and one sets these gigantic shapes in motion in a kind of vast "blurred procession," upon which, pretending that it is humanity, one looks down with colossal contempt.
From the age of seventeen to thirty Mr. Hecht has been gulping modern literature voraciously, with a sure instinct leading him to the authors who dispense the strongest vodka. He is himself described as a cool, sarcastic intelligence; but clearly he loves to stimulate that cool, sarcastic intelligence by cultivating the society of minds acquainted with strange dreams, delirium, anarchy, nihilism. Mr. Hansen gives an excellent account of his reading and his successive literary infatuations. When he first met Mr. Hecht he was reading Burton's "Arabian Nights," the next day it was Gautier—in translation, then Dostoievsky, Huysmans, Anatole France, Arthur Symons, George Moore, Baudelaire, Poe, Whitman. Andreyev, H. L. Mencken, Arthur Machen, etc. In his latest novel, "Humpty Dumpty," there are two or three pages in which the hero, sorting his library onto the shelves, gives a summary comment upon modern authors, indicating how swiftly Mr. Hecht runs beyond his old masters. For example: Nietzsche is now "like an old Spanish cannon." Pater is "a good teething ring for embryonic stylists." "Mencken will last as long as the bookcase at least. He's a noisy guest." D. H. Lawrence's work is "an amateur blue print of sexual impulses poorly remembered." "Three psychoanalysis books are enough for any library. To hell with Sigmund. I begin to dislike him anyway. He's corrupted immorality." "We'll spotlight 'Ulysses' in the center here. The first herculean effort to disorganize the
