rks of art, fine scenery, and beautiful
women. From an aesthetic point of view, I possess refined nerves,--too
refined, perhaps, owing to my early training and a naturally
impressionable temperament. This aesthetic sensitiveness gives me
as many delights as torments, and renders me one great service: it
preserves me from cynicism or otherwise extreme corruption, and serves
me instead of moral principle. I recoil from many things, not because
they are wicked, but because they are ugly. From my aesthetic nerves I
derive also a certain delicacy of feeling. Taken all in all, it seems
to me that I am a man a little marred by life, decent enough though to
say the truth, rather floating in mid-air because not supported by any
dogma, either social or religious. I am also without an aim to which I
could devote my life.

One word more about my abilities before concluding the synthesis. My
father, my aunt, my colleagues, and sometimes strangers, consider them
simply prodigious. I allow that my intellect has a certain glitter.
But will the _improductivite Slave_ scatter all the hopes invested in
me? Considering all I have, or rather have not done up to this day,
either for others or myself, I feel inclined to think that such
will be the case. This confession costs me more than appears on the
surface. My irony when I think of myself tastes bitter on the palate.
There was something barren in the clay from which God formed the
Ploszowskis, since on that soil everything springs up and grows so
luxuriously, yet produces no fruit. Truly, if with this barrenness,
this powerlessness to act, I possessed the abilities of a genius, it
would be a strange kind of genius,--a genius without portfolio, as
there are ministers of state without portfolio.

This definition, "a genius without portfolio" seems to fit me to
perfection. I shall take out a patent of invention for the word. But
the definition does not apply to me alone. Its name is legion. Side
by side with the _improductivite Slave_ goes the genius without
portfolio; it is a pure product of the Slav soil. Once more I say its
name is legion. I do not know another part of the world where so much
ability is wasted, in which even those who bring forth something give
so little, so incredibly little, in comparison with what God gave
them.

ROME, BABUINO, 14 January.

Another letter from my aunt urging me to come. I am coming, I am
coming, dear aunt, though God knows I am doing it out of l