Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/57

 miculous emotional approach, like the promenade of the lumbricus terrestris; Mr. Hecht darts at his like a wasp. He is a stylist, and he feels a kind of ecstasy in the stabbing use of words. He is a satirist exulting in the stripping of shams. In Gargoyles, he is a cynic with the point of mad King Lear crying:—

He is an angry and disenchanted moralist. But he is also—and this is the particularly interesting aspect of his case—an angry and disenchanted "immoralist." The emancipated heroes of Gargoyles and Erik Dorn hurl themselves over precipices of experience to wallow in abysses of spiritual inanity and despair. Yet before they are emancipated, as Mr. Hecht sees them, they are in an equal agony of moral chains. Basine, in Gargoyles, loathes all women for his wife's sake. "His distaste for his wife kept him faithful to her because his imagination baulked at the idea of embracing another Henrietta." Again we are told—almost in the Dreiserian phraseology—that "cowardice" had made him