only is her behaviour true to type, but what is revealed of the nature of her disease is convincing. She is a purely objective creation—a mere picture. Modern fictionists specializing in insanity want to make analytic studies usually. Probably this is the reason so few have essayed mania, which might be correctly painted from a live model, if the painter were satisfied with a picture and did not aspire to interpretation. Not that an interpretive study, if accurate, might not be uniquely interesting. The ideal novel portraying an insane hero or heroine remains to be written by a man or woman gifted with creative imagination and artistic expression who has recovered from one or more attacks of manic-depressive insanity.

M. Paul Morand, who has been sketching imaginary international figures, men and women, has recently depicted general paresis in La Nuit Portofino Kulm, the opening sketch in the volume entitled Ferme la Nuit. O'Patah is a composite of Oscar Wilde, Eamon de Valera and Gabriele d'Annunzio, doubly dedicated as poet and Irishman-to ridicule, to misfortune and to sublimity. M. Morand says that "his organic disorders followed the typical course of his disease". But he makes O'Patah talk and act in a way that would be quite impossible for a victim of general paresis. He does, however, in a masterly way which meets the extreme exigencies of both art and science, foreshadow in the opening scene of the episode the disease which is soon to fasten upon O'Patah, first crippling his faculties and then causing his death. Here, in the Royal Suite at the Waldorf, surrounded by an ante-room full of reporters, and bombarded with telegrams and scented notes, the hero-poet, with the vanity of a tenor idol, the brawn of a Sampson and the pompousness of a political boss, receives the sculptor interested in making a bust of him, in a scene of utter confusion. Like the opening notes of a symphony, the disarray of the room in which the reader first sees O'Patah is an index of the more general and essential confusion of which he is later to be a witness. The room in which a person of abnormal mentality lives is as significant of his disease as his speech or his conduct. Ibsen is the only writer I recall who has given an exact picture of general paresis. In his description is to be found the delineation of the disease in all its astonishing manifestations.

Mrs. Katharine Fullerton Gerould is given to portraying individuals who are burdened with one form of psychopathy or another, but they are rarely, if ever, insane. In Bluebonnet, a short story in the volume called Valiant Dust, Millicent-who has all the family nerves-has visual hallucinations which condition an aberrant conduct, but in reality she can laugh at them and explain their genesis. Her husband, a lawyer with a single track mind, is so engrossed in his profession that he has no time to companion his wife and to effect a communal life with her, though he is profoundly solicitous of her health. When she writes to her brother, a pompous, self sufficient, arbitrary individual, that she has been surrounded by strange people including a most dreadful little girl in a blue sunbonnet who goes about and hits the furniture with her hard little knuckles and who is in every way impish, and gives a circumstantial account of their visits to her, both her husband and brother are profoundly concerned lest she be developing insanity. Her husband receives the letter from her brother and informs Millicent of it, and she tells him at once that it was a joke which she wanted to play on "the pompous fool George". He is at once reassured and turns to the engrossments of his profession, leaving Millicent to her own devices. She has, however, found that engrossments for her are not teas at the golf club and visits of indolent women, but the creations of her own imagination.

So she turns to them again, rather than to colourless diversions that her husband thinks should be sufficient to fill her life. And this time she carries the play to a far greater extent, for she now begins to believe in their reality herself, and she goes some lengths to deepen her own conviction, even so far as to buy the gingham in the village to make the blue bonnet for the impish little girl, and to pour tea into each of the six cups which she had laid for her party, and to wet the spoons, so that the maid might be convinced that her invisible acquaintances had been there in reality. Her husband then sends for an alienist, and I doubt not that he told him, after getting the facts of the case, and sizing up the husband, that Bluebonnet was a wish-fulfilment on the genesic side of Millicent's nature and that the other five were attempts at fictitious fulfilment of her craving for contact with

people who had done something in the world, who were doing something in the world, who had time to talk about their accomplishments and their failures, to laugh at them and lament them.

In The Clean Heart, by Mr. A. S. M. Hutchinson, the hero is evidently intended to become insane in the early chapters of the book. He has spent his youth up to thirty working for other people and suppressing himself, and although a successful man he is restive and ill at ease. He is possessed with the idea of satisfying himself, but doesn't know what he wants. One day he leaves his office (he is an editor and also a successful novelist) and is pursued by his double, jumps off a bridge into water, is fished out, runs nowhere in particular and falls in with a cheerful tramp, joins him and becomes a hobo, gets rid of his double, enjoys life and tries all available kinds of selfishnesses, and finally returns home a normal man.

This is an attempt at fulfilment vastly inferior to that of Mr. Polly, who was not overdrawn and whose behaviour was in the nature of the possible, while the hero of The Clean Heart was labeled a lunatic and made to behave as a philosopher taking a needed vacation.

Miss May Sinclair has drawn insane persons true to life, although they are always minor actors in her dramas, her chief characters being let off with milder aberrations. In the psychopathic family of Mary Olivier, Aunt Charlotte, though moving in a vague background, playing with dolls and pets and giving them away preparatory to an imaginary marriage, moves convincingly as a dement; while the brother who is sent to America and returns with delusions of having committed cruel acts while there, has fallen a victim to the hereditary taint.

One of the best high-grade feebleminded characters in fiction is the boy in Miss Willa Cather's Paul's Case; while the late crop of novels has produced psychopathic personalities of many varieties, some of whom are purported by the author or supposed by most readers to be insane, such as the Father in Mary Lee, by Geoffrey Dennis, a monster of cruelty and religious fanaticism; and the "Mad Messiah" in The Ragged Messenger, by W. B. Maxwell, who, after having been an epileptic in youth, developed the belief that he was divinely inspired. In a recent novel, The

Orissers, Mr. L. H. Myers has sketched an interesting psychopath, Cosmo, who quickly got beyond his creator's control.

A unique study of psychopathic personality in literature has come from Italy, Un Uomo Finito. In it Signor Giovanni Papini has given a revelation of his morbid childhood, his raging adolescence, his furious flights from reality, his near-delusions of grandeur which led him to aspire to omnipotence but to fall short of being able to believe himself a god, and his descent into the depths of depression, as these states have never been offered in a single volume the record of a single life. It is admittedly autobiographic and Signor Papini's present piety fits in admirably to the personality.

An open question remains as to whether or not the great advance in the study of morbid psychology witnessed by the present age has been or is being reflected in the fiction of the same period; whether, with the widespread interest in the subject, any of the psychopathic creations of modern novelists surpass in understanding, in presentation or in power of appeal those of Dostoievsky, Ibsen, De Maupassant and other writers of the past century.

It is desirable that we should become saner both as individuals and as nations. That we are becoming less so as individuals the statistics of institutions for the insane would seem to prove; that we are becoming less so as nations needs no proof, but if it did. I could readily supply it. We get the Laocoön grasp on disease when we know whence and how it comes. We await this information in regard to insanity. Meanwhile it only throws sand in the gearbox of the available machinery for finding out about it to create literature in which established facts are misrepresented. If we are going to have insanity in fiction, let us have the real thing.

JOSEPH COLLINS.

OF STANDARDS

BY HENRY RUTGERS MARSHALL

THAT tastes in regard to the attribution of beauty are very diverse and variable is a fact that is constantly forced upon our attention. That it has been patent to men of the past, as it is to us, is indicated in the formulation of the proverbial phrase de gustibus non est disputandum. In truth this variability of taste often raises the question whether there are any reliable standards in the realm of æsthetics at all, whether one man's taste is not as well founded as that of any other.

Nevertheless we find a large proportion of those who consider this question seriously convinced that there must exist some really fixed æsthetic standards, if we could but discover them. Indeed even those who hold that dispute in regard to matters of taste is bootless will balk when it is suggested that their position involves the notion that there is no warrant for the belief in the experience of objective beauty apart from the objectified experience of the one who receives the impression.

When we attempt to determine which of these sharply contrasted views is justified we naturally recall the fact that standards exist not only in the field of Beauty, but also in the fields of what we know as the True and the Good, and this in turn reminds us of the very generally accepted grouping of the Beautiful, the True (in the sense of the valid), and the Good (in the sense of the morally good).

We habitually distinguish our experiences as relating (1) to impressions upon us, (2) to our reactions upon these impressions, i.e. our self expressions, and (3) to experiences relating classes 1 and 2, in the realm of thought. It would appear therefore, as I argued in an article in The Philosophical Review for October, 1922, that we naturally accept the triad, the Beautiful, the Good, and the True, as mutually independent, mutually exclusive, and exhaustive, because the Beautiful is the Real of