ven handicapped by what they have
considered a blighting defect can understand. He is a youth, therefore,
with an intense craving for sympathy and understanding. He must have it.
The thought of his lack, and the part which his disability plays in it
soon becomes an obsession. He is tortured, miserable.

"Curiously the story rises to no spired climax. To some it has apparently
appealed as a drab, unrelieved narrative. To me at least it is a gorgeous
weave, as interesting and valuable at the beginning as at the end. There
is material in its three hundred thousand or more words for many novels
and indeed several philosophies, and even a religion or stoic hope. There
are a series of women, of course--drab, pathetic, enticing as the case may
be,--who lead him through the mazes of sentiment, sex, love, pity,
passion; a wonderful series of portraits and of incidents. There are a
series of men friends of a peculiarly inclusive range of intellectuality
and taste, who lead him, or whom he leads, through all the intricacies of
art, philosophy, criticism, humour. And lastly comes life itself, the
great land and sea of people, England, Germany, France, battering,
corroding, illuminating, a Goyaesque world.

"Naturally I asked myself how such a book would be received in America, in
England. In the latter country I was sure, with its traditions and the
Athenaeum and the Saturday Review, it would be adequately appreciated.
Imagine my surprise to find that the English reviews were almost uniformly
contemptuous and critical on moral and social grounds. The hero was a
weakling, not for a moment to be tolerated by sound, right-thinking men.
On the other hand, in America the reviewers for the most part have seen
its true merits and stated them. Need I say, however, that the New York
World finds it 'the sentimental servitude of a poor fool,' or that the
Philadelphia Press sees fit to dub it 'futile Philip,' or that the Outlook
feels that 'the author might have made his book true without making it so
frequently distasteful'; or that the Dial cries 'a most depressing
impression of the futility of life'?

"Despite these dissonant voices it is still a book of the utmost import,
and has so been received. Compact of the experiences, the dreams, the
hopes, the fears, the disillusionments, the ruptures, and the
philosophising of a strangely starved soul, it is a beacon light by which
the wanderer may be guided. Nothing is left out; the author write