ographical—to a very great extent, I surmise. In dramatic imagination, the imagination which penetrates and lives within other types of personality than one's own, Mr. Hecht is as deficient as Byron. Hitherto he comprehends and sympathizes thoroughly with only one type of mind, and that is the type described by him in the preceding paragraph as his own. The shape of this mind, as I conceive it, is due primarily to three pressures, of which I will describe the operation in a little more detail.
From the age of seventeen to thirty Mr. Hecht has, so to speak, sat at the center of Chicago journalism, a city in which, one would like to hope, journalism is more exclusively concerned with accidents, frauds, and crimes than in any other city in the world. He has sat there for thirteen years, a high-strung, excitable receiving organism, while day after day for 4,745 days there have streamed in upon him from all over the city reports of all the fires and boiler explosions and automobile collisions; all the installment company sharks, and oil promotion companies, and bank defalcations, and City Hall intrigues; and all the raping and lynching and love-nesting and bootlegging and highway robbery committed in one of the great paradises of stick-up men. After excessive subjection to this sort of stimuli one becomes quite incapable of the normal human reaction to it; one ceases to individualize and discriminate; one develops a kind of self-protective callousness and reacts to the moving atrocities as merely good stories or poor stories, "old stuff" or "sob stuff." If in addition to being a journalist one is also a poet, one generalizes all the accidents into one colossal accident, all the frauds into one colossal fraud, all the crimes into one colossal crime;
