her out of her bourgeois family. Gradually he makes her over in his own image, till she becomes also a hard egotistical lust for experience with no end beyond itself. The men she mingles with, like the women he mingles with, lose all individuality; become bits of the mob flesh tossed into the caldron of a libidinous egotism. Savaron accurately concludes that he has suffered from "a sort of insanity which concealed itself in an intellectual honesty toward life." For him, the end is suicide. It is a very terrible book, brilliantly written, enriched with poetic vision and original wit, and psychologically, I believe, perfectly sound.
There are two interesting ways of testing the soundness of Mr. Hecht's horrible psychological realism. One way is relatively comfortable, and it may even conduce to smugness. It is to take the report of "The Amazing Crime and Trial of Leopold and Loeb,"[1] and to study the traits of the two brilliant, well-to-do young college men, who thought they were supermen and beyond good and evil, particularly Leopold, who was an expert ornithologist and knew half a dozen difficult languages and was graduated from college with Phi Beta Kappa rank. Study the traits of these two young supermen who had lost the faculty of appropriate emotional reaction to experience, who looked at the human pageant, including their own trial, as detached intellectual spectators, and who killed a fourteen-year-old boy "for fun"; and you will find there, recorded by alienists and psychiatrists, every prominent feature of the type of mind described by Mr. Hecht in "Erik Dorn" and "Humpty Dumpty." The other way of testing Mr. Hecht's psychological veracity is more painful. It is this: Whenever he tells
- ↑ Chicago, 1924.
