ABSTRACT
His tragedy might be called the tragedy of incongruity. He is nothing if not ironical. He has a keen eye for inconsistencies of all sorts-for the disagreement between circumstances and human wishes, between facts and human beliefs, between flesh and spirit, between action and pur pose, between emotion and intelligence. By a process of disintegration, he reduces human life and human beings to a chaos of warring elements. He likes to blow little bubbles of sentiment in order that he may prick them, especially he likes to mix the categories of the mental and the mechanical. For instance: 'The greatest tragedy of the spirit is that sooner or later it succumbs to the flesh. . . . The tragedies of the spirit are mere struttings and posturings on the margin of life, and the spirit itself is only an accidental exuberance, the product of spare vital energy, like the feathers on the head of a hoopoo or the innumerable populations of useless and foredoomed spermatozoa.'
