The World's Illusion. By Jacob Wassermann. Published by  Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York.

The two volumes of “The World's Illusion” by Jacob Wassermann offer us such a huge chunk of life's pudding that everyone can put in a thumb and pluck out whatever kind of a plum best pleases his personal palate. One of the largest and most juicy of these plums is the psychiatric, even psychoanalytic, confection that spices the dish. The book begins as if it were going to be another version of “The Affairs of Anatole” or such like foolishness, and indeed such “affairs” run through it, but illuminated by a purpose that the Viennese Schnitzler, M.D. though he is, never dreamt of in his philosophy; and it ends with a legend of redemption through pain and grief, a mystic tale of “The Victorious and Perfect.” It is to seek this that the hero Christian, the beautiful and wealthy and high-placed youth, sells all that he has, but instead of giving it to the poor, returns it to the family fortune from which it came and gives only himself to the poor. This, however, proves to be a great gift, for Christian, it develops, is a sort of natural psychoanalyst. He goes about doing good in that way, and produces soul-shaking results just by persistently questioning people about themselves. With a dispassionate passion he holds up the mirror to the human nature about him, which quails before its own image. A generally inarticulate person, though eloquent enough when the author can see no other way out of it, Christian prods and prods and prods with his courteous and penetrating questions, and succeeds in drawing to the surface much of the most remote and forgotten past of those he has set out to understand. “Don't be afraid,” he says to the boy Michael, “tell me everything. I shall understand, or, at all events, I shall do my best to understand.” So Michael relieves himself of the secrets that were destroying him. Among those whom he leads on to the confession that is good for the soul is Karen, the degraded prostitute that Christian takes up as a protegee, and who finds herself telli