Przybyszewski asserts that physicians do not busy themselves with history; if they did, they would know that decadence has always existed; that it is not decadence at all, but merely a phase of development as important as normality: Normality is stupidity, decadence is genius! Is there, he asks, a more notable case of the abnormal than the prophet of Protestantism, Martin Luther? They are all children of Satan, he cries, those great ones who for the sake of the idea sacrifice the peace of thousands, as Alexander and Napoleon; or those who spoil the dreams of youth, Socrates and Schopenhauer; or those who venture into the depths and love sin because only sin has depth, Poe and Rops; and those who love pain for the sake of pain and ascend the Golgotha of mankind, Chopin and Schumann. Satan was the first philosopher, the first anarchist; and pain is at the bottom of all art, and with Satan, the father of illusions! It is wise to stop here, else might we become entangled in a Miltonic genealogy of the angels. I give the foregoing list to show how easy it is to twist a theory to one’s own point of view. The decadence theory is silly; and equally absurd is Przybyszewski’s idea that the normal is the stupid. This Pole seems anything but normal or stupid. He now writes plays in the Strindberg style; formerly he lectured on Chopin, and played the F sharp minor polonaise—he was possessed by the key of F sharp minor, and saw “soul-states” whenever a composer wrote in that tonality! _Audition colorée_, this? Nor is there cause for alarm in the word anarchy, which means in its ideal state unfettered self-government. If we all were self-governed governments would be sinecures. Anarchy often expresses itself in rebellion against conventional art forms—the only kind of anarchy that interests me. A most signal example is Henry James. Surprising it is to find this fastidious artist classed among the anarchs of art, is it not? He is one, as surely as was Turgénieff, the de Goncourts, or Flaubert. The novels of his later period,—What Maisie Knew, The Wings of a Dove, The Ambassadors, The Better Sort, The Sacred Fount, The Awkward Age, and the rest,—do they not all betray the revolution of Henry James from the army of the conventional? He will be no dull realist or flamboyant romantic or desiccated idealist. Every book he has written, from The Lesson of the Master and The Pattern in the Carpet, is at once a personal confession and a declaration of artistic independence. Subtle Henry James among the revolutionists! Yes, it is even so. He has seceded forever from the army of English tradition, from Bronté, Eliot, Dickens, and Thackeray. He may be the discoverer of the fiction of the future. * * * * *