of art from stereotyped, slavish copyists of nature; apostle of intellectualism and emotionalism versus æstheticism, and from it he has created Charles Strickland, victim of a strange disease resulting in dissociation of personality. The critics tell us "The Moon and Sixpence" is a "great" book. From the standpoint of literary construction it may be entitled to such designation. From the standpoint of one who desires in fiction some verisimilitude of life as it is, or as it should be if it were ideal, it is disgusting and nauseous, atavistic in implication, primitive in delineation, bestial in its suggestion, and it tends to undermine faith in the fundamental goodness of human nature. It is radicalism in realism carried to the _n_th degree. A middle-class Englishman of unknown antecedents, of commonplace somatic and intellectual possessions, of emotional barrenness and shut-in personality, marries, procreates, and serves--on the London Stock Exchange, after the manner of his kind, until he is forty. If artistic impulses had peeped from his unconscious mind to his conscious he had not betrayed them. Then, when constructive incubal activity had passed its height, he becomes big with the idea that his unsightly hulk harbors the soul of an artist. He forsakes his family without warning and without making the smallest provision for their maintenance or welfare, goes to Paris to study art, to scorn convention and decency, and to treat mankind with contumely. He knows no French, and gradually his English vocabulary shrinks to "You are a damn fool" when a man makes proffer of service or supper, and "Tell her to go to hell" if the offer of self or succor comes from a woman. When he writes, however, his mental elaborations encompass the degree that permits him to pen this chaste message: "God damn my wife. She is an excellent woman. I wish she was in hell." Like all victims of dementia præcox, when the disorder conditions bizarre conduct for the first time in mid-maturity, he becomes profoundly egocentric, neglectful of his appearance and of his person, and callously insensitive to the feelings and rights of others. As the components of personality dissociate the god disappears, the beast remains, puissant and uncontrollable when under the dominion of primeval appetites or instincts. He has no pride to swallow when he feeds from the hand that still stings from slapping him, no more than does the lion who devours the meat thrust into his cage on the prong that a moment before prodded and wounded him.