The New Republic, Vol. 32, No. 410, October 11, 1922, p. 180
Chameleon: Being the Book of My Selves, by Benjamin De Casseres. New York: Lieber & Lewis. $1.75.
Mr. De Casseres apparently chose his title to evade the responsibility of writing philosophic essays—but there is no other excuse for not judging Chameleon as such. One can make several minor reservations in favor of Mr. De Casseres, but beyond them he exemplifies chiefly the danger of having an idiom rather than a style. Given a capitalized, excited, hurried, paradoxical, epigrammatic, imagistic, personifying and dramatic idiom, and all one needs to do is borrow viewpoints. It is not necessary to develop or apply or even restate accurately the original concepts. Pyrotechnics will substitute, and so Mr. De Casseres vulgarizes the thoughts of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche into a cheap display. “All knowledge is word-juggle,” he ballyhoos, thereby making philosophy an easy game for virtuosi. He consistently avoids definition to offer an image, which often is loose, which anyone who changes Imagination to Art or Instinct in this metaphor can verify: “Imagination is a spurt from the depths of Being, a swirling geyser that gravitates to a zenith set in the infinite.” With Mr. Van Vechten, Mr. De Casseres carries the flush of excitement which Huneker paraded for American criticism into an obvious cheat. A reaction finds our younger writers beginning to forsake exclamations for architecture, flashes for solidity. That is, our intellectual adolescence shifts into maturity.
One suspects Mr. De Casseres’s overemphasis to be compensation for weakness, for his inability to criticize or deepen the philosophic concepts he accepts, and so wrest free from the grip of stronger minds.
On the social side, the damage from his environment suffered by Mr. De Casseres is a minor case document in What America Has Done to Literary Genius and Talent. That is why it is just to add that Mr. De Casseres deserves a plaudit for writing about Nietzsche and Schopenhauer as far back as 1903, and that his idiom achieved better results in a book of poetry, The Shadow-Eater in 1915.
Gorham B. Munson.