a
highly complex culture and civilization. He regards himself as a
nineteenth-century Hamlet, and for him not merely the times, but his
race and all mankind, are out of joint. He is not especially Polish
save by birth; he is as little at home in Paris or at Rome as in
Warsaw. Set him down in any quarter of the globe and he would be
equally out of place. He folds the mantle of his pessimism about him.
Life has interested him purely as a spectacle, in which he plays no
part save a purely passive one. His relation to life is that of the
Greek chorus, passing across the stage, crying "Woe, woe!"

Life has interested, entertained, and sometimes wearied him. He muses,
philosophizes, utters the most profound observations upon life, art,
and the mystery of things. He puts mankind and himself upon the
dissecting-table.

Here is a nature so sensitive that it photographs every impression,
an artistic temperament, a highly endowed organism; yet it produces
nothing. The secret of this unproductiveness lies perhaps in a certain
tendency to analyze and philosophize away every strong emotion that
should lead to action. Here is a man in possession of two distinct
selves,--the one emotional, active; the other eternally occupied in
self-contemplation, judgment, and criticism. The one paralyzes the
other. He defines himself as "a genius without a portfolio," just as
there are certain ministers-of-state without portfolios.

In such a character many of us will find just enough of ourselves to
make its weaknesses distasteful to us. We resent, just because
we recognize the truth of the picture. Leon Ploszowski belongs
unmistakably to our own times. His doubts and his dilettanteism are
our own. His fine aesthetic sense, his pessimism, his self-probings,
his weariness, his overstrung nerves, his whole philosophy of
negation,--these are qualities belonging to this century, the outcome
of our own age and culture.

If this were all the book offers us one might well wonder why it
was written. But its real interest centres in the moment when the
cultivated pessimist "without dogma" discovers that the strongest and
most genuine emotion of his life is its love for another man's wife.
It is an old theme; certainly two thirds of our modern French novels
deal with it; we know exactly how the conventional, respectable
British novel would handle it. But here is a treatment, bold,
original, and unconventional. The character of the woman stands out in
s