fashion strikingly different. In the historical novels the stage
is crowded with personages. In "Without Dogma," the chief interest
centres in a single character. This is not a battle between contending
armies, but the greater conflict that goes on in silence,--the battle
of a man for his own soul.

He can scarcely be considered an heroic character; he is to some
extent the creature of circumstances, the fine product of a
highly complex culture and civilization. He regards himself as a
nineteenth-century Hamlet, and for him not merely the times, but his
race and all mankind, are out of joint. He is not especially Polish
save by birth; he is as little at home in Paris or at Rome as in
Warsaw. Set him down in any quarter of the globe and he would be
equally out of place. He folds the mantle of his pessimism about him.
Life has interested him purely as a spectacle, in which he plays no
part save a purely passive one. His relation to life is that of the
Greek chorus, passing across the stage, crying "Woe, woe!"

Life has interested, entertained, and sometimes wearied him. He muses,
philosophizes, utters the most profound observations upon life, art,
and the mystery of things. He puts mankind and himself upon the
dissecting-table.

Here is a nature so sensitive that it photographs every impression,
an artistic temperament, a highly endowed organism; yet it produces
nothing. The secret of this unproductiveness lies perhaps in a certain
tendency to analyze and philosophize away every strong emotion that
should lead to action. Here is a man in possession of two distinct
selves,--the one emotional, active; the other eternally occupied in
self-contemplation, judgment, and criticism. The one paralyzes the