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THE Face of the World, even more than The Great Hunger, deals with matters for which the American is likely to have small patience, if any ear at all. He is, in the first place, scarcely concerned with such recondite problems as the insatiable hunger for universality of consciousness or with the struggle to maintain a world conscience. Why the hero of The Great Hunger should keep on chasing a rainbow like that vision of his, with a good wife and a fine home, even after he has lost his solid fortune, or why Harold Mark in The Face of the World should worry himself into neglect of his profession, loss of his wife, and premature old age, and bring a great catastrophe upon a decent town through his fretting over what was happening to the poor Armenians in Turkey or the natives of Zanzibar or the children of the Dead End, are concerns not of the news-sheets or the tickers but of an extremely subjective life which, it has long since been clear, pioneering, world-wilderness-subduing America has had no time for.

Harold Mark is one who is continually sinking into the sea of humanity, losing himself in the soul of all mankind, hypnotized by the rolling panorama of life that sweeps over the face of the world. This obsessive conscience of unity and responsibility with all men drives him from pillar to post, leaves him without roots in the ordinary soil of life, turns all the things of common value to dross in his hands, and finally gives him, indeed, the relative character of a menace to society. He finds no release in vigorous action; his profession, medicine, comes to be meaningless; he does not even try to hold his good, life-loving and life-accepting wife.

And when he tries to root himself again, withdraw to his native village, a little corner of life where he can work and live in peace, he finds only new demands upon his conscience. Ivar, the young fellow-townsman of Mark, drawn relentlessly to disaster by a fruitless infatuation, has Mark's brooding fatality and sharpens the other horn of the dilemma in which Mark struggles. It seems fatal to take the world upon one’s shoulders, but the catastrophe which the pathetic love-maddened Ivar brings upon the town by burning it to