and nuance of his
madness. Its convolutions seemed neither incomprehensible nor mysterious
to him.

An intolerable loathing for life, an illuminated contempt for men and
women, had long ago taken possession of him. This philosophic attitude
was the product of his egoism. He felt himself the center of life and it
became his nature to revolt against all evidences of life that existed
outside himself. In this manner he grew to hate, or rather to feel an
impotent disgust for, whatever was contemporary.

When his normality abandoned him, he avoided a greater tragedy. In a
manner it was not Mallare who became insane. It was his point of view
that went mad. Although there are passages in the Journal that escape
coherence, the greater part of the entries are simple almost to naivete.
They reveal an intellect able to adjust itself without complex
uprootings to the phenomena engaging its energies. The first concrete
evidence of the loathing for life that was to result in its own
annihilation appears in a passage beginning abruptly--

"Most of all I like the trees when they are empty of leaves. Their
wooden grimaces must aggravate the precisely featured houses of the
town. People who see my work for the first time grow indignant and call
me sick and artificial. (Bilious critics!) But so are these trees.

"People think of art in terms of symmetry. With a most amazing conceit
they have decided upon the contours of their bodies as the standards of
beauty. Therefore I am pleased to look at trees or at anything that
grows, unhandicapped by the mediocritizing force of reason, and note how
contorted such things are."

Mallare's point of view toward his world--the attitude that went
mad--was nothing more involved than his egoism. His infatuation with
self was destined to arrive at a peak on whose height he became overcome
with a dizziness. He wrote in his Journal:

"It is unfortunate that I am a sculptor, a mere artist. Art has become
for me a tedious decoration of my impotence. It is clear I should have
been a God. Then I could have had my way with people. To shriek at them
obliquely, to curse at them through the medium of clay figures, is a
preposterous waste of time. A wounded man groans. I, impaled by life,
emit statues.

"As a God, however, I would have found a diversion worthy my contempt. I
would have made the bodies of people like their thoughts--crooked,
twisted, bulbous. I would have given them faces resembling their
em