A reminiscence: On a rainy autumn night I went to hear him lecture. “... and if the psychologists will find contradictions in my words—I shall not feel dismayed. There are contradictions that are dearer to me than most perfect consequentialities.” From the dim light of the platform ached a face distorted with contempt and suffering, with the grim clairvoyance of the Beyond. At moments the eyebrows leaped up and bulged the forehead into thick, strained furrows, and the eyes suddenly burst in a flash that revealed unknown worlds, twisting your soul with awe and mystery. But soon the flame would extinguish, and the face would resume the masque of contemptuous weariness; the mouth-corners congealed a satanic would-be smile that prepared one for his famous “Heh-heh.” That face haunted me for many days and nights, as if my inner vision had been scalded by an unearthly chimera. My friends, who have seen his exaggerated portrait painted by Krzyzanowski, will understand me. Those who will read his works (if they are translated), will understand me. _Homo Sapiens_[1] is but a nuance of his multiplex creative spirit, though perhaps a most characteristic nuance. Przybyszewski, like Nietzsche, like Wilde, is a unique mosaique, in which the personality, the artist, his life and his works, are inseparable, indivisible units of the wonderful whole. Who can fathom this hellish cosmos, this mare tenebrarum of the modern man’s soul, which the mad Pole has traversed and penetrated to the bottom, and has cast out shrieking monsters and gargoyles illuminated with blinding, dazzling, infernal flames? [1] _Homo Sapiens, by Stanislaw Przybyszewski. New York: Alfred A. Knopf._ I cannot. Perhaps only pale glimpses of reflections. * * * * * Those who have heard Przybyszewski play Chopin tell us that no virtuoso can compare with his creative interpretation of his melancholy compatriot. In his profound essay on _Chopin and Nietzsche_ I have been impressed not so much with the morbid theory as with the characteristic feature present in all his work—the reflection of his own personality. In his favorite artists, in his heroes, in his women, he has painfully sought an expression of his restless, boundless self. Thus Chopin becomes one of the numerous selves of Przybyszewski. Let me picture the Composer in the light of the Poet. Specifically Slavic features: extreme subtility of feeling, easy excitability, passionateness and sensuousness, predilection for luxury and extravagance, and, chief of all, a peculiar melancholy lyricism, which is nothing but the expression of the most exalted egoism, whose sole and highest criterion is his own “I.” These, and the profound melancholy of his native limitless plains with their desolate sandy expanses, with the lead-skies over them, have been influences keenly contradicting his flexible, light vivaciousness of the Gallic, his coquettish effeminacy, his love for life and light.