never can understand the lengths to which some authors go in self-repetition. Half the books are written to prove that water is dry, and the other half that it's wet. If you would only stop and think just for one moment, cries Tolstoï, you would at once see what a ridiculous life you are leading and you would refuse to lead it any longer. Stop and think! Ay, but 't is difficult thinking to-day.
It will be all over and done with so long--by the time you read this--that the Triple Alliance may be in three pieces; but for the moment the complications of European politics alternately startle and depress my day with furious cannonades of honour from an Italian gunboat and brazen dronings of national anthems from a German band. For the young man whom Tolstoï has described as the most comic figure in Europe, coming to meet Umberto I. in Venice, inconsiderately stationed his yacht just outside my window; and though he is gone at last, _Gott sei Dank_, the echoes of him still linger in irrelevant cannon-shots that send the pigeons scurrying in mad swoops; while, as if removed from the oppression of his presence, the band of the _Hohenzollern_ plays London music-hall tunes all day long, commencing, significantly enough, with "Oh, Mr. Porter, what a funny man you are!" I never realised how international is our music-hall till I heard Italians staggering home at midnight, singing "Two lovely black eyes" in choice Venetian. A beautiful yacht this _Hohenzollern_, as large as an Atlantic liner: I suppose an Imperial yacht is like an Imperial pint. 'T was a great moment when it sailed in round a bend, slow and serene--a glorious white vessel, radiant with flags, stately and majestic in its movement as a sonnet of Milton, and about it a black swarm of gondolas, those of the noble families equipped with half a dozen gondoliers in green, yellow, or blue liveries, and at the stern of each boat a trail of silk. And the dense crowds huzzahed, and the band played "God Save the Queen," only in German, so that it meant, _Heil dir im Siegeskranz_. And after that came the Italian national air, which isn't an anthem, but a quick march, and so lacks dignity. The "Wacht am Rhein" made a half-hearted effort to be present, but in the night we had the Emperor's own "Sang an Aegir," stuck in the middle of a Wagner programme. Beyond this, compliment could scarcely go.