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concentrated upon highbrow books: biographies, histories or art, and essays.
    We read, I remember, an essay entitled “Leisure and Mechanism” by Bertrand Russell, the point of which was that it is better to do nothing and amount to nothing than to do a wrong thing. To make clear what this meant the noble author cited a certain newspaper-magnate who had no vices and slaved away faithfully at his lifework; and, year in and year out, for millions of newspaper readers, set the vulgarest example and advocated entirely evil policies. It would have been better for the world if he had lain snoozing on a miserable sofa or under a shade tree all his life, the philosopher said. The effect of his virtue and industriousness had been only to increase the harm he was in a position to do.
    This essay infuriated Mr. Auerbach. He arose and strode around and shook his fist. He had respected Russell as a master- mathematician and admired him as a great liberal and pacifist, but this was the limit! With his most tearful look, shaking his forefinger at me, he maintained that work, hard work, no matter what hard work, was all-essential. It was a good thing in itself, indeed it was the basis of morality. Save for the necessity of it, with the sting of poverty in the lives of the poor and the desire of rich men to get richer, all men would lapse into themselves in drunkenness, lewdness, and every vile, selfish habit, he said. This righteous wrath was my introduction to a form of puritanism which is an important problem today, pro or con. In Mr. Auerbach’s case it was not connected with any religion, although there was an echo of Elijah or Jeremiah in the tone of his remarks. After this he would not hear another word by Bertrand Russell and often referred to him as frivolous and a bad influence on young people.
    Now and then he told me what I wanted to know about himself. Like many German-Jews in those days he was romantically pro-German. Born in the United States, the son of an old-fashioned, comfortable banking family, he was sent for higher education to Heidelberg and he never got over it. Our involvement in the so-called World War struck him as a wicked mistake; and after quarrelling with certain relatives and business associates he retired from the firm he had founded, and suffered in silence while Germany was being defeated. Even the charities of wartime were against his principles; and it was then, in the sudden loneliness of his rich Park Avenue apartment, that he was inspired to take up art collecting.
    In the spring I accompanied him and his wife abroad in a half-secretarial, half-filial capacity, chiefly to keep him company when she was engaged and to give him my arm at street corners where his failing eyesight was not to be trusted. He took a last look at the museums of Europe through great binoculars, focusing them as close as he could get to one painting after another; and he added a few final treasures to his collection.
    Since the War his dearest philanthropy had been assisting the German universities to re-equip their laboratories and to bring their libraries back up to date; and he had to see people in Berlin and Munich about all this, and some very distinguished sociability went with it. Even in England he found a way to be serviceable to the Fatherland, in the correction of prejudices left over from the conflict and its vindication in the eyes of the world. That was in 1923. There was a group of Englishmen just then, half in and half out of government, whose international policy and attitude toward the erstwhile enemy suited him. They were idealists, pacifists, and radical economists, and various liberal gentlemen who simply admired Germany, in its national temperament and culture and political philosophy as it appeared then, more than they admired their own nation or its allies.
    Three or four were rather famous figures in 1923; today they have been forgotten. I think that we should be reminded of them and when peace is