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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75230 ***
+
+
+
+                         TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
+
+In the plain text version text in italics is enclosed by underscores
+(_italics_), small capitals are represented in upper case as in SMALL
+CAPS and the sign ^ before any letter or text, like ^e, represents "e"
+as a superscript.
+
+A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated
+variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used
+has been kept.
+
+Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.
+
+The original cover art has been modified by the transcriber and is
+granted to the public domain.
+
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+                           THE DOCTOR LOOKS
+                             AT LITERATURE
+
+                         PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES
+                          OF LIFE AND LETTERS
+
+                                  BY
+                            JOSEPH COLLINS
+
+                 AUTHOR OF “THE WAY WITH THE NERVES,”
+              “MY ITALIAN YEAR,” “IDLING IN ITALY,” ETC.
+
+                            [Illustration]
+
+                               NEW YORK
+                        GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+
+                           COPYRIGHT, 1923,
+                      BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+
+                   THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT LITERATURE. I
+                PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+                             _In Memoriam_
+
+
+                             PEARCE BAILEY
+
+                           DEVOTED COLLEAGUE
+                            LOYAL COADJUTOR
+                           INDULGENT FRIEND
+
+
+
+
+                            ACKNOWLEDGMENT
+
+
+    The author wishes to express his thanks to the editors of the
+    _North American Review_, the _New York Times_ and the
+    _Literary Digest International Book Review_ for permission
+    to elaborate material used by them into certain chapters of this
+    volume.
+
+
+
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+  CHAPTER                                                           PAGE
+
+     I   PSYCHOLOGY AND FICTION                                      15
+
+    II   IRELAND'S LATEST LITERARY ANTINOMIAN: JAMES JOYCE           35
+
+   III   FEODOR DOSTOIEVSKY: TRAGEDIST, PROPHET, AND PSYCHOLOGIST    61
+
+    IV   DOROTHY RICHARDSON AND HER CENSOR                           96
+
+     V   MARCEL PROUST: MASTER PSYCHOLOGIST AND PILOT OF
+         THE “VRAIE VIE”                                            116
+
+    VI   TWO LITERARY LADIES OF LONDON: KATHERINE MANSFIELD
+         AND REBECCA WEST                                           151
+
+   VII   TWO LESSER LITERARY LADIES OF LONDON: STELLA BENSON
+         AND VIRGINIA WOOLF                                         181
+
+  VIII   THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DIARIST: W. N. T. BARBELLION         191
+
+    IX   THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DIARIST: HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL        219
+
+     X   GEORGES DUHAMEL: POET, PACIFIST, AND PHYSICIAN             237
+
+    XI   EVEN YET IT CAN'T BE TOLD--THE WHOLE TRUTH
+         ABOUT D. H. LAWRENCE                                       256
+
+   XII   THE JOY OF LIVING AND WRITING ABOUT IT: JOHN ST.
+         LOE STRACHEY                                               289
+
+  XIII   THE KING OF GATH UNTO HIS SERVANT: MAGAZINE INSANITY       307
+
+
+
+
+                             ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+  JAMES JOYCE                                                        37
+
+  FEODOR DOSTOIEVSKY                                                 63
+
+  MARCEL PROUST IN 1890                                             119
+
+  A PAGE OF CORRECTED PROOF SHOWING MARCEL PROUST'S METHOD
+    OF REVISION                                                     127
+
+  KATHERINE MANSFIELD                                               153
+
+  REBECCA WEST                                                      173
+    Photograph by _Yevonde, London_
+
+  STELLA BENSON                                                     183
+
+  HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL                                              221
+
+  GEORGES DUHAMEL                                                   239
+    From a Drawing by _Ivan Opffer_ in _THE BOOKMAN_
+
+  D. H. LAWRENCE                                                    259
+
+  D. H. LAWRENCE                                                    267
+    From a drawing by _Jan Juta_
+
+  J. ST. LOE STRACHEY                                               291
+    From a Drawing by _W. Rothenstein_
+
+
+
+
+                           THE DOCTOR LOOKS
+                             AT LITERATURE
+
+
+                           THE DOCTOR LOOKS
+                             AT LITERATURE
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER I
+                        PSYCHOLOGY AND FICTION
+
+
+Few words attract us like the word psychology. It has the call of the
+unknown, the lure of the mysterious. It is used and heard so frequently
+that it has come to have a definite connotation, but the individual
+who is asked to say what it is finds it difficult either to be exact
+or exhaustive. Psychologists themselves experience similar difficulty.
+Psychology means the science of the soul, but we have no clearer
+conception of the soul today than Aristotle had when he wrote his
+treatise on it.
+
+Professor Palmer states that William James once said that psychology
+was “a nasty little subject,” and that “all one cares to know lies
+outside.” Doubtless many who have far less knowledge of it have often
+felt the same way. The present fate of psychology, or the science of
+mental life, is to be handled either as a department of metaphysics, or
+as subsidiary to so-called intelligence testing. The few remaining true
+psychologists are the physiological psychologists and a small group
+of behaviourists. In this country Woodworth, who takes the ground of
+utilising the best in the arsenal of both the intro-spectionists and
+the behaviourists, and calls the result “dynamic psychology,” leads the
+former; and Watson the latter.
+
+Psychology has no interest in the nature of the soul, its origin or
+destiny, or in the reality of ideas. Nor does it concern itself with
+explanation of mental phenomena in terms of forces which can neither
+be experienced nor inferred from experience. It is concerned with the
+facts of mental life and with describing, analysing, and classifying
+them. When it has done this it hands the results over to the logician
+who occupies himself with them from a purposeful rather than a causal
+point of view; and he makes what he may of them, or he puts them at the
+disposal of fellow scientists who use them to support conjectures or to
+give foundation to theories.
+
+It is universally admitted that when we want to get a true picture of
+human life: behaviour, manners, customs, aspirations, indulgences,
+vices, virtues, it is to the novelist and historian that we turn, not
+to the psychologist or the physiologist. The novelists gather materials
+more abundantly than the psychologists, who for the most part have a
+parsimonious outfit in anything but morbid psychology. Psychologists
+are the most indolent of scientists in collecting and ordering
+materials, James and Stanley Hall being outstanding exceptions.
+
+Fiction writers should not attempt to carry over the results of
+psychological inquiries as the warp and woof of their work. They
+should study psychology to sharpen and discipline their wits, but
+after that the sooner they forget it the better. The best thing that
+fiction writers can do is to depict the problematic in life in all
+its intensity and perplexity, and put it up to the psychologists as a
+challenge.
+
+In the fifty years that psychology has had its claims as a science
+begrudgingly allowed, there have arisen many different schools, the
+most important of which are: (1) Those that claim that psychology is
+the science of mental states, mental processes, mental contents, mental
+functions. They are the “Functionalists.” There is an alternative to
+the consciousness psychology--the psychology of habit--touched on
+its edges by Professor Dewey in “Habit and Conduct.” And (2) those
+that claim the true subject matter of psychology is not mind or
+consciousness, but behaviour. They refuse to occupy themselves with
+“consciousness,” and for introspection they substitute experiment and
+observation of behaviour. Their theoretical goal is the prediction and
+control of behaviour. They are the “Behaviourists.” The literature
+infused with interest in psychological problems--fiction, criticism,
+and to a small extent social economics--has little connection with
+the older psychology based on subjectivities, except as it takes over
+the vagaries of technique and terminology of the psychoanalysts. The
+literature of greatest merit seems to avail itself most profitably of
+definite psychological materials when it turns to the behaviourist
+type. Indeed, it is with this school that the novelist most closely
+allies himself. Or it was, until the “New Psychology” seduced him.
+
+This last school claims that consciousness and all it implies is
+a barren field for the psychologist to till. If he is to gather a
+crop that will be an earnest of his effort, he must turn to the
+unconscious, which we have with us so conspicuously eight hours out
+of every twenty-four that even the most benighted recognise it, and
+which is inconspicuously with us always, looking out for our self- and
+species-preservation, conditioning our ends, and shaping our destinies.
+
+The New Psychology, which is by no means synonymous with the teachings
+of Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna, regards the human mind as an intricate
+and complex mechanism which has gradually evolved through the ages
+to suit the needs of its possessor. The adaptation has, however, not
+been perfect, and the imperfections reveal themselves in frequent,
+startling, and embarrassing lapses from the kind of mind which would
+best enable its possessor to adjust himself to the conditions and
+demands of modern civilisation. It recognises that it deals with a
+mind which sometimes insists upon behaving like a savage, but which is
+nevertheless the main engine of the human machinery, human personality,
+from which society expects and exacts behaviour consistent with the
+ideals of advanced civilisation. The practical psychologist realises
+that he has to cope with this wayward mind, and if he is to be of
+service in effecting a reconciliation between it and the requirements
+of civilisation, he cannot ignore it, spank it, or coerce it by calling
+it bad names. He must understand it first; then he may train it. The
+trouble with the New Psychology, whether it is “New Thought” or one of
+the mutually antagonistic schools of psychoanalysis, is that it almost
+inevitably runs off into what James terms “bitch-philosophy.”
+
+Through this tangled web of vagaries there is a thin thread of
+work that is not only fiction, but literature; and this is usually
+characterised by obvious parade of psychological technique.
+
+Just as civilised man's body has been evolved gradually from more
+primitive species and has changed through the various stages of
+evolution to meet the changing conditions of the environment and
+necessities, so has his mind. In this advance and transformation
+the body has not lost the fundamental functions necessary for the
+preservation of the physical being. Neither has the mind. But both
+the body and the mind, or the physical and psychical planes of the
+individual, have been slowly developed by environment and life in such
+a way that these fundamental functions and instincts have been brought
+more and more into harmony with the changing demands of life. This
+process, outwardly in man's circumstances and his acts, inwardly in his
+ability to shape one and perform the other, constitutes civilisation.
+It is doubtful if the instincts are quite as definite as some of our
+professors, McDougall and his followers, claim, and they lack utility
+when used as a basis for social interpretation either in essays or
+fiction.
+
+Dr. Loeb's forced movements as a basis for a structure of interests
+is far more plausible. It is the interplay of interests, rather than
+of instincts, which is the clay our practical activities are pottered
+from, and should be the reliable source of materials for literature.
+Whenever fiction cuts itself down to instincts it becomes ephemeral as
+literature.
+
+The two fundamental and primitive instincts of all living organisms,
+civilised man included, are the nutritional urge and the creative urge,
+or the instinct of self-preservation and that of the preservation
+of the species. To these there is added, even in the most primitive
+savages, the herd instinct, which leads men to form groups or tribes,
+to fight and labour for the preservation of them, and to conform to
+certain standards or symbols of identification with the tribe. The
+Freudians do not recognise the herd instinct as anything but sublimated
+bi-sexuality, attributing the tendency to regard the opinion of
+one's associates to the psychic censor, instead of to an instinct.
+These three instincts are recognised in their commonest and most
+normal expression today as the tendency to provide for oneself and
+one's family; the tendency to marry and rear children under the best
+conditions known; and the tendency to regard the opinion of one's
+associates and to be a consistent member of the social order to which
+one acknowledges adherence.
+
+It is small wonder, then, that the realist and the romanticist, whose
+arsenal consists of observation and imagination, find in narration of
+dominancy and display of these instincts and tendencies the way to
+the goal for which they strive: viz., interest of others, possibly
+edification. Certain novelists, Mr. D. H. Lawrence for instance, pursue
+discussion of the fundamental ones with such assiduity and vehemence
+that the unsophisticated reader might well suspect that life was made
+up of the display and vagaries of these essences of all living beings.
+But without cant or piety it may be said there is such a thing as
+higher life, spiritual life, and readers of psychoanalytic novels must
+keep in mind the fact that the Freudian psychology denies the reality
+of any such higher life, accounting for the evidences of it which are
+unescapable in terms of “subliminations,” such as “taboos.” Though
+these three instincts form the basis upon which the whole of man's
+mental activity is built, they by no means form its boundary. At some
+prehistoric period it is possible that they did, but during countless
+ages man's mind has been subject to experiences which called for other
+mental activity than the direct and primitive expression of these
+urges, and he has had to use his mental machinery as best he could
+to meet these demands. He had no choice. He could not scrap his old
+machinery and supply his mind with a new equipment better fitted to do
+the complex work civilisation demanded.
+
+The result is that the working of these instincts on the experience
+presented to the mind has brought about innumerable complications.
+These are known in the New Psychology as mental complexes. They have
+been to some modern novelists what the miraculous food given to Israel
+in the Wilderness was--their sole nutriment. Complexes, or conflicts
+resulting from adaptation of the primitive mental machinery to more
+intricate and varied processes than those with which it was originally
+intended to cope, determine much of man's mental life.
+
+To understand the workings of a mind is like trying to unravel a
+tangled skein of thread. The two main difficulties are: (1) That up to
+this time our mental training, our perceptions, our consciousness, our
+reason, have been exercised for the specific purpose of maintaining
+ourselves in the world. They have not been concerned with helping us
+to understand ourselves; (2) That there are parts of our minds whose
+existence we do not recognise, either because we will not or because
+we cannot, for the reason that they have come to be regarded as being
+in conflict with other parts which we have long admitted as having
+the first claim to recognition. In other words, not having known how
+to adapt certain parts of our mental machinery to the newer purposes
+for which we needed them, we have tried to suppress them or ignore
+them. In doing so we have only deceived ourselves, because they are
+still connected up with the main engine and influence all of the
+latter's output, harmoniously or jarringly--sometimes to the extent of
+interfering seriously with its working.
+
+The work of the practical psychologist is to learn how to overcome
+these two difficulties and to teach others how to use the knowledge.
+This is the task novelists frequently set themselves, and some,
+Willa Cather in “Paul's Case” and Booth Tarkington in “Alice Adams,”
+accomplish it admirably. Like the teacher and the priest, they have
+learned that surplus energy of the mind may be diverted from the
+biologically necessary activities into other fields of useful and
+elevating effort. They have learned that the second difficulty can be
+best overcome by facing the truth about our minds, however unpleasant
+and unflattering it may at first sight appear to be. Recognition
+of the existence of the two primitive urges, the instincts of
+self-preservation and of the preservation of the race, is the first
+step toward appreciation of their reasonable limitations and the extent
+to which they may be brought into harmony with the requirements of a
+well-balanced life.
+
+This leads us to refer for a moment to a tremendous force which, in any
+discussion of the working of the instincts, cannot be ignored. It is a
+constant effort or tendency, lying behind all instincts, to attain and
+maintain mental, emotional, and spiritual equilibrium. The tendency is
+expressed by the interaction, usually automatic and unconscious, which
+goes on between complexes and tends to establish the equilibrium. At
+the same time the working of individual instincts tends to upset it.
+Whenever the automatic process is suspended to any great degree, as by
+the cutting off from the rest of the mind of one complex, the result
+is a one-sided development which causes mental disturbances and often
+eventually mental derangement. As the instincts and complexes incline
+to war among themselves, there is a stabilising influence at work
+tending to hold us in mental equilibrium and thus to keep us balanced
+or sane. No one in the domain of letters has understood this force and
+its potentialities like Dostoievsky. “The Possessed” is a chart of that
+sea so subject to storm and agitation. The effort toward integration
+is perhaps a true instinct, and rests on a sound physiological
+basis, so well described by Sherrington. It furnishes a genuine theme
+for description of life's activities, and well-wrought studies of
+integration and disintegration take highest rank in fiction.
+
+With all their prolixity, the Victorian novelists managed to depict
+progress in one direction or another. This is more than can be said of
+most modern novelists, who are exhausted when they have succeeded in
+a single analysis, and commit the crass literary error of seeking to
+explain, when all that the most acute psychologist could possibly do
+would be to catch at a pattern, a direction, and an outcome, as mere
+description--problem rather than explanation being the dramatic motive.
+
+While the novelist's business is to see life and his aspiration is to
+understand what he sees, many novelists of today are, by their work,
+claiming to understand life in a sense that is not humanly possible.
+Human conduct affords the best raw material for the novelist. If he
+represents this in such a way that it seems to reflect life faithfully
+he is an artist; but the psychological novelist goes further and feels
+bound to account for what he represents. Ordinarily he accounts for
+it in one of three ways: (1) by the inscrutability of Providence--as
+many of the older novelists did; (2) by theories of his own; (3) by
+the theories of those whose profession to understand life and conduct
+he accepts. In short, he must have a philosophy of life. The mistake
+many novelists are making is to confuse such a philosophy of life with
+an explanation of mental processes and a formula for regulating them.
+Neither philosophy nor psychology is an exact science. If a novelist
+wishes to describe an operation for appendicitis or a death from a
+gastric ulcer, he can easily get the data necessary for making the
+description true to fact. But if he aspires to depict the conduct,
+under stress, of a person who has for years been a prey to conflicting
+fear and aspiration, or jealousy and remorse, or hatred and conscience,
+what psychologist can give him a formula for the correct procedure?
+Who can predict the reactions of his closest friend under unusual
+conditions?
+
+With our earnest realistic novelist ready to sit at the feet of science
+and avail himself of its investigations--prepared, as Shaw would say,
+to base his work on a genuinely scientific natural history--there is
+danger of his basing it, too, upon psychology which is not “genuinely
+scientific,” because its claims cannot be substantiated by experience.
+While the novelist is in such a receptive state along comes a
+scientist, hedged also with that special authority which physicians
+possess in the eyes of many laymen, and offers the complete outfit of
+knowledge and (as he assures the novelist) inductively derived theory
+that the novelist has been sighing for. This is Freud. He or his
+disciples can explain anything in the character and conduct line while
+you wait. If you want to know why a given person is what he is, or why
+he acts as he does, Freud can tell you. His outfit is not, ostensibly,
+“metaphysical,” like much of the older psychology that our novelist
+encountered in college days. It is human, concrete, and surprisingly
+easy to understand. A child can grasp the main principles. Our novelist
+tests out a few of them on life as he has known it and finds that they
+seem to work. If he is not completely carried off his feet, he may
+grin at some of the formulas as he might at a smutty joke, but his own
+observations concerning the excessively mothered boy and his reading of
+some of the great dramas of the world are to him sufficient evidence
+of their soundness; and he bases the behaviour of his characters upon
+them with the same assurance of their accuracy that he would have in
+basing the account of a surgical operation and its results upon the
+data supplied him by a surgeon who had successfully performed hundreds
+of exactly similar operations and watched their after effects.
+
+One of the rudimentary instincts of human nature is curiosity, an
+urge to investigate the unknown, the mysterious. It is mystery that
+constitutes romance. It is the unknown that makes romance of one's
+future, fate, fortune, mind--at least that part of the mind which
+we do not understand and which is always taking us by surprise and
+playing us tricks. Curiosity is forced movement developed along the
+lines of interest. It is quite likely to follow the line of least
+resistance, and just now there is little resistance to sex curiosity.
+Those who find fascination in the New Psychology today found the
+old psychology of a quarter of a century ago a stupid bore. The old
+psychology dealt exclusively with what is now called the “conscious
+mind:” with analysing the concept of directed thought, with measuring
+the processes of the mind which we harnessed, or believed we harnessed,
+and drove subject to our wills to do our work. The old psychology was
+academic, dry, as proper and conventional as the C Major scale, without
+mystery, without thrills, and therefore without interest, except to the
+psychologist.
+
+The New Psychology is different. And this “difference” is exactly why
+it has proved to be almost as effective bait to the feminine angler
+after romance which may serve her as caviar to the prosaic diet of
+every-day existence as are spiritualism and the many other cults and
+new religions whose attraction and apparent potency are now explainable
+by what we understand of this very psychology--or the science of the
+mind. There is no reason to suppose that the current doctrines of
+the subconscious will do more for civilisation or art than the older
+doctrines of consciousness. The fact that they seize the popular fancy
+and are espoused with enthusiasm is of no particular significance,
+since the very same attitude was an accompaniment of the older
+doctrines.
+
+It would be difficult to exaggerate the prevalent interest in
+psychology. I shall cite three indications of it: The pastor of one of
+the large and influential churches in New York asked me a short time
+ago if I would give a talk on Psychology before the Girls' Club of his
+church. When I suggested that some other subject might be more fitting
+and helpful, he replied that all the girls were reading books on
+psychology, that he was sure none or few of them understood what they
+read, and that he was convinced that their indulgence was unhealthy.
+Should one go into any large general book-shop in New York or elsewhere
+and survey the display, he will find that a conspicuous department
+is devoted to “Books on Advanced Thinking,” and upon inquiry he will
+find that it is the most popular department of the store. The most
+uniform information that a psychiatrist elicits from the families of
+youths whose minds have undergone dissolution is that for some time
+previous to the onset of symptoms they displayed a great interest in
+books on philosophy and psychology, and many of them had taken up
+psychoanalysis, or whatever passes under that name; joined some League
+of the Higher Illumination; or gone in for “mental fancy work” of some
+kind.
+
+Before taking up specific illustrations of psychology in modern
+fiction, I wish to say to amateurs interested in the study of
+psychology, that frank recognition of their own unconscious minds or
+of the part of their instinctive life or memories which may have been
+intentionally or automatically pushed out of consciousness, does not
+call for digging into the unconscious through elaborate processes
+of introspection or through invoking the symbolism of dreams. Even
+were it done, the result would probably reveal nothing more startling
+than would a faithful account of the undirected thoughts which float
+uninvited through the mind during any idle hour. For most normal
+persons such thoughts need neither to be proclaimed nor denied.
+The involuntary effort toward equilibrium of a normal mind will
+take adequate care of them. The study of such mental conditions and
+processes in abnormal individuals, however, is often of great service
+to the psychologist and facilitates understanding of the workings of
+both the normal and the unbalanced mind.
+
+I also desire to call attention to the value of an objective mental
+attitude if one would conserve mental equilibrium and keep the working
+mind at its highest point of health and productivity. One of the
+greatest safeguards of mental equilibrium is the desire for objective
+truth. This is an indication that the mind is seeking for harmony
+between itself and the external world, and it has a biological basis
+in the fact that such harmony between the organism and the external
+world makes for security. The desire for objective truth is a straight
+pathway between the ego-complex and the ideal of a rational unified
+self. Parallel with this rational self there is an ethical self which
+has freed itself from the complexes caused by the conflict between the
+egoistic instincts and the external moral codes, and uses the rational
+self to secure harmony of thought and action based on self-knowledge.
+These two ideals may be pursued consciously and may be made the main
+support of that complete and enlightened self-consciousness which is
+essential for the most highly developed harmonious personality.
+
+For a time it seemed to the casual observer that the New Psychology
+was so steeped in pruriency that it could not be investigated without
+armour and gas mask. Happily such belief is passing, and many now see
+in it something more than the dominancy and vagaries of the libido,
+which convention has insisted shall veil its face and which expediency
+has suggested shall sit at the foot of the table rather than at the
+head. It has awakened a new interest in the life of the spirit, which
+is in part or in whole outside consciousness, and it has finally
+challenged the statement of the father of modern psychology, Descartes:
+“I think, therefore I am.”
+
+The religionist advises us to “Get right with God.” At least he is
+bidding for integration of interests. The humanist in literature who
+tries to get life going right with its memories is doing the same
+thing. To be on good terms with memory is happiness; to be on bad terms
+with it is tragedy. Both are fields for literary workmanship. The more
+the individual works up his memories in contact with his experiences,
+the more objective he becomes. On “Main Street” everybody remembers
+everything about everybody else and thinking becomes objective, with
+aspects no finer than the daily experiences of the thinkers. There is
+no chance for romance and adventure because the memories of the few
+who erred by embarking on adventurous ways are so vivid in the minds
+of their neighbours, and so often rehearsed by them, as to inhibit the
+venturesome. Instead of mental equilibrium between vital and struggling
+interests, there is only inertia. This makes a good theme for a
+sporadic novel, but it is not a basis for a school of novelists. Mr.
+Lewis set himself a task that he could perform. On a level where life
+is richer and memories are crowded out by sensational experiences the
+task is harder.
+
+It is a mistake to think that psychology is all introspection and
+conjecture of the unconscious. Mental life in the broadest sense is
+behaviour, instinctive and intelligent. Few have shown themselves
+more competent to observe, estimate, and describe such behaviour than
+the author of “Main Street.” That novel was a study of temperament, a
+portrayal of environment, and an attempt to estimate their interaction
+and to state the result. It was recognised by those who had encountered
+or experienced the temperament and who had lived, voluntarily or
+compulsorily, in the environment, to be a true cross-section of life
+focussed beneath a microscopic lens, and anyone who examined it had
+before him an accurate representation of the conscious experiences
+of at least two individuals, and a suggestion of their unconscious
+experiences as well. This permitted the reader, even suggested to
+him, to compare them with his own sensations and ideas. Thus it was
+that emotions, sentiments, and judgments were engendered which, given
+expression, constituted something akin to public opinion. The result
+was a beneficence to American literature, for the purpose of the writer
+was known, and it was obvious to the knowing that he had accomplished
+it.
+
+In “Babbitt” Mr. Lewis set himself a much more limited task. The
+picture is life in a Middle Western city of the U. S. A. It is as
+accurate as if it had been reflected from a giant mirror or reproduced
+from a photographic plate. George F. Babbitt is signalled by his fellow
+townsmen as an enviable success from a financial and familiar point of
+view. Nevertheless he grows more discontent with life as prosperity
+overtakes him. The burden of his complaint is that he has never done a
+single thing he wanted to in his whole life. It is hard to square his
+words with his actions, but he convinces himself. So having run the
+gamut of prosperity, paternity, applause, wine, women, and song--in his
+case it is dance, not song--without appeasement, he finally gets it
+vicariously through observing his son who not only knows what he wants
+to do, but does it. He summarises what life has taught him in a few
+words: “Don't be scared of the family. No, nor of all Zenith. Nor of
+yourself, the way I've been. Go ahead, old man! The world is yours!”
+
+Mr. Lewis' purpose was to describe the behaviour of a certain type of
+man in a certain kind of city, of which the world is full. He gives the
+former a definite heredity, an education with an amalgam of sentiment,
+a vague belief that material success spells happiness, that vulgar
+contact with one's fellows constitutes companionship, and that Pisgah
+sights of life are to be had by gaining a social elevation just beyond
+the one occupied. Then he thwarts his ambition to become a lawyer with
+an incontrovertible outburst of sex and sentimentality, and all his
+life he hears a bell tolling the echoes of his thwarted ambition. He
+feels that he has been tricked by circumstance and environment, and
+that display of chivalry to his wife and loyalty to his chum were
+wasted. They were indeed, for they had been offered, like the prayers
+of the hypocrites, in clubs and in corners of the street, and displayed
+for his own glory.
+
+Materialism was Babbitt's undoing. It destroyed the framework on which
+man slings happiness and contentment, and which is called morality and
+idealism. When that went he became a creature of Mr. Karel Capek's
+creation. Mr. Babbitt, in common with countless benighted parents,
+cherished a delusion. He believed that filial love, so-called, is
+an integral part of an offspring's make-up. It is an artefact, an
+acquisition, a convention: it is a thing like patriotism and creed.
+One is born with a certain slant toward it and as soon as he becomes
+a cognisant, sentient organism he realises that it is proper to
+have it and to display it. In fact he is made to do so during his
+formative years; thus it becomes second nature. And that is just what
+it is--second nature. Parental love is first nature. If this were a
+disquisition on love, instead of on novelists, I should contend that
+there are two kinds of love: a parent's love for its child, especially
+the mother's; and a believer's love for God. When Mr. Babbitt wallows
+in the trough of the waves of emotion because he doesn't get the
+affection and recognition from his children which is his due, he
+alienates our sympathy and Mr. Lewis reveals the vulnerable tendon of
+his own psychology.
+
+Were I the dispenser of eugenic licenses to marry, I should insist that
+everyone contemplating parenthood should have read the life history of
+the spider, especially the female of the species, who is devoured by
+her offspring. All novelists should study spiders first-hand. Filial
+love, or the delusion of it, furnishes the material for some of the
+finest ironies and deepest tragedies of life, and as Mr. Lewis adopts
+it as a medium for characterisation quite free from the teaching of
+the Freudians who would make it a fundamental instinct, the reader is
+entitled to expect from him a more reasonable treatment of the subject.
+
+Babbitt's tragedy in the failure of his children's affection is the
+tragedy of millions of parents the world over. There is hardly a note
+that would be more sure of wide appeal. But it cannot be explained by
+the mere fact that, despite the Decalogue, no person of reason will
+ever “honour” where honour is not merited. It is hard to pity Babbitt
+because he could not commandeer the filial respect and honour which he
+had failed to inspire. If this were all, the situation would be simple.
+But, like countless other deluded parents, Babbitt believes that
+merely by bringing children into the world he has staked out a claim
+on their love, just as the child has a claim on the love of those who
+brought him into the world. And in this belief lies the irony and the
+tragedy: in the disparity between tradition and fact; between reason
+and instinct. The tradition or convention that filial love corresponds
+to parental love probably had its origin in the mind of the parent who
+would have liked to supply the child with such reciprocal instinct--a
+love that would transcend reason and survive when respect and honour
+had failed--but nature has not kept pact with the parental wish. In
+the realisation and acceptance of the truth lies the Gethsemane that
+each parent must face who would mount to higher heights of parenthood
+than the planes of instinct. Hence the universal appeal: the reason
+why the reader sympathises with Babbitt even while condemning him.
+He has forfeited the right to what he might have claimed--honour and
+affection--to fall back upon more elemental rights which were a figment
+of the imagination. Mr. Lewis' psychology would have struck a truer
+note if he had differentiated more clearly between the universal parent
+tragedy and Babbitt's own failure as a parent.
+
+With the regeneration or civic orientation of Babbitt I am not
+concerned--that is in the field of ethics. But, as a student of
+literary art and craftsmanship, it seems to me the sawdust in Mr.
+Lewis' last doll.
+
+To depict the display of Babbitt's consciousness as Mr. Lewis has done
+is to make a contribution to behaviourism, to make a psychological
+chart of mental activity. One may call it realism if one likes, because
+it narrates facts, but it is first and foremost a narrative of the
+activities and operation of the human mind.
+
+“Babbitt” may be construed as the American intelligence of Mr. Lewis'
+generation turning on its taskmaster. All men who live by writing, and
+have any regard for fine art and “belles lettres,” or any ideals for
+which, in extremity, they might be willing to get out alone with no
+support from cheering multitudes and do a little dying on barricades,
+live and work with the Babbitt iron in their souls. Mr. Lewis probably
+had his full dose of it. He had been an advertising copy-writer,
+selling goods by his skill with a pen, to Babbitts, and for Babbitts.
+He had been sub-editor for a time of one of those magazines which are
+owned and published by Babbitts and tricked out and bedizened for a
+“mass circulation” of Babbitts. He hated Babbitt. When he saw the
+favourable opportunity he meant to turn Babbitt inside out and hold
+him up to scorn. But Mr. Lewis is not savage enough, and his talent is
+not swinging and extravagant enough, and he has not humour enough, to
+make him a satirist. He is a photographic artist with an incomparable
+capacity for the lingo of “one hundred per cent Americans.” As he
+gets deeper and deeper into the odious and contemptible Babbitt,
+he begins to be sorry for him, and at the end he is rather fond of
+him--faithfully telling the facts about him all the while. He pities
+Babbitt in Babbitt's sense of frustration by social environment and
+circumstances, and admires him for telling his son not to let himself
+be similarly frustrated.
+
+To call such a book “an exceedingly clever satire” and its leading
+character “an exceedingly clever caricature” is, it seems to me, to
+confess unacquaintance with one's countrymen or unfamiliarity with
+the conventional meaning of the words “satire” and “caricature.” Such
+admission on the part of the distinguished educator and critic who has
+recently applied these terms to it is most improbable.
+
+If a photograph of a man is caricature and a phonographic record of his
+internal and externalised speech constitutes satire, then “Babbitt” is
+what the learned professor says it is.
+
+There is a type of novel much in evidence at present called
+psychological, which is reputed to depict some of the established
+principles of psychology. It should be called the psychoanalytic
+novel, and psychoanalysis is only a step-child of psychology. There
+are hundreds of such novels. Some of them are considered at length
+later. Here I shall mention only one; “The Things We Are,” by John
+Middleton Murry. The story is of a young man, Boston by name, who has
+been unfitted for the experiences of adult life by excess of maternal
+love--the most familiar of all the Freudian themes. The narrative is
+developed largely through description of successive states of mind
+of the subject, with only the necessary thread of story carried by
+recounting outward events. After the death of his mother, Boston finds
+himself unable to take hold of life and dogged with a sense of the
+futility of all things. He tries various kinds of uncongenial work as
+cure for the sense that life is but a worthless experience, all of
+which fail. Finally he retires to a suburban inn to live on his income,
+and there, through the kindly human contact of the innkeeper and his
+wife, he experiences the awakening of a latent artistic impulse for
+expression and narration. He finds himself believing that he could
+give years to becoming the patient chronicler of the suburb which has
+provided him such beneficial retreat. Even his small peep at community
+and family life gives Mr. Boston uplift and expansion, and makes more
+significant the greatest of the Commandments. He sends for his one
+London friend, a literary man, who brings with him the young woman to
+whom he is practically engaged. The recently released libido of Mr.
+Boston focusses and remains focussed upon her. He interests her and
+finally wins her, and the long “inhibited” Mr. Boston finds himself
+in “normal” love. The environment prepared him and “he effected a
+transformation” on Felicia--in the language of the psychoanalyst.
+The thesis of the story is that for this particular kind of neurotic
+suffering, “suppression of the libido,” cure lies in “sublimation of
+the libido,” best effected by art and love in this case, after work,
+social service, and religion have been tried and failed.
+
+The psychology of the sick soul is a science in itself, and is known
+as psychotherapy. There are many sick souls in the world--far more
+than is suspected. Very few, comparatively, of them are confined in
+institutions or cloistered in religious retreats or universities. The
+majority of them toil to gain their daily bread. They are the chief
+consumers of cloudy stuff and mystic literature. The purveyors of the
+latter owe it to them not to deceive them about psychoanalysis. As a
+therapeutic measure it has not been very useful. The novelist should
+be careful not to give it more potentiality for righteousness than it
+possesses.
+
+It is the history of panics, epidemics, revivals, and other emotional
+episodes that they always recur. The present generation is fated to
+be fed on novels embodying the Freudian theories of consciousness
+and personality. Like certain bottles sent out from the pharmacist,
+they should have a label “poison: to be used with care.” The contents
+properly used may be beneficial, even life saving. They may do harm,
+great harm. Freudianism will eventually go the way of all “isms,” but
+meanwhile it would be kind of May Sinclair, Harvey J. O'Higgins _et al_
+to warn their readers that their fiction is based on fiction. A man's
+life may be determined for him by instincts which are beyond the power
+of his reason to influence or direct, but it has not been proven. It is
+hypothesis, and application of the doctrine is inimical to the system
+of ethics to which we have conformed our conduct, or tried to conform
+it, with indifferent success, for the past nineteen hundred years.
+
+It is often said that man will never understand his mate. There
+are many things he will never understand. One of them is why he is
+attracted by spurious jewels when he can have the genuine for the same
+price. Ten years ago, or thereabouts, a jewel of literature was cast
+before the public and was scorned. I recall but one discerning critic
+who estimated it justly, Mr. Harry Dounce. Yet “Bunker Bean” is one of
+the few really meritorious American psychological novels of the present
+generation. It is done with a lightness of touch worthy of Anthony
+Hope at his best; with an insight of motives, impulses, aspirations,
+and determinations equal to the creator of “Mr. Polly”; and with a
+knowledge of child psychology that would be creditable to Professor
+Watson.
+
+There are few more vivid descriptions of the workings of the child mind
+than that given by Mr. Harry Leon Wilson in the account of Bunker's
+visit to “Granper” and “Grammer,” and the seduction of his early
+childhood by the shell from the sea. Dickens never portrayed infantile
+emotions and reactions with greater verisimilitude than Mr. Wilson when
+knowledge of the two inevitables of life--birth and death--came, nearly
+simultaneously, to Bunker's budding mind.
+
+If journals whose purpose is to orient and guide unsophisticated
+readers, and to illuminate the road that prospective readers must
+travel, would give the “once over” to books when they are published
+and the review ten years later, it would mark a great advance on the
+present method. If such a plan were in operation at the present time
+“Bunker Bean” would be a best seller and “If Winter Comes” would be
+substituting in the coal famine.
+
+Force or energy in a new form has come into fictional literature within
+the past decade, and I propose to consider it as it is displayed in
+the writings of those who are mostly responsible for it: James Joyce,
+Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, and to consider some of the younger
+English novelists from the point of view of psychology.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER II
+           IRELAND'S LATEST LITERARY ANTINOMIAN: JAMES JOYCE
+
+    “The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a
+    life does it spring.”--STEPHEN DÆDALUS.
+
+
+Ireland has had the attention of the world focussed on her with much
+constancy the past ten years. She has weathered her storms; she has
+calmed her tempests; and she is fast repairing the devastations of her
+tornadoes. None but defamers and ill-wishers contend that she will
+not bring her ship of state successfully to port and that it will not
+find safe and secure anchorage. During her perilous voyage one of her
+rebellious sons has been violently rocking the boat of literature. His
+name is James Joyce and his craft has had various names: first “The
+Dubliners,” and last “Ulysses.”
+
+A few intuitive sensitive visionaries may understand and comprehend
+“Ulysses,” James Joyce's mammoth volume, without previous training
+or instruction, but the average intelligent reader will glean little
+or nothing from it, save bewilderment and disgust. It should be
+companioned with a key and a glossary like the Berlitz books. Then
+the attentive and diligent reader might get some comprehension of Mr.
+Joyce's message, which is to tell of the people whom he has encountered
+in his forty years of sentiency; to describe their behaviour and
+speech; to analyse their motives; and to characterise their conduct.
+He is determined that we shall know the effect the “world,” sordid,
+turbulent, disorderly, steeped in alcohol and saturated with jesuitry,
+had upon an emotional Celt, an egocentric genius whose chief diversion
+has been blasphemy and keenest pleasure self-exaltation, and whose
+life-long important occupation has been keeping a note-book in which he
+has recorded incident encountered and speech heard with photographic
+accuracy and Boswellian fidelity. Moreover, he is determined to tell
+them in a new way, not in straightforward, narrative fashion with a
+certain sequentiality of idea, fact, occurrence; in sentence, phrase,
+and paragraph that is comprehensible to a person of education and
+culture; but in parodies of classic prose and current slang, in
+perversions of sacred literature, in carefully metred prose with
+studied incoherence, in symbols so occult and mystic that only the
+initiated and profoundly versed can understand; in short, by means of
+every trick and illusion that a master artificer, or even magician, can
+play with the English language.
+
+It has been said of the writings of Tertullian, one of the two greatest
+church writers, that they are rich in thought, and destitute of form,
+passionate and hair-splitting, elegant and pithy in expression,
+energetic and condensed to the point of obscurity. Mr. Joyce was
+devoted to Tertullian in his youth. Dostoievsky also intrigued him.
+From him he learned what he knows of _mise en scene_, and particularly
+to disregard the time element. Ibsen and Hauptmann he called master
+after he had weaned himself from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. But
+he calls no one master now; even Homer he calls _comare_. It is related
+that “A.E.” once said to him, “I'm afraid you have not enough chaos in
+you to make a world.” The poet was a poor prophet. Mr. Joyce has made a
+world, and a chaotic one in which no decent person wants to live.
+
+It is likely that there is no one writing English today who could
+parallel his feat, and it is also likely that few would care to do it
+were they capable. This statement requires that it be said at once that
+Mr. Joyce has seen fit to use words and phrases which the entire world
+has covenanted not to use and which people in general, cultured and
+uncultured, civilised and savage, believer and heathen, have agreed
+shall not be used because they are vulgar, vicious, and vile. Mr.
+Joyce's reply to this is: “This race and this country and this life
+produced me--I shall express myself as I am.”
+
+[Illustration: JAMES JOYCE]
+
+An endurance test should always be preceded by training. It requires
+real endurance to finish “Ulysses.” The best training for it is careful
+perusal or reperusal of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” the
+volume published six or seven years ago which revealed Mr. Joyce's
+capacity to externalise his consciousness, to set it down in words.
+It is the story of his own life before he exiled himself from his
+native land, told with uncommon candour and extraordinary revelations
+of thought, impulse, and action, many of them of a nature and texture
+which most persons do not feel free to reveal, or which they do not
+feel it is decent and proper to confide to the world.
+
+The facts of Mr. Joyce's life with which the reader who seeks to
+comprehend his writings should be familiar are: He was one of many
+children of South Ireland Catholic parents. In his early childhood his
+father had not yet dissipated their small fortune and he was sent to
+Clongowes Wood, a renowned Jesuit College near Dublin, and remained
+there until it seemed to his teachers and his parents that he should
+decide whether or not he had a vocation; that is whether he felt
+within himself, in his soul, a desire to join the order. Meanwhile he
+had experienced the profoundly disturbing impulses of pubescence; the
+incoming waves of genesic potency had swept over him, submerged him,
+and carried him into a deep trough of sin, from which, however, he was
+extricated, resuscitated, and purged by confession, penitence, and
+prayer. But the state of grace would not endure. He lost his faith, and
+soon his patriotism, and he held those with whom he formerly worshipped
+up to ridicule, and his country and her aspirations up to contumely.
+He continued his studies in the Old Royal University of Dublin,
+notwithstanding the abject poverty of his family. He was reputed to be
+a poet then, and many of the poems in “Chamber Music” were composed
+at this period. He had no hesitation in admitting the reputation,
+even contending for it. “I have written the most perfect lyric since
+Shakespeare,” he said to Padraic Colum; and to Yeats, “We have met too
+late; you are too old to be influenced by me.” If belief in his own
+greatness has ever forsaken him in the years of trial and distress that
+have elapsed between then and now, no one, save possibly one, has heard
+of it. Mr. William Hohenzollern in his sanguine moments was never as
+sure of himself as Mr. James Joyce in his hours of despair.
+
+After graduation he decided to study medicine, and, in fact, he did
+pursue the study for two or three years, one of them in the medical
+school of the University of Paris. Eventually he became convinced that
+medicine was not his vocation, even though funds were available for
+him to continue his studies, and he decided to take up singing as a
+profession, “having a phenomenally beautiful tenor voice.” These three
+novitiates furnished him with all the material he has used in the
+four volumes that he has published. Matrimony, parentage, ill-health,
+and a number of other factors put an end to his musical ambitions. He
+taught for a brief time in Dublin and wrote the stories that are in
+“Dubliners,” which his countrymen baptised with fire; and began the
+“Portrait.” But he couldn't tolerate “a place fettered by the reformed
+conscience, a country in which the symbol of its art was the cracked
+looking-glass of a servant,” so he betook himself to a country in the
+last explosive crisis of paretic grandeur. In Trieste he gained his
+daily bread by teaching Austrians English and Italian, having a mastery
+of the latter language that would flatter a Padovian professor. The war
+drove him to the haven of the expatriate, Switzerland, and for four
+years he taught German, Italian, French, English, to anyone in Zurich
+who had time, ambition, and money to acquire a new language. Since the
+Armistice he has lived in Paris, first finishing the book which is his
+_magnum opus_ and which he says and believes represents everything that
+he has to say or will have to say, and he is now enjoying the fame and
+the infamy which its publication and three editions within two years
+have brought him.
+
+As a boy Mr. Joyce's cherished hero was Odysseus. He approved of
+his subterfuge for evading military service; he envied him the
+companionship of Penelope; and all his latent vengeance was vicariously
+satisfied by reading of the way in which he revenged himself on
+Palamedes. The craftiness and resourcefulness of the final artificer of
+the siege of Troy made him permanently big with envy and admiration.
+But it was the ten years of his hero's life after he had eaten of the
+lotus plant, that wholly seduced Mr. Joyce and appeased his emotional
+soul. As years went by he realised that his own experiences were
+not unlike those of the slayer of Polyphemus and the favourite of
+Pallas-Athene, and after careful deliberation and planning he decided
+to write an Odyssey. In early childhood Mr. Joyce had identified
+himself with Dædalus, the Athenian architect, sculptor, and magician,
+and in all his writings he carries on in the name of Stephen Dædalus.
+Like the original Dædalus, his genius is great, his vanity is greater,
+and he can brook no rival. Like his prototype, he was exiled from
+his native land after he had made a great contribution to the world.
+Like him, he was received kindly in exile, and like him, also, having
+ingeniously contrived wings for himself and used them successfully, he
+is now enjoying a period of tranquillity after his sufferings and his
+labour.
+
+“Ulysses” is the record of the thoughts, antics, vagaries, and
+actions--more particularly the thoughts--of Stephen Dædalus, an
+Irishman, of artistic temperament; of Leopold Bloom, an Irish-Hungarian
+Jew, of scientific temperament and perverted instincts; and of his
+wife, Marion Tweedy, daughter of an Irish major of the Royal Dublin
+Fusiliers stationed in Gibraltar, and a Jewish girl. Marion was a
+concert singer given to coprophilly, especially in her involutional
+stages, spiritual and physical. Bloom's acquired perversion he
+attempted to conceal by canvassing for advertisements for _The
+Freeman_.
+
+Dublin is the scene of action. The events--those that can be
+mentioned--and their sequence are:
+
+    “The preparation for breakfast, intestinal congestion, the
+    bath, the funeral, the advertisement of Alexander Keyes, the
+    unsubstantial lunch, the visit to Museum and National Library,
+    the book-hunt along Bedford Row, Merchants' Arch, Wellington
+    Quay, the music in the Ormond Hotel, the altercation with a
+    truculent troglodyte, in Bernard Kierman's premises, a blank
+    period of time including a car-drive, a visit to a house
+    of mourning, a leave-taking, ... the prolonged delivery of
+    Mrs. Nina Purefoy, the visit to a disorderly house ... and
+    subsequent brawl and chance medley in Beaver Street, nocturnal
+    perambulation to and from the cabman's shelter, Butt Bridge.”
+
+And these are some of the things they thought and talked of:
+
+    “Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman,
+    prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of
+    arc and glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic
+    trees, exposed corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman
+    catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation,
+    Jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day,
+    the maleficent influence of the presabbath, Stephen's collapse.”
+
+Mr. Joyce is an alert, keen-witted, educated man who has made it a
+life-long habit to jot down every thought that he has had, drunk or
+sober, depressed or exalted, despairing or hopeful, hungry or satiated,
+in brothel or in sanctuary, and likewise to put down what he has
+seen or heard others do or say--and rhythm has from infancy been an
+enchantment of the heart. It is not unlikely that every thought he
+has had, every experience he has ever encountered, every person he
+has ever met, one might say everything he has ever read in sacred or
+profane literature, is to be encountered in the obscurities and in
+the franknesses of “Ulysses.” If personality is the sum total of all
+one's experiences, all one's thoughts and emotions, inhibitions and
+liberations, acquisitions and inheritances, then it may truthfully be
+said that “Ulysses” comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a
+personality than any book I know.
+
+He sets down every thought that comes into consciousness. Decency,
+propriety, pertinency are not considered. He does not seek to give
+them orderliness, sequence, or conclusiveness. His literary output
+would seem to substantiate some of Freud's contentions. The majority
+of writers, practically all, transfer their conscious, deliberate
+thought to paper. Mr. Joyce transfers the product of his unconscious
+mind to paper without submitting it to the conscious mind, or if he
+submits it, it is to receive approval and encouragement, perhaps even
+praise. He holds with Freud that the unconscious mind represents the
+real man, the man of Nature, and the conscious mind the artificed man,
+the man of convention, of expediency, the slave of Mrs. Grundy, the
+sycophant of the Church, the plastic puppet of Society and State. For
+him the movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of
+the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside. “Peasant's
+heart” psychologically is the unconscious mind. When a master
+technician of words and phrases set himself the task of revealing the
+product of the unconscious mind of a moral monster, a pervert and an
+invert, an apostate to his race and his religion, the simulacrum of a
+man who has neither cultural background nor personal self-respect, who
+can neither be taught by experience nor lessoned by example, as Mr.
+Joyce did in drawing the picture of Leopold Bloom, he undoubtedly knew
+full well what he was undertaking, how unacceptable the vile contents
+of that unconscious mind would be to ninety-nine out of a hundred
+readers, and how incensed they would be at having the disgusting
+product thrown in their faces. But that has nothing to do with the
+question: has the job been done well; is it a work of art? The answer
+is in the affirmative.
+
+The proceedings of the council of the gods, with which the book opens,
+are tame. Stephen Dædalus, the Telemachus of this Odyssey, is seen
+chafing beneath his sin--refusal to kneel down at the bedside of his
+dying mother and pray for her--while having an _al fresco_ breakfast in
+a semi-abandoned turret with his friend Buck Mulligan (now an esteemed
+physician of Dublin), and a ponderous Saxon from Oxford whose father
+“made his tin by selling jalap to the Zulus,” who applauds Stephen's
+sarcasms and witticisms. Stephen has a grouch because Buck Mulligan has
+referred to him, “O, it's only Dædalus whose mother is beastly dead.”
+This Stephen construes to be an offense to him, not to his mother.
+Persecutory ideas are dear to Stephen Dædalus. In his moody brooding
+this is how he welds words:
+
+    “Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from
+    the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out
+    the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying
+    feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two
+    by two. A hand plucking the harp-strings merging their twining
+    chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.”
+
+Meanwhile his sin pursues him as “the Russian gentleman of a particular
+kind” pursued Ivan Karamazov when delirium began to overtake him. He
+recalls his mother, her secrets, her illness, her last appeals. While
+breakfasting Buck and Stephen plan a glorious drunk to astonish the
+druidy druids, with the latter's wage of schoolmaster which he will
+receive that day. Later Buck goes in the sea while Stephen animadverts
+on Ireland's two masters, the Pope of Rome and the King of England, and
+recites blasphemous poetry.
+
+Stephen spends the forenoon in school, then takes leave of the pedantic
+proprietor, who gives him his salary and a paper on foot and mouth
+disease. Telemachus embarks on his voyage, and the goddess who sails
+with him communes with him as follows:
+
+    “Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more,
+    thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here
+    to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty
+    boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of
+    the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them
+    bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce
+    against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire,
+    _maestro di color che sanno_. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in?
+    Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through
+    it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.”
+
+This is the first specimen of the saltatory, flitting, fugitive,
+on-the-surface purposeless thought that Stephen produces as he walks
+Sandymount Strand. From this point the book teems with it and with
+Bloom's autistic thoughts. It is quite impossible to give a synopsis or
+summary of them. It must suffice to say that in the fifteen pages Mr.
+Joyce devotes to the first leg of the voyage that will give him news
+of Ulysses, an hour's duration, a film picture has been thrown on the
+screen of his visual cortex for which he writes legends as fast as the
+machine reels them off. It is Mr. Joyce's life that is thus remembered:
+his thoughts, ambitions, aspirations, failures, and disappointments;
+the record of his contacts and their engenderment--what was and what
+might have been. On casual examination, such record transformed into
+print looks like gibberish, and is meaningless. So does shorthand. It
+is full of meaning for anyone who knows how to read it.
+
+The next fifty pages are devoted to displaying the reel of Mr. Leopold
+Bloom's mind, the workings of his psycho-physical machinery, autonomic
+and heteronomic, the idle and purposeful thoughts of the most obnoxious
+wretch of all mankind, as Eolus called the real Ulysses. While he
+forages for his wife's breakfast, prepares and serves it, his thoughts
+and reflections are answers to the question “Digman, how camest thou
+into the realms of darkness?” for no burial honours yet had Irish
+Elpenor received.
+
+Then follows a picture of Dublin before the revolution, its newspapers,
+and the men who made them, with comment and characterisation by Stephen
+Dædalus, interpolations and solicitations by Leopold Bloom. Naturally
+the reader who knew or knew of William Brayden, Esquire, of Oakland,
+Sandymount, Mr. J. J. Smolley whose speech reminds of Edmund Burke's
+writings, or Mr. Myles Crawford whose witticisms are founded on Pietro
+Aretino, would find this chapter more illuminating, though not more
+entertaining, than one who had heard of Dublin for the first time in
+1914. Nor does it facilitate understanding of the conversation there to
+know the geography of an isle afloat where lived the son of Hippotas,
+his six daughters, and six blooming sons.
+
+Bloom continues his apparently purposeless and obviously purposeful
+thoughts after the Irish Læstrygonians had stoned him, for another
+fifty pages. Everything he sees and everyone he encounters generate
+them. They are connected, yet they are disparate. I choose one of the
+simplest and easiest to quote:
+
+    “A procession of whitesmocked men marched slowly towards him
+    along the gutter, scarlet sashes across their boards. Bargains.
+    Like that priest they are this morning: we have sinned, we have
+    suffered. He read the scarlet letters on their five tall white
+    hats: H. E. L. Y. S. Wisdom Hely's. Y lagging behind drew a
+    chunk of bread from under his foreboard, crammed it into his
+    mouth and munched as he walked. Our staple food. Three bob a
+    day, walking along the gutters, street after street. Just keep
+    skin and bone together, bread and skilly. They are not Boyl:
+    no: M'Glade's men. Doesn't bring in any business either. I
+    suggested to him about a transparent show cart with two smart
+    girls sitting inside writing letters, copybooks, envelopes,
+    blotting paper. I bet that would have caught on. Smart girls
+    writing something catch the eye at once. Everyone dying to know
+    what she's writing. Get twenty of them round you if you stare
+    at nothing. Have a finger in the pie. Women too. Curiosity.
+    Pillar of salt. Wouldn't have it of course because he didn't
+    think of it himself first. Or the inkbottle I suggested with
+    a false stain of black celluloid. His ideas for ads like
+    Plumtree's potted under the obituaries, cold meat department.
+    You can't like 'em. What? Our envelops. Hello! Jones, where are
+    you going? Can't stop, Robinson, I am hastening to purchase
+    the only reliable inkeraser _Kansell_, sold by Hely's Ltd.,
+    85 Dame Street. Well out of that ruck I am. Devil of a job it
+    was collecting accounts of those convents. Tranquilla convent.
+    That was a nice nun there, really sweet face. Wimple suited her
+    small head. Sister? Sister? I am sure she was crossed in love
+    by her eyes. Very hard to bargain with that sort of a woman.
+    I disturbed her at her devotions that morning. But glad to
+    communicate with the outside world. Our great day, she said,
+    Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Sweet name too: caramel. She
+    knew, I think she knew by the way she. If she had married she
+    would have changed. I suppose they really were short of money.
+    Fried everything in the best butter all the same. No lard for
+    them. My heart's broke eating dripping. They like buttering
+    themselves in and out. Molly tasting it, her veil up. Sister?
+    Pat Claffey, the pawn-broker's daughter. It was a nun they say
+    invented barbed wire.”
+
+Man may not think like this, but it is up to the psychologist to prove
+it. So far as I know he does. Lunatics do, in manic “flights”; and
+flights of ideas are but accentuations of normal mental activity.
+
+The following is a specimen of what psychologists call “flight of
+ideas.” To the uninitiated reader it means nothing. To the initiated it
+is like the writing on the wall.
+
+    “Bloom. Flood of warm jimjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow
+    in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow, invading. Tipping
+    her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate
+    dilating. Tup. The joy the feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o'er
+    sluices pouring gushes. Flood, gush, flow, joy-gush, tupthrop.
+    Now! Language of love.”
+
+In the next section Stephen holds forth on ideals and literature and
+gives the world that which Mr. Joyce gave his fellow students in
+Dublin to satiety, viz. his views of Shakespeare, and particularly his
+conception of Hamlet. “Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all
+minds that have lost their balance,” one of his cronies remarked. Even
+in those days Mr. Joyce's ideas of grandeur suggested to a student
+of psychiatry who heard him talk that he had the mental disease with
+which that symptom is most constantly associated, and to another of his
+auditors that he had an _idée fixe_, and that “the moral idea seems
+lacking, the sense of destiny, of retribution.” They never hurt Mr.
+Joyce--such views as these. The armour of his _amour propre_ has never
+been pierced; the belief in his destiny has never wavered. The meeting
+in the National Library twenty years ago gives him opportunity to
+display philosophic erudition, dialectic skill, and artistic feeling in
+his talk with the young men and their elders. It would be interesting
+to know from any of them, or from Mr. T. S. Eliot, if the following is
+the sort of grist that is brought to the free-verse miller, and can
+poetry be made from it.
+
+    “Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers. _Isis Unveiled._ Their Pali
+    book we tried to pawn. Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot
+    he thrones an Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels, their
+    oversoul, mahamahatma. The faithful hermetists await the light,
+    ripe for chelaship, ringroundabout him. Louis H. Victory. T.
+    Caulfield Irwin. Lotus ladies tend them i' the eyes, their
+    pineal glands aglow. Filled with his god he thrones, Buddh under
+    plantain. Gulfer of souls, engulfer. He souls, she souls, shoals
+    of souls. Engulfed with wailing creecries, whirled, whirling,
+    they bewail.”
+
+In contrast with this take the following description of the drowned man
+in Dublin Bay as a specimen of masterly realism:
+
+    “Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At
+    one he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin Bar. Driving
+    before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly
+    shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing
+    landward, a pace a pace a porpoise. There he is. Hook it quick.
+    Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him. Easy
+    now. Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine.... Dead breaths
+    I living breathe, tread dead dust.... Hauled stark over the
+    gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his
+    leprous nosehole snorting to the sun.”
+
+There are so many “specimens” of writing in the volume that it is quite
+impossible to give examples of them. Frankness compels me to state that
+he goes out of his way to scoff at God and to besmirch convention, but
+that's to show he is not afraid, like the man who defied God to kill
+him at 9.48 p.m.
+
+    “The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it
+    badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the
+    lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call
+    _bio boia_, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us,
+    ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that
+    in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more
+    marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife
+    unto himself.”
+
+The Dædalus family and their neighbourhood--their pawn-brokers,
+shopkeepers, spiritual advisers; the people they despised, those they
+envied, the Viceroy of Ireland, now come in for consideration. Mr.
+Dædalus is a sweet-tempered, mealy-mouthed man given to strong drink
+and high-grade vagrancy who calls his daughters “an insolent pack of
+little bitches since your poor mother died.” Their appearances and
+emotional reactions, and their contacts with Stephen and Bloom who are
+passing the time till they shall begin the orgy which is the high-water
+mark of the book, are instructive to the student of behaviouristic
+psychology.
+
+Readers of Dostoievsky rarely fail to note the fact that occurrences
+of a few hours required hundreds of pages to narrate. The element
+of time seems to have been eliminated. It is the same in “Ulysses.”
+This enormous volume of seven hundred and thirty-two pages is taken
+up with thoughts of two men during twelve hours of sobriety and six
+of drunkenness. I do not know the population of Dublin, but whatever
+it may be, a vast number of these people come into the ken of Dædalus
+and Bloom during those hours, and into the readers'; for it is through
+their eyes and their ears that we see and hear what transpires and is
+said. And so the trusting reader accompanies one or both of them to the
+beach, and observes them in revery and in repose; or to a café concert,
+and observes them in ructions and in ruminations. A countryman of Mr.
+Joyce, Edmund Burke, said “custom reconciles us to everything,” and
+after we have accompanied these earthly twins, Stephen and Leopold,
+thus far, we do not baulk at the lying-in hospital or even the red
+light district, though others more sensitive and less tolerant than
+myself would surely wish they had deserted the “bark-waggons” when the
+occupants were invited into the brothel.
+
+The book in reality is a moving picture with picturesque legends, many
+profane and more vulgar. For a brief time Mr. Joyce was associated with
+the “movies,” and the form in which “Ulysses” was cast may have been
+suggested by experiences with the Volta Theatre, as his cinematograph
+enterprise was called.
+
+Mr. Joyce learned from St. Thomas Aquinas what Socrates learned from
+his mother: how to bring thoughts into the world; and from his boyhood
+he had a tenderness for rhythm. It crops out frequently in “Ulysses.”
+
+    “In Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of holy
+    Michan. There rises a watchtower beheld of men afar. There sleep
+    the mighty dead as in life they slept, warrior and princes
+    of high renown. A pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring
+    waters, fishful streams where sport the gunnard, the plaice,
+    the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse, the
+    dab, the brill, the flounder, the mixed coarse fish generally
+    and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to be
+    enumerated. In the mild breezes of the west and of the east
+    the lofty trees wave in different directions their first class
+    foliage, the wafty sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, the exalted
+    planetree, the eugenic eucalyptus and other ornaments of the
+    arboreal world with which that region is thoroughly well
+    supplied. Lovely maidens sit in close proximity to the roots of
+    the lovely trees singing the most lovely songs while they play
+    with all kinds of lovely objects as for example golden ingots,
+    silvery fishes, crans of herrings, drafts of eels, codlings,
+    creels of fingerlings, purple seagems and playful insects. And
+    heroes voyage from afar to woo them, from Eblana to Slievemargy,
+    the peerless princes of unfettered Munster and of Connacht the
+    just and of smooth sleek Leinster and of Cruachan's land and of
+    Armagh the splendid and of the noble district of Boyle, princes,
+    the sons of kings.”
+
+At other times he seems to echo the sonorous phrasing of some forgotten
+master: Pater or Rabelais, or to paraphrase William Morris or Walt
+Whitman, or to pilfer from the Reverend William Sunday.
+
+    “The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round
+    tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed
+    frankeyed red-haired freely freckled shaggybearded widemouthed
+    largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded
+    hairylegged ruddyfaced, sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to
+    shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous
+    knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his body
+    wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair
+    in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (_Ulex
+    Europeus_). The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the
+    same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within
+    their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged
+    her nest. The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for
+    the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. A
+    powerful current of warm breath issued at regular intervals from
+    the profound cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic resonance
+    the loud strong hale reverberations of his formidable heart
+    thundered rumblingly causing the ground, the summit of the
+    lofty tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate
+    and tremble.”
+
+The chapter from which these quotations are taken, when the friends
+turn into Barney Kiernan's to slake their thirst, shows Mr. Joyce
+with loosed tongue--the voluble, witty, philosophic Celt, with an
+extraordinary faculty of words. If an expert stenographer had taken
+down the ejaculations as they spurted from the mouth of Tom and Jerry,
+and the deliberations of Alf and Joe, and the other characters of
+impulsive energy and vivid desire, then accurately transcribed them,
+interpolating “says” frequently, they would read like this chapter.
+
+Conspicuous amongst Mr. Joyce's possessions is a gift for facile
+emotional utterance. The reader feels himself affected by his impulses
+and swept along by his eloquence. He is scathingly sarcastic about
+Irish cultural and political aspirations; loathsomely lewd about their
+morals and habits; merciless in his revelations of their temperamental
+possessions and infirmities; and arbitrary and unyielding in his belief
+that their degeneration is beyond redemption. Like the buckets on an
+endless chain of a dredger, the vials of his wrath are poured time
+after time upon England and the British Empire “on which the sun never
+rises,” but they are never emptied. Finally he embodies his sentiment
+in paraphrase of the Creed.
+
+    “They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell
+    upon earth and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived
+    of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump
+    and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody
+    hell, the third day he arose again from the bed, steered into
+    haven, sitteth on his beamend till further orders whence he
+    shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.”
+
+He recounts his country's former days of fame and fortune, but he
+doesn't foresee any of the happenings of the past three years.
+
+    “Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here
+    today instead of four, our lost tribes? And our potteries and
+    textiles, the finest in the whole world! And our wool that
+    was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal and our flax and our
+    damask from the looms of Antrim and our Limerick lace, our
+    tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough
+    and our Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquand de Lyon
+    and our woven silk and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised
+    point from the Carmelite convent in New Ross, nothing like it
+    in the whole wide world. Where are the Greek merchants that
+    came through the pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar now grabbed
+    by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian purple to sell in
+    Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even
+    Giraldus Cambrensis, Wine, peltries, Connemara marble, silver
+    from Tipperary, second to none, our farfamed horses even today,
+    the Irish hobbies, with King Philip of Spain offering to pay
+    customs duties for the right to fish in our waters. What do the
+    yellowjohns of Anglia owe us for our ruined trade and our ruined
+    hearths? And the beds of the Barrow and Shannon they won't
+    deepen with millions of acres of marsh and bog to make us all
+    die of consumption.”
+
+Nowhere is his note-book more evident than in this chapter.
+Krafft-Ebing, a noted Viennese psychiatrist, said a certain disease was
+due to civilisation and syphilisation. Mr. Joyce made note of it and
+uses it. The _Slocum_ steamboat disaster in New York, which touched all
+American hearts twenty years ago; the prurient details of a scandal in
+“loop” circles of Chicago; a lynching in the South are referred to as
+casually by Lenehan, Wyse _et al_ while consuming their two pints, as
+if they were family matters.
+
+That the author has succeeded in cutting and holding up to view a slice
+of life in this chapter and in the succeeding one--Bloom amongst the
+Nurse-girls--it would be idle to deny. That it is sordid and repulsive
+need scarcely be said. It has this in common with the writings of all
+the naturalists.
+
+The author's familiarity with the Dadaists is best seen in his chapter
+on the visit to the Lying-in Hospital. Some of it is done in the
+pseudostyle of the English and Norse Saga; some in the method adopted
+by d'Annunzio in his composition of “Nocturne.” He wrote thousands and
+thousands of words on small pieces of paper, then threw them into a
+basket, and shuffled them thoroughly. With a blank sheet before him and
+a dripping mucilage brush in one hand, he proceeded to paste them one
+after another on the sheet. A sample of the result is:
+
+    “Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little
+    perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as
+    most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied
+    who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite
+    and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's ornament
+    deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general
+    consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by
+    no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more
+    efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward
+    may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that
+    proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be
+    absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of
+    omnipollent nature's incorrupted benefaction.”
+
+Tired of this, he paraphrases the Holy Writ.
+
+    “And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and
+    there nighed them a mickle noise as of many that sat there at
+    meat. And there came against the place as they stood a young
+    learning knight yclept Dixon. And the traveller Leopold was
+    couth to him sithen it had happed that they had had ado each
+    with other in the house of misericord where this learning knight
+    lay by cause the traveller Leopold came there to be healed
+    for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a
+    horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him for which he did
+    do make a salve of volatile salt and chrism as much as he might
+    suffice. And he said now that he should go into that castle for
+    to make merry with them that were there.”
+
+When this palls, he apes a satirist like Rabelais, or a mystic like
+Bunyan. Weary of this, he turns to a treatise on embryology and a
+volume of obstetrics and strains them through his mind. One day some
+serious person, a disciple or a benighted admirer, such as M. Valery
+Larbaud, will go through “Ulysses” to find references to toxicology,
+Mosaic law, the Kamustra, eugenics, etc., as such persons and scholars
+have gone through Shakespeare. Until it is done no one will believe the
+number of subjects he touches is marvellous, and sometimes even the way
+he does it. For instance this on birth control:
+
+    “Murmur, Sirs, is eke oft among lay folk. Both babe and parent
+    now glorify their Maker, the one limbo gloom, the other in purge
+    fire. But, Gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we
+    nightly impossibilise, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost,
+    Very God, Lord and Giver of Life.”
+
+It is worthy of note also that Mr. Joyce defines specifically the sin
+against the Holy Ghost, which for long has been a stumbling block to
+priest and physician. He does not agree with the great Scandinavian
+writer toward whom he looked reverently in his youth. Ella Rentheim
+says to Borkman, “The Bible speaks of a mysterious sin for which there
+is no forgiveness. I have never understood what it could be; but now I
+understand. The great, unpardonable sin is to murder the love-life in a
+human soul.”
+
+The object of it all is to display the thought and erudition of Stephen
+Dædalus, “a sensitive nature, smarting under the lashes of an undivined
+and squalid way of life”; and the emotions, perversions, and ambitions
+of Leopold Bloom, a devotee of applied science, whose inventions were
+for the purpose of
+
+    “rendering obsolete popguns, elastic airbladders, games of
+    hazard, catapults. They comprised astronomical kaleidoscopes,
+    exhibiting the twelve constellations of the Zodiac from Aries
+    to Pisces, miniature mechanical orreries, arithmetical gelatine
+    lozenges, geometrical to correspond with zoological biscuits,
+    globemap playing balls, historically costumed dolls.”
+
+It is particularly in the next chapter, one of the strangest of
+literature, that Mr. Joyce displays the apogee of his art. Dædalus
+and Bloom have passed in review on a mystic stage all their intimates
+and enemies, all their detractors and sycophants, the scum of Dublin,
+and the spawn of the devil. Mr. Joyce resurrects Saint Walpurgis,
+galvanises her into life after twelve centuries' death intimacy with
+Beelzebub, and substituting a squalid section of Dublin for Brocken,
+proceeds to depict a festival, the devil being host. The guests in the
+flesh and of the spirit have still many of their distinctive corporeal
+possessions, but the reactions of life no longer exist. The chapter is
+replete with wit, humour, satire, philosophy, learning, knowledge of
+human frailties, and human indulgences, especially with the brakes of
+morality off. And alcohol or congenital deficiency takes them off for
+most of the characters. It reeks of lust and filth, but Mr. Joyce says
+life does, and the morality he depicts is the only one he knows.
+
+In this chapter is compressed all of the author's experiences, all his
+determinations and unyieldingness, and most of the incidents that gave
+a persecutory twist to his mind, made him an exile from his native
+land, and deprived him of the courage to return. He does not hesitate
+to bring in the ghost of his mother whom he had been accused of killing
+because he would not kneel down and pray for her when she was dying,
+and to question her as to the verity of the accusation. But he does
+not repent even when she returns from the spiritual world. In fact,
+the capacity for repentance is left out of Mr. Joyce's make-up. It is
+as impossible to convince Mr. Joyce that he is wrong about anything
+on which he has made up his mind as it is to convince a paranoiac
+of the unreality of his false beliefs, or a jealous woman of the
+groundlessness of her suspicions. It may be said that this chapter
+does not represent life, but I venture to say that it represents life
+with photographic accuracy as Mr. Joyce has seen it and lived it;
+that every scene has come within his gaze; that every speech has been
+heard or said; and every sentiment experienced or thrust upon him. It
+is a mirror held up to life--life which we could sincerely wish and
+devoutly pray that we were spared; for it is life in which happiness is
+impossible, save when forgetfulness of its existence is brought about
+by alcohol, and in which mankind is destitute of virtue, deprived of
+ideals, deserted by love.
+
+To disclaim it is life that countless men and women know would be
+untrue, absurd, and libellous. I do not know that Mr. Joyce makes any
+such claim, but I claim that it is life that he has known.
+
+Mr. Joyce had the good fortune to be born with a quality which the
+world calls genius. Nature exacts a galling income tax from genius,
+and as a rule she co-endows it with unamenability to law and order.
+Genius and reverence are antipodal, Galileo being the exception to
+the rule. Mr. Joyce has no reverence for organised religion, for
+conventional morality, for literary style or form. He has no conception
+of the word obedience, and he bends the knee neither to God nor man.
+It is interesting and important to have the revelations of such a
+personality, to have them first hand and not dressed up. Heretofore our
+only avenues of information concerning them led through asylums for the
+insane, for it was there that revelations were made without reserve. I
+have spent much time and money in my endeavour to get such revelations,
+without great success. Mr. Joyce has made it unnecessary for me to
+pursue the quest. He has supplied the little and big pieces of material
+from which the mental mosaic is made.
+
+He had the profound misfortune to lose his faith, and he cannot rid
+himself of the obsession that the Jesuits did it for him. He is trying
+to get square by saying disagreeable things about them and holding
+their teachings up to scorn and obloquy. He was so unfortunate as to be
+born without a sense of duty, of service, of conformity to the State,
+to the community, to society; and he is convinced he should tell about
+it, just as some who have experienced a surgical operation feel that
+they must relate minutely all its details, particularly at dinner
+parties and to casual acquaintances.
+
+Not ten men or women out of a hundred can read “Ulysses” through,
+and of the ten who succeed in doing it for five of them it will be a
+_tour de force_. I am probably the only person aside from the author
+that has ever read it twice from beginning to end. I read it as a test
+of Christian fortitude: to see if I could still love my fellow-man
+after reading a book that depicts such repugnance of humanity, such
+abhorence of the human body, and such loathsomeness of the possession
+that links man with God, the creative endowment. Also the author is
+a psychologist, and I find his empiric knowledge supplements mine
+acquired by prolonged and sustained effort.
+
+M. Valery Larbaud, a French critic who hailed “Ulysses” with the
+reverence with which Boccaccio hailed the Divine Comedy, and who has
+been giving conferences on “Ulysses” in Paris, says the key to the
+book is Homer's immortal poem. If M. Larbaud has the key he cannot
+spring the lock of the door of the dark safe in which “Ulysses” rests,
+metaphorically, for most readers. At least he has not done so up to
+this writing.
+
+The key is to be found in the antepenultimate chapter of the book; and
+it isn't a key, it's a combination, a countryman of Mr. Joyce's might
+say. Anyone who tries at it long enough will succeed in working it,
+even if he is not of M. Larbaud's cultivated readers who can fully
+appreciate such authors as Rabelais, Montaigne, and Descartes.
+
+The symbolism of the book is something that concerns only Mr. Joyce,
+as nuns do, and other animate and inanimate things of which he has
+fugitive thoughts and systematised beliefs.
+
+After the Cheu-sinese orgy, Bloom takes Stephen home, and
+unfortunately they awaken Marion, for she embraces the occasion to
+purge her mind in soliloquy. Odo of Cluny never said anything of a
+woman's body in life that is so repulsive as that which Mr. Joyce has
+said of Marion's mind: a cesspool of forty years' accumulation. Into it
+has drained the inherited vulgarities of Jew and gentile parent; within
+it has accumulated the increment of a sordid, dissolute life in two
+countries, extending over twenty-five years; in it have been compressed
+the putrid exhalations of studied devotion to sense gratification.
+Mr. Joyce takes off the lid and opens the sluice-way simultaneously,
+and the result is that the reader, even though his sensitisation has
+been fortified by reading the book, is bowled over. As soon as he
+regains equilibrium he communes with himself to the effect that if the
+world has many Marions missionaries should be withdrawn from heathen
+countries and turned into this field where their work will be praised
+by man and rewarded by God.
+
+Mental hygiene takes on a deeper significance to one who succeeds in
+reading “Ulysses,” and psychology has a larger ceinture.
+
+Much time has been wasted in conjecturing what Mr. Joyce's message is.
+In another connection he said, “My ancestors threw off their language
+and took another. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them.
+Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they
+made? No honourable and sincere man has given up his life, his youth,
+and his affections to Ireland from the days of Tone to those of Parnell
+but the Irish sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled
+him and left him for another. Ireland is the old sow that eats her
+farrow.”
+
+“Ulysses” is in part vendetta. He will ridicule Gaelic renaissance of
+literature and language; he will traduce the Irish people and vilify
+their religion; he will scorn their institutions, lampoon their morals,
+pasquinade their customs; he will stun them with obscene vituperation,
+wound them with sacrilege and profanity, immerse them in the vitriolic
+dripping from the “tank” that he seeks to drive over them; and for what
+purpose? Revenge. Those dissatisfied with the simile of the fury of a
+scorned woman should try “Ulysses.”
+
+Mr. Joyce has made a contribution to the science of psychology, and he
+has done it quite unbeknownst to himself, a fellow-countryman might
+say. He has shown us the process of the transmuting of thought to
+words. It isn't epoch making like “relativity,” but it will give him
+notoriety, possibly immortality.
+
+    “A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional
+    and are the portals of discovery.”--STEPHEN DÆDALUS.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III
+       FEODOR DOSTOIEVSKY: TRAGEDIST, PROPHET, AND PSYCHOLOGIST
+
+
+A hundred years ago, in Moscow, a being manifested its existence, who
+in the fullness of extraordinary vision and intellectuality heralded
+a religious rebirth, became the prophet of a new moral, ethical, and
+geographical order in the world, and the prototype of a new hero. Time
+has accorded Feodor Mikhailovitch Dostoievsky the position of one of
+the greatest writers of the nineteenth century, and as time passes his
+position becomes more secure. Like the prophet of old, during life he
+was fastened between two pieces of timber--debts and epilepsy--and sawn
+asunder by his creditors and his conscience. Posterity links his name
+with Pushkin and Tolstoi as the three great writers of their times.
+They are to the Russian Renaissance what Leonardo, Michelangelo, and
+Raphael were to the Italian Renaissance.
+
+It is appropriate now, the centenary of his birth, to make a brief
+statement of Dostoievsky's position as a writer or novelist, and
+in so doing estimate must be made of him as a prophet, preacher,
+psychologist, pathologist, artist, and individual. Though he was not
+schooled to speak as expert in any of these fields, yet speak in them
+he did, and in a way that would have reflected credit upon a professor.
+It is particularly the field of morbid psychology, usually called
+psychiatry, that Dostoievsky made uniquely his own. He described many
+of the nervous and mental disorders, such as mania and depression, the
+psychoneuroses, hysteria, obsessive states, epilepsy, moral insanity,
+alcoholism, and that mysterious mental and moral constitution called
+“degeneracy” (apparently first hand, for there is no evidence or
+indication that he had access to books on mental medicine), in such a
+way that alienists recognise in his descriptions masterpieces in the
+same way that the painter recognises the apogee of his art in Giotto or
+Velázquez.
+
+Not only did he portray the mental activity and output of the
+partially and potentially insane, but he described the conduct and
+reproduced the speech of individuals with personality defects, and
+with emotional disequilibrium, in a way that has never been excelled
+in any literature. For instance, it would be difficult to find a more
+comprehensive account of adult infantilism than the history of Stepan
+Trofimovitch, a more accurate presentation of the composition of a
+hypocrite than Rahkitin, of “The Brothers Karamazov.” No one save
+Shakespeare has shown how consuming and overwhelming jealousy may be.
+That infirmity has a deeper significance for anyone familiar with the
+story of Katerina Ivanovna. Indeed Dostoievsky is the novelist of
+passions. He creates his creatures that they may suffer, not that they
+may enjoy from the reactions of life, though some of them get pleasure
+in suffering. Such was Lise, the true hysteric, who said, “I should
+like some one to torture me, marry me and then torture me, deceive me
+and then go away. I don't want to be happy.”
+
+[Illustration: FEODOR DOSTOIEVSKY]
+
+Like Baudelaire and Nietzsche, whom he resembled morally and
+intellectually, Dostoievsky was an intellectual romantic in rebellion
+against life. His determination seemed to be to create an individual
+who should defy life, and when he had defied it to his heart's content
+“to hand God back his ticket,” having no further need of it as the
+journey of existence was at an end. There is no place to go, nothing
+to do, everything worth trying has been tried and found valueless, and
+wherever he turns his gaze he sees the angel standing upon the sea
+and upon the earth avowing that there shall be time no longer; so he
+puts a bullet in his temple if his name is Svidrigailov, or soaps a
+silken cord so that it will support his weight when one end is attached
+to a large nail and the other to his neck, if it is Stavrogin.
+Dostoievsky as a littérateur was obsessed with sin and expiation.
+He connived and laboured to invent some new sin; he struggled and
+fought to augment some old one with which he could inflict one of his
+creation, and then watch him contend with it, stagger beneath it, or
+flaunt it in the world's face. After it has wrought havoc, shipwrecked
+the possessor's life, and brought inestimable calamity and suffering
+to others, then he must devise adequate expiation. Expiation is
+synonymous with sincere regret, honest request for forgiveness, and
+genuine determination to sin no more, but Dostoievsky's sinners must
+do something more; they must make renunciation in keeping with the
+magnitude of their sins, and as this is beyond human expression they
+usually kill themselves or go mad.
+
+He had planned for his masterpiece “The Life of a Great Sinner,” and
+the outline of it from his note-book deposited in the Central Archive
+Department of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, has
+now been published. The hero is a composite of the Seven Deadly Sins:
+pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth, plus the
+sin against the Holy Ghost. No one has yet succeeded in defining that
+sin satisfactorily, but it is what Dostoievsky's antinomian heroes were
+trying to do, especially such an one as Stavrogin. Another noteworthy
+feature about them is that they were all sadistic or masochistic: they
+got pleasure varying from an appreciative glow to voluptuous ecstasy
+and beyond, from causing pain and inducing humiliation, or having it
+caused in them by others.
+
+This was a conditioning factor of conduct of all his antinomian heroes,
+and unless it be kept in mind when reading of them, their antics and
+their reflections are sometimes difficult of comprehension. He makes
+one of them, one of the most intellectual and moral, Ivan Karamazov,
+say “You know we prefer beating-rods and scourges--that's our national
+institution.... I know for a fact there are people who at every blow
+are worked up to sensuality, which increases progressively at every
+blow they inflict.”
+
+It is difficult for a psychiatrist, after reading Dostoievsky's novels,
+to believe that he did not have access to the literature of insanity
+or have first-hand knowledge of the insane, and the criminologist must
+wonder where he got his extraordinary knowledge of the relation between
+suffering and lust. It may be that the habits of the Emperor Cheou-sin
+Yeow-waug were known to him, just as those of Caligula and Claudius
+were known to him.
+
+It is not with the passions of the body or of the senses alone that
+his heroes contend, but with those of the mind. The fire that burns
+within them is abstraction, and the fuel that replenishes it is
+thought--thought of whence and whither. By it the possessors are lashed
+to a conduct that surpasses that of hate, jealousy, lubricity, or any
+of the baser passions as the light of an incandescent bulb surpasses
+that of a tallow candle. They are all men of parts, either originally
+endowed with great intelligence or brought to a certain elevation of
+intellectuality by education. Their conduct, their actions, their
+misdeeds, their crimes are the direct result of their argumentation,
+not of concrete, but of abstract things, and chiefly the nature and
+existence of God, the varieties of use that an individual may permit
+his intelligence, free-will, free determination, and of the impositions
+of dogma founded on faith and inspiration which seem contrary to reason
+and science.
+
+All his heroes are more or less insane. Herein lies Dostoievsky's
+strength and his weakness in character creation. None of them could
+be held fully responsible in a court of justice. Out of the mouth
+of babes and sucklings the Lord ordained strength, but there is no
+writing to show that out of the mouths of the insane comes wisdom. Not
+that insanity is inimical to brilliant, even wise, utterance; but the
+pragmatic application of wisdom to life calls for sanity.
+
+Dostoievsky himself was abnormal. He was what the physician calls a
+neuropathic and psychopathic individual. In addition, he had genuine
+epilepsy, that is, epilepsy not dependent upon some accidental disease,
+such as infection, injury, or new growth. He was of psychopathic
+temperament and at different times in his life displayed hallucination,
+obsession, and hypochondria.
+
+He wrote of them as if he were the professor, not the possessor. The
+psychopathic constitution displays itself as:
+
+    “An unstable balance of the psychic impulses, an overfacile
+    tendency to emotion, an overswift interchange of mental phases,
+    an abnormally violent reaction of the psychic mechanism. The
+    feature most striking to the beholder in the character of such
+    sufferers is its heterogeneous medley of moods and whims, of
+    sympathies and antipathies; of ideas in turn joyous, stern,
+    gloomy, depressed and philosophical; of aspirations at first
+    charged with energy then dying away to nothing. Another feature
+    peculiar to these sufferers is their self-love. They are the
+    most naïve of egoists; they talk exclusively and persistently
+    and absorbedly of themselves; they strive always to attract the
+    general attention, to excite the general interest and to engage
+    everyone in conversation concerning their personality, their
+    ailments and even their vices.”
+
+Scores of his characters had such constitution, and in none is it more
+perfectly delineated than in Katerina Ivanovna, though Lise Hohlakov,
+of the same novel, had wider display of the hysteria that grew on this
+fertile soil.
+
+The facts of Dostoievsky's life that are important to the reader who
+would comprehend his psychopathic creations are that his father,
+surgeon to the Workhouse Hospital at Moscow, was a stern, suspicious,
+narrow-minded, gloomy, distrustful man who made a failure of life. “He
+has lived in the world fifty years and yet he has the same opinions
+of mankind that he had thirty years ago,” wrote Feodor when seventeen
+years old. His mother was tender-minded, pious, and domestic, and died
+early of tuberculosis. Although much has been written of his boyhood,
+there is nothing particularly interesting in it bearing on his career
+save that he was sensitive, introspective, unsociable, and early
+displayed a desire to be alone. The hero of the book “Youth” relates
+that in the lowest classes of the gymnasium he scorned all relations
+with those of his class who surpassed him in any way in the sciences,
+physical strength, or in clever repartee. He did not hate such a person
+nor wish him harm. He simply turned away from him, that being his
+nature. These characteristics run like a red thread through the entire
+life of Dostoievsky. A tendency to day-dreaming was apparent in his
+earliest years, and he gives graphic accounts of hallucination in “An
+Author's Diary.” At the age of sixteen he was admitted to the School of
+Engineering and remained there six years. During the latter part of his
+student days he decided upon literature as a career. Before taking it
+up, however, he had a brief experience with life after he had obtained
+his commission as engineer, which showed him to be totally incapable
+of dealing with its every-day eventualities, particularly in relation
+to money, whose purpose he knew but whose value was ever to remain a
+secret. It was then that he first displayed inability to subscribe or
+to submit to ordinary social conventions; indeed, a determination to
+transgress them.
+
+From his earliest years the misfortunes of others hurt him and
+distressed him, and in later life the despised and the rejected, the
+poor and the oppressed, always had his sympathy and his understanding.
+God and the people, that is the Russian people, were his passion. “The
+people have a lofty instinct for truth. They may be dirty, degraded,
+repellent, but without them and in disregard of them nothing useful
+can be effected.” The intellectuals who held themselves aloof from
+the masses he could not abide, and atheists, and their propaganda
+socialism, were anathema. He demanded of men who arrogated to
+themselves a distinction above their fellow men, “who go to the people
+not to learn to know it, but condescendingly to instruct and patronise
+it,” not only repentance, but expiation by suffering.
+
+His first important literary contribution was entitled “Poor Folk.”
+He was fortunate enough to be praised by his contemporaries and
+particularly by Bielinsky, an editor and great critic, who saw in
+the central idea of the story corroboration of his favourite theory,
+viz.: abnormal social conditions distort and dehumanise mankind to
+such an extent that they lose the human form and semblance. As the
+result of this publication, Dostoievsky made the acquaintance of the
+leading literary lights of St. Petersburg, many of whom praised him too
+immoderately for his own good, as he produced nothing worthy of his
+fame until many years after the event in his life which must be looked
+upon as the beginning of his mental awakenment--banishment and penal
+servitude in Siberia.
+
+Toward the middle of the nineteenth century the doctrines of the
+Frenchman, Charles Fourier, were having such acceptance in this
+country, where the North American Phalanx in New Jersey and the
+Brook farm in Massachusetts were thriving, as to encourage the
+disciples of that sentimental but wholly mad socialist in other lands,
+particularly in Russia, that their hopes of seeing the world dotted
+with _Phalansteres_ might be fulfilled. Dostoievsky later stated most
+emphatically that he never believed in Fourierism, but nibbling at it
+nearly cost him his life. In fact, all that stood between him and death
+was the utterance of the word “Go,” which it would seem the lips of the
+executioner had puckered to utter when the reprieve came. Dostoievsky
+was suspected of being a Revolutionary. One evening at the Petrashevsky
+Club he declaimed Pushkin's poem on Solitude:
+
+  “My friends, I see the people no longer oppressed,
+  And slavery fallen by the will of the Czar,
+  And a dawn breaking over us, glorious and bright,
+  And our country lighted by freedom's rays.”
+
+In discussion he suggested that the emancipation of the peasantry might
+have to come through a rising. Thus he became suspected. But it was not
+until he denounced the censorship and reflected on its severity and
+injustice that he was taken into custody. He and twenty-one others were
+sentenced to death. He spent four years in a Siberian prison and there
+became acquainted with misery, suffering, and criminality that beggars
+description.
+
+    “What a number of national types and characters I became
+    familiar with in the prison; I lived into their lives and so
+    I believe I know them really well. Many tramps' and thieves'
+    careers were laid bare to me, and above all the whole wretched
+    existence of the common people. I learnt to know the Russian
+    people as only a few know them.”
+
+After four years he was, through the mediation of powerful friends,
+transferred for five years to military service in Siberia, chiefly at
+Semipalatinsk. In 1859 he was permitted to return to St. Petersburg,
+and in the twenty years that followed he published those books upon
+which his fame rests; namely, “Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot,” “The
+Possessed,” “The Journal of an Author,” and “The Brothers Karamazov.”
+In 1867 he was obliged to leave Russia to escape imprisonment for debt,
+and he remained abroad, chiefly in Switzerland, for four years.
+
+In his appeal to General Todleben to get transferred from the military
+to the civil service and to be permitted to employ himself in
+literature, he said:
+
+    “Perhaps you have heard something of my arrest, my trial and
+    the supreme ratification of the sentence which was given in the
+    case concerning me in the year 1849. I was guilty and am very
+    conscious of it. I was convicted of the intention (but only the
+    intention) of acting against the Government; I was lawfully
+    and quite justly condemned; the hard and painful experiences
+    of the ensuing years have sobered me and altered my views in
+    many respects, but then while I was still blind I believed in
+    all the theories and Utopias. For two years before my offense
+    I had suffered from a strange moral disease--I had fallen into
+    hypochondria. There was a time even when I lost my reason. I was
+    exaggeratedly irritable, had a morbidly developed sensibility
+    and the power of distorting the most ordinary events into things
+    immeasurable.”
+
+While Dostoievsky was in prison his physical health improved very
+strikingly, but, despite this, his epilepsy, which had previously
+manifested itself only in vague or minor attacks, became fully
+developed. Attempts have been made to prove that prison life and
+particularly its hardships and inhumanities were responsible in a
+measure for Dostoievsky's epilepsy; but such allegations are no more
+acceptable than those which attribute it to his father's alcoholism.
+His epilepsy was a part of his general make-up, a part of his
+constitution. It was an integral part of him and it became an integral
+part of his books.
+
+The phenomena of epilepsy may be said to be the epileptic personality
+and the attack with its warning, its manifestations, and the
+after-effects. The disease is veiled in the same mystery today as it
+was when Hercules was alleged to have had it. Nothing is known of its
+causation or of its dependency, and all that can truthfully be said
+of the personality of the epileptic is that it is likely to display
+psychic disorder, evanescent or fixed. Attacks are subject to the
+widest variation both as to frequency and intensity, but the most
+enigmatic things about the disease are the warnings of the attack, and
+the phenomena that sometimes appear vicariously of the attack--the
+epileptic equivalent they are called. Dostoievsky had these _auræ_ and
+equivalents in an unusual way and with extraordinary intensity, and
+narration of them as they were displayed in the different characters
+of his creation who were afflicted with epilepsy, and of their effects
+and consequences is an important part of every one of his great books.
+Dostoievsky would seem to have been of the belief that a brain in
+which some of the mechanisms are disordered may yet remain superior
+both intellectually and morally to others less affected, and that
+the display of such weakness or maladjustment may put the possessor
+in tune with the Infinite, may permit him to blend momentarily with
+the Eternal Harmony, to be restored temporarily to the Source of its
+temporal emanation. Although he describes this in his “Letters,” as he
+experienced it, he elaborates it in his epileptic heroes, and in none
+so seductively as in “The Idiot.” He makes Prince Myshkin say:
+
+    “He thought amongst other things how in his epileptic
+    condition there was one stage, just before the actual attack,
+    when suddenly in the midst of sadness, mental darkness and
+    oppression his brain flared up, as it were, and with an unwonted
+    outburst all his vital powers were vivified simultaneously. The
+    sensation of living and of self-consciousness was increased at
+    such moments almost tenfold. They were moments like prolonged
+    lightning. As he thought over this afterward in a normal state
+    he often said to himself that all these flashes and beams of
+    the highest self-realisation, self-consciousness and “highest
+    existence” were nothing but disease, the interruption of the
+    normal state. If this were so, then it was by no means the
+    highest state, but, on the contrary, it must be reckoned as the
+    very lowest. And yet he came at last to the very paradoxical
+    conclusion: What matter if it is a morbid state? What difference
+    can it make that the tension is abnormal, if the result itself,
+    if the moment of sensation when remembered and examined in the
+    healthy state proves to be in the highest degree harmony and
+    beauty, and gives an unheard-of and undreamed-of feeling of
+    completion, of balance, of satisfaction and exultant prayerful
+    fusion with the highest synthesis of life? If at the last moment
+    of consciousness before the attack he had happened to say to
+    himself lucidly and deliberately “for this one moment one might
+    give one's whole life,” then certainly that moment would be
+    worth a lifetime. However, he did not stand out for dialectics;
+    obfuscation, mental darkness and idiocy stand before him as the
+    obvious consequences of those loftiest moments.”
+
+It is a question for the individual to decide whether one would give
+his whole life for a moment of perfection and bliss, but it is probable
+that no one would without assurance that some permanent advantage, some
+growth of spirit that could be retained, some impress of spirituality
+that was indelible, such as comes from an understanding reading of
+“Hamlet” or a comprehended rendering of “Parsifal,” would flow from
+it or follow it. But to have it and then come back to a world that
+is “just one damn thing after another” it is impossible to believe.
+Dostoievsky was right when he said that Myshkin could look forward
+to obfuscation, mental darkness, and imbecility with some certainty,
+for physicians experienced with epilepsy know empirically that the
+unfortunates who have panoplied warnings, and especially illusions,
+are most liable to become demented early. But that all epileptics with
+such warnings do not suffer this degradation is attested by the life of
+Dostoievsky, who was in his mental summation when death seized him in
+his sixtieth year.
+
+Another phenomenon of epilepsy that Dostoievsky makes many of his
+characters display is detachment of the spirit from the body. They
+cease to feel their bodies at supreme moments, such as at the
+moment of condemnation, of premeditated murder, or planned crime.
+In other words, they are thrown into a state of ecstasy similar to
+that responsible for the mystic utterances of St. Theresa, or of
+insensibility to obvious agonies such as that of Santa Fina. He not
+only depicts the phenomena of the epileptic attack, its warnings, and
+its after-effects in the most masterful way, as they have never been
+rendered in literature, lay or scientific, but he also describes many
+varieties of the disease. Before he was exiled, in 1847, he gave a most
+perfect description of the epileptic constitution as it was manifested
+in Murin, a character in “The Landlady.” The disease, as it displays
+itself in the classical way, is revealed by Nelly in “The Insulted and
+Injured,” but it is in Myshkin, in “The Idiot,” that we see epilepsy
+transforming the individual from adult infantilism, gradually, almost
+imperceptibly, to imbecility, the victim meantime displaying nobility
+and tender-mindedness that make the reader's heart go out to him.
+
+The first fruits of Dostoievsky's activities after he had obtained
+permission to publish were inconsequential. It was not until the
+appearance of “Letters from a Deadhouse,” which revealed his
+experiences and thoughts while in prison, and the volume called “The
+Despised and the Rejected,” that the literary world of St. Petersburg
+realised that the brilliant promise which he had given in 1846 was
+realised. Some of his literary adventures, especially in journalism,
+got him into financial difficulties, and he began to write under the
+lash, as he described it, and against time.
+
+In 1865 appeared the novel by which he is widely known, “Crime and
+Punishment,” in which Dostoievsky's first great antinomian hero,
+Raskolnikov, a repentant nihilist, is introduced to the reader.
+He believes that he has a special right to live, to rebel against
+society, to transgress every law and moral precept, and to follow
+the dictates of his own will and the lead of his own thought. Such
+a proud, arrogant, intellectual spirit requires to be cleansed,
+and inasmuch as the verity, the essence of life, lies in humility,
+Dostoievsky makes his hero murder an old pawnbroker and his sister and
+then proceeds to put him through the most excruciating mental agony
+imaginable. At the same time his mother and sister undergo profound
+vicarious suffering, while a successor of Mary Magdalene succours
+him in his increasingly agonised state and finally accompanies him
+to penal servitude. Many times Raskolnikov appears upon the point of
+confessing his crime from the torments of his own conscience, but, in
+reality, Svidrigailov, a strange monster of sin and sentiment, and the
+police officer, Petrovitch, a forerunner of Sherlock Holmes, suggest
+the confession to him, and between the effect of their suggestion and
+the appeal of Sonia, whose love moves him strangely, he confesses but
+does not repent. He does not repent because he has done no sin. He has
+committed no crime. The scales have not yet fallen from his eyes. That
+is reserved for the days and nights of his prison life and is to be
+mediated by Sonia's sacrificial heroism.
+
+It is interesting to contemplate Dostoievsky at the state of
+development when he wrote “Crime and Punishment,” or rather the state
+of development of his idea of free will. Raskolnikov has the same
+relation to Stavrogin of “The Possessed” and to Kirillov, the epileptic
+of the same book, as one of the trial pictures of the figures in the
+Last Supper has to Leonardo's masterpiece. Dostoievsky apparently was
+content to describe a case of moral imbecility in its most attractive
+way, and then when he had outlined its lineaments, to leave it and not
+adjust it to the other groupings of the picture that was undertaken.
+It would seem that his interest had got switched from Raskolnikov to
+Svidrigailov, who has dared to outrage covenants and conventions,
+laws and morality, and has measured his will against all things.
+Svidrigailov knows the difference between good and evil, right and
+wrong; indeed he realises it with great keenness, and when he finds
+that he is up against it, as it were, and has no escape, he puts the
+revolver to his temple and pulls the trigger. Death is the only thing
+he has not tried, and why wait to see whether eternity is just one
+little room like a bathhouse in the country, or whether it is something
+beyond conception? Why not find out at once as everything has been
+found out? Svidrigailov is Dostoievsky's symbol of the denial of God,
+the denial of a will beyond his own.
+
+    “If there is a will beyond my own, it must be an evil will
+    because pain exists. Therefore I must will evil to be in
+    harmony with it. If there is no will beyond my own, then I must
+    assert my own will until it is free of all check beyond itself.
+    Therefore I must will evil.”
+
+Raskolnikov represents the conflict of will with the element of moral
+duty and conscience, and Svidrigailov represents its conflict with
+defined, deliberate passion. This same will in conflict with the will
+of the people, the State, is represented by Stavrogin and Shatov, while
+its conflict with metaphysical and religious mystery is represented
+by Karamazov, Myshkin, and Kirillov. Despite the fact that they pass
+through the furnace of burning conflicts and the fire of inflaming
+passions, the force of dominant will is ever supreme. Their human
+individuality, as represented by their ego, remains definite and
+concrete. It is untouched, unaltered, undissolved. Though they oppose
+themselves to the elements that are devouring them, they continue to
+assert their ego and self-will even when their end is at hand. Myshkin,
+Alyosha, and Zosima submit to God's will but not to man's.
+
+“Crime and Punishment” and “The Brothers Karamazov” are the books by
+which Dostoievsky is best known in this country, and the latter, though
+unfinished, was intended by him to be his great work, “a work that is
+very dear to me for I have put a great deal of my inmost self into
+it,” and it has been so estimated by the critics. Indeed, it is the
+summary of all his thoughts, of all his doubts, of all his fancies, and
+such statement of his faith as he could formulate. It is saturated in
+mysticism and it is a _vade mecum_ of psychiatry. It is the narrative
+of the life of an egotistic, depraved, sensuous monster, who is a toad,
+a cynic, a scoffer, a drunkard, and a profligate, the synthesis of
+which, when combined with moral anæsthesia, constitutes degeneracy; of
+his three legitimate sons and their mistresses; and of an epileptic
+bastard son who resulted from the rape of an idiot girl.
+
+The eldest son, Dimitri, grows up unloved, unguided, unappreciated,
+frankly hostile to his father whom he loathes and despises,
+particularly when he is convinced that the father has robbed him of his
+patrimony. He has had a rake's career, but when Katerina Ivanovna puts
+herself unconditionally in his power to save her father's honour he
+spares her. Three months later, when betrothed to her, he has become
+entangled in Circe's toils by Grushenka, for whose favour Fyodor
+Pavlovitch, his father, is bidding.
+
+The second son, Ivan, half brother to Dimitri, whose mother was driven
+to insanity by the orgies staged in her own house and by the lusts
+and cruelties of her husband, is an intellectual and a nihilist. He
+is in rebellion against life, but he has an unquenchable thirst for
+life, and he will not accept the world. To love one's neighbours is
+impossible; even to conceive of it is repugnant. He will not admit
+that all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, and he insists
+“while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures.” He does
+not want forgiveness earned for him vicariously. He wants to do it
+himself. He wants to avenge his suffering, to satisfy his indignation,
+even if he is wrong. Too high a price is asked for harmony; it is
+beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. “And so,” he says to
+his younger brother, the potential Saint Alyosha, “I hasten to give
+back my entrance ticket. It's not God that I don't accept, only I most
+respectfully return Him the ticket.”
+
+Dostoievsky speaks oftener out of the mouth of Ivan than of any of his
+other characters. When some understanding Slav like Myereski shall
+formulate Dostoievsky's religious beliefs it will likely be found that
+they do not differ materially from those of Ivan, as stated in the
+chapter “Pro and Contra” of “The Brothers Karamazov.” He sees in Christ
+the Salvation of mankind, and the woe of the world is that it has not
+accepted Him.
+
+The third brother, Alyosha, is the prototype of the man's redeemer--a
+tender-minded, preoccupied youth, chaste and pure, who takes no thought
+for the morrow and always turns the other cheek, and esteems his
+neighbour far more than himself. At heart he is a sensualist. “All the
+Karamazovs are insects to whom God has given sensual lust which will
+stir up a tempest in your blood,” said Ivan to Alyosha when he was
+attempting to set forth his philosophy of life. But this endowment
+permits him the more comprehensively to understand the frailties of
+others and to condone their offences. The monastic life appeals to
+him, but he is warded off from it by Father Zosima, the prototype of
+Bishop Tikhon, in “Stavrogin's Confession,” whose clay was lovingly
+moulded by Dostoievsky, but into whose nostrils he did not blow the
+breath of life. This monk, who had been worldly and who, because of
+his knowledge, forgives readily and wholly, is a favourite figure
+of Dostoievsky, and one through whom he frequently expresses his
+sentiments and describes his visions. His convictions, conduct and
+teaching may be summarised in his own words:
+
+    “Fear nothing and never be afraid; and don't fret. If only your
+    penitence fail not, God will forgive all. There is no sin, and
+    there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not
+    forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great
+    as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin
+    which could exceed the love of God? Think only of repentance,
+    continual repentance, but dismiss fear altogether. Believe
+    that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that He loves you
+    with your sin, in your sin. It has been said of old that over
+    one repentant sinner there is more joy in heaven than over ten
+    righteous men. Go, and fear not. Be not bitter against men.
+    Be not angry if you are wronged. Forgive the dead man in your
+    heart what wrong he did you. Be reconciled with him in truth.
+    If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God.
+    All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I,
+    a sinner, even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on
+    you, how much more will God. Love is such a priceless treasure
+    that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only
+    your own sins but the sins of others.”
+
+Alyosha is Dostoievsky's attempt to create a superman. He is the most
+real, the most vital, the most human, and, at the same time, the most
+lovable of all his characters. He is the essence of Myshkin and
+Stavrogin and Karamazov and Father Zosima, the residue that is left
+in the crucible when their struggles were reduced, their virtues and
+their vices distilled. He is Myshkin whose mind has not been destroyed
+by epilepsy, he is Stavrogin who has seen light before his soul was
+sold to the devil, he is Ivan Karamazov redeemed by prayer and good
+works, he is the apotheosis of Father Zosima. “He felt clearly and as
+it were tangibly that something firm and unshakable as the vault of
+heaven had entered into his soul. It was as though some idea had seized
+the sovereignty of his mind--and it was for all his life and for ever
+and for ever.” In other words, Alyosha realises in a mild form and
+continuously that which Myshkin realises as the result of disease and
+spasmodically. Alyosha goes into a state of faith, of resignation,
+of adjustment with the Infinite, and Myshkin goes into dementia via
+ecstasy.
+
+As a peace-maker, adjuster, comforter, and inspiration he has few
+superiors in profane literature. His speech at the Stone of Ilusha
+embodies the whole doctrine of brotherly love.
+
+Dimitri's hatred of his father becomes intense when they are rivals for
+Grushenka's favours, so that it costs him no pang to become potentially
+a parricide on convincing himself that the father has been a successful
+rival. Psychologically he represents the type of unstable, weak-willed,
+uninhibited being who cannot learn self-control. Such individuals
+may pass unmarked so long as they live in orderly surroundings, but
+as soon as they wander from the straight path they get into trouble.
+Their irritability, manifested for the smallest cause, may give rise
+to attacks of boundless fury which are further increased by alcohol,
+and the gravest crimes are often committed in these conditions. The
+normal inhibitions are entirely absent; there is no reflection, no
+weighing of the costs. The thought which develops in the brain is at
+once translated into action. Their actions are irrational, arbitrary,
+dependent upon the moment, governed by accidental factors.
+
+Despite overwhelming proof, Dimitri denies his guilt from the start.
+It is an open question if the motive of this denial is repentance,
+shame, love for Grushenka, or fear. The three experts of the trial each
+has his own opinion. The first two declare Dimitri to be abnormal.
+The third regards him as normal. The author himself has made it easy
+to judge of Dimitri's state of mind. Though on the boundary line of
+accountability, he is not in such a pathological condition as to
+exclude his free determination; however, he is not fully responsible
+for the crime, and extenuating circumstances have to be conceded by the
+judge.
+
+Smerdyakov, the illegitimate child of the idiot girl whom Karamazov
+_pere_ raped on a wager and who eventually murders his father
+(vicariously, as it were, his morality having been destroyed by Ivan),
+is carefully delineated by Dostoievsky. He is epileptic. Not only are
+the disease and its manifestations described, but there is a masterly
+presentation of the personality alteration which so often accompanies
+its progress. In childhood he is cruel, later solitary, suspicious,
+and misanthropical. He has no sense of gratitude and he looks at the
+world mistrustfully. When Fyodor Pavlovitch hears he has epilepsy he
+takes interest in him, sees to it that he has treatment, and sends him
+to Moscow to be trained as cook. During the three years of absence his
+appearance changes remarkably. Here it may be remarked that though
+Dostoievsky lived previous to our knowledge of the rôle that the
+ductless glands play in maintaining the appearance and conserving the
+nutritional equilibrium of the individual, he gives, in his delineation
+of Smerdyakov, an extraordinarily accurate description of the somatic
+and spiritual alteration that sometimes occurs when some of them
+cease functioning. It is his art also to do it in a few words, just
+as it is his art to forecast Smerdyakov's crime while discussing the
+nature and occurrence of epileptic-attack equivalents, which he called
+contemplations.
+
+The way he disentangles the skeins from the confused mass of putridity,
+disease, and crime of which this novel is constituted, has been the
+marvel and inspiration of novelists the world over for the past fifty
+years. Dimitri wants to kill his father for many reasons, but the one
+that moves him to meditate it and plan it is: Grushenka, immoral and
+unmoral, will then be beyond the monster's reach; Grushenka whose
+sadism peeps out in her lust for Alyosha and who can't throw off
+her feeling of submission for the man who had violated her when she
+was seventeen. Dimitri loves Grushenka and Grushenka loves Dimitri
+“abnormals with abnormal love which they idealised.” During an orgy
+which would have pleased Nero, Dimitri lays drunken Grushenka on the
+bed, and kisses her on the lips.
+
+    “'Don't touch me,' she faltered in an imploring voice. 'Don't
+    touch me till I am yours.... I have told you I am yours, but
+    don't touch me ... spare me.... With them here, with them close
+    you mustn't. He's here. It's nasty here.'”
+
+He sinks on his knees by the bedside. He goes to his father's house at
+a propitious time and suitably armed for murder; he hails him to the
+window by giving the signal that he has learned from Smerdyakov would
+apprise him of the approach of Grushenka; but before he can strike
+him Smerdyakov, carrying out a plan of his own, despatches him, and
+Dimitri flees. The latter half of the book is taken up with the trial
+of Dimitri and the preliminaries to it, which give Dostoievsky an
+opportunity to pay his respects to Jurisprudence and to medicine and
+to depict a Slav hypocrite, Rahkitin. Smerdyakov commits the crime to
+find favour in the eyes of his god Ivan. He knows that Ivan desired
+it, suggested it, and went away knowing it was going to be done--at
+least that is the impression the epileptic mind of Smerdyakov gets--and
+under that impression he acts when he despatches his father with
+the three-pound paper weight. The unprejudiced reader will feel the
+sympathies that have gradually been aroused for Smerdyakov because
+of his disease fade as he reads of the plan that the murderer made,
+and when he has hung himself after confessing to Ivan. In proportion
+as they recede for the valet, they will be rearoused for Ivan whose
+brain now gives away under the hereditary and acquired burden. This
+gives Dostoievsky the opportunity to depict the prodromata and early
+manifestations of acute mania as they have never, before or since, been
+depicted in lay literature.
+
+Description of the visual hallucination which Ivan has in the early
+stages, that a “Russian gentleman of a particular kind is present,”
+and the delusion that he is having an interview with him, might have
+been copied from the annals of an asylum, had they been recorded there
+by a master of the narrative art. It is one of the first, and the most
+successful attempts to depict dual personality, and to record the
+beliefs and convictions of each side of the personality. He listens to
+his _alter ego_ sit in judgment upon him and his previous conduct, and
+is finally goaded by him to assault, as was Luther under similar though
+less dramatic circumstances. “Voices,” as the delirious and insane
+call them, have never been more accurately rendered than in the final
+chapters of the Ivan section of the book.
+
+An exhaustive psychosis displaying itself in intermittent delirium, and
+occurring in a profoundly psychopathic individual, is the label that
+a physician would give Ivan's disorder. Alyosha saw in it that God,
+in whom Ivan disbelieved, and His truth were gaining mastery over his
+heart, which still refused to submit.
+
+“The Idiot” was one of Dostoievsky's books which had a cold reception
+from the Russian reading public, but which has been, next to “The
+Brothers Karamazov” and “Crime and Punishment,” the most popular in
+this country. The basic idea is the representation of a truly perfect
+and noble man, and it is not at all astonishing that Dostoievsky made
+him an epileptic. He had been impressed, he said, that all writers who
+had sought to represent Absolute Beauty were unequal to the task. It is
+so difficult, for the beautiful is the ideal, and ideals have long been
+wavering and waning in civilised Europe. There is only one figure of
+absolute beauty, Christ, and he patterns Prince Myshkin upon the Divine
+model. He brings him in contact with Nastasya Filipovna, who is the
+incarnation of the evil done in the world, and this evil is represented
+symbolically by Dostoievsky as the outrage of a child. The nine years
+of brooding which had followed the outrage inflicted upon Nastasya as
+a child by Prince Tosky had imprinted upon her face something which
+Myshkin recognises as the pain of the world, and from the thought of
+which he cannot deliver himself, and which he cannot mitigate for her.
+She marries him after agonies of rebellion, after having given him to
+her _alter ego_ in virginal state, Aglaia Epanchin, and then takes
+him away to show her power and demonstrate her own weakness; but she
+deserts him on the church steps for her lover Rogozhin, who murders
+her that night. Myshkin, finding Rogozhin next morning, says more than
+“Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” He lies beside him
+in the night and bathes his temples with his tears, but fortunately in
+the morning when the murderer is a raving lunatic a merciful Providence
+has enshrouded Myshkin in his disease.
+
+As Dimitri Merejkowski, the most understanding critic and interpreter
+of Dostoievsky who has written of him, truthfully says, his works are
+not novels or epics, but tragedies. The narrative is secondary to the
+construction of the whole work, and the keystone of the narrative is
+the dialogue between the characters. The reader feels that he hears
+real persons talking and talking without artifice, just as they would
+talk in real life; and they express sentiments and convictions which
+one would expect from individuals of such inheritance, education,
+development, and environment, obsessed particularly with the
+injustices of this world and the uncertainties of the world to be,
+concerned day and night with the immortality of the soul, the existence
+of God, and the future of civilisation.
+
+It has been said that he does not describe the appearance of his
+characters, for they depict themselves, their thoughts and feelings,
+their faces and bodies, by their peculiar forms of language and tones
+of voice. Although he does not dwell on portraiture, he has scarcely a
+rival in delineation, and his portraits have that quality which perhaps
+Leonardo of all who worked with the brush had the capacity to portray,
+and which Pater saw in the _Gioconda_; the revelation of the soul and
+its possibilities in the lineaments. The portrait of Mlle. Lebyadkin,
+the imbecile whom the proud Nikolay Stavrogin married, not from love
+or lust, but that he might exhaust the list of mortifications, those
+of the flesh, for himself, and those of pride for his family; that he
+might kill his instincts and become pure spirit, is as true to life as
+if Dostoievsky had spent his existence in an almshouse sketching the
+unfortunates segregated there. The art of portraiture cannot surpass
+this picture of Shatov, upon whose plastic soul Stavrogin impressed his
+immoralities in the shape of “the grand idea” and who said to Stavrogin
+in his agony, “Sha'n't I kiss your foot-prints when you've gone? I
+can't tear you out of my heart, Nikolay Stavrogin:”
+
+    “He was short, awkward, had a shock of flaxen hair, broad
+    shoulders, thick lips, very thick overhanging white eyebrows, a
+    wrinkled forehead, and a hostile, obstinately downcast, as it
+    were shamefaced, expression in his eyes. His hair was always
+    in a wild tangle and stood up in a shock which nothing could
+    smooth. He was seven or eight and twenty.”
+
+It is not as a photographer of the body that Dostoievsky is a source
+of power and inspiration in the world today, and will remain so for
+countless days to come--for he has depicted the Russian people as has
+no one else save Tolstoi, and his pictures constitute historical
+documents--but as a photographer of the soul, a psychologist.
+Psychology is said to be a new science, and a generation ago there was
+much ado over a new development called “experimental psychology,” which
+was hailed as the key that would unlock the casket wherein repose the
+secrets of the mind; the windlass that would lift layer by layer the
+veil that has, since man began, concealed the mysteries of thought,
+behaviour, and action. It has not fulfilled its promise. It would be
+beyond the truth to say that it has been sterile, but it is quite true
+to say that the contributions which it has made have been as naught
+compared with those made by abnormal psychology. Some, indeed, contend
+that the only real psychological contributions of value have come from
+a study of disease and deficiency, and their contentions are granted by
+the vast majority of those entitled to opinion.
+
+Dostoievsky is the master portrayer of madness and of bizarre states
+of the soul and of the mind that are on the borderland of madness.
+Not only has he depicted the different types of mental alienation,
+but by an intuition peculiar to his genius, by a species of artistic
+divination, he has understood and portrayed their display, their
+causation, their onset--so often difficult to determine even for the
+expert--and finally the full development of the disease. Indeed,
+he forestalled the description of the alienists. “They call me a
+psychologist,” says Dostoievsky; “it is not true. I am only a realist
+in the highest sense of the word, that is I depict all the soul's
+depth. Arid observations of every-day trivialities I have long ceased
+to regard as realism--it is quite the reverse.”
+
+It is the mission of one important branch of psychology to depict the
+soul's depth, the workings of the conscious mind, and as the interior
+of a house that one is forbidden to enter is best seen when the house
+has been shattered or is succumbing to the incidences of time and
+existence, so the contents of the soul are most discernible in the
+mind that has some of its impenetralia removed by disease. It was in
+this laboratory that Dostoievsky conducted his experiments, made his
+observations, and recorded the results from which he drew conclusions
+and inferences. “In my works I have never said so much as the twentieth
+part of what I wished to say, and perhaps could actually have said. I
+am firmly convinced that mankind knows much more than it has hitherto
+expressed either in science or in art. In what I have written there
+is much that came from the depth of my heart,” he says in a letter to
+a friendly critic, to which may be added that what he has said is in
+keeping with the science of today, and is corroborated by workers in
+other fields of psychology and psychiatry.
+
+“The Possessed,” in which Dostoievsky reached the high-water mark of
+personality analysis, has always been a stumbling block to critics
+and interpreters. The recent publication by the Russian Government of
+a pamphlet containing “Stavrogin's Confession” sheds an illuminating
+light on the hero; and even second-hand knowledge of what has gone
+on in Russia, politically and socially, during the past six years
+facilitates an understanding of Pyotr Stepanovitch, Satan's impresario,
+and of Kirillov, nihilist.
+
+The task that Dostoievsky set himself in “The Possessed” was not
+unlike that which the Marquis de Sade set himself in “Justine, or the
+Misfortunes of Virtue,” and Sacher-Masoch in “Liebesgeschichten”; viz.,
+to narrate the life of an unfortunate creature whose most important
+fundamental instinct was perverted and who could get the full flavour
+of pleasure only by inflicting cruelty, causing pain, or engendering
+humiliation.
+
+    “Every unusually disgraceful, utterly degrading, dastardly, and
+    above all, ridiculous situation in which I ever happened to
+    be in my life, always roused in me, side by side with extreme
+    anger, an incredible delight.”
+
+Stavrogin was apparently favoured by fortune: he had charm, education,
+wealth, and health. In reality he was handicapped to an incalculable
+degree. After a brilliant brief career in the army and in St.
+Petersburg society, he withdrew from both and associated with the dregs
+of the population of that city, with slip-shod government clerks,
+discharged military men, beggars of the higher class, and drunkards of
+all sorts. He visited their filthy families, spent days and nights in
+dark slums and all sorts of low haunts. He threw suspicion of theft
+on the twelve-year-old daughter of a woman who rented him a room for
+assignations that he might see her thrashed, and a few days later he
+raped her. The next day he hated her so he decided to kill her and
+was preparing to do so when she hanged herself. This is not featured
+in the novel as it now stands. Until the publication of “Stavrogin's
+Confession” interpreters of Stavrogin's personality who maintained
+that he was a sadist were accused of having read something into his
+character that Dostoievsky did not intend him to have. After committing
+this “greatest sin in the world,” he determined to cripple his life
+in the most disgusting way possible, that he might pain his mother,
+humiliate his family, and shock society. He would marry Marya, a
+hemiplegic idiot who tidied up his room. After the ceremony he went
+to stay with his mother, the granddame of their province. He went to
+distract himself, which included seducing and enslaving Darya, Shatov's
+sister, a ward of his mother, and a member of the family.
+
+Suddenly, apropos of nothing, he was guilty of incredible outrages
+upon various persons and, what was most enigmatic, these outrages
+were utterly unheard of, quite inconceivable, entirely unprovoked and
+objectless. For instance, one day at the club, he tweaked the nose of
+an elderly man of high rank in the service. When the Governor of the
+club sought some explanation Stavrogin told him he would whisper it in
+his ear.
+
+    “When the dear, mild Ivan Ossipovitch hurriedly and trustfully
+    inclined his ear Stavrogin bit it hard. The poor Governor would
+    have died of terror but the monster had mercy on him, and let go
+    his ear.”
+
+The doctor testified that he was temporarily unbalanced, and after a
+few weeks' rest and isolation he went abroad for four years and there
+Lizaveta Nikolaevna, Shatov's wife, and several others succumbed, and
+he also met his old tutor's son, Pyotr Stepanovitch, his deputy in
+the Internationale, who from that moment became his apologist, his
+tool, his agent, and finally the instrument of his destruction. The
+gratification of Stavrogin's perverted passion, the machinations of the
+Republicans and nihilists, and the revelations of Shatov's limitations
+and of Mr. Kirillov's nihilistic idealism are the threads of the story.
+Shatov was the son of a former valet of Stavrogin's mother who had been
+expelled from the University after some disturbance, a radical with a
+tender heart, who had held Stavrogin up as an ideal.
+
+    “He was one of those idealistic beings common in Russia who are
+    suddenly struck by some overmastering idea which seems, as it
+    were, to crush them at once and sometimes for ever. They are
+    never equal to coping with it, but put passionate faith in it,
+    and their whole life passes afterward, as it were, in the last
+    agonies under the weight of the stone that has fallen upon them
+    and half crushed them.”
+
+Shatov's overmastering idea was that Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch could do
+no wrong, and the stone that crushed him was Nikolay's misdeeds. Mr.
+Kirillov, the engineer, believed that he who conquers pain and terror
+will become a god.
+
+    “Then there will be a new life, a new man, everything will be
+    new ... then they will divide history into two parts: from the
+    gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of
+    God to the transformation of the earth and of man physically.
+    Man will be God and will be transformed physically and all men
+    will kill themselves.”
+
+“He who kills himself only to kill fear will become a god at once.”
+Kirillov believed or feared that eternal life was now, not hereafter.
+There are moments when time suddenly stands still for men, and it
+was fear that it might become eternal that he could not tolerate. In
+Dostoievsky's books there is always one contemptible character, a
+sanctimonious hypocrite, a fawning holier-than-thou, a pious scandal
+monger, a venomous volunteer of first aid to the morally injured. In
+this book his name is Liputin, an elderly provincial official.
+
+These are the chief figures of the drama.
+
+When Shatov had been killed; when Kirillov's promise: namely, that he
+would commit suicide on request, had been exacted; when Stavrogin's
+imbecile wife and her brother Lebyadkin had been despatched; when
+Lisa, who was abducted by Stavrogin on the eve of her marriage and
+then abandoned, had been knocked on the head and killed by the mob
+because she was Stavrogin's woman who “had come to look at the wife
+he had murdered”; when Shatov's wife had come back to him and borne
+Stavrogin's child in his presence; when Stepan Trofimovitch had
+displayed his last infantile reaction and his son Peter, the Russian
+Mephistopheles, had made a quick and successful get-away, Stavrogin
+wrote to Darya and suggested that she go with him to the Canton of
+Uri, of which he was a citizen, and be his nurse. Darya, for whom
+humiliation spelled happiness, consented and Varvara Petrovna, hearing
+of the plan, succumbed to the sway of maternal love and arranged to go
+with them.
+
+The day they had planned to begin their journey Stavrogin was not to be
+found, but search of the loft revealed his body hanging from a hook by
+means of a silken cord which had been carefully soaped before he slung
+it around his neck.
+
+At the inquest the doctors absolutely and emphatically rejected all
+idea of insanity.
+
+“The Possessed” has been the most enigmatic of the writer's books
+because critics could not agree as to the motives of Stavrogin's crimes
+and conduct. With the publication of “Stavrogin's Confession” the
+riddles were solved. In the book as originally planned (and modified
+at the request of the publisher of the periodical in which the novel
+originally appeared), Stavrogin, instead of hanging himself, went
+to Our Lady Spasso-Efimev Monastery and confessed himself to Bishop
+Tikhon. Dostoievsky recruited his spiritual _menschenkenners_ from
+the ranks of those who, in youth, had played the game of life hard,
+transgressed, and repented. Tikhon was one of them, a strange composite
+of piety and worldliness chained to his cell by chronic rheumatism and
+alcoholic tremours.
+
+Stavrogin had been obsessed by a phrase from the Apocalypse: “I know
+thy works; that thou art neither hot nor cold. I would thou wert cold
+or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot,
+I will spew thee out of my mouth.” He would be lukewarm no longer. He
+handed Tikhon three little sheets of ordinary small-sized writing paper
+printed and stitched together. It was entitled “From Stavrogin” and
+was a confession of his sins. He couldn't dislodge from his mind the
+vision of the little girl Matryosha. He identified her with photographs
+of children that he saw in shop windows. A spider on a geranium leaf
+caused the vision of her as she killed herself to rise up before him,
+and this vision came to him now every day and every night
+
+    “not that it comes itself, but that I bring it before myself and
+    cannot help bringing it although I can't live with it. I know I
+    can dismiss the thought of Matryosha even now whenever I want
+    to. I am as completely master of my will as ever. But the whole
+    point is that I never wanted to do it; I myself do not want to,
+    and never shall.”
+
+Tikhon suggested that he would be forgiven if his repentance was
+sincere, and told him he knew an old man, a hermit and ascetic of such
+great Christian wisdom that he was beyond ordinary understanding. He
+suggested that Stavrogin should go to him, into retreat, as novice
+under his guidance, for five years, or seven, for as many as were
+necessary. He adjured him to make a vow to himself so that by this
+great sacrifice he would acquire all that he longed for and didn't
+even expect, and assured him that he could not possibly realise now
+what he would obtain from such guidance and isolation and repentance.
+
+Stavrogin hesitated and the Bishop suddenly realised that he had no
+intention of repenting. It dawned upon him that Stavrogin's plan was to
+flaunt his sin in the face of God as he had previously flaunted it in
+the face of society, and in a voice which penetrated the soul and with
+an expression of the most violent grief Tikhon exclaimed,
+
+    “Poor lost youth, you have never been so near another and a
+    still greater crime as you are at this moment. Before the
+    publication of the 'Confession,' a day, an hour perhaps before
+    the great step, you will throw yourself on another crime, as a
+    way out, and you will commit it solely in order to avoid the
+    publication of these pages.”
+
+Stavrogin shuddered with anger and almost with fear and shouted “You
+cursed psychologist!,” and left the cell without looking at Tikhon.
+
+The annihilation of the sense of time in Dostoievsky's stories was
+first dwelt upon by Merejkowski, and it has been much discussed by all
+of his serious commentators. Events occur and things take place within
+a few hours in his books which would ordinarily take months and years.
+The reason for this timeless cycle of events may be sought in the
+experiences that the author had in the moments preceding his attacks of
+epilepsy in which he had thoughts and emotions which a lifetime would
+scarcely suffice to narrate.
+
+Dostoievsky is the greatest of subjective writers because he goes
+deepest and is the most truthful. His books are narratives of sins and
+crimes and descriptions of attempts at expiation. He didn't invent
+sins, he took them from life; he presented those he had committed and
+seen committed. He invented only the expiation, and some of that,
+it must be admitted, he experienced. His sinners are never normal
+mentally. They are never insane legally, but all of them are insane
+medically.
+
+Dostoievsky himself was far from “normal” mentally, aside from his
+epilepsy, though he made approximation to it as he grew older. His
+mind was a garden sown with the flower seeds of virtue and the thistle
+seeds of vice. All of them germinated. Some became full blown, others
+remained stunted and dwarfed.
+
+    “I have invented a new kind of enjoyment for myself,” he wrote
+    to his brother, “a most strange one--to make myself suffer. I
+    take your letter, turn it over in my hand for several minutes,
+    feel if it is full weight, and having looked on it sufficiently
+    and admired the closed envelope, I put it in my pocket. You
+    won't believe what a voluptuous state of soul, feeling and heart
+    there is in that!”
+
+That is the _anlage_ of masochism. In the outline of “The Life of a
+Great Sinner,” the novel whose completion would permit him to die in
+peace, for then he should have expressed himself completely, one sees
+the wealth of detail taken by the author from his boyhood and early
+manhood. The hero of the “Life” was unsociable and uncommunicative;
+a proud, passionate, and domineering nature. So was Dostoievsky. So
+here was to be apotheosis of individualism, consciousness of his
+superiority, of his determination, and of his uniqueness. Dostoievsky
+wrote of himself in 1867, “Everywhere and in everything I reach the
+furthest limits; I have passed beyond the boundaries of all life.”
+
+The most inattentive reader of his “Letters” will be reminded of
+Dostoievsky when they read that the hero of the “Life” “surprised
+everybody by unexpectedly rude pranks,” “behaved like a monster,”
+“offended an old woman,” and that he was obsessed with the idea of
+amassing money; and the alternative stages of belief and disbelief of
+the hero are obviously recollections of his own trials. “I believe I
+shall express the whole of myself in it” he wrote of it to a friend,
+and no one familiar with his books and his life can read the outline
+of it and doubt that he would have succeeded. Wherever Dostoievsky
+looked he saw a question mark and before it was written “Is there a
+God? Does God exist?” He was determined to find the answer. He had
+found Christ abundantly and satisfactorily, but the God of Job he never
+knew, nor had He ever overthrown him or compassed him with His net.
+
+Dostoievsky was a rare example of dual personality. His life was the
+expression of his ego personality (and what a life of strife and misery
+and unhappiness it was!), revealed with extraordinary lucidity in his
+“Letters” and “The Journal of an Author”; and his legacy to mankind
+is the record of his unconscious mind revealed in his novels. The
+latter is the life he would have liked to live, and in it he depicts
+the changes in man's moral nature that he would have liked to witness.
+His contention was that man should be master of his fate, captain of
+his soul. He must express his thought and conviction in action and
+conduct, particularly in his relation to his fellow-man. He must take
+life's measure and go to it no matter what it entails or how painful,
+unpleasant, or disastrous the struggle, or the end.
+
+Many thoughtful minds believe that Dostoievsky has shown us the only
+salvation in the great crisis of the European conscience. The people,
+it matters not of what nationality, still possess the strength and
+equilibrium of internal power. The conviction that man shall not live
+as a beast of burden still survives in the Russian people and is shared
+with them by the masses throughout the civilised world. Salvation from
+internal anarchy was his plea, and it is the plea that is today being
+made by millions in other lands than his.
+
+As a prophet he foresaw the supremacy of the Russian people, the
+common people succoured to knowledge, faith, and understanding by
+liberty, education, and health, and by conformation to its teaching
+the Renaissance of the Christian faith, which shall be a faith that
+shall show man how to live and how to die, and which shall be manifest
+in conduct as well as by word of mouth; primacy of the Russian church;
+and the consummation of European culture by the effort and propaganda
+of Russia. “Russia is the one God-fearing nation and her ultimate
+destiny shall be to make known the Russian Christ for the salvation
+of lost humanity.” No one can say at this day that his prophecies may
+not come true, and to the student of history there may seem to be more
+suggestive indication of it in the Russia of today than in that of half
+a century ago; for from a world in ferment unexpected distillations
+may flow. But to the person who needs proof Russia is silent now.
+Dostoievsky's doctrines have not dropped as the rain, nor has his
+speech been distilled as the dew, though he published the name of the
+Lord and ascribed greatness unto our God. Indeed, the fate that has
+overtaken Russia would seem to deny the possibility of the fulfillment
+of his prophecies either for his country or his people.
+
+As a narrator of the events of life here, and of the thoughts of life
+here and hereafter, he has had few peers of any nation or language.
+That he did it in a disorderly way must be admitted; that the events of
+his tragedies had little time incidence is obvious to the most casual
+reader; that the reader has to bring to their perusal concentration
+and application is beyond debate; and that his characters are
+“degenerates,” using that word in its biological sense, there is no
+doubt. But despite these defects, Dostoievsky succeeds in straining the
+essence of the Russian's soul through his unconscious to his conscious
+mind, and then expressing it; and his books are the imperishable
+soul-prints of his contemporaneous countrymen. Not only does he stand
+highest in literary achievement of all men of his time, but he is a
+figure of international significance in the world of literature. His
+life and struggle was Hauptmann's song,
+
+    “Always must the heart-strings vibrate in the breath of the
+    world's sorrow, for the world's sorrow is the root of heaven's
+    desire.”
+
+He foresaw with clairvoyancy the necessity of making religion livable,
+not professed with the lips and scorned in action, but a code or
+formulation that would combine Life, Love, and Light pragmatically;
+and although he was not able to formulate his thought or to express
+it clearly and forcibly, to synthetise and codify it, as it were,
+formulators of the new religion, of Christianity revivified or
+dematerialised, will consult frequently and diligently the writings of
+Feodor Dostoievsky.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IV
+                   DOROTHY RICHARDSON AND HER CENSOR
+
+
+The novelists are behind the naturalists in the recording of minutiæ.
+Many of the latter have set down the life history of certain species
+of birds in exhaustive detail--every flip of the tail, every peck
+preceding the grand drama of courtship and marriage, every solicitude
+of paternity, every callousness of guardianship.
+
+An analogous contribution to realism in the domain of fiction has
+been made by Dorothy M. Richardson, an interesting figure in English
+literature today. She has written six books about herself. When one
+considers that her life has been uneventful, one might say drab,
+commonplace, and restricted, this is an accomplishment deserving of
+note and comment.
+
+Critics and connoisseurs of literary craftsmanship have given her a
+high rating, but they have not succeeded in introducing her to the
+reading public. She is probably the least known distinguished writer
+of fiction in England, but she has a certain public both in her own
+country, and in this in which all her novels have been republished.
+
+Her influence on the output of English fiction since the publication
+of “Pointed Roofs,” in 1913, is one of the outstanding features in
+the evolution of novel-writing during the present decade. Since
+Flaubert set the pace for a reaction against the conception of the
+realistic novel as the faithful transcription of life as perceived
+by the novelist; and his followers introduced into novel-writing a
+more subtle art than that of mere transcription of life, by making
+the hypothetical consciousness through which the story is presented
+a determining factor in its essence, this factor has been assuming a
+more and more important rôle. The autobiographical novel, tracing its
+lineage straight back to Rousseau, has become a prevailing fashion
+in fiction. It remained, however, for Miss Richardson to give the
+example--aside from James Joyce and Marcel Proust--of a novel in which
+the consciousness of the writer should assume the leading rôle in a
+drama that just missed being a monologue. Miss Richardson has made,
+not herself in the ordinary sense of the word, but her subjective
+consciousness, the heroine of her narrative; and the burden of it has
+been to present the development of this consciousness, or energy,
+directly to the reader in all its crudity and its dominancy. The
+result is a novel without plot, practically without story interest.
+It is a question what influence this “artistic subjectivism,” as Mr.
+J. Middleton Murry has called it, will have upon the fiction of the
+future. Of its influence upon that of the present there can be no
+question.
+
+Her technique is intensive, netting in words the continuous flow of
+consciousness and semi-consciousness. She is first and foremost a
+symbolist, an exponent of autistic thinking, a recorder of the product
+of what is called by the popular psychology her “unconscious mind,”
+which has got by the “censor,” a mythical sort of policeman who, in her
+case, often sleeps on his post, or is so dazed by the supply from her
+unconscious he cannot carry on.
+
+This recently rechristened official, from the baptismal font of the
+Freudians, is responsible for much literature of questionable value.
+Latterly he has become something of a radical and has been permitting
+stuff to get by on many wires and postal avenues that seems to those
+whose “censors” have been doing duty in the name of Reason or _Amour
+Propre_ to be, if not immoral, at least indecent. Miss Richardson's
+“censor” is a Socialist, but he is not a Red. He hasn't much time for
+appearances and diplomacy, and he has so many fish to fry that he
+cannot have all his time taken up with putting his best foot forward.
+Therefore Miriam Henderson doesn't believe in the religion of her
+forebears, she isn't strong for the National cause, and she doesn't
+hark to any party cry. She doesn't like her mother, and it is the
+tendency of the modern “censor” to emphasise that; but to “pater”
+her allegory and her ordered stream of thought are uniformly kind
+and indulgent. Her “censor” early in life warned her that he was no
+parent of shams and if she wanted to live a peaceful life she must
+be unconventional. So Miriam determined to be “different.” She is
+unsociable. She cannot think of anyone who does not offend her. “I
+don't like men and I loathe women. I am a misanthrope. So is pater.”
+He further assured her that “freedom” is the gateway and roadway to
+happiness, and to travel thereon, with a little money to satisfy the
+self-preservative urge, constituted the joy of life. Up to this point
+Miriam and the “censor” got on famously. It was when he announced that
+he was determined not to exhaust himself keeping down her untutored
+passions that she revealed a determination that staggered him. The
+“censor” capitulated. The result is that Miss Richardson's books are of
+all symbolic literature the least concerned with the sinfulness of the
+flesh, therefore furthest removed from comedy.
+
+Miriam Henderson--who is Dorothy M. Richardson, the narrator of her
+own life--is the third of four daughters of a silly, inane, resigned
+little mother and an unsocial father of artistic temperament, the son
+of a tradesman whose ruling passion is to be considered a country
+gentleman. His attitude toward life and his efforts to sustain it have
+culminated in financial ruin, and Miriam finds herself at the age of
+eighteen, all reluctant and unprepared, confronted with the necessity
+of depending upon her own efforts for a living--unless she can achieve
+escape, as do two of her sisters, in marriage. She meets the situation
+bravely--cowardice is not one of her faults--and the six books contain
+a statement of her struggles against circumstance and a psychological
+analysis of her personality. As self is less able to accept compromises
+or to make adaptations in her case than in that of the average mortal,
+the conflict is fierce; but it is soul struggle, not action.
+
+Miriam's first tilt with life, recorded in “Pointed Roofs,” is as
+a governess in a small German boarding-school, from which she is
+politely dismissed, without assigned reason, at the close of the
+first term. Her second, in “Backwater,” is as a teacher of drab
+youngsters in a North London school. After less than a year, ennui,
+restlessness, and discontent compel her to resign without definite
+outlook or prospects. She finds herself, in “Honeycomb,” established
+as governess to two children in the country home of a prosperous Q.C.
+The situation suddenly becomes unendurable after a few months--for no
+stated reason--and she eagerly seeks escape in her mother's illness. In
+“The Tunnel” she at last finds a “job” to her taste when she becomes
+assistant in the office of several London dentists, and denizen of a
+hall bedroom in a dismal Bloomsbury rooming-house. In “Interim” she
+loses her opportunity of marrying a wholesome Canadian by flirting with
+a Spanish Jew. And in “Deadlock” she puts forth her first tentative
+efforts to write and becomes engaged to a man with whom she believes
+herself to be in love, but of whom she does not intellectually approve.
+
+Her next novel is likely to be called “Impasse,” for meanwhile, in real
+life, Miss Richardson has married and a new element has been introduced
+into her life which she will not be able to keep from tincturing and
+tinting her “unconscious,” but which she will not be able to get past
+her “censor.” It would not surprise us either should she switch from
+this series and cast her next book in the form of an episode or short
+story. Revelations of impulses, thoughts, determinations have been
+considered “good form” in literature when they were one's own, but when
+they were another's, submitted to the narrator's judgement or reason,
+especially a wife's or a husband's, it has been considered bad taste
+either to narrate or to publish them. Moreover the alleged facts are
+always questioned.
+
+In the six books, whose titles are symbolic and which were originally
+meant to be grouped under the one head of “Pilgrimage”--her adventure
+of life--the author has presented what might be described as a cinema
+of her mind, not particularly what the New Psychology calls, with
+all the assurance of infallibility, the “unconscious mind.” She has
+the faculty of taking a canvas and jotting down everything she sees
+in a landscape and then finishing it in the studio in such a way as
+to convince the person who has seen similar landscapes or who has an
+eye for scenic beauty that her work is nearly perfect. She does it by
+a skillful blending of the mind products of purposeful and autistic
+thinking.
+
+The autonomic mechanism of man displays the closest approximation to
+perpetual motion that exists. It never rests. As yet we do not know
+how far thought is conditioned by the autonomic nervous system, but
+we know that the mind is never idle any more than the heart or the
+lungs. Constantly a stream of thoughts flows from it or through it.
+These thoughts vary in quality and quantity, and their variations
+have formed endless and bitter discussions of psychologists. Whenever
+the waking mind is not entirely occupied with directed thoughts, it
+is filled with a succession of more or less vivid or vague thoughts,
+often popularly referred to as “impressions,” which seem to arise
+spontaneously and are usually not directed toward any recognised end or
+purpose. A significant feature of them is the prominence of agreeable
+impressions concerning oneself, people or things--or thoughts of these
+as one would wish them to be, rather than as they are known to be. It
+is these autistic, or wishful thoughts, which, constantly bubbling
+up to the surface of consciousness like the water of a spring, give
+colour to personality. They reveal it more luminously than anything
+else--unless one goes still deeper and lays bare the thoughts at the
+hidden source of the spring, thus penetrating the unconscious itself,
+as the Freudians claim to do through the symbolism of dreams.
+
+Whether Miriam Henderson, proceeding in this fashion, revealed more
+of her real self than did Marie Bashkirtseff, or Anatole France in
+“Le Petit Pierre,” “La Vie en Fleur” and the other charming books
+with which he has been ornamenting his old age, is an open question.
+However, Dorothy M. Richardson has established a reputation as one of
+the few Simon-pure realists of modern English literature.
+
+Another faculty which is developed to an exceptional degree in Miriam
+is what psychologists call the association of cognitions and memories.
+The “Wearin' of the Green” on a hand organ while she is big with
+thoughts of what her trip to a foreign land may bring her makes her
+think of
+
+    “rambles in the hot school garden singing 'Gather roses while
+    ye may,' hot afternoons in the shady north room, the sound of
+    turning pages, the hum of the garden beyond the sun-blinds,
+    meeting in the sixth form study ... Lilla with her black hair
+    and the specks of bright amber in the brown of her eyes, talking
+    about free-will.”
+
+Then she stirs the fire and back her thoughts whisk to her immediate
+concerns.
+
+Music more than anything else calls into dominancy these associated
+recollections. Listening to the playing of one of the schoolgirls at
+the German school she suddenly realises:
+
+    “That wonderful light was coming again--she had forgotten
+    her sewing--when presently she saw, slowly circling, fading
+    and clearing, first its edge, and then, for a moment the
+    whole thing, dripping, dripping as it circled, a weed-grown
+    mill-wheel.... She recognised it instantly. She had seen it
+    somewhere as a child--in Devonshire--and never thought of it
+    since--and there it was. She heard the soft swish and drip
+    of the water and the low humming of the wheel. How beautiful
+    ... it was fading.... She held it--it returned--clearer this
+    time and she could feel the cool breeze it made, and sniff
+    the fresh earthly smell of it, the scent of the moss and the
+    weeds shining and dripping on its huge rim. Her heart filled.
+    She felt a little tremour in her throat. All at once she knew
+    that if she went on listening to that humming wheel and feeling
+    the freshness of the air, she would cry. She pulled herself
+    together, and for a while saw only a vague radiance in the room
+    and the dim forms grouped about. She could not remember which
+    was which. All seemed good and dear to her. The trumpet notes
+    had come back, and in a few minutes the music ceased.... Someone
+    was closing the great doors from inside the schoolroom.”
+
+It would be difficult to find in literature a better illustration
+of revival of unconscious or “forgotten” memory than this. An
+extraordinary thing about it is that these and similar revivals are
+preceded by an aura or warning in the shape of a light, similar to the
+warnings that Dostoievsky had before having an epileptic attack during
+which he experienced ecstasy so intense and overpowering that had it
+lasted more than a few seconds the human mechanism would have broken
+beneath the display. Miriam's ecstasy is of a milder sort, and the
+result is like that which the occupant of a chamber with drawn blinds
+and sealed windows might experience should some magic power stealthily
+and in a mysterious way flood it gradually with sunshine and replace
+the stale atmosphere with fresh air.
+
+Many can testify from personal experience the power that music has to
+influence purposeful thinking. It would not astonish me to hear that
+Einstein had solved some of the intricate problems of “relativity”
+under the direct influence of the music of Beethoven, Wagner, or Liszt.
+It is the rod with which most temperamental persons smite the rock of
+reality that romance may gush out and refresh those who thirst for it.
+Miriam often wields the rod in her early days to the reader's intense
+delight.
+
+While giving Miss Richardson her full measure of praise as recorder of
+her unconscious mental activity in poetic and romantic strain, we must
+not overlook her unusual capacity to delineate the realities of life,
+as they are anticipated and encountered.
+
+The description of her preparation for going away in the first chapter
+of “Pointed Roofs” is perfect realism: the thoughts of a young girl
+in whom a conflict between self-depreciation and self-appreciation
+is taking place. This is marvellously portrayed in the narration of
+her thoughts and apprehensions of her ability to teach English in the
+German school to which she is journeying. It is a fool's errand to be
+going there with nothing to give. She doubts whether she can repeat the
+alphabet, let alone parse and analyse.
+
+This mastery of realism is displayed throughout the series. The
+inwardly rebellious governess in the country house of prosperous people
+is made vivid in her setting when she says:
+
+    “There was to be another week-end. Again there would be the
+    sense of being a visitor amongst other visitors; visitor was not
+    the word; there was a French word which described the thing,
+    'convive,' 'les convives' ... people sitting easily about a
+    table with flushed faces ... someone standing drunkenly up with
+    eyes blazing with friendliness and a raised wineglass ... women
+    and wine, the rose of Heliogabalus; but he was a Greek and
+    dreadful in some way, convives were Latin, Roman; fountains,
+    water flowing over marble, white-robed strong-faced people
+    reclining on marble couches, feasting ... taking each fair mask
+    for what it shows itself; that was what this kind of wealthy
+    English people did, perhaps what all wealthy people did ... the
+    maimed, the halt, the blind, _compel_ them to come in ... but
+    that was after the others had refused. The thing that made you
+    feel jolliest and strongest was to forget the maimed, to _be_ a
+    fair mask, to keep everything else out and be a little circle of
+    people knowing that everything was kept out. Suppose a skeleton
+    walked in? Offer it a glass of wine. People have no right to be
+    skeletons, or if they are to make a fuss about it. These people
+    would be all the brighter if they happened to have neuralgia;
+    some pain or emotion made you able to do things. Taking each
+    fair mask was a fine grown-up game. Perhaps it could be kept up
+    to the end? Perhaps that was the meaning of the man playing
+    cards on his death-bed.”
+
+The author has the gift of narration, too, of making a picture with a
+few sweeps of the brush. In “Pointed Roofs” Miriam gives a synopsis
+of her parents and their limitations in a few words, which is nearly
+perfect. She does it by narration of her thoughts in retrospection,
+which is another striking feature of her technique.
+
+    “She thought sleepily of her Wesleyan grandparents, gravely
+    reading the 'Wesleyan Methodist Recorder,' the shop at
+    Babington, her father's discontent, his solitary fishing and
+    reading, his discovery of music ... science ... classical
+    music in the first Novello editions ... Faraday ... speaking
+    to Faraday after lectures. Marriage ... the new house ... the
+    red brick wall at the end of the garden where young peach-trees
+    were planted ... running up and downstairs and singing ... both
+    of them singing in the rooms and the garden ... she sometimes
+    with her hair down and then when visitors were expected pinned
+    in coils under a little cap and wearing a small hoop ... the
+    garden and lawns and shrubbery and the long kitchen-garden
+    and the summer-house under the oaks beyond and the pretty
+    old gabled 'town' on the river and the woods all along the
+    river valley and the hills shining up out of the mist. The
+    snow man they both made in the winter--the birth of Sarah
+    and then Eve ... his studies and book-buying--and after five
+    years her own disappointing birth as the third girl, and the
+    coming of Harriet just a year later ... her mother's illness,
+    money troubles--their two years at the sea to retrieve ...
+    the disappearance of the sunlit red-walled garden always in
+    full summer sunshine with the sound of bees in it or dark
+    from windows ... the narrowings of the house-life down to the
+    Marine Villa--with the sea creeping in--wading out through
+    the green shallows, out and out till you were more than waist
+    deep--shrimping and prawning hour after hour for weeks together
+    ... poking in the rock pools, watching the sun and the colours
+    in the strange afternoons ... then the sudden large house
+    at Barnes with the 'drive' winding to the door.... He used
+    to come home from the City and the Constitutional Club and
+    sometimes instead of reading 'The Times' or the 'Globe' or the
+    'Proceedings of the British Association' or Herbert Spencer,
+    play Pope Joan or Jacoby with them all, or Table Billiards and
+    laugh and be 'silly' and take his turn at being 'bumped' by
+    Timmy going the round of the long dining-room table, tail in
+    the air; he had taken Sarah and Eve to see 'Don Giovanni' and
+    'Winter's Tale' and the new piece, 'Lohengrin.' No one at the
+    tennis-club had seen that. He had good taste. No one else had
+    been to Madame Schumann's Farewell ... sitting at the piano
+    with her curtains of hair and her dreamy smile ... and the
+    Philharmonic Concerts. No one else knew about the lectures at
+    the Royal Institution, beginning at nine on Fridays.... No one
+    else's father went with a party of scientific men 'for the
+    advancement of science' to Norway or America, seeing the Falls
+    and the Yosemite Valley. No one else took his children as far as
+    Dawlish for the holidays, travelling all day, from eight until
+    seven ... no esplanade, the old stone jetty and coves and cowrie
+    shells....”
+
+Nature was in a satirical mood when she equipped Miriam for her
+conflict. Early the casual reader recognises her as the kind of girl
+who is socially difficult and who seems predestined to do “fool
+things.” The psychologist looks deeper and sees a tragic jest. Plain
+in appearance, angular in manner, innocent of subtlety, suppleness,
+or graciousness of body or soul, with a fine sensitiveness fed by
+an abnormal self-appreciation, which she succeeds in covering only
+at the cost of inducing in it a hot-house growth, Miriam Henderson
+enters upon the task of an unskilled wage-earner with a mind turned
+inward and possessed by that modern and fashionable demon politely
+known as a “floating libido.” Dogged, if not actually damned, by her
+special devil, Miriam is driven in frenzied and blinded unrest from
+one experience to another, in vain efforts to appease its insistent
+demands, placing the blame for her failure to achieve either success or
+happiness everywhere except where it belongs.
+
+Tortured by romantic sentimentalism unrelieved by a glimmer of
+imagination or humour; over-sexed but lacking the magnetism without
+which her sex was as bread without yeast; with a desire for adulation
+so morbid that it surrounded itself with defences of hatred and
+envy, Miriam's demon drove or lured her through tangled mazes of the
+soul-game, and checkmated every effort to find herself through her
+experiences.
+
+In “Pointed Roofs,” even through the wall of self, the reader catches
+the charm with which the German school held Miriam, in the music
+floating through the big _saal_, the snatches of schoolgirl slang and
+whimsical wisdom, and Fraulein Pfaff with her superstitions, her rages,
+her religiosity, and her sensuality. But this is the background of the
+picture, just as the background of the home which she had so clingingly
+left had been the three light-hearted sisters with their white plump
+hands and feminine graces, the tennis, the long, easy dreamy days; and
+the foreground had been Miriam cherishing a feeling of “difference”
+toward the feminine sisters, feeding her smarting self-love by her
+fancied resemblance to her father who hated men and loathed women,
+and dreaming of the “white twinkling figure coming quickly along the
+pathway between the rows of hollyhocks every Sunday afternoon.”
+
+The “high spot” in her experience at the German school is revealed in
+the answer to the question: Why could not Miriam get on with “tall
+Fraulein Pfaff smiling her horse smile”? Miriam leaves the school
+cloaked in injured innocence. But the cloak is no mask for the native
+wit of the schoolgirls. They know--and Miriam knows--that the answer
+is the old Swiss teacher of French upon whom the Fraulein herself has
+designs. Even before he is revealed reading poetry to the class with
+a simper while Miriam makes eyes at him, or in a purported chance
+encounter alone in the _saal_, the girls have twitted Miriam in a way
+that would have warned a more sensible girl that she was venturing upon
+dangerous ground. But Miriam's demon had made her insensible to such
+hints, just as it had robbed her of the common sense which would have
+made her understand, even without warnings, that she could not work for
+a woman and “go vamping” on her preserves.
+
+If Miriam's flirtation with the Swiss professor had been in a spirit of
+frolicsomeness it would have presented at least one hopeful symptom.
+But Miriam is incapable of frolicking--abnormally so. The absence of
+the play impulse in her is striking, as is the lack of spontaneous
+admirations or enthusiasms for people or things. Her impressions are
+always in terms of sensuous attraction or repulsion--never influenced
+by appeal to intellect, æsthetic taste, admiration, or ambition.
+Other girls exist for her, not as kindred spirits, but as potential
+rivals--even her sisters--and she is keen to size them up solely by
+qualities which she senses may make them attractive to the other sex.
+The exceptions to this are certain German girls whose over-sentimental
+make-up furnishes easy material for Miriam's starved libido.
+
+The next picture is at her country home where a dance has been staged,
+in Miriam's own consciousness, especially as a temporary farewell
+appearance of the “white twinkling figure,” now materialised into Ted.
+Ted appears on programme time bringing with him a strange young man
+with a German name and manner of speech, with whom she promptly goes
+off spooning in a dark conservatory, where she is discovered by Ted.
+She hopes the scene will stir Ted to emulation. But it does not. When
+she returns to the light Ted has gone home. And that seems to be the
+last of him. The strange young man is keen to announce his departure
+the coming day for foreign parts. So Miriam is left to set off for her
+next school without further adventures in love-making, and the reader
+is left to wonder whether she is not one of the girls who are incurably
+given to taking their Teds more seriously than they intend to be taken.
+
+In “Backwater” Miriam is a teacher of little girls in a Bambury Park
+school kept by three quaint refined little old English women--a
+palatable contrast to the coarseness of Fraulein Pfaff--for nine
+months. She is successful as a teacher, but finds her situation
+unendurable and resigns. The emotional shallowness of the girls and
+their lower middle-class mothers with aspirations to “get on” are
+dreary, but hardly sufficiently dismal to provoke the black despair and
+unreasoning rage which cause her to cry out in her moments of revolt,
+“But why must I be one of those to give everything up?” There is no
+masculine element connected with the school life, as there had been
+with that of the German school. She contrasts herself with her sisters
+who have made adaptations to life, two having become engaged and the
+third having settled happily into a position as governess. But Miriam
+can not settle, nor adapt. Her demon will not permit.
+
+A girl of nineteen, brought up in middle-class culture, without
+previous experiences except as teacher in two girls' schools, becomes
+governess, as “Honeycomb” relates, in the country home of a Q. C.,
+upon the introduction of friends of a future brother-in-law. From the
+day of her arrival her wishful thinking revolves around the man of the
+family. She loathes teaching the children and fails to hide from them
+her boredom. By lampooning the eccentricities and stupidities of Mrs.
+Corrie she betrays her hatred of women, her besetting “inferiority
+complex,” which, in this instance, is partly justified by the adult
+infantilism of the lady and her absorbing attachment to a woman of
+questionable morality. Without anything to which to tie it on the
+other side, Miriam constructs--as a spider might a web out of her own
+unconscious self--a bridge of affinity between herself and the Q. C.,
+placing such significance as her demon prompts upon his insignificant
+words or looks, until he snubs her at dinner when she attempts to take
+too leading a part in the conversation. Immediately she hates it all,
+with the collapse of her bridge, and is ready to throw up her “job” and
+all it implies.
+
+Romance would seem remote from a hall bedroom in a sordid London
+rooming-house and the duties of first aid to a firm of dentists. But
+this is where Miriam finds it, for a time at least. The central figure
+is one of the dentists in whom her autistic thoughts discover a lonely
+sensitive man eager for the sympathetic understanding which Miriam is
+ready to offer. The boredom of teaching gives place to ecstasy in the
+discharge of the details, often repellent, which go to fill up the
+“strange rich difficult day.” Her drab existence becomes a charmed
+life until Miriam's libido, which has been running away with her like
+a wild horse, shies right across the road at the first young girl she
+sights within the orbit of the dentist. Judging from the reaction of
+the latter, the explosion of jealousy and hatred that took place in
+Miriam's mind must have found outward expression, for he retreats
+behind a barrier of an “official tone,” which infuriates Miriam into
+demanding an explanation and brings in reply to her demand a letter
+from him beginning: “Dear Miss Henderson--You are very persistent”;
+and concluding “foolish gossip which might end by making your position
+untenable.” For the first time Miriam admits her folly, saying,
+
+    “I have nothing now but my pained self again, having violently
+    rushed at things and torn them to bits. It's all my fault from
+    the very beginning.... I make people hate me by _knowing_ them
+    and dashing my head against the wall of their behaviour.... I
+    did not know what I had. Friendship is fine, fine porcelain.
+    I have sent a crack right through it.... Mrs. Bailey (her
+    landlady) ... numbers of people I never think of would like
+    to have me always there.... At least I have broken up his
+    confounded complacency.”
+
+When Miriam's dingy lodging-house becomes a boarding-house new food
+comes to her creative urge in the form of daily association with
+masculine boarders. Her resolution in the early pages of “Interim” to
+take “no more interest in men,” collapses like a house of cards upon
+the first onslaught. A close companionship develops between her and
+a Spanish Jew of more than unconventional ideas and habits. But her
+special devil is soon busy again, and Miriam discovers romance in the
+presence in the house of a young Canadian who is studying in London.
+When he comes into the dining-room where Miriam is sitting with other
+boarders after dinner, and sits down with his books to study:
+
+    “He did not see that she was astonished at his coming nor her
+    still deeper astonishment in the discovery of her unconscious
+    certainty that he would come. A haunting familiar sense of
+    unreality possessed her. Once more she was part of a novel; it
+    was right, true like a book for Dr. Heber to come in in defiance
+    of every one, bringing his studies into the public room in order
+    to sit down quietly opposite this fair young English girl. He
+    saw her apparently gravely studious and felt he could 'pursue
+    his own studies' all the better for her presence.... Perhaps if
+    he remained steadily like that in her life she could grow into
+    some semblance of his steady reverent observation. He did not
+    miss any movement or change of expression.... It _was_ glorious
+    to have a real, simple homage coming from a man who was no
+    simpleton, coming simple, strong and kindly from Canada to put
+    you in a shrine....”
+
+And yet all he does is to look at her! She goes for a walk and
+
+    “the hushed happiness that had begun in the dining-room half an
+    hour ago seized her again suddenly, sending her forward almost
+    on tiptoe. It was securely there; the vista it opened growing in
+    beauty as she walked; bearing within her in secret unfathomable
+    abundance the gift of ideal old-English rose and white gracious
+    adorable womanhood given her by Dr. Heber.”
+
+When he goes to church she interprets it as a symptom of falling in
+love, but if it is, the further progress of the disease is along
+lines which would baffle even those who have specialised in the study
+of the malady in fiction and poetry through ages. He goes back to
+Canada, along with his companion students, without saying a word to his
+fellow-boarder and leaves to the landlady the difficult task of warning
+Miriam that her association with the Spanish Jew has furnished a
+subject of gossip in the house, and that another boarder has confided
+to her that Dr. Heber had “made up his mind to speak,” but that he had
+been scared by Miriam's flirtation with the little Jew.
+
+Miriam never questions the correctness of the landlady's diagnosis, nor
+the authenticity of her information. Still less does she doubt her own
+interpretation of the wholesome direct-minded Canadian's silent looks
+in her direction.
+
+Finally a man comes into her life who literally proposes marriage.
+He is a young Russian Jew student, small of stature and suggestive
+of an uncanny oldness. Under his influence she begins translating
+stories from the German and seems to find some of the beneficial
+possibilities of “sublimation” in the task. The test is not a true
+one, however, because this little stream into which the current of her
+libido is temporarily turned is too closely associated with the main
+channel--Shatov--and when she becomes engaged to him the translation
+seems to be forgotten.
+
+“Deadlock” is the conflict between instinct and taste, involved in
+marrying a man with whom she is in love but who arouses a revolt of her
+inherited traditions and intellectual and æsthetic biases; or between
+her ego instinct and her herd instinct. There the reader takes leave of
+her at the end of the sixth volume.
+
+A far more serious deadlock than that presented by her engagement is
+the deadlock imposed upon Miriam by nature in creating her a woman and
+endowing her with qualities which keep her in a state of revolt against
+her Creator and against what to her is the indignity of being a woman.
+This is epitomised splendidly in “The Tunnel,” when she is fretting her
+mind through the wearying summer days to keep pace with the illness
+that is creeping upon her. Entries in the dentists' index under the
+word “Woman” start the train of thought:
+
+    “inferior; mentally, morally, intellectually and physically
+    ... her development arrested in the interest of her special
+    functions ... reverting later towards the male type ... old
+    women with deep voices and hair on their faces ... leaving off
+    where boys of eighteen began.... Woman is undeveloped man ... if
+    one could die of the loathsome visions.... Sacred functions ...
+    highest possibilities ... sacred for what? The hand that rocks
+    the cradle rules the world? The future of the race? What world?
+    What race? Men.... Nothing but men; forever.... It will go on
+    as long as women are stupid enough to go on bringing men into
+    the world ... even if civilised women stop the colonials and
+    primitive races would go on. It was a nightmare. They despise
+    women and they want to go on living--to reproduce--themselves.
+    None of their achievements, no 'civilisation,' no art, no
+    science can redeem that. There is no possible pardon for men.
+    The only answer to them is suicide; all women ought to agree to
+    commit suicide.... All the achievements of men were poisoned at
+    the root. The beauty of nature was tricky femininity. The animal
+    world was cruelty. Jests and amusements were tragic distractions
+    from tragedy.... The woman in black works. It's only in the
+    evenings she can roam about seeing nothing. But the people she
+    works for know nothing about her. She knows. She is sweeter than
+    he. She is sweet. I like her. But he is more me.”
+
+Earlier, but less consciously, she expresses it when, watching the men
+guests at the Corrie's,
+
+    “Miriam's stricken eyes sought their foreheads for relief.
+    Smooth brows and neatly brushed hair above; but the smooth
+    motionless brows were ramparts of hate; pure murderous hate.
+    That's men, she said, with a sudden flash of certainty, that's
+    men as they are, when they are opposed, when they are real.
+    All the rest is pretence. Her thoughts flashed forward to a
+    final clear issue of opposition, with a husband. Just a cold
+    blank hating forehead and neatly brushed hair above it. If a
+    man doesn't understand or doesn't agree he's just a blank bony
+    conceited thinking, absolutely condemning forehead, a face
+    below, going on eating--and going off somewhere. Men are all
+    hard angry bones; always thinking something, only one thing at
+    a time and unless that is agreed to, they murder. My husband
+    shan't kill me.... I'll shatter his conceited brow--_make_ him
+    see ... two sides to every question ... a million sides ... no
+    questions, only sides ... always changing. Men argue, think they
+    prove things; their foreheads recover--cool and calm. Damn them
+    all--all men.”
+
+Few writers could have sketched Miriam Henderson without condemning her
+and without inviting the condemnation of the reader. Miss Richardson
+has done it. She has given us Miriam as she knows herself, without
+explanation, plea, or sentence, and left us to judge for ourselves. She
+does not label her. And this is probably the reason Miss Richardson's
+work has found so small an audience. People demand labels. They want to
+be “told.” And she does not “tell” them. She invites them to think, and
+original thinking is an unpopular process.
+
+If ten people were to read these books and write their impressions of
+them, the results would be as different as were the thoughts of the ten
+people. Because each result would add what the author has left out: a
+judgment, or an estimate of Miriam. And this judgment would be rendered
+upon the evidence, but according to the mind of the judge.
+
+The question which everyone must decide for himself is: when such
+revelations of the conscious and the unconscious are spread before
+him in words and sentences, does the result constitute gibberish or
+genius; is it slush or sanity; is it the sort of thing one would try
+to experience; or should one struggle and pray to be spared? It may be
+the highroad to dementia--this concentrating of all one's thoughts upon
+oneself, and oneself upon a single instinct. And Miriam might well have
+been headed for it when she failed to differentiate between ideas based
+upon objective evidence and ideas created solely out of her instinctive
+craving, which is an approach toward the belief of the insane person in
+his own delusions.
+
+We identify ourselves, motives, and conduct with the characters of
+fiction who cut a good figure; we identify with the ones who do not,
+those we dislike, disdain, or condemn. Has anyone identified himself
+with Miriam Henderson and added to his or her stature?
+
+The strongest impression made upon an admirer of Miss Richardson's
+craftsmanship is a wish that it might be applied to the study of a
+different, a more normal, type of personality. But the wish that such
+a study might be given us is burdened with a strong doubt whether its
+fulfillment would be humanly possible. Could anyone but an extreme type
+of egocentric person make such a study of himself? Could anyone whose
+libido was normally divided in various channels follow its course so
+graphically? And would not such division destroy the unity essential to
+even so much of the novel form as Miss Richardson preserves?
+
+Here is a deadlock for the reader: Miss Richardson's art and Miriam as
+she is; or a Miriam with whom one could identify oneself as a heroine
+of fiction.
+
+The novel, according to Miss Richardson, may be compared to a
+picture-puzzle in a box. Properly handled, the pieces may be made
+to constitute an entity, a harmonious whole, a thing of beauty, a
+portrait or a pergola, a windmill or a waterfall. The purpose of
+the novel is to reveal the novelist, her intellectual possessions,
+emotional reactions, her ideals, aspirations, and fulfilments, and to
+describe the roads and short-cuts over which she has travelled while
+accomplishing them. People and things encountered on the way do not
+count for much, especially people. They are made up largely of women,
+whom she dislikes, and men, whom she despises. It should be no part
+of its purpose to picture situations, to describe places, to narrate
+occurrences other than as media of author-revelation. Undoubtedly
+it is one of the most delightful things in the world--this talking
+about oneself. I have known many persons who pay others, physicians
+for instance, to listen. But unless the narration is ladened with
+adventure, or interlarded with humour, or spiced with raciness, it is
+often boring; and reluctantly it must be admitted that when we have
+ceased to admire Miss Richardson's show of art, when we no longer
+thrill at her mastery of method, when we are tired of rising to the fly
+of what Miss Sinclair calls her “punctilious perfection” of literary
+form, she becomes tiresome. Egocentrics should have a sense of humour.
+Samuel Butler thus endowed might have been assured of immortality.
+Lacking that, they should have extensive contact with the world. That
+is what enlivens the psychological jungle of Marcel Proust. If Henri
+Amiel had had a tithe of Jean Jacques Rousseau's worldly and amatory
+experiences his writings might have had great influence and a large
+sale.
+
+Miss Dorothy M. Richardson has revealed herself a finished technician.
+She may be compared to a person who is ambitious to play the Chopin
+Studies. She practices scales steadily for a year and then gives a
+year to the Studies themselves. But when she essays to play for the
+public she fails because, although she has mastered the mechanical
+difficulties, she has not grasped the meaning. She reveals life without
+drama and without comedy, and that such life does not exist everybody
+knows.
+
+She may have had compensation for her effort from two sources: her
+imitators and her benefactors. The former are too numerous to mention,
+but Mr. J. D. Beresford and Miss May Sinclair would undoubtedly admit
+their indebtedness.
+
+It is vicarious compensation, also, to be praised by one's peers and
+superiors. If Dorothy M. Richardson hasn't yet had it, in the writer's
+judgment she may look forward to it with confidence.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER V
+    MARCEL PROUST: MASTER PSYCHOLOGIST AND PILOT OF THE “VRAIE VIE”
+
+
+Marcel Proust may justly be hailed as the greatest psychological
+novelist of his time. He was to normal psychology what Dostoievsky
+was to abnormal psychology: an unsurpassed observer, interpreter, and
+recorder of men's thoughts and conduct.
+
+It would be hazardous to attempt to estimate the place he will
+eventually have in literature until the remaining volumes of “A la
+Recherche du Temps Perdu,” and “Le Temps Retrouvé” are published. But
+the volumes of the former that have appeared: “Du Côté de Chez Swann,”
+“Á l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs,” “Le Côté de Guermantes,” and
+“Sodome et Gomorrhe” justify the statement that with the death of
+their author in November, 1922, France lost a writer whose fame will
+rank with that of Balzac. It is not likely that he will ever have
+a popularity comparable to Balzac or even to Bourget, Barbusse, or
+several other contemporaries, for M. Proust is an author for writers.
+He will never be read by the large class of novel readers who create
+the market demand for novels of action and plot; nor will he appeal
+to that hardly less numerous class--chiefly women--who find the
+emotional novel palatable food. However, those who, like the writer,
+cannot punish themselves by struggling through a detective story and
+by whom the most skillfully contrived plot can be endured only if the
+harassment which it causes is counterbalanced by the charm of its
+literary style or its interpretation of the personality of the author
+reacting to conditions more or less common to all mankind, may find
+in M. Proust a novelist whom they can ill afford to ignore. And no
+writer of fact or fiction today would be just to himself were he to
+proceed with his art without making the acquaintance of this master
+artificer and psychologist. Proust will be remembered as a pioneer
+who explored the jungle of the unconscious memory, and a marvellous
+interpreter of the laws governing associated memories. I doubt not his
+name will be as inseparably connected with the novel of the future as
+that of de Maupassant or Poe has been with the short story of the last
+few decades, even while his wares will still find scant sale, save to
+writers, dilettantes, professional students of letters, of form, and of
+psychology.
+
+The measure of success that was vouchsafed him came late in life. He
+was fifty when the Goncourt Prize was awarded “A l'Ombre des Jeunes
+Filles en Fleurs” in 1919. Until that time his writings were known to
+readers of “La Nouvelle Revue Française,” to friends, and to a limited
+circle whose members have an urge for the unusual, and a flair for
+the picturesque in literature. Then readers began to nibble at “Du
+Côté de Chez Swann,” and the more they nibbled, that is the oftener
+they read it, or attempted to read it--for it is difficult even for a
+cultured Frenchman--the more keenly aware did they become that they
+had encountered a new force, a new sensibility in literature, and,
+like appetite that comes with eating, the greater was their desire
+to develop an intimacy with him. “Le Côté de Guermantes” showed that
+he walked and talked, dined and wined, registered the thoughts and
+interpreted the dreams of the aristocracy with the same security,
+understanding, perspicacity, and clairvoyancy that he had brought to
+bear on the bourgeoisie in “Du Côté de Chez Swann.” In “Sodome et
+Gomorrhe” he did the impossible. He talked with frankness and with a
+tone of authority of an enigmatic, inexplicable aberration of nature,
+inversion of the genesic instinct, which antedates possibly by millions
+of years the differentiation of man from anthropoid stock; which
+has always been with us, now the patent of good form, the badge of
+intellectual superiority, the hallmark of æsthetic refinement, as in
+the days of Hellenic supremacy; now the stigma of sin, the scarlet
+letter of infamy, the key of the bottomless pit, as today; and which
+unquestionably will always continue to be with us. He divested it
+of pruriency; he rescued it from pornography; he delivered it from
+pathology; and at the same time he made the penologist pause and
+“normal” man thoughtful.
+
+Whether this freakishness of nature is as common as M. Proust
+says, whether it bulks so large in the conduct of daily life as he
+intimates, is a matter for the individual to estimate. No statistics
+are available, but experienced psychiatrists and discerning pedagogues
+know that a considerable proportion of mankind is so constituted. To
+deny it is equivalent to acknowledging that one is immune to evidence;
+to consider it a vice is to flaunt an allegation of falsehood in
+the face of biology. One can imagine the shock the world would have
+today if everyone told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
+the truth about his genesic instinct. If, then, it was decided to
+segregate and deprive of liberty the inverted, what a strange medley
+it would be of general and soldier, of prince and pauper, of priest
+and parishioner, of genius and moron, of ambassador and attaché, of
+poet, artist, and savant. It will mark an epoch in modern civilisation
+when this strange variation from the normal shall be subject to study
+by such investigators as Mendel, de Vries, Tschermak, and the host of
+biologists who are slowly solving the mysteries of heredity. Meanwhile
+the preparation for such work is the formation of public opinion, and
+probably there is no better way to accomplish it than that adopted by
+M. Proust.
+
+So far the only one of M. Proust's books that has appeared in English
+is “Du Côté de Chez Swann,” (Swann's Way), by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.
+The translation itself is a work of art, and the reading public is
+under profound obligation to this master stylist.
+
+[Illustration: MARCEL PROUST IN 1890]
+
+The narrator is M. Proust himself, but the reader who would understand
+Proust must keep in mind that he has distributed his own personality
+between two characters, the narrator of the story, and Swann. Those who
+see Proust only in the first, or only in Swann, see but half of him.
+
+In the overture he recalls the memories of a precocious, sentimental,
+sickly childhood spent in his aunt's house in Combray, with an
+indulgent mother, a sensible matter-of-fact father, an archaic
+paternal grandmother, and two silly sentimental grandaunts. He
+succeeds in introducing in the most incidental way M. Swann, the son
+of a stockbroker, “a converted Jew and his parents and grandparents
+before him,” who has successfully unlocked the door of smart and
+savant society; his former mistress Odette de Crecy whom he has now
+married, to the disgust of his neighbours; his daughter with whom the
+narrator is to fall in love; M. Vinteuil whose sonata contains the
+solvent of Swann's amatory resistance, and his daughter, a Gomorrite;
+M. de Villeparisis; and M. de Charlus, who we shall see in “Sodome et
+Gomorrhe” is not like other men.
+
+The setting is in Brittany.
+
+    “Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used
+    to see it from the railway when we arrived there every year
+    in Holy Week, was no more than a church epitomising the town,
+    representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon, and
+    as one drew near, gathering close about its long, dark cloak,
+    sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as a shepherd
+    gathers his sheep, the woolly grey backs of its flocking houses,
+    which a fragment of its mediæval ramparts enclosed, here and
+    there, in an outline as scrupulously circular as that of a
+    little town in a primitive painting.”
+
+He who invokes his memories is a boy of ten or thereabouts, lying in
+bed and awaiting dinner to end and M. Swann to depart that his mother
+may kiss him goodnight. Memory of it was like a luminous panel, sharply
+defined against a vague and shading background.
+
+    “The little parlour, the dining-room, the alluring shadows
+    of the path along which would come M. Swann, the unconscious
+    author of my sufferings, the hall through which I would journey
+    to the first step of that staircase, so hard to climb, which
+    constituted, all by itself, the tapering 'elevation' of an
+    irregular pyramid; and, at the summit, my bedroom, with the
+    little passage through whose glazed door Mamma would enter; in
+    a word, seen always at the same evening hour, isolated from all
+    its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its
+    shadowy background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like
+    the setting one sees printed at the head of an old play, for its
+    performance in the provinces); to the drama of my undressing,
+    as though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by
+    a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there
+    but seven o'clock at night.”
+
+The power not only of reproducing scenes and events, but also of
+revivifying states of consciousness long past through invoking
+associated memories, is utilised with an effect rarely parallelled
+in literature. It is invoked through any of the special senses, but
+chiefly through taste and hearing. The little cake soaked in tea which,
+taken many years after the trivial events of his childhood at Combray
+had been all but forgotten, unlocks, as if by magic, the chamber stored
+with memories.
+
+    “No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it,
+    touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body,
+    and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were
+    taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but
+    individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at
+    once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its
+    disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation
+    having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a
+    precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was
+    myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.”
+
+He then tries to analyse the state, and
+
+    “that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out every
+    obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit
+    all attention to the sounds which come from the next room....
+    Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being
+    must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to
+    that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind....
+    Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness,
+    this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an
+    identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb,
+    to raise up out of the very depths of my being?”
+
+It does reach the surface of consciousness, for
+
+    “once I had recognised the taste of the crumb of madeleine
+    soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to
+    give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the
+    discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the
+    old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up
+    like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little
+    pavilion, opening on to the garden.... And just as the Japanese
+    amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and
+    steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are
+    without character or form, but, the moment they become wet,
+    stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive
+    shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and
+    recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden
+    and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and
+    the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the
+    parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings,
+    taking their proper shape and growing solid, sprang into being,
+    town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”
+
+M. Proust's description of the first effect upon him of the little
+“madeleine” dipped in tea, when, “weary after a dull day, with the
+prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the
+tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake” is almost a paraphrase
+of the words of Locke in his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding.”
+
+Music, more than anything else, has the power of invoking Swann's
+associated memories. A little phrase of old Vinteuil's Sonata runs like
+a fine thread all through the tangle of Swann's love for Odette de
+Crecy, although the memory of the phrase goes back prior to his meeting
+Odette--to the night of the party at which he had heard it, after going
+home from which
+
+    “he was like a man into whose life a woman, whom he has seen for
+    a moment passing by, has brought a new form of beauty, which
+    strengthens and enlarges his own power of perception, without
+    his knowing even whether he is ever to see her again whom he
+    loves already, although he knows nothing of her, not even her
+    name.”
+
+Swann had tried in vain to identify the fugitive phrase which had
+awakened in him a passion for music that seemed to be bringing into his
+life the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation.
+
+    “Like a confirmed invalid whom all of a sudden, a change of
+    air and surroundings, or a new course of treatment, or, as
+    sometimes happens, an organic change in himself, spontaneous
+    and unaccountable, seems to have so far removed from his malady
+    that he begins to envisage the possibility, hitherto beyond all
+    hope, of starting to lead--and better late than never--a wholly
+    different life, Swann found in himself, in the memory of the
+    phrase that he had heard, in certain other sonatas which he
+    had made people play over to him, to see whether he might not,
+    perhaps, discover his phrase among them, the presence of one of
+    those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe, but
+    to which, as though the music had had upon the moral barrenness
+    from which he was suffering a sort of recreative influence, he
+    was conscious once again of a desire, almost, indeed, of the
+    power to consecrate his life.”
+
+    “It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture our own past;
+    all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past
+    is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of
+    intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that
+    material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as
+    for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or
+    not before we ourselves must die.”
+
+Associative memory depends upon the fact that though the grouping
+of the stimuli is novel, the elementary components are individually
+similar to previous stimuli, and Proust avails himself of this
+established fact. These elementary stimuli leave retention traces
+in the central nervous system. When the same stimuli recur in a new
+grouping the pathways and centres that bear such traces are brought
+into connection and are combined in new ways. This modifies the form of
+the response. As the separate retention traces were due to conditions
+resembling the present, the new response will tend to be adaptive. This
+associative memory is known in psychology as mnemonic combination.
+
+Although no attempt is made to describe the development of the
+personality of the sensitive, sentimental, impressionable, precocious
+child who narrates the story, one gets an extraordinarily vivid picture
+of him. He has the hallmarks and habituations of neuropathy, and
+amongst them phantasying and substitution.
+
+    “In those days, when I read to myself, I used often, while I
+    turned the pages, to dream of something quite different. And to
+    the gaps which this habit made in my knowledge of the story more
+    were added by the fact that when it was Mamma who was reading to
+    me aloud she left all the love-scenes out. And so all the odd
+    changes which take place in the relations between the miller's
+    wife and the boy, changes which only the birth and growth of
+    love can explain, seemed to me plunged and steeped in a mystery,
+    the key to which (as I could readily believe) lay in that
+    strange and pleasant-sounding name of _Champi_, which draped
+    the boy who bore it, I knew not why, in its own bright colour,
+    purpurate and charming.”
+
+That his neuropathic constitution was a direct inheritance is obvious.
+He got it through his Aunt Leonie
+
+    “who since her husband's death, had gradually declined to leave,
+    first Combray, then her house in Combray, then her bedroom,
+    and finally her bed; and who now never 'came down,' but lay
+    perpetually in an indefinite condition of grief, physical
+    exhaustion, illness, obsessions, and religious observances....
+    My aunt's life now was practically confined to two adjoining
+    rooms, in one of which she would rest in the afternoon while
+    they aired the other.”
+
+Despite these apparent restrictions of life's activities she knows more
+of the happenings of the village than the town crier, and in a way she
+conditions the conduct of her neighbours whose first question is “What
+effect will it have on Aunt Leonie?” Her contact with people is limited
+to Françoise, a perfect servant, to Eulalie, a limping, energetic, deaf
+spinster, and to the reverend Curé.
+
+    “My aunt had by degrees erased every other visitor's name from
+    her list, because they all committed the fatal error, in her
+    eyes, of falling into one or other of the two categories of
+    people she most detested. One group, the worse of the two, and
+    the one of which she rid herself first, consisted of those who
+    advised her not to take so much care of herself, and preached
+    (even if only negatively and with no outward signs beyond
+    an occasional disapproving silence or doubting smile) the
+    subversive doctrine that a sharp walk in the sun and a good
+    red beefsteak would do her more good (her, who had had two
+    dreadful sips of Vichy water on her stomach for fourteen hours)
+    than all her medicine bottles and her bed. The other category
+    was composed of people who appeared to believe that she was
+    more seriously ill than she thought, in fact that she was as
+    seriously ill as she said. And so none of those whom she had
+    allowed upstairs to her room, after considerable hesitation and
+    at Françoise's urgent request, and who in the course of their
+    visit had shown how unworthy they were of the honour which had
+    been done them by venturing a timid: 'Don't you think that if
+    you were just to stir out a little on really fine days...?'
+    or who, on the other hand, when she said to them: 'I am very
+    low, very low; nearing the end, dear friends!' had replied: 'Ah,
+    yes, when one has no strength left! Still, you may last a while
+    yet'; each party alike might be certain that her doors would
+    never open to them again.”
+
+[Illustration: A PAGE OF CORRECTED PROOF SHOWING MARCEL PROUST'S METHOD
+OF REVISION]
+
+With all his literary art, and mastery of the mysterious powers that
+suggestion has to heighten awareness and deepen information, M. Proust
+does not succeed in enlightening us as to how the boy at Combray
+comes to possess so much information of people and such knowledge of
+the world. Part of it is intuitive, but understanding of Vinteuil's
+daughter, who “after a certain year we never saw alone, but always
+accompanied by a friend, a girl older than herself, with an evil
+reputation in the neighbourhood, who in the end installed herself
+permanently at Montjouvain,” thus leading M. Vinteuil broken-hearted
+to the grave because of the shame and scandal of her sadism, is beyond
+possibility even for a boy of his precocity and prehensibility.
+
+    “For a man of M. Vinteuil's sensibility it must have been
+    far more painful than for a hardened man of the world to
+    have to resign himself to one of those situations which are
+    wrongly supposed to occur in Bohemian circles only; for they
+    are produced whenever there needs to establish itself in the
+    security necessary to its development a vice which Nature
+    herself has planted in the soul of a child, perhaps by no more
+    than blending the virtues of its father and mother, as she
+    might blend the colours of their eyes. And yet however much M.
+    Vinteuil may have known of his daughter's conduct it did not
+    follow that his adoration of her grew any less. The facts of
+    life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are
+    cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs,
+    so they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them
+    continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening
+    them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one
+    after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family,
+    will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or
+    the capacity of its physician.”
+
+Thus does he introduce most casually a subject which bulks large in
+“Sodome et Gomorrhe,” and which M. Proust understands like a composite
+priest, physician, and biologist.
+
+Most of the grist of the boy's mill comes over the road that skirts
+Swann's park, but some comes the Guermantes Way. In “Le Côté de
+Guermantes,” which followed “A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs,”
+he makes us as intimately acquainted with the Duchesse de Guermantes,
+Mme. de Villeparisis, and other notables of the _société élegante_, as
+he does in “Swann's Way” with the Verdurins and their “little nucleus”
+which furnishes a background to Odette, and furnishes M. Proust with
+canvas upon which to paint the portrait of an Æsculapian bounder, Dr.
+Cottard, who, it has been said, is still of the quick. M. Proust was
+the son and the brother of a physician and had abundant opportunity
+not only to get first-hand information but to have his natural insight
+quickened. In the same way one discovers his Jewish strain (his mother
+was a Jewess) in his mystic trends and in his characters such as Bloch
+and Swann. “Whenever I formed a strong attachment to any one of my
+friends and brought him home with me that friend was invariably a Jew.”
+Moreover his lack of a sense of humour is an Hebraic trait. With the
+exception of the reaction provoked in his grandfather by the advent
+of one of these friends, “Swann's Way,” and indeed all M. Proust's
+writings, are humourless.
+
+The genesis of Swann's love and the dissolution of Odette's take up one
+volume. If it is not a perfect description of the divine passion in a
+mature man surfeited by conquest and satiated by indulgence, it is an
+approximation to it.
+
+He was introduced one day at the theatre to Odette de Crocy by an old
+friend of his, who had spoken of her to him as a ravishing creature
+with whom he might very possibly come to an understanding. She made no
+appeal to Swann; indeed she not only left him indifferent, aroused in
+him no desire, but gave him a sort of physical repulsion. But Odette
+knew the _ars amandi_ as did Circe or Sappho, and ere long she had
+entangled him in the meshes of Eros' net. When the net was drawn to
+her craft and the haul examined, it didn't interest her, though she
+kept it, for it contributed to her material welfare. Then M. Proust
+did a psychological stunt which reveals an important aspect of his
+mastery of the science. Swann identified Odette with Zipporah, Jethro's
+daughter, whose picture is to be seen in one of the Sixtine frescoes by
+Botticelli. Her similarity to it enhanced her beauty and rendered her
+more precious in his sight. Moreover it enabled him to introduce the
+image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies where she assumed a
+new and nobler form. And whereas the mere sight of her in the flesh,
+by perpetually reviving his misgivings as to the quality of her face,
+her figure, the whole of her beauty, used to cool the ardour of his
+love, those misgivings were swept away and that love confirmed now that
+he could re-erect his estimate of her on the sure foundations of his
+æsthetic principles. Instead of placing a photograph of Odette on his
+study table, he placed one of Jethro's daughter, and on it he lavished
+his admiration and concentrated his intensity in all the abandon of
+substitution.
+
+The author utilises the potency of suspense to bring Swann's ardour to
+the boiling point. One evening when Odette had avoided him he searched
+the restaurants of the Boulevards in a state of increasing panic.
+
+    “Among all the methods by which love is brought into being,
+    among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there
+    are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now
+    and then, sweeps over the human spirit. For then the creature in
+    whose company we are seeking amusement at the moment, her lot
+    is cast, her fate and ours decided, that is the creature whom
+    we shall henceforward love. It is not necessary that she should
+    have pleased us up till then, any more, or even as much as
+    others. All that is necessary is that our taste for her should
+    become exclusive.”
+
+He proceeded to cultivate his love in an emotional medium and to
+inoculate himself with the culture which rendered him immune to
+love of another. The culture medium was furnished by Vinteuil, the
+old composer, who had died of a broken heart. “He would make Odette
+play him the phrase from the sonata again ten, twenty times on end,
+insisting that, while she played, she must never cease to kiss him.”
+
+    “Watching Swann's face while he listened to the phrase, one
+    would have said that he was inhaling an anæsthetic which allowed
+    him to breathe more deeply.”
+
+The effect that it had was deep repose, mysterious refreshment.
+He felt himself transformed into a “creature foreign to humanity,
+blinded, deprived of his logical faculty, almost a fantastic unicorn,
+a chimera-like creature conscious of the world through his two ears
+alone.”
+
+Swann's discovery of the spiritual and bodily inconstancies of his
+mistress, the perfidies and betrayals of the Verdurins, his jealousy,
+planned resentments, and resurrection are related in a way that
+convinces us that Proust saw life steadily and saw it whole.
+
+To appease his anguish, to thwart his obsession, to supplant his
+preoccupation he decided to frequent again the aristocratic circles
+he had forsaken. The description of the reception at Mme. de Saint
+Euverte's, showing the details of fashionable life, is of itself a
+noteworthy piece of writing. Not only is it replete with accurate
+knowledge of such society, but it gives M. Proust the opportunity
+to display understanding of motives and frailties and to record
+impressions of contact with the world abroad. Speaking of one of the
+guests he says:
+
+    “She belonged to that one of the two divisions of the human
+    race in which the untiring curiosity which the other half feels
+    about people whom it does not know is replaced by an unfailing
+    interest in the people whom it does.”
+
+The peculiar tendency which Swann always had to look for analogies
+between living people and the portraits in galleries reasserted itself
+here in a more positive and more general form. One of the footmen
+was not unlike the headsman in certain Renaissance pictures which
+represent executions, tortures, and the like. Another reminded him of
+the decorative warriors one sees in the most tumultuous of Mantegna's
+paintings. “He seemed as determined to remain as unconcerned as if he
+had been present at the massacre of the innocents or the martyrdom
+of St. James.” As he entered the salon one reminded him of Giotto's
+models, another of Albert Dürer's, another of that Greek sculpture
+which the Mantuan painter never ceased to study, while a servant with a
+pallid countenance and a small pig-tail clubbed at the back of his head
+seemed like one of Goya's sacristans.
+
+It was this soirée that conditioned irrevocably Swann's future life,
+and the little phrase from Vinteuil's Sonata did it for him. To have
+heard it “in this place to which Odette would never come, in which no
+one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely
+absent” made him suffer insupportably. While listening to it
+
+    “suddenly it was as though she had entered, and this apparition
+    tore him with such anguish that his hand rose impulsively to his
+    heart.... All his memories of the days when Odette had been in
+    love with him, which he had succeeded, up till that evening, in
+    keeping invisible in the depths of his being, deceived by this
+    sudden reflection of a season of love, whose sun, they supposed,
+    had dawned again, had awakened from their slumber, had taken
+    wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for
+    his present desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.”
+
+It raised the flood-gate of the dam in which he had stored the
+memories of Odette when she loved him and before he loved her. Not
+only did it liberate the memories of her, but the memories that were
+associated with them: all the net-work of mental habits, of seasonable
+impressions, of sensory reactions, through which it extended over a
+series of groups its uniform meshes, by which his body now found itself
+inextricably held.
+
+    “When, after that first evening at the Verdurins', he had had
+    the little phrase played over to him again, and had sought to
+    disentangle from his confused impressions how it was that, like
+    a perfume or a caress, it swept over and enveloped him, he had
+    observed that it was to the closeness of the intervals between
+    the five notes which composed it and to the constant repetition
+    of two of them that was due that impression of a frigid, a
+    contracted sweetness; but in reality he knew that he was basing
+    this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but merely upon
+    certain equivalents, substituted (for his mind's convenience)
+    for the mysterious entity of which he had become aware, before
+    ever he knew the Verdurins, at that earlier party, when for the
+    first time he had heard the sonata played....
+
+    “In his little phrase, albeit it presented to the mind's eye
+    a clouded surface, there was contained, one felt, a matter so
+    consistent, so explicit, to which the phrase gave so new, so
+    original a force, that those who had once heard it preserved the
+    memory of it in the treasure-chamber of their minds. Swann would
+    repair to it as to a conception of love and happiness....
+
+    “Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it
+    existed, latent, in his mind, in the same way as certain other
+    conceptions without material equivalent, such as our notions
+    of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the
+    rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified
+    and adorned. Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be
+    obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so long as
+    we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which
+    we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any
+    material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity
+    of a lamp that has just been lighted, in view of the changed
+    aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even
+    the memory of the darkness....
+
+    “So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the
+    sonata did, really, exist. Human as it was from this point of
+    view, it belonged, none the less, to an order of supernatural
+    creatures whom we have never seen, but whom, in spite of that,
+    we recognise and acclaim with rapture when some explorer of the
+    unseen contrives to coax one forth, to bring it down from that
+    divine world to which he has access to shine for a brief moment
+    in the firmament of ours.”
+
+From that evening Swann understood that the feeling which Odette
+had once had for him would never revive. He had made his bed, and
+he resolved to share it in holy matrimony with Odette, though this
+discomforted his friends and made him a species of Pariah.
+
+Mme. Swann in Combray was a solitary, but not in Paris. There she
+queened it, as many lovely ladies had done before her. The account of
+that, and of the narrator's love for Gilberte, Swann's daughter, who,
+when he had encountered her casually at Combray, had made a stirring
+and deep impression on him; and the advent of Albertine, a potential
+Gomorrite, make up the contents of the succeeding instalment, entitled
+“A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs.” Gilberte, Swann's daughter,
+and the narrator now approaching puberty, came to play together in the
+Champs Elysées, frolicking like children, innocently, though another
+feeling began soon to bud in him, a feeling which he did not yet
+understand. In this volume the narrator relates the experiences he had
+when a youth, and therefore there is more precision in the description
+of the persons with whom he came in contact. The volume also throws
+much light indirectly on Proust's personality. From a certain incident
+which he tells regarding the way he was brought up, one sees that
+his father was a rigourous aristocrat, stiff in his demeanour, and
+very particular in the choice of his connections. He, the narrator,
+was brought up in a way the Germans would call “schablonenmässig”:
+everything was discussed at a family council, as though he were an
+inanimate plaything. His naïvete, the result of such training, is very
+characteristic.
+
+For some time he had been longing to see “Phèdre” played by the famous
+Mme. La Berma (evidently Sarah Bernhardt, for at that time she was the
+only one who played “Phèdre”). After long deliberation because of his
+illness, it was decided he should go chaperoned by his grandmother,
+to see his ideal actress. The scene opened with two men who rushed
+on in the throes of heated argument. He did not know that this was
+part of the play and that the men were actors; he thought they were
+some ruffians who had forced their way into the theatre and who would
+surely be ejected by the officials. He wondered, though, that the
+spectators not only did not protest, but listened to them with the
+greatest attention. Only when the theatre re-echoed with applause did
+he understand that the two men were actors. Afterwards, when two ladies
+came upon the stage, both of portly bearing, he could not decide which
+one was La Berma; a little later he learned that neither of them was
+the great actress. To reconcile such unsophistication with the account
+of the peeping Tom episode when he laid bare Mlle. Vinteuil's deforming
+habituation is very difficult.
+
+Swann, now ill, and repentant, was consumed with ambition to introduce
+his wife, Odette, into high society, in which he succeeded to a great
+extent. Though he did not like M. Buntemps because of his reactionary
+opinions, he, “the director of the minister's office,” was an important
+personage and his wife, Mme. Buntemps, was a steady visitor in Odette's
+salon. But once in a while he was malicious enough to exasperate
+Mme. Buntemps. He told her once he would invite the Cottards and the
+Duchesse de Vendome to dinner. Mme. Buntemps protested, saying it was
+not seemly that the Cottards should be at the same table with the
+Duchesse. In reality she was jealous of the Cottards who were going to
+share the honour with her. The Prince d'Agrigente was invited, because
+it was altogether “private”! Odette is described as a woman of low
+intelligence, without education, speaking faulty French, but shrewd,
+dominating her husband. One of her guests was Mme. Cottard, the wife
+of Dr. Cottard, the medical bounder who had now become Professor, a
+woman who did not belong to her present circle. But she had to invite a
+person who could tell her former friends of her high connections, so as
+to raise their envy.
+
+The Marquis de Norpais, a former ambassador, is admirably drawn. He was
+naturally considered by the narrator's father as the cream of society.
+Just think of it! a man with two titles: Monsieur l'Ambassadeur,
+and Son Excellence Monsieur le Marquis! It is true that he was an
+ambassador under a republican government. But because of this he was
+interesting, for despite his antecedents he was entrusted with several
+extraordinary missions by very radical ministers. When a monarchist
+would not accept that honour, the republican government having had no
+fear that he might betray it, M. de Norpais himself willingly accepted
+the charge. Being in his blood a diplomat, he could not help exercising
+the functions of a diplomat, though in his heart he detested the
+republican spirit of government.
+
+The narrator's mother did not admire his intelligence, but for the
+father every word of M. l'Ambassadeur de Norpais was an oracle. He had
+always wished that his son should become a diplomat, while the son
+wished to take up literature so as not to be separated from Gilberte.
+M. de Norpais, who did not much like the new style diplomats, told the
+narrator's father that a writer could gain as much consideration and
+more independence than a diplomat. His father changed his mind.
+
+It is quite impossible, within the space of an essay, to give even an
+outline of the remaining volumes that have already appeared of this
+amazing and epochal novel.
+
+Without doubt M. Proust had a definite idea in mind, a determination to
+make a contribution: to prove that the dominant force in mental life
+is association, the chief resource of mentality reminiscence. Thus the
+primitive instincts of mankind and their efforts to obtain convention's
+approbation furnish the material with which he has built. It is
+extraordinary how large association bulks: individuals remind him of
+famous paintings, not merely the general characters of the people whom
+he encounters in his daily life, but rather what seem least susceptible
+of generalisation, the individual features of men and women whom he
+knows. For instance, a bust of the Doge Loredan by Antonio Rizzo,
+is suggested by the prominent cheekbones, the slanting eyebrows, in
+short a speaking likeness to his own coachman Rami; the colouring of a
+Ghirlandajo, by the nose of M. de Palancy; a portrait by Tintoretto, by
+the invasion of the plumpness of the cheek by an outcrop of whisker,
+the broken nose, the penetrating stare, the swollen eyelids of Dr. du
+Bolbon.
+
+If, on descending the stairs after one of the Doncières evenings,
+suddenly on arriving in the street, the misty night and the lights
+shining through suggest a time when he arrived at Combray, at once
+there is thrown on the screen of his consciousness a picture of
+incidents there and experiences elsewhere that are as vivid and as
+distinct as if he were looking at them on a moving-picture screen. Then
+suddenly there appears a legend “the useless years which slipped by
+before my invisible vocation declared itself, that invisible vocation
+of which this work is the history.” Like the monk who seeks God in
+solitude, like Nietzsche who sought Him in reason, M. Proust has sought
+to reveal his soul, his personality, the sum total of all his various
+forms of consciousness by getting memory to disgorge her contents, the
+key to the chamber being association.
+
+    “We try to discover in things, endeared to us on that account,
+    the spiritual glamour which we ourselves have cast upon them;
+    we are disillusioned, and learn that they are in themselves
+    barren and devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds,
+    to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all
+    our spiritual forces in a glittering array so as to influence
+    and subjugate other human beings who, as we very well know, are
+    situated outside ourselves, where we can never reach them.”
+
+There are so many features of M. Proust's work that excite admiration
+that it is possible to enumerate only a few. Despite a studied style
+of confusion and interminable sentences, suspended, hyphenated,
+alembicated, and syncopated, that must forever make him the despair
+of anyone whose knowledge of French is not both fundamental and
+colloquial, he makes telling, life-like pen pictures of things and
+persons. Such is one of Françoise, the maid at Combray,
+
+    “who looked as smart at five o'clock in the morning in her
+    kitchen, under a cap whose stiff and dazzling frills seemed
+    to be made of porcelain, as when dressed for church-going;
+    who did everything in the right way, who toiled like a horse,
+    whether she was well or ill, but without noise, without the
+    appearance of doing anything; the only one of my aunt's maids
+    who when Mamma asked for hot water or black coffee would bring
+    them actually boiling; she was one of those servants who in a
+    household seem least satisfactory, at first, to a stranger,
+    doubtless because they take no pains to make a conquest of him
+    and show him no special attention, knowing very well that they
+    have no real need of him, that he will cease to be invited to
+    the house sooner than they will be dismissed from it; who, on
+    the other hand, cling with most fidelity to those masters and
+    mistresses who have tested and proved their real capacity, and
+    do not look for that superficial responsiveness, that slavish
+    affability, which may impress a stranger favourably, but often
+    conceals an utter barrenness of spirit in which no amount of
+    training can produce the least trace of individuality.
+
+    “The daughter of Françoise, on the contrary, spoke, thinking
+    herself a woman of today and freed from all customs, the
+    Parisian argot and did not miss one of the jokes belonging to
+    it. Françoise having told her that I had come from a Princess:
+    'Ah, doubtless a Princess of the cocoanut.' Seeing that I
+    was expecting a visitor, she pretended to think that I was
+    called Charles. I answered 'No,' naïvely, which permitted
+    her to exclaim 'Ah, I thought so! And I was saying to myself
+    Charles waits (charlatan).' It wasn't very good taste, but I
+    was less indifferent when as a consolation for the tardiness
+    of Albertine, she said, 'I think you can wait for her in
+    perpetuity. She will not come any more.' Ah, our gigolettes of
+    today!
+
+    “Thus her conversation differed from that of her mother but what
+    is more curious the manner of speaking of her mother was not the
+    same as that of her grandmother, a native of Bailleau-le-Pin
+    which was near the country of Françoise. However the patois were
+    slightly different, like the two country places. The country
+    of the mother of Françoise was made up of hills descending
+    into a ravine full of willows. And, very far from there, on
+    the contrary, there was in France a little region where one
+    spoke almost exactly the same patois as at Meseglise. I made
+    the discovery at the same time that I was bored by it. In fact,
+    I once found Françoise talking fluently with a chambermaid of
+    the house who came from the country and spoke its patois. They
+    understood each other mostly. I did not understand them at
+    all. They knew this but did not stop on this account, excused,
+    so they thought, by the joy of being compatriots, although
+    born so far apart, for continuing to speak before me this
+    foreign language as if they did not wish to be understood. This
+    picturesque study of linguistic geography and comradeship was
+    followed each week in the kitchen without my taking any pleasure
+    in it.”
+
+Time, M. Proust was convinced, was made for slaves. It takes longer
+to read his account of a soirée at the Prince de Guermantes' than
+it would to attend it. It requires half a volume to narrate it. The
+account is masterly, and the reader is filled with the feelings that
+actual experience might produce. Those who have had contact with
+aristocracy, and whose lucidity of mind has not been impaired by it,
+also find such an account interesting. Here one meets aristocrats of
+every complexion, heirs of the oldest and proudest names in Gotha's
+Almanach, and those whose pedigree is not so ancient, upon whom the
+former look condescendingly. As in a Zoo, one sees a great variety
+of the aristocrat genus, and if one has believed that the nobility
+is formed of people different and better than the common herd the
+delusion is dissipated. Here is a light that fairly dazzles those who
+are susceptible to the appeal of clothes, wealth, and jewels. If one's
+yearnings are for things more substantial in human nature he will not
+be satisfied as a guest of the Prince de Guermantes. Diogenes there
+would have used his lantern in vain.
+
+One becomes intimately acquainted with the _haut monde_, their colossal
+pride, and overweening conceit, concealed from the eyes of those
+below them in the hierarchy by thin veils of conventional and shallow
+amiability which they make more and more transparent as the people
+they deal with are further removed from the blue zone of the _nobilior
+spectrum_. One discovers also another characteristic: the capacity for
+putting up with such pride and conceit from above, and for making the
+best of it for the sake of securing the lustre which comes with the
+good will of those higher up, and contact with them.
+
+In the society of the Guermantes one becomes acquainted with such
+specimens of human meanness and hatefulness, such hypocrisy, such
+paucity of the sentiments that ennoble life, that he finds himself
+wondering why better flowers do not grow in the enchanted gardens.
+Those which seemed so beautiful at a distance turn out to be not only
+without fragrance, but with a bad odour. The _grand monde_, in truth,
+seems to be nothing but a small world of gossiping and shallow talk,
+a world aware of no other nobility than that of inherited titles, and
+scorning the idea that real nobility is a refinement of the soul,
+produced by education, to which rich and poor, high and low, may all
+aspire. The feeling of a man not recognised as an aristocrat who,
+for some special reason, gains admission to this circle, is made
+vivid in the experience of a talented physician who has saved the
+life of the Prince de Guermantes and who owes his invitation to the
+reception to the Prince's gratitude. The experience of a Bavarian
+musician is also interesting. It shows how great can be the insolence
+of aristocracy swollen with vanity. At the soirée we meet nobles who
+never possessed ideals which acted as armour against pollution, nobles
+with imaginations easily inflamed by the attractions of women servants,
+whose lust for a chambermaid is sufficient to dim all consciousness
+of their pedigrees. And we meet others who are even lower, noblemen
+and ladies who keep up the traditions of Sodom and Gomorrah in modern
+society.
+
+It may be beside the question to inquire the intention of the author
+in painting this picture of high society and then dwelling on aspects
+of it that can only cause disgust. His words at times seem to reveal
+a sarcastic intention. His descriptions are so full of minute details
+and so rich in incidents of extreme naturalness that it is impossible
+to believe that even a lively imagination could fabricate them. One
+easily sees that they are fragments of real life. This keeps the
+interest alive, despite the involved style. His periods are so twisted
+and turgid with associated thoughts, so bristling with parenthetical
+clauses that often profound effort is required to interpret them.
+There is none of the plain, clear, sane, sunny style of a Daudet,
+or of Paul Bourget. This causes a sensation of discomfort at times,
+especially when the author indulges in introspection that reveals a
+morbid imagination and pathological sensitiveness; as, for instance, in
+the distinction between abiding sorrows and fugitive sorrows; on how
+our beloved departed ones live in us, act on us, transform us even more
+than the living ones; and how those who are dead grow to be more real
+to us who love them than when they were alive.
+
+We feel an unhealthiness under it all. We have to stop and analyse, to
+unravel the main idea from the tangled skein in which it is hidden.
+But it is a work that brings its own reward. It brings real jewels of
+_finesse de pensée et d'observation_, such as those on the reminiscence
+of departed sensations and feelings; on the different selves which we
+have been in the past and which coexist in our present individuality;
+on the eclipses to which the latter is subject when one of its
+components suddenly steps from the dark recesses into the vivid light
+of consciousness; on the elements of beauty apparent in different
+individuals who are partial incarnations of one great beauty without;
+on reminiscence of Plato; on the anxiety of expectation while awaiting
+a person; on the effect which consciousness of his own sinfulness has
+on the sinner; on the interchange of moral qualities and idiosyncrasies
+of persons bound by mutual sympathy; on the permanence of our
+passions--in mathematical jargon, a function of the time during which
+they have acted on our spirit. It also discloses treasures of delicate
+feeling, such as are awakened in a person by the image of a beloved one
+that flashes vivid in his memory.
+
+But to discover such treasures one has often to wade through a series
+of long and indigestible sentences of thirty or forty lines.
+
+I recall reading in an English magazine, a number of years ago,
+an article entitled “A Law in Literary Expression.” Stated in its
+plainest terms, the law is this: that the length of the phrase--not the
+sentence, but its shortest fraction, the phrase--must be measured by
+the breath pause. M. Proust breaks this law oftener than any citizen of
+this country breaks the prohibition law, no matter how imperious may be
+his thirst.
+
+Finally the frank and scientific way in which he has discussed a
+subject that has always been tabooed in secular literature calls for
+remark. Of the posterity of Sodom he says it forms a colony spread all
+over the world, and that one can count it as one can count the dust of
+the earth. He studies all the types and varieties of sodomists. Their
+manners and ways, their sentiments, their aberrations of the senses,
+their shame are passed in review. It is a sort of scientific, poetical
+treatise. The actions in which the sodomistic instinct finds its outlet
+are often compared to the seemingly conscious actions by which flowers
+attract the insects that are the instruments of their fecundation.
+Botany and sexuality are mixed together. Sometimes the scientific
+spirit, gaining the upper hand, leads him to look upon these phenomena
+of genesic inversion as manifestations of a natural law, and therefore
+marvellous, like all the workings of nature. He is nearly carried away,
+and finds excuses for what is considered a vice, and seems to be on the
+verge almost of expressing his admiration.
+
+Some of his observations on sodomistic psychology are highly
+interesting, although expressed in long periods.
+
+I append a few pages of literal translation from the opening chapter
+of “Sodome et Gomorrhe”; first, that the reader may have a sample
+of M. Proust's style; second, that he may gain an insight of the
+grasp the writer has of one of nature's most unsolvable riddles; and
+finally, that he may have the description of an individual who plays an
+important part in the novel.
+
+    “At the beginning of this scene, before my unsealed eyes, a
+    revolution had taken place in M. de Charlus, as complete, as
+    immediate as if he had been touched by a magic wand. Until
+    then, not understanding, I had not seen. The vice (so-called
+    for convenience), the vice of each individual, accompanies him
+    after the manner of those genii who are invisible to those who
+    ignore their presence. Goodness, deceit, a good name, social
+    relations do not allow themselves to be discovered, they exist
+    hidden. Ulysses himself did not at first recognise Athene. But
+    gods are immediately perceptible to gods, the like to the like,
+    so M. de Charlus was to Julien. Until now, in the presence of
+    M. de Charlus, I was like an absent-minded man in company with
+    a pregnant woman, whose heavy figure he had not remarked and
+    of whom, in spite of her smiling reiteration 'Yes, I am a bit
+    tired just now,' he persists in asking indiscreetly, 'What is
+    the matter with you then?' But, let some one say to him, 'She
+    is pregnant,' he immediately is conscious of her abdomen and
+    hereafter sees nothing but that. Enlightenment opens the eyes;
+    an error dissipated gives an added sense.
+
+    “Those persons who do not like to believe themselves examples of
+    this law in others--towards the Messieurs de Charlus of their
+    acquaintance whom they did not suspect even until there appears
+    on the smooth surface of a character, apparently in every
+    respect like others, traced in an ink until then invisible,
+    a word dear to the ancient Greeks, have only to recall, in
+    order to satisfy themselves, how at first the surrounding world
+    appeared naked, devoid of those ornamentations which it offers
+    to the more sophisticated, and also, of the many times in their
+    lives that they had been on the point of making a break. For
+    instance, nothing upon the characterless face of some man could
+    make them suppose that he was the brother, the fiancé or the
+    lover of some woman of whom they are on the point of making an
+    uncomplimentary remark, as, for example, to compare her to a
+    camel. At that moment, fortunately, however, some word whispered
+    to him by a neighbour freezes the fatal term on his lips. Then
+    immediately appears, like a _Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin_, these
+    words, 'This is the fiancé, or the brother, or the lover of the
+    woman, therefore it would be impossible to call her a camel
+    before him,' and, this new notion alone causes the retreat or
+    advance of the fraction of those notions, heretofore completed,
+    that he had had concerning the rest of the family.
+
+    “The real reason that M. de Charlus was different from other men
+    was because another being had been engrafted upon him, like the
+    horse upon the centaur, that his being was incorporated with
+    that of the Baron. I had not hitherto perceived. The abstract
+    had not become materialised, the being, finally understood had
+    lost its power of remaining invisible, and the transmutation of
+    M. de Charlus into a new person was so complete that not only
+    the contrasts of his face, of his voice, but retrospectively
+    the heights and depths of his relations with me, everything,
+    in fact, which had until then appeared incoherent, became
+    intelligible, disclosed itself, like a phrase which, without
+    meaning so long as the letters composing it are scattered
+    becomes, if the characters be placed in their proper order, a
+    thought impossible to forget.
+
+    “Moreover I now understood why, a short time ago, when I saw
+    M. de Charlus coming out from Mme. de Villeparisis' I thought
+    he looked like a woman. It was because he was one! He belonged
+    to that race of beings whose ideal is virile because their
+    temperament is feminine, and who are, in appearance only, like
+    other men. The silhouette cast in the facet of their eyes,
+    through which they see everything in the universe, is not that
+    of a nymph but of a beautiful young man. One of a race upon
+    whom rests a curse, who is forced to live in an atmosphere of
+    falsehood and perjury because he knows that his desire, that
+    which gives to all creatures the greatest satisfaction in life,
+    must be unavowed, being considered punishable and shameful, who
+    must even deny God himself, since when even as a Christian he
+    appears as an accused at the bar of the tribunal he must before
+    Christ and in his name defend himself as if from a calumny from
+    that which is his very life; son without a mother, forced to lie
+    to her all her life, even to the moment when he is closing her
+    eyes, friend without friendships, in spite of all those who are
+    attracted by his charm, fully recognised, and whose hearts would
+    lead them to be kind--for can those relations, which bloom only
+    by favour of a lie, be called friendship, when the first burst
+    of confidence he might be tempted to express, would cause him to
+    be rejected with disgust? Should he, by chance, have to do with
+    an impartial mind, that is to say a sympathetic one, even then
+    diverted from him by a psychology of convention, would permit
+    to flow from the confessed vice even the affection which is the
+    most foreign to him--as certain judges extenuate and excuse more
+    easily assassination amongst inverts and treason amongst Jews
+    from reasons drawn from original sin and fatality of race.
+
+    “Finally, lovers (at least according to the first theory
+    advanced which one will see modified by the continuation and
+    which would have angered them above everything had not this
+    contradiction been wiped out from before their eyes by the same
+    illusion that made them see and live) to whom the possibility
+    of this love (the hope of which gives them the force to bear so
+    many risks, so much solitude) is nearly closed since they are
+    naturally attracted to a man who does not resemble in any way a
+    woman, a man who is not an invert and who therefore cannot love
+    them; consequently their desire would remain forever unappeased
+    if money did not deliver to them real men or if the imagination
+    did not cause them to take for real men the inverts to whom
+    they are prostituted. Whose only honour is precarious; whose
+    only liberty provisory, up to the discovery of the crime; whose
+    only situation is unstable like the poet, who, fêted at night
+    in all the salons, applauded in all the theatres of London
+    is chased from his lodgings in the morning and can find no
+    place to lay his head. Turning the treadmill like Sampson and
+    saying like him, 'The two sexes will die each on his own side.'
+    Excluded even (except during the days of great misfortune
+    when the greatest number rallies around the victim like the
+    Jews around Dreyfus--from the sympathy--sometimes of society)
+    excluded even from their kind who see with disgust, reflected
+    as in a mirror which no longer flatters, all those blemishes
+    which they have not been willing to see in themselves and which
+    make them understand that that which they call their love (and
+    to which, playing upon the word, they have annexed everything
+    that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism can add to
+    love) comes not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen,
+    but from an incurable malady. Like the Jews again (save a few
+    who only care to consort with their own race and have always
+    on the lips ritualistic words and consecrated pleasantries);
+    they fly from each other, seeking those who are most unlike
+    them, who will have nothing to do with them, pardoning their
+    rebuffs, intoxicating themselves with their condescensions; but
+    also reassembled with their kind by the very ostracism which
+    strikes them, the opprobrium into which they have fallen, and
+    finally taking on (as a result of a persecution similar to that
+    of Israel) the physical and moral characteristics of a race,
+    sometimes beautiful, often frightful, finding (in spite of all
+    the mockeries that those more homogeneous, better assimilated
+    to the other race, in appearance less of an invert heap upon
+    him who is apparently more of one) finding even a kind of
+    expansion in frequenting with their kind, even an aid from
+    their existence so that while denying that they belong to that
+    race (whose very name is the greatest of injuries) those who
+    have succeeded in hiding the truth, that they also are of that
+    despised race, unmask those others, less to injure them, not
+    detesting them, than to excuse themselves, as a physician seeks
+    the appendicitis inversion in history, they find pleasure in
+    recalling that Socrates was one of them and that the same thing
+    was said of Jesus by the Israelites, without remembering that
+    then when homo-sexuality was normal there was no abnormality,
+    as there were no anti-Christians before Christ, also that
+    opprobrium alone makes it crime, since it has been only allowed
+    to exist as crime because it is refractory to all predication,
+    all example, to all punishment by virtue of special innate
+    disposition which repulses men more (although it may accompany
+    high moral qualities) than certain vices which contradict high
+    moral qualities, such as theft, cruelty, bad faith, better
+    understood, therefore more easily excused by men in general.
+
+    “Forming a free-masonry, much more extended, more efficacious
+    and less suspected than that of the lodges, because it rests
+    upon an identity of tastes, of needs, of habits, of dangers, of
+    apprenticeships, of knowledge, of traffic and of language. Whose
+    members avoid one another and yet immediately recognise each
+    other by natural or conventional signs, involuntary or studied,
+    which disclose to the mendicant one of his kind in the lord
+    whose carriage door he opens, to the father in the fiancé of his
+    daughter, to him who had wished to be cured, to confess, in the
+    physician, the priest or the lawyer whom he had gone to consult;
+    all obliged to protect their secret, but, at the same time,
+    sharing the secret of the others, which was not suspected by the
+    others and which makes the most improbable romances of adventure
+    seem true to them, for, in their romantic life, anachronically,
+    the ambassador is the friend of the criminal, the prince who,
+    with a certain freedom of manner, (which an aristocratic
+    education gives and which would be impossible with a little
+    trembling bourgeois) leaves the house of the duchess to seek the
+    Apache. Rejected part of the human collectivity but all the same
+    an important part, suspected where it does not exist, vaunting
+    itself, insolently with impunity where it is not divined;
+    counting its adherents everywhere, amongst the people, in the
+    army, in the temple, in the prison, upon the throne; finally
+    living, at least a great number of them, in a caressing and
+    dangerous intimacy with men of the other race, provoking them,
+    enticing them to speak of this vice as if it were not theirs, a
+    game which is made easy by the blindness or the falseness of the
+    others, a game which may be prolonged for years--until the day
+    of Scandal, when these conquerors are devoured. Until this time
+    obliged to hide their true life, to turn away their regards from
+    where they would wish to fix them, to fix them upon that from
+    which they would naturally turn away--to change the meaning of
+    many adjectives in their vocabulary, a social constraint merely,
+    slight compared to that interior constraint which their vice, or
+    that which is improperly called so, imposes upon them, less with
+    regard to others than to themselves and in a manner which makes
+    it seem not to be a vice--to themselves. But certain ones, more
+    practical, more hurried, who have not time to bargain and to
+    renounce the simplification of life and the gain of time that
+    might result from cooperation, have made two societies, of which
+    the second is exclusively composed of beings like themselves.”
+
+M. Proust's work is the first definite reply in the affirmative to the
+question whether fiction can subsist without the seductive power due
+to a certain illusory essence of thought. Whether in this respect he
+will have many, if any, successful followers is to be seen. But his
+own volumes stand as an astonishing example of an organic and living
+fiction obtained solely by the effort to portray truth.
+
+Because of the unique qualities of his novels and the fact that they
+are developed on a definite psychological plan, more than the usual
+interest in a favourite writer is attached to the personality of M.
+Proust. During his lifetime inaccessible both because of aristocratic
+taste and of partial invalidism, his figure is likely to become more
+familiar to the reading world--even to those who never read his
+books--than the figures of great authors who walked with the crowd and
+kept the common touch.
+
+Neither Proust the man nor Proust the author can be considered apart
+from his invalidism. It shows all through his writings, although
+what the malady was which rendered him, if not a _de facto_ invalid,
+certainly a potential invalid, is not known. Some of his friends
+accused asthma, others a disease of the heart, while still others
+attributed it to “nerves.” In reality his conduct and his writings were
+consistent with neuropathy and his heredity. And if the hero of “A
+la Recherche du Temps Perdu” is to be identified with himself, as is
+popularly supposed, he was from early childhood delicate, sensitive,
+precocious, and asthmatic, that is profoundly neuropathic.
+
+He was fastidious in his tastes; he liked the best styles, the most
+elegant ladies, aristocratic salons, and fashionable gatherings. He was
+noted for the generosity of his tips. His life reminds one of the hero
+of Huysman's famous novel. In his early days, M. Proust was a great
+swell, and there is no doubt that many of his descriptions of incidents
+and persons are elaborations of notes that he made after attending a
+reception given by the Duchesse de Rohan, or other notables of the
+Faubourg St. Germain, in whose houses he was an habitué.
+
+His social activity may have been deliberate preparation for his work,
+as his fifteen-year apprenticeship to Ruskin was preparation. Or it may
+have been a pose, much the same as his mannerisms, habits, customs,
+and possibly some features of his invalidism, were a pose. Surely he
+enjoyed the reputation of being “different.”
+
+He ruminated on Rousseau and studied Saint-Simon. When he arrived at
+the stage where he could scoff at one and spurn the other, he learned
+Henry James by heart. Then he wrote; he had prepared himself. The
+deficit which art and endeavour failed to wipe out was compensated by
+his maternal inheritance.
+
+One may infer whither he is going by reading Proust once, but to
+accompany him he must be read a second time. Those who would get
+instruction and enlightenment must read him as Ruskin, his master,
+said all worth while books must be read: “You must get into the habit
+of looking intensely at words and assuring yourself of their meaning,
+syllable by syllable.”
+
+The discerning reader must look intensely at M. Proust's words. If he
+looks long enough they seem to take on the appearance of _Mene, Tekel,
+Phares_.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VI
+  TWO LITERARY LADIES OF LONDON: KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND REBECCA WEST
+
+
+Many persons are so constituted that they accept any positive statement
+as fact unless they know it to be false. Few more positive statements
+are made in print than “So and So is England's or America's or France's
+leading or most popular writer of fiction or verse.” Publicity agents
+have found apparently that such claim sells books and needs no
+substantiation. The reading public rarely protests. It denies in a more
+effective way, but before the denial gets disseminated many credulous
+seekers of diversion and culture are misled.
+
+There are several young women writing fiction in England today of whom
+it can be said truthfully that they ornament the profession of letters.
+Women have long justified their reputation for being intuitive by their
+fictional writing. It is likely that they may proceed to establish
+an equal reputation for accurate observation, logical inference, and
+temperate narrative. Had not the waves of death recently encompassed
+Katherine Mansfield in her early maturity she would have remained at
+the top of the list, the place where now, varying with individual taste
+and judgment, stand the names of Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West,
+Stella Benson, Virginia Woolf, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Mary Webb, Rose
+Macaulay, to mention no others. For the first time in history women
+prose writers preponderate, and it is a good augury for a country which
+has been so quickly and successfully purged of anti-feminism.
+
+Katherine Mansfield's output has been small, but quality has made
+up for quantity. Her reputation is founded on two volumes of short
+stories. To say that they reveal capacity to create life, to recognise
+the temperament, intellectuality, and morality of the ordinary human
+beings that one encounters, and to display their behaviour; as well
+as a power to analyse personality and to depict individuality that
+equals de Maupassant, is to make a truthful statement, and a temperate
+one. Indeed, she seemed to her contemporaries to be possessed of some
+unsanctified and secret wisdom.
+
+Her history is brief. She was Kathleen Beauchamp, third daughter of
+a man of affairs, recently knighted, and was born in Wellington, New
+Zealand. She was 23 years old when she married, just before the war,
+J. Middleton Murry, the British critic and novelist. Her first book
+“In a German Pension,” published when she was 21, gave no promise of
+great talent. Her first mature work was a series of book reviews in
+_The Nation and Athenæum_, about 1919. She was quickly recognised to
+be a subtle and brilliant critic. In 1920 the publication of “Bliss
+and Other Stories” revealed her metal and temper. Development and
+maturity marked her second and last collection, “The Garden-Party and
+Other Stories,” which followed in 1922. Hardly had the promise of her
+early work been recognised before it was overshadowed by progressive
+pulmonary disease, and after long months of illness, during which she
+was obliged to spend most of her time away from England, she died in
+France on January 9, 1923.
+
+Katherine Mansfield had a technique which may be compared to that of
+a great stage manager. When the play is put on, the scenes and the
+characters, the atmosphere and the environment, the sentiment and the
+significance are satisfying, intelligent and convincing. The world seen
+through her eyes, and the conduct of its most highly organised product,
+is the world that may be seen by anyone who has normal, keen vision.
+The conduct of the people who encumber it is that which an observer
+without inherited bias or acquired bigotry knows intuitively, and has
+learned from experience, is the conduct that reflects our present
+development, our attitudes, our interests, our desires, and most of all
+our dispositions.
+
+[Illustration: KATHERINE MANSFIELD]
+
+She prepared the stage and then her characters came on. She didn't
+bore with narrative of their birth, weary with incidents of their
+development, or disgust with details of their vegetative existence.
+They reacted to their immediate desires and environment in the way that
+people act in real life. She had a comprehensive understanding of human
+motives, and she realised how firmly engrained in man is the organic
+lust to live and to experience pleasure.
+
+To find the balance in fiction midway between the “joy stuff” which for
+the last decade has been threatening to reduce American literature to
+a spineless pulp, and morbid realism which, in both England and this
+country, has been reflecting the influence of so-called psychoanalysis,
+is an accomplishment deserving of the thanks of all admirers of sanity
+in art. Miss Mansfield has succeeded in doing this, with the result
+that a large measure of the charm of her art lies in its sanity,
+its extraordinary freedom from obsessions, from delusions, and from
+excessive egocentricity. To borrow a term from music, she may be said
+to have possessed an unerring sense of pitch.
+
+The easiest way of estimating any unknown element is to compare it
+to something already known, and Katherine Mansfield has been called
+the Chekhov of English fiction. Such a comparison may be useful as an
+approach to her work. In truth, however, while her position in English
+fiction may be compared with that of the illustrious Russian, she is in
+no sense an imitator, a disciple of him or of any one else. Her art is
+her own.
+
+It can best be estimated from study of her last published story. If
+Katherine Mansfield, feeling herself already drawn into the shadow of
+approaching death, had tried to leave the world one final sample of
+her art which would epitomise her message and her method, “The Fly,”
+published in _The Nation and Athenæum_ of March 18, 1922, is a lasting
+triumph of her success. In a story of twenty-five hundred words she
+has said more than most authors say in a one-hundred-thousand word
+novel, or, indeed, in many novels. Not only is every word pregnant
+with meaning, but for those who can read between the lines there is an
+indictment of the life she is picturing too poignant for any but strong
+souls who can look upon the wine of life when it is red; who can even
+drain the cup to the bitter dregs in their sincere desire to learn its
+truth, without suffering the draft to send its poison into their souls.
+It is not that Katherine Mansfield was poisoned with the bitterness of
+life, or weakened with the taint of pessimism. On the contrary, she
+was as immune to bitterness, to poison, to weakness, as a disembodied
+spirit would be to disease. She was like pure white glass, reflecting
+fearlessly the part of life that was held before her, but never
+colouring it with her own personality. Her reflection was impartial.
+
+In “The Fly” the _dramatis personæ_ are old Mr. Woodifield, the boss,
+and the fly. Old Mr. Woodifield is not described, but the reader sees
+him, small of body and of soul, shrivelled, shaky, wheezy, as he
+lingers in the big, blatantly new office chair on one of the Tuesdays
+when, since the “stroke” and retirement from his clerkship, he has
+escaped from the solicitude of the wife and the girls back into his
+old life in the city--“we cling to our last pleasures as the tree
+clings to its last leaves”--and revelled in the sense of being a guest
+in the boss's office. The boss is more graphic because he remains
+nameless. “Stout, rosy, five years older than Mr. Woodifield and
+still going strong, still at the helm” is what we are told he is, but
+this is what we see: A brutal, thick man, purring at the admiration
+of the old clerk for his prosperity revealed in the newly “done-up”
+office; self-satisfied, selfish, and supercilious, offering a glass
+of whiskey as a panacea for the old man's tottering pitifulness, and
+then listening, insolently tolerant, to the rambling outpourings of
+the old soul, harmless, disciplined to long poverty of purse, of life,
+of thought, about the “Girls” visit to the soldier's grave in Belgium
+and the price they paid for a pot of jam. Then the picture changes.
+The shuffling footsteps of the old man have died out, the door is
+closed for half-an-hour, the photograph of a “grave-looking boy in
+uniform standing in one of those spectral photographers' parks with
+photographers' storm-clouds behind him,” looks out at the boss who has
+“arranged to weep.” But the floodgates which have opened at the tap of
+the one sentiment of which the boss was capable are now suffering from
+the rust of six years. Tears refuse to come.
+
+A fly drops into the pot of ink, and the boss, absent-mindedly noticing
+its struggles for freedom, picks it out with a pen and shakes it on
+to the blotting paper, where the little animal makes a heroic effort
+to clean off the ink and get ready for life again. But the boss has
+an idea. In spite of himself, his admiration is aroused by the fly's
+struggle, his pluck--“that was the way to tackle things, that was the
+right spirit. Never say die; it was only a question of.... But the
+fly has again finished its laborious task and the boss has just time
+to refill his pen, to shake fair and square on the newly cleaned body
+yet another dark drop. What about it this time?” And yet another.
+“He plunged his pen back into the ink, leaned his thick wrist on the
+blotting paper, and as the fly tried its wings, down came a great
+heavy blot. What would it make of that?... Then the boss decided
+that this time should be the last, as he dipped the pen deep in the
+inkpot. It was. The last blot fell on the soaked blotting-paper and the
+bedraggled fly lay in it and did not stir.” And as he rings for some
+new blotting-paper, a feeling of unaccountable wretchedness seizes him
+and he falls to wondering what it was he had been thinking about before
+the fly had attracted his attention. “For the life of him, he could not
+remember.” And that is the end of the story.
+
+Katherine Mansfield's art resembles that of the great Russian
+physician-novelist in that she preaches no sermon, points no moral,
+expounds no philosophy. Although there is no available exposition of
+her theories, her work is evidence that her conception of art was
+to depict the problematic as it was presented to her, and leave the
+interpretation to the reader's own philosophy. She made Raoul Duquette
+say, in “Je ne parle pas Française,” one of the most psychologically
+remarkable of her stories: “People are like portmanteaux, packed with
+certain things, started going, thrown about, tossed away, dumped down,
+lost and found, half emptied suddenly or squeezed fatter than ever
+until finally the Ultimate Porter swings them on to the Ultimate Train,
+and away they rattle.” That may have been her own belief.
+
+While it may be true in a certain sense that the artist sees only
+himself in his art, there is an essential difference between seeing
+himself reflected in life and in seeing life as in himself. Katherine
+Mansfield habitually did the latter. And it is this fact that enabled
+her to use as models, or accessories, or background any of the chance
+travellers she may have encountered with almost equal success. If she
+ever reflected herself in her art, it was a normal and objective self,
+a self which was interested in the drama being enacted about her, not
+merely the drama of her own soul; and in the fine points of this drama
+as well as in its leading actors and more obvious aspects.
+
+Her world from which she has gathered the material for her two books of
+stories has been richly variegated, and her readers are given the full
+benefit of a versatile experience. She was _La Gioconda_ of English
+fiction writers. “Je ne parle pas Française” shows that she knew
+the soul maladies and, like Walter Pater's conception of Leonardo's
+masterpiece, she knew some of the secrets of the grave: though she had
+not “been a diver in deep seas,” nor “trafficked for strange webs with
+Eastern merchants.” She did not _finish_ an individual. She narrated
+an episode which revealed his or her character; she didn't lead up to
+some epochal event like marriage, a dramatic reconciliation, a studied
+folly, or a crime. She depicted an episode, and left you to put
+such interpretation upon it, or to continue it, as your experience,
+imagination, or desire might suggest. She was a picture maker, not
+pigment by pigment, cell by cell, but with great sweeps of the brush.
+
+She usually depicted sentimental _men_, whose long suits were fidelity
+and constancy, or men whose fundamental urges were not harmonised
+to convention. Her women were, in the main, fickle, designing,
+inconstant, shallow, truckling, vain. “Marriage à la Mode,” is a
+specimen. William keeps his romantic and sentimental view of life
+after prosperity and progeny come. Isabel doesn't. She is all for
+progress and evolution--new house, new environment, new friends, new
+valuation of life's possessions. He goes home for week-ends chockful
+of love and sentimentality. She meets him at the station with her new
+friends--sybarites and hedonists in search of sensation. He soon finds
+he isn't in the game at all as Isabel now plays it. So he decides to
+abbreviate his visit. On the way back to town he concocts a long letter
+full of protestations of unselfish love, and willingness to stand aside
+if his presence is a drag on her happiness. She reads it aloud to her
+guests who receive it with sneers and jeers. Isabel has a moment of
+self-respect, and withdraws to her room and experiences the vulgarity
+and loathesomeness of her conduct. She will write to William at once
+and dispel his fears and reassure him, but while she is holding her
+character up to her eyes disparagingly she hears her guests calling her
+and decides “I'll go with them and write to William later--some other
+time. Not now. But I shall _certainly_ write.” Procrastination, not
+hesitation, condition her downfall.
+
+In “Je ne parle pas Française” she handled a subject--the implantation
+of the genesic instinct--in such a way that the reader may get little
+or much from it, depending upon his knowledge and experience. But in
+the lines and between the lines there is exposition of practically all
+that is known of the strange deviations of the libido. Raoul Duquette
+and Dick, his English friend, who cannot kill his mother, cannot give
+her the final blow of letting her know that he has fallen in love with
+Mouse, are as truly drawn to life as Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud,
+or as Encolpius and Giton of the Satyricon.
+
+It is a far cry from the depths glimpsed--but with such terrible
+sureness--in this story, to the budding soul of a young girl from the
+country as pictured in Leila in “Her First Ball”; or to the very spirit
+of healthy youth, both frivolous, superficial youth, and sensitive
+idealising youth, which exudes from the pages of “The Garden-Party.”
+
+She depicted transformation of mental states, the result of suggestion
+or impulse, much as a prestidigitator handles his Aaron's rod. This is
+particularly well seen in Leila. The reader shares her joyous mental
+state, full of vistas of hope and love and joy. Then a fat man who has
+been going to parties for thirty years dances with her and pictures her
+future follies, strifes, struggles, and selfishness at forty. At once
+she realises her doll is stuffed with sawdust, and cries and wants to
+go home, but a young man comes along, dances with her again, and behold
+the filling isn't sawdust, but radium!
+
+Katherine Mansfield's art may be studied in such a story as “At the
+Bay.” The _dramatis personæ_ are: Beryl, a temperamental young lady
+looking for romance, seeking fulfilment of destiny, thwarted by a
+Narcissus inhibition; Linda, her sister, without temperament, to whom
+fulfilment is repellant; Mrs. Harry Kember, unmoral and immoral, a
+vampire with a past and keen for a future; Harry Kember, her husband of
+whom many things are said, but none adequate to describe him; Stanley
+Burnell, a conventional good man--mollycoddle; Jonathan Trout, a poet
+compelled by fate to be a drone; Alice, a servant in transformation
+from chrysalis to butterfly; Mrs. Stubbs, a vegetative hedonist; and
+several delightful children and a devoted “Granma.”
+
+They spend a holiday at the seashore and Beryl looks for romance. Here
+is the picture:
+
+    “Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole
+    of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big
+    bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see
+    where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy
+    road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of
+    it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond
+    them; there was nothing to mark which was beach and where was
+    the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops
+    hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy
+    toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and
+    the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with
+    wetness. Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew
+    lay on the flat nasturtium leaves. It looked as though the sea
+    had beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave
+    had come tippling, rippling--how far? Perhaps if you had waked
+    up in the middle of the night you might have seen a big fish
+    flicking in at the window and gone again....”
+
+You feel the wetness of it. Then come the first signs of waking up in
+the place: the shepherd with his dog and flock making for the Downs,
+the cat waiting on the gatepost for the milk-girl--harbingers of the
+day's activities.
+
+Then the picture is animated.
+
+    “A few minutes later the back door of one of the bungalows
+    opened, and a figure in a broad-striped bathing suit flung down
+    the paddock, cleared the stile, rushed through the tussock
+    grass into the hollow, staggered up the sandy hillock, and
+    raced for dear life over the big porous stones, over the
+    cold, wet pebbles, on to the hard sand that gleamed like oil.
+    Splish-splosh! Splish-splosh! The water bubbled round his legs
+    as Stanley Burnell waded out exulting. First man in as usual!
+    He'd beaten them all again. And he swooped down to souse his
+    head and neck.”
+
+This is a complete revelation of his character--smug, righteous,
+selfish, the centre of a world in which every tomorrow shall be like
+today, and today is without romance. He feels cheated when Jonathan
+Trout tries to talk to him.
+
+    “But curse the fellow! He'd ruined Stanley's bathe. What an
+    unpractical idiot the man was! Stanley struck out to sea again,
+    and then as quickly swam in again, and away he rushed up the
+    beach.”
+
+There is something pathetic in his determination to make a task of
+everything, even the entailments of matrimony.
+
+    “You couldn't help feeling he'd be caught out one day, and then
+    what an almighty cropper he'd come! At that moment an immense
+    wave lifted Jonathan, rode past him, and broke along the beach
+    with a joyful sound. What a beauty! And now there was another.
+    That was the way to live--carelessly, recklessly, spending
+    oneself. He got on to his feet and began to wade towards the
+    shore, pressing his toes into the firm, wrinkled sand. To take
+    things easy, not to fight against the ebb and flow of life, but
+    to give way to it--that was what was needed. It was this tension
+    that was all wrong. To live--to live!”
+
+The whole world of his home moves round Stanley. When he returns for
+breakfast he has every member of the family working for him. When Beryl
+does not help him at once, its mechanism must be dislocated. But Linda
+he can't draw into the net. “Linda's vagueness on these occasions could
+not be real, Stanley decided.”
+
+The bathing hour on the beach for the women and children is as vivid as
+if taken by a camera.
+
+    “The firm, compact little girls were not half so brave as the
+    tender, delicate-looking little boys. Pip and Rags, shivering,
+    crouching down, slapping the water, never hesitated. But Isabel,
+    who could swim twelve strokes, and Kezia, who could nearly swim
+    eight, only followed on the strict understanding they were not
+    to be splashed. As for Lottie, she didn't follow at all. She
+    liked to be left to go in her own way, please. And that way was
+    to sit down at the edge of the water, her legs straight, her
+    knees pressed together, and to make vague motions with her arms
+    as if she expected to be wafted out to sea. But when a bigger
+    wave than usual, an old whiskery one, came lolloping along in
+    her direction, she scrambled to her feet with a face of horror
+    and flew up the beach again.”
+
+Mrs. Harry Kember and Beryl give an exhibition of the vampire and the
+novice, while Linda dreams the morning away in revery and retrospect.
+Beryl's dream of romance when she is alone in the garden after
+everybody else in the household has gone to bed receives a rude jolt
+from Harry Kember.
+
+The story is illustrative of Miss Mansfield's art in leaving her
+characters without killing or marrying them or bringing great adventure
+into their lives. It leaves one with a keen interest in what is next
+for Beryl, although she is not the most attractive of the figures in
+the story, but there is no indication that we shall meet her again.
+“Granma” and the children are the features of this story, and appear as
+real as life. The author's faculty in making the reader interested in
+characters who do not play heroic or leading rôles is distinctive. Even
+the sheep-dog's encounter with the cat on the gatepost is delightful,
+also the glimpse of Mrs. Stubbs' cottage with its array of bathing
+suits and shoes and the lady's reception of Alice are art: “With her
+broad smile and the long bacon knife in her hand, she looked like a
+friendly brigand.”
+
+“Prelude,” the introductory story of “Bliss and Other Stories,” is
+a further revelation of Beryl, with side lights on her sister Linda
+and Linda's husband, Stanley, and her quite wonderful mother. The
+Narcissus in Beryl has bloomed. Forced to accept bed and board from her
+brother-in-law, she bewails her fate while chanting the praises of her
+physical charms and mental possessions. Linda, by this time, has given
+herself all the air of confirmed invalidism. Linda gets her emotional
+appeasement from what might have been; Beryl, from what is going to
+be--both foundationed in introspection. When Linda first met Stanley
+out in Australia she scorned him, but previous to or after their
+marriage she fell in love with him. But her antipathy to childbearing
+and her fear of it are so profound that they colour all her thoughts
+and emotions. This is best seen when she relates her dream about birds.
+
+“Prelude” is not a story of Linda, but of Beryl and her hypocrisy.
+It should be dovetailed into “At the Bay.” The overtures and the
+temptation which were made to her by Mr. and Mrs. Harry Kember have
+not borne fruit. She is in love with herself and it may be that that
+is what the author meant to convey. The description of herself and
+her comment on her own appearance: “Yes, my dear, there is no doubt
+about it, you really are a lovely little thing” is very illuminating.
+She persuades herself that she is a potential Nina Declos and that
+if opportunity had not been denied her she could rival Messalina.
+Hypocrisy is bearing in on her and it is not quite evident, at the
+close of “Prelude,” where it is going to lead her.
+
+The burden of the story is to intensify interest in Beryl, and her
+influences and surroundings, and to heighten the suspense of the
+reader. On finishing “At the Bay” one has a picture of the romantic
+girl; at the close of “Prelude” one feels that something is going to
+happen to her before the author finishes with her. The reader gets no
+clue, however, to what it might be, except that it would be the working
+out of her temperament--admiration for self and longing for romance
+through which to express this self. Her longing at first seemed to be
+for expression of self biologically and intellectually; now it seems
+to be to find a setting in which to frame becomingly this adorable
+self--an essential difference in character and the difference that is
+the axis upon which the story might be expected to turn. If people are
+their temperaments, it is such subtle differences of temperament which
+determine destiny, or what they shall work out for themselves from
+given circumstances.
+
+Beryl is more cold-blooded, more calculating than she at first appeared
+to be, and never again will she be in danger of capitulating to a
+Kember. What she wants is to shine, and she is going to use her valued
+attractions designedly as currency to accomplish this. Beryl and Linda
+are studies in selfishness and introspection. The latter is phlegmatic
+and lazy, mentally and emotionally as well as physically.
+
+“Granma” and the children are still the most attractive figures in the
+family. How such a woman as “Granma” could have had daughters like
+Beryl and Linda is truer to life than to fiction. Had we known their
+father they might not have been so enigmatic.
+
+Katherine Mansfield had a genius for catching the exact meaning of
+the little touches in life, the little ironies and comedies as well
+as the single little wild flower in a rank growth of weeds. She was
+delightfully objective. She had a quality rare in women writers,
+especially, of not putting all her treasures in one basket, of not
+concentrating upon one character and that character more or less the
+expression of herself; and of being interested in the whole drama as it
+passed. She could enter into the soul of a charwoman or a cat and take
+a snap-shot of it which made the reader love the charwoman or the cat,
+as well as she could paint a picture that gives the very atmosphere
+of children at play or of dawn at the seashore or night in a quiet
+house--even better than she could make an X-ray study of the soul of a
+selfish woman or a stupid self-righteous man.
+
+The “high light” of “The Garden-Party” is the contrast between a
+typical happy prosperous family and an equally unhappy poor one; a
+garden-party for the young girls of the first family, the accidental
+death of the man and the wage-earner of the second. One lives on the
+hill in the sunlight; the other in the damp forbidding hollow below.
+They are near neighbours in point of space; strangers in all other
+respects. One makes an art of the graces and pleasures of life; the
+other is familiar with the gloom typified by poverty and death.
+Both accept their existences unquestioningly, in worlds as different
+psychologically as they are physically.
+
+The author does not preach; there is no straining for effect. Laura,
+one of three sisters, is more sensitive than the other members of the
+family. She alone feels contrasts. She is revelling in the preparations
+for the garden-party when she hears from the workmen of the man's
+sudden death, and her joy is clouded. But her mother and sisters make
+light of it, and the party proceeds--a picture of average wholesome
+young joyousness. Then the mother sends Laura, with a basket of cakes,
+to the man's family. The dramatic contrast is in Laura's impressions
+when she goes, in her party clothes, with the frivolous-looking basket,
+down into the hollow at dusk. That is all. There is no antagonism, no
+questioning of fate, no sociology--just a picture. Only the ability
+not to use an extra word, the taste and the humour which kept out any
+mawkishness saved the story from being “sob stuff.”
+
+When Katherine Mansfield read virtues into her female characters she
+usually made them humble, lowly, or plain, such as Ma Parker, Miss
+Brill, and Beryl's mother. She could introduce Ma Parker who cleaned
+the flat of the literary gentleman every Tuesday, and in eleven pages,
+without a single approach to sentimentality, make you in love with the
+old scrubwoman, with her hard life and heroic unselfish soul, when you
+left her standing in the cold street wondering whether there was any
+place in the world where she could have a cry at last. The motive of
+this story is much the same as that of “The Garden-Party,” the sharp
+contrast between two extreme types of life which circumstances bring
+close together.
+
+In “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” the author walked with a sure
+step on thin ice from the first sentence to the last, never taking a
+false step or undignified slide. Humour alone preserved the balance
+where the ice was not too thin, and kept her from slipping over the
+invisible line of safety in the direction of bathos on the one side,
+or of the coarsely comic on the other. To make two old ladies who had
+spent their lives “looking after father, and at the same time keeping
+out of father's way” and who at father's death find themselves among
+those whom life had passed by, interesting and intriguing, is a severe
+test for a writer. Not only are they dead emotionally, but their habit
+of thought has become too set to be readjusted to their new freedom.
+Miss Mansfield made them as funny as they naturally would have been,
+without “making fun” of them. Their funniness is lovable. For instance:
+
+    “At the cemetery while the coffin was lowered, to think that
+    she and Constantia had done this thing without asking his
+    permission. What would father say when he found out? For he was
+    bound to find out sooner or later. He always did. 'Buried. You
+    two girls had me buried.' She could hear his stick thumping.”
+
+Or when the organ-grinding and the spot of sunshine on their mother's
+picture start in both silent reminiscence as to whether life might have
+been different if she had lived.
+
+    “Might they have married? But there had been nobody for them to
+    marry. There had been father's Anglo-Indian friends before he
+    quarrelled with them. But after that she and Constantia never
+    met a single man except clergymen. How did one meet men? Or even
+    if they'd met them, how could one have got to know men well
+    enough to be more than strangers? One read of people having
+    adventures, being followed, and so on. But nobody had ever
+    followed Constantia and her.”
+
+“Miss Brill” is a sketch with a whimsical pathos. A little old maiden
+lady who dresses up every Sunday and goes to the _Jardin Publiques_ in
+Paris and sits on a bench, getting her romance out of watching people
+and feeling that she is a part of the passing life, goes one Sunday as
+usual. The feature in the sketch is the little fur piece around her
+neck.
+
+    “Miss Brill put up her hand and touched her fur. Dear little
+    thing! It was nice to feel it again. She had taken it out of its
+    box that afternoon, shaken out the mothpowder, given it a good
+    brush, and rubbed the life back into the dim little eyes.”
+
+It is to her like a pet animal or even a child. At first she finds the
+park less interesting than usual, but finally, as she senses romance
+in a pair of park lovers who sit down on her bench, she hears the boy
+say, “that stupid old thing at the end there. Why does she come here at
+all--who wants her? Why doesn't she keep her silly old mug at home?”
+And the girl, giggling, replies, “It's her fu-fur which is so funny....
+It's exactly like a fried whiting.” Suddenly the romance and the joy
+have all gone out of the old lady, and when she lays away her little
+fur piece in its box sadly and puts on the lid she thinks she hears
+something crying.
+
+Ability to depict the hidden speck of beauty under an uncompromising
+exterior not only inspired some of Katherine Mansfield's finest
+touches, but is especially refreshing after acquaintance with many
+writers who seem bent solely upon discovering some inmost rottenness
+and turning upon it the X-rays. There are many old ladies in this book,
+and the loving skill with which she has reproduced for the reader the
+charm she was able to see in them is indicative not only of her art,
+but also of her essential wholesomeness.
+
+“The Man Without a Temperament” is an objective study of an unpopular
+man. One knows him from the few outward glimpses given of him as well
+as if the author had made an intensive psychological study of him.
+That is, one knows him as one knows other people, not as he knows
+himself. The sketch is pregnant with irony and pathos. Without a
+temperament--unfeeling--is the world's verdict of him. In reality, he
+has more feeling than his critics. What he lacks is not feeling, but
+expression. He is like a person with a pocketful of “paper” who has
+to walk because he hasn't change to pay his carfare, or to go hungry
+because he can't pay for a meal. People who know him trust him, even
+if they do not fancy him or feel quite at ease with him; but with
+strangers he has no chance. A life study of such a character would make
+him interesting. A photograph shows him as one of the people who “never
+take good pictures.”
+
+In “Bliss and Other Stories,” the author went into deeper water than in
+the other collection. She was less concerned with the little ironies
+and with the fine points of her characters, and more with great
+passions.
+
+“Bliss,” the story, shows the same method as do many of her other
+stories, but reversed. It is as if her reel were being run before the
+reader backwards. Instead of hunting out the one flower in a patch
+of weeds, she painted a young married woman's Garden of Eden and
+then hunted down the snake. From the first note of Bertha Young's
+unexplainable bliss one knows that the snake motive is coming, but
+does not know how or where. The feeling of it runs through Bertha's
+psychical sense of secret understanding--the “something in common”
+between herself and Pearl Fulton, who, by a subtle uncanniness, is made
+to suggest a glorified “vamp.” The leading motive of the story is the
+psychic sympathy between the women, who are antitheses. Commonly such
+a sense of understanding would take the form of antipathy. That it
+is attraction--harking back in all likelihood to something in Bertha
+remote and unrecognised--constitutes the distinctiveness of the motive.
+The art is revealed in a clear-cut picture--nothing more. Katherine
+Mansfield knew so marvellously where to stop. She had a good eye, a
+deft hand, an understanding mind, a sense of humour, and she loved her
+fellow-beings.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Until “The Judge” was published Miss Rebecca West, in the opinion of
+many amateur and professional critics, was the most promising young
+woman to enter the field of literature in the reign of King George. Her
+advent to the literary world was impressive, and in a little book on
+Henry James in the “Writers of the Day” series she revealed a capacity
+of interpretation and facility of expression which made her elders
+envious and her contemporaries jealous. It was obvious to the casual
+reader of this book, and of her journalistic contributions, that not
+only had she the artistic temperament, but that she was familiar with
+its display in others, and that she had read widely, discriminatingly,
+and understandingly. Moreover, she was a thoroughly emancipated young
+woman and bore no marks of the cage that had restrained her sex. Her
+cleverness, her erudition, her resourcefulness were admitted. It was
+rated to be an asset, also, that she did not hesitate to call a spade
+a spade or to use the birch unsparingly when she felt it was for the
+benefit of the reading public, misled and deluded as it so often is
+by false prophets, erring evangelists, and self-seeking promoters. In
+other words, though she had sentiment and sympathy, she knew how to use
+them judiciously. In “Notes on Novels” she constantly reminds herself
+that there is a draught that we must drink or not be fully human. One
+must know the truth. When one is adult one must raise to one's lips the
+wine of truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk but draws the
+mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality, or else
+walk forever queer and small like a dwarf. Miss West does not intend
+that her countrymen shall display these deformities.
+
+Her first novel, “The Return of the Soldier,” a fictional exposition
+of the Freudian wish, was acclaimed by critics as the first fulfilment
+of the promise she had given. The teachings of the Austrian mystic
+were not much known then in England, the country that now seems to
+have swallowed them, bait, line, and sinker, not only in the fields
+of fiction but in pedagogy and in medicine; so Miss West's little
+book was more widely read and discussed than it might be today when
+Miss May Sinclair, Mr. J. D. Beresford, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, and many
+other popular novelists have made his theories look like facts to the
+uninitiated.
+
+The story is of Christopher, the ideal type of young Englishman who
+knows how to fight and to love.
+
+    “He possessed in a great measure the loveliness of young men,
+    which is like the loveliness of the spring, foal or the sapling,
+    but in him it was vexed with a serious and moving beauty by the
+    inhabiting soul. To see him was to desire intimacy with him so
+    that one might intervene between this body which was formed
+    for happiness and the soul which cherished so deep a faith in
+    tragedy.”
+
+It is narrated by his cousin who has loved him platonically since
+youth. Chris had a romantic and ardent love affair with an inn-keeper's
+daughter in his youth, but he married Kitty, a beautiful little
+conventional non-temperamental young woman with a charming and
+cultivated soprano voice, of the class of women who
+
+    “are obscurely aware it is their civilising mission to flash the
+    jewel of their beauty before all men so that they shall desire
+    and work to get the wealth to buy it, and thus be seduced by
+    a present appetite to a tilling of the earth that serves the
+    future.”
+
+He goes to the war, gets concussion of the brain which causes amnesia,
+or forgetfulness of certain epochal events in his life, particularly
+his marriage to Kitty. “Who the devil is Kitty?” he replies when he
+is told she might have something to say on hearing of his plan to
+marry Margaret Allingham. Though some of the events of his life from
+twenty-one, when he fell in love with Margaret, to thirty-six, when
+he got injured, can be revived in his memory by Jenny, a resourceful
+understanding person, the sort of cousin every man should have, no
+argumentation can reconcile him to Kitty, and “he said that his body
+and soul were consumed with desire for Margaret and that he would never
+rest until he once more held her in his arms.”
+
+After exhausting every means that love and science can suggest to jog
+his memory or wipe out the amnesia, it is decided to bring him and
+Margaret together. No one who had known her as the “Venus of Monkey
+Island,” a composite of charity and love, would recognise her now,
+seamed and scarred and ravaged by squalid circumstance, including
+dreary matrimony to a man with a weak chest that needed constant
+attention. Moreover, “all her life long Margaret had partaken of the
+inalienable dignity of a requited love, and lived with men who wore
+carpet slippers in the house.” Such experience had left deforming
+scars. However, Chris sees her with the eyes of youth, and her presence
+resurrects juvenile emotions. Under their influence Margaret undergoes
+transformation.
+
+    “She had a little smile in her eyes as though she were listening
+    to a familiar air played far away, her awkwardness seemed
+    indecision as to whether she would walk or dance to that distant
+    music, her shabbiness was no more repulsive than the untidiness
+    of a child who had been so eager to get to the party that it has
+    not let its nurse fasten its frock.”
+
+However, their interviews do not get them anywhere from Kitty's
+standpoint, and she decides to send for Dr. Gilbert Anderson.
+
+    “Heaven knows she had no reason for faith in any doctor, for
+    during the past week so many of them sleek as seals with their
+    neatly brushed hair and their frockcoats, had stood around Chris
+    and looked at him with the consequential deliberation of a
+    plumber.”
+
+But Dr. Anderson was different.
+
+    “He was a little man with winking blue eyes, a flushed and
+    crumpled forehead, a little grey moustache that gave him the
+    profile of an amiable cat and a lively taste in spotted ties,
+    and he lacked that appetiteless look which is affected by
+    distinguished practitioners.”
+
+[Illustration: REBECCA WEST] Photograph by _Yevonde, London._
+
+Dr. Anderson explains to the family that Christopher's amnesia is the
+manifestation of a suppressed wish and that his unconscious self
+is refusing to let him resume his relations with his normal life.
+He forgot his life with his wife because he was discontented, and
+there was no justification for it for “Kitty was the falsest thing
+on earth, in tune with every kind of falsity.” The doctor proposes
+psychoanalysis, but Margaret says she knows a memory so strong that it
+will recall everything else, in spite of his discontent, the memory of
+the boy, his only child who had died five years before. Dr. Anderson
+urges her to take Christopher something the boy had worn, some toy they
+used to play with. So she takes a jersey and ball and meets Chris in
+the garden where there is only a column of birds swimming across the
+lake of green light that lays before the sunset, and as Chris gazes
+at Margaret mothering them in her arms the scales fall from his eyes
+and he makes obeisance to convention and bids his creative libido _au
+revoir_.
+
+Jenny is witness of the transformation and when Kitty asks “How does he
+look?” she answers, though her tongue cleaves to the roof of her mouth,
+“Every inch a soldier.”
+
+When Miss West next essayed fiction in “The Judge” it was the
+diagnosis of the creative urge that was her theme. It is one of
+Freud's contentions that the male child, before it hears the voice
+of conscience and the admonition of convention, has carnal yearnings
+for the mother, the female child for the father. With the advent of
+sense, with the development of individuality, with the recognition of
+obligation to others, and particularly with the acquisition of the
+sense of morality, these are replaced with what are called normal
+desires. In some instances the transformation does not take place. The
+original trend remains, and it is spoken of as an infantile fixation.
+Its juvenile and adult display is called sin ethically and crime
+socially.
+
+The wages of sin still is death, according to Miss West's portrayal,
+but it is not called sin. It is merely behaviourism interpreted in the
+light of the New Psychology.
+
+“Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of
+the father” is her thesis. As a work of art “The Judge” has elicited
+much praise. As a human document, a mirror held up to actual life, a
+statement of the accepted facts of heredity and of behaviour, and of
+the dominancy and display of passion, lust, jealousy, anger, revenge, I
+doubt that it merits unqualified approbation.
+
+Marion Yaverland, daughter of a Kentish father and a French mother,
+had yielded without compunction to the wooing of the local squire and
+had borne a child, Richard, around whose development, personality, and
+loving the story is built.
+
+    “Vitality itself had been kneaded into his flesh by his parents'
+    passion. He had been begotten when beauty, like a strong
+    goddess, pressed together the bodies of his father and mother,
+    hence beauty would disclose more of her works to him than to
+    other sons of men with whose begetting she was not concerned.”
+
+But the goddess did not give him straight genesic endowment, so he
+was not able to keep filial love and carnal love in their proper
+channels. And from this flowed all the tragedy. His mother realised his
+infirmity, though she didn't look upon it as an infirmity, from the
+earliest days; and, unfortunately, she did not attempt to eradicate
+it--if it is ever eradicable.
+
+Squire Harry behaved badly to Marion, save financially, and public
+opinion backed up by a stoning in the streets (a real Old Testament
+touch) by a moron and his more youthful companions, made her accept an
+offer of marriage from the squire's butler, a loathsome creature called
+Peacey. In proposing marriage and promising immunity to its obligations
+he said:
+
+    “Marion, I hope you understand what I'm asking you to do. I'm
+    asking you to marry me. But not to be my wife. I never would
+    bother you for that. I'm getting on in life, you see, so that I
+    can make the promise with some chance of keeping it.”
+
+But Peacey deceived no one save Marion. Miss West's description of
+the one visit of violence which he made to his wife, and which was
+followed in due time by Roger, whom Richard hated from birth, is a bit
+of realism that in verisimilitude has rarely been excelled. Roger was
+a pasty, snivelling, rhachitic child who developed into a high-grade
+imbecile of the hobo type, and finally managed to filter through the
+Salvation Army owing to some filter paper furnished by his mother that
+bore the legend “For the Gov^t and Comp^a of the Bank of England.”
+
+From earliest childhood Richard and his mother both realised that their
+intimacy was unnatural and unpromising for happiness. When he was two
+years old
+
+    “He used to point his fingers at her great lustrous eyes as he
+    did at flowers, and he would roll his face against the smooth
+    skin of her neck and shoulders; and when he was naked after his
+    bath he liked her to let down her hair so that it hung round him
+    like a dark, scented tent.”
+
+Poor little monster, how unfortunate that he could not then have been
+given a hormone that would extrovert his budding perversion!
+
+    “She always changed her dress for tea, and arranged her hair
+    loosely like a woman in a picture, and went out into the garden
+    to gather burning leaves and put them in vases about the room,
+    and when it fell dark she set lighted candles on the table
+    because they were kinder than the lamp to her pain-flawed
+    handsomeness and because they kept corners of dusk in which
+    these leaves glowed like fire with the kind of beauty that
+    she and Richard liked. She would arrange all this long before
+    Richard came in, and sit waiting in a browse of happiness,
+    thinking that really she had lost nothing by being cut off from
+    the love of man for this was very much better than anything she
+    could have had from Harry.”
+
+Somewhat like the way the daughter of Senator Metellus Celere, called
+by some Claudia and by others Lesbia, arranged the visits of Catullus.
+
+When Richard was sixteen he forced life's hand and leapt straight
+from boyhood into manhood by leaving school where he had shown great
+promise in science, and becoming a sailor so that he should be
+admirable to his mother. His wanderings took him to South America
+where he had great success in affairs of the heart and of the purse.
+It is with disposition of the latter that the book opens in the office
+of a lubricitous old Scotch solicitor where sits a young red-haired
+temperamental suffragette whimpering for the moon.
+
+Ellen Melville is a lovable Celt of seventeen, and her creator displays
+a comprehensive insight into her mind and emotions. She is what Rebecca
+West once was and wished to be. It is sad that the pathway of her life
+leads so early to the _Via Dura_ and that Richard Yaverland had not
+tarried in Vienna or Zurich to be psychoanalysed.
+
+Richard falls in love with her at first sight. He woos her ardently,
+though simply, and she responds like a “nice” girl, like a girl who
+feels that for the endowment of that most wondrous thing in the world,
+the cerebral cortex, it is vouchsafed her to exercise restraints and
+make inhibitions which insects and animals cannot. In the highest sense
+she is rational and instinctive.
+
+Ellen goes south to visit her future mother-in-law and a few days later
+Richard joins them. Roger meanwhile has “found Jesus,” and Poppy, a
+Salvation Army lassie, one stage removed from “Sin.” While knocking
+at Marion's door to gain entry that they may announce their intention
+to marry, their gaze floats upward and they see Ellen being kissed by
+the man to whom she will be married in three months. Roger, who is
+instinctive but not rational, puts a wrong interpretation upon it, and
+from that mal-interpretation the final tragedy flows. A few days later
+Marion realises there is no happiness for Richard and Ellen so long
+as she lives. She walks out into the marshes. Roger accuses Richard
+of driving his mother to it “because she saw that there was something
+wrong between you two.” He elaborates the accusation, and Richard
+drives a bread-knife into Roger's heart.
+
+Richard knows his doom is sealed. So he invites Ellen to share a
+cattlemen's hut with him on the farther side of the creek where his
+mother had drowned herself, until the people come to take him--and to
+share it comprehensively.
+
+    “Her love had not been able to reach Richard across the dark
+    waters of his mother's love and how like a doom that love had
+    lain on him. Since life was like this she would not do what
+    Richard asked.”
+
+But she does.
+
+The mode in which “The Judge” is cast is noteworthy because of its
+novelty and of the success attending it. Here is no sequential
+narrative, no time-table of events in the order in which they happened.
+The contact of Richard and Ellen is set forth in a straightforward
+way, but the main thesis of the book, the Laocoon grip of mother-love
+on Richard is conveyed indirectly, surreptitiously, atmospherically
+rather than verbally. Ellen, though she is quite normal, senses it at
+once when she meets Marion, and the writer approximates perfection of
+her art most closely in narrations of the first interviews of these two
+women, who are as unlike as the Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady.
+
+While this mode may not prove an obstacle to an easy grasp of the
+novel upon first reading by writers or critics, it is doubtful whether
+the casual reader for diversion will comprehend its significance
+without special effort and perhaps several attempts at mastering the
+intricacies in the development of the story. The plan which the author
+has adopted of beginning, in direct narrative form, with the mature
+life of Richard and his love for Ellen, and then revealing through
+retrospect and suggestion the events of his early life and that of his
+mother, is a tax upon the technique of any novelist. The form has been
+used with notable success by Miss Elizabeth Robins in “Camilla.” But
+Miss West has not entirely mastered its difficulties, and her failure
+to do so seriously mars the story.
+
+Miss West's reputation for brilliancy has not suffered by “The Judge,”
+but if one were to sentence her after reading it, he would be compelled
+to say she is no novelist. If it is an index of her imaginative
+capacity, of her conception of life, of her insight into conduct,
+of her knowledge of behaviour, we must content ourselves with her
+contributions as critic and guide.
+
+The subject of her two novels is behaviourism of sexual motivation. It
+is an index of the change that has taken place in Great Britain within
+the past ten years, a change that should be acclaimed by everyone
+desirous of the complete emancipation of women.
+
+Rebecca West has leaned her ear in many a secret place where rivulets
+dance their wayward round, and beauty born of murmuring sound has
+passed into her soul, to paraphrase the words of one who, were he in
+the flesh, would likely not meet Miss West's entire approbation.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VII
+TWO LESSER LITERARY LADIES OF LONDON: STELLA BENSON AND VIRGINIA WOOLF
+
+
+Miss Stella Benson and Mrs. Virginia Woolf are young women who have
+come to the fore very rapidly. The former, who lived in this country
+for two years after the war, published in 1915, when she was barely
+out of her teens, a novel called “I Pose” which revealed an unusual
+personality with an uncommon outlook on life, and an enviable capacity
+to describe what she saw, felt, and fabricated. Until the appearance
+of her last novel it might be said that she created types which
+symbolised her ideas and attitudes and gave expression to them through
+conveniently devised situations, rather than attempting to paint models
+from life and placing them in a realistic environment.
+
+“I Pose” is a story of allegorical cast lightened with flashes of
+whimsical sprightliness. A pensive Gardener who likes to pose as
+“original,” a Suffragette who disguises romance under a mask of
+militancy, a practical girl, Courtesy, and a number of others take
+an ocean voyage and have many adventures, at the end of which the
+Suffragette and the Gardener find themselves in love, just as any other
+young people who had been dancing and playing tennis, instead of posing
+as individuals with convictions.
+
+For the setting of her two succeeding books, “This is the End,” and
+“Living Alone,” Miss Benson created a world of her own, and in a
+foreword to the latter book she says:
+
+    “This is not a real book. It does not deal with real people,
+    nor should it be read by real people. But there are in the
+    world so many real books already written for the benefit of real
+    people, and there are still so many to be written, that I cannot
+    believe that a little alien book such as this, written for the
+    magically-inclined minority, can be considered too assertive a
+    trespasser.”
+
+Her world is not the traditional fairyland of the nursery, nor are the
+supernatural endowments of some of the characters the classic equipment
+of witches and fairies, although her _dramatis personæ_ include both
+who function under the law of Magic. Rather is her dramatic machinery
+in these books a vehicle in the form of a sort of delicate symbolism
+for getting over a very sane attitude toward certain social foibles and
+trends of today. Incidentally it gives her opportunity of expressing
+this attitude in frequent witticisms and epigrammatic sayings for which
+she has a gift. In “Living Alone” social service and organised charity
+are the targets for her irony. She says,
+
+    “Perception goes out of committees. The more committees you
+    belong to, the less of ordinary life you will understand. When
+    your daily round becomes nothing more than a round of committees
+    you might as well be dead ... organizing work consists of
+    sitting in 'busses bound for remote quarters of London, and
+    ringing the bells of people who are almost always found to be
+    away for a fortnight.”
+
+So after Sarah Brown, whose work consists of
+
+    “sitting every morning in a small office, collecting evidence
+    from charitable spies about the Naughty Poor, and, after
+    wrapping the evidence in mysterious ciphers, writing it down
+    very beautifully upon little cards, so that the next spy might
+    have the benefit of all his forerunners' experience,”
+
+eats the magic sandwiches which the witch has given her for her lunch,
+the scales fall from her eyes. “I am sentimental,” she says to herself.
+
+[Illustration: STELLA BENSON]
+
+    “It is sentimental to feel personal affection for a Case, or to
+    give a child of the Naughty Poor a penny without full enquiry,
+    or to say 'a-goo' to a grey pensive baby eating dirt on the
+    pavement ... or in fact to confuse in any way the ideas of
+    charity and love.”
+
+She resigns her “job” and her place on the committees and goes to live
+in the House of Living Alone.
+
+In other words, Miss Benson gives the artist in her what is called
+“rope.” She doesn't ask herself, “Will people think I am mad, or
+infantile?” She doesn't care what “people think.” And that is an
+encouraging sign. Women writers will come to their estates more
+quickly and securely the more wholeheartedly they abandon themselves
+to portraying instincts as they experience them, behaviour as they
+observe it, motives and conduct as they sense and encounter them,
+accomplishments and aspirations as they idealise them, the ideals being
+founded, like the chances of race horses, on past performances.
+
+In her last novel, “The Poor Man,” Miss Benson's art shows tremendous
+development. This story is characterisation in the finest sense.
+Edward, the poor man, as a psychological study, is living, vivid,
+almost tragically real in the reactions which betray his inherent
+defects--a poor devil who never gets a chance. Miss Benson preaches
+no sermon, points no moral, makes no plea. She gives us a slice of
+life--and gives it relentlessly, but justly. It is the Old Testament
+justice which visits the iniquity of the father upon the third and
+fourth generations, and leaves the reader with the congenial task of
+finishing the sentence by supplying the mercy without which this old
+world could hardly totter under the weight of this Commandment. The
+story, however, makes no reference either to eugenics or to religion.
+The application is for the reader to supply--if he is so inclined.
+The author is not concerned with “science,” but with art. She does
+not bore us with a history of Edward's heredity or of his early life.
+She introduces him to us sitting in Rhoda Romero's room in San
+Francisco--an unwelcome guest--without throwing light upon his previous
+existence, except that he had been “shell-shocked” and had experienced
+three air raids in London.
+
+From his introduction we know Edward as we know an acquaintance, not
+as we know ourselves. His tragedy is his feeble mentality and still
+feebler temperament, and the heart of the tragedy is the contrast
+between his intentions and his acts. Edward always means well. He is
+not vicious; not lazy. But he is stupid. He wants to be decent; wants
+to be liked; even wants to work. He is weak, sickly, drinks too much,
+and there is nothing he knows how to do well. It is as a victim, rather
+than as an aggressive wrong-doer, that we see him secretly currying
+favour with school-boys he is supposed to be teaching, and ignoring
+their insults, selling what belongs to others, and at last robbing a
+boy of thirteen who has been left alone by his father in a hotel in
+Pekin, whence Edward has gone in headlong and blind pursuit of Emily,
+with whom he has become infatuated without even knowing her name. But
+such is the art of his delineator that one finds oneself almost pitying
+him when his infatuation climaxes in the declaration from Emily: “Can't
+you leave me alone? I can't bear you. I couldn't bear to touch you--you
+poor sickly thing.” It is on this note that the drama ends.
+
+If one were obliged to confine himself to backing one entry in the
+Fiction Sweepstakes now being run in England (entries limited to women
+above ten and under forty), he would do well to consider carefully the
+Stella Benson entry. Many would back Sheila Kaye-Smith, but the expert
+and seasoned bettor would be likely to find so many characteristics of
+the plough-horse that he would not waste his money.
+
+Had Rose Macaulay not succumbed to smartness and become enslaved by
+epigram, her chances would have been excellent. As it is, she attempts
+to carry too much weight. The committee, the literary critics, have
+done what they could to lighten it, but “Mystery at Geneva” is her
+answer.
+
+E. M. Delafield, Clemence Dane, and even G. B. Stern would be selected
+by many, no doubt. But judged from their record, not on form, they
+cannot be picked as winners.
+
+The entry that is most likely to get place, if it doesn't win, is the
+youngest daughter of the late Sir Leslie Stephen, Mrs. Virginia Woolf.
+
+“Mark on the Wall,” her most important story, deals with the flood
+of thought, conscious and unconscious, when so-called abstraction
+is facilitated by intent gazing. The hypnotist anæsthetises the
+consciousness by having the subject gaze at some bright object, she by
+gazing at a snail. The illusion facilitates thought of the place and
+of the lives that have been lived there. The richness of the thought
+stream thus induced gives full play for her facility of expression and
+capacity for pen pictures.
+
+There is in Mrs. Woolf a note of mysticism, of spirituality which
+reveals itself in a conscious or unconscious prayer for the elusive
+truth. This note of itself sets her apart from the realistic woman
+writers of today. Although often vividly realistic in her form, there
+is in her work an essence which escapes the bounds of realism. This is
+most strongly acknowledged in “Monday or Tuesday,” a volume of short
+stories and sketches. The book takes its name from a little sketch of
+three hundred and fifty words, for which the only accurate label is
+“prose poem.” It is a direct illustration of the author's meaning when
+she makes her hero say, in “The Voyage Out”:
+
+    “You ought to write music.... Music goes straight for things.
+    It says all there is to say at once. In writing it seems to me
+    there's so much scratching on the match-box.”
+
+For prose writing “Monday or Tuesday” is a triumph in the elimination
+of “scratching on the match-box.” One recognises in it the longing,
+more or less vaguely felt by all people, but inexpressible by most
+of them who are not poets, musicians, or artists in form or colour,
+for some supreme good which she calls truth. The New Psychology
+would attribute it to the unconscious and call it an ugly name. But
+Mrs. Woolf does not name it; she merely gives voice to the aspiration
+welling up from somewhere in people's deeper selves and hovering
+hauntingly, just out of range but near enough to colour the quality of
+their thoughts, even when they are occupied with the most trivial and
+commonplace business of life. They can never elude it, any more than
+they can long elude the “Hound of Heaven,” but unlike the latter it
+is not a relentless pursuer, but a lovely, tantalising wraith--always
+present but never attainable or definable.
+
+In “An Unwritten Novel,” in the same collection, Mrs. Woolf again
+reveals a power of discernment, as well as the irony which is a part of
+her large human sympathy, in the conclusion of the story, which opens
+with:
+
+    “Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make
+    one's eyes slide over the paper's edge to the poor woman's
+    face--insignificant without that look, almost a symbol of human
+    destiny with it.”
+
+During a railway journey the writer makes up a novel to fit the face
+of the old woman opposite her--a story of an old maid whom life had
+cheated, thwarted, and denied all expression of sex, and left her
+embittered, resentful, envious, and starved.
+
+    “They would say she kept her sorrow, suppressed her secret--her
+    sex, they'd say--the scientific people. But what flummery to
+    saddle her with sex!”
+
+When she reaches her destination the old woman is met by her son--and
+the “story” remains unwritten.
+
+In “A Society,” Mrs. Woolf shies a few brick-bats--and well-aimed
+ones--at modern feminism. Her gesture is, however, more one of the
+irresistible impulse of the humourist to enjoy herself than any
+intention to do serious violence.
+
+The members of the Society, who are a number of young girls bent upon
+self-education and believing that the object of life is to produce
+good people and good books, find themselves as a result of their
+investigations forced to acknowledge that if they hadn't learned to
+read they might still have been bearing children in ignorance, and that
+was the happiest life after all. By their learning they have sacrificed
+both their happiness and their ability to produce good people, and they
+are confronted, moreover, with the awful thought that if men continue
+to acquire knowledge they will lose their ability to produce good books.
+
+    “Unless we provide them with some innocent occupation we shall
+    get neither good people nor good books; we shall perish beneath
+    the fruits of their unbridled activity; and not a human being
+    will survive to know that there once was Shakespeare.”
+
+The Society disbands with the conclusion that when a little girl has
+learned how to read “there's only one thing you can teach her to
+believe in--and that is in herself.”
+
+“Kew Gardens” is as vivid a picture as if it had been painted in
+colour, of the public gardens on a hot summer day, with their
+procession of varied humanity, old, young, and in the flush of life,
+each flashing for a moment with all of its own intense personality,
+like a figure in a cinema, before the reader, and then passing into
+the shadow as vague as the breath of the flowers, the buzzing of the
+dragon-fly, or the memories which for a moment the garden had invoked.
+
+The two novels, “The Voyage Out,” published in 1915, and “Night and
+Day,” in 1919, are love stories in which, through the efforts of the
+lovers to find and express themselves, the author reveals her own ideas
+of life. Her machinery is largely that of dialogue between the lovers,
+and her chief actors are normal young men and women, wholesome in their
+outlook, as well as frank in their expression of their problems, which
+revolve largely around matrimony. The result is that while the novels
+are introspective in a way, as well as daring in their analysis of
+the author's psychology, they are free from the morbidness of many of
+the introspective books of today. “The Voyage Out” is the expression
+of healthy, normal youth reverently but straightforwardly seeking in
+marriage the deeper values that underlie its superficialities and
+justify the quality of its idealism.
+
+In no more striking and creditable way have the women of Britain
+demonstrated the legitimacy of “Rights” than by their fiction of the
+past few years.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VIII
+          THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DIARIST: W. N. P. BARBELLION
+
+    “The life of the soul is different. There is nothing more
+    changing, more varied, more restless ... to describe the
+    incidents of one hour would require eternity.”--_Journal of
+    Eugénie de Guérin._
+
+
+Bruce Frederick Cummings, an English entomologist and assistant at the
+Natural History Museum, South Kensington, developed in early life an
+infectious disease of the central nervous system called disseminated
+sclerosis, which riddles the brain and spinal cord with little islets
+of tissue resembling scars, and died of it October 22, 1919, in the
+thirtieth year of his age. Six months before his death he published
+a book entitled “The Journal of a Disappointed Man,” under the pen
+name of W. N. P. Barbellion. It is not destined to live as long as
+Pepys' “Diary” or Amiel's “Journal,” but it may outlive “The Journal
+of Marie Bashkirtseff”--the three great diaries of the past century.
+“The Journal of a Disappointed Man,” in conjunction with another called
+“A Last Diary,” published after his death, may be looked upon as the
+revelation of a conscious mind, as complete as the conscious mind can
+make it. These books afford us opportunity to study the psychology
+of one variety of self-revelation, just as the books of James Joyce
+and Dorothy Richardson permit study of the subconscious mind, and
+more specifically undirected or wishful thinking, technically called
+autistic.
+
+While absolute classification of people is always inaccurate and
+misleading, still for the convenience of this study, in order to bring
+into high relief the features which distinguish Barbellion's diaries
+from the other three great self-revelations of the conscious mind,
+the authors mentioned may be said to typify four distinct classes of
+diarists. The immortal Pepys may be dismissed with the words: pedant,
+philosopher, humourist. Amiel may be considered the mystic poet, with
+emphasis upon the spiritual side of his nature; Marie Bashkirtseff, the
+emotional artist whose talent was interpretive rather than creative;
+and Barbellion, the man of science, direct, forceful, effective on
+his objective side, but subjectively morbid and egocentric, unable to
+estimate correctly his own limitations or to direct his emotions into
+channels which would have made for happy living or sane thinking.
+
+Cummings began to keep a diary when he was thirteen years old, and
+after seventeen years he had accumulated twenty post-quarto volumes
+of manuscript. Two years before his death he made an entry “Am busy
+rewriting, editing and bowdlerising my Journal for publication against
+the time when I shall have gone the way of all flesh. Reading it
+through again, I see what a remarkable book I have written.” In it and
+in another small volume published posthumously, called “The Joy of
+Life,” he said,
+
+    “You will find much of Bruce Frederick Cummings as he appears
+    to his Maker. It is a study in the nude, with no appeal to
+    pemmicanised intellects, but there is meaty stuff in it, raw,
+    red or underdone.”
+
+The noteworthy features of his life may be stated briefly. He was the
+youngest child of a journalist known in the little town of Barnstable,
+in Devon, as a shrewd and facile man, and of a timid, pious mother
+of the lower middle class. A puny child, backward in development
+mentally and physically, solitary, sensitive, shy, secretive, and
+self-conscious, he displayed an uncommon interest in nature, birds,
+fishes, insects, and all wild creatures. When he was fourteen he
+determined to become a naturalist, but his father's illness obliged him
+to contribute to the family maintenance. At sixteen he wrote,
+
+    “Signed my death warrant, i.e. my articles apprenticing me to
+    journalism for five years. By Jove, I shall work frantically
+    during these years so as to be ready at the end of them to take
+    up a natural history appointment.”
+
+And work he did, for in little more than a year he was offered a small
+appointment at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, which he had to refuse
+because of his father's complete incapacity. But after another year of
+newspaper work and intensive study at night and at odd moments, he won
+an appointment in competitive examination to the staff of the Natural
+History Museum at South Kensington. There he remained six years, until
+July, 1917, when he was compelled to resign owing to the progress
+of his disease. In September, 1915, he married, after he had been
+declared unfit for military duty and after the secret of his obscure
+and baffling disease, and its outcome, had been revealed to some of his
+family and to his fiancée.
+
+Two months after he married, despite his infirm state, he offered his
+services to his King and Country, having previously obtained from his
+own physician a letter addressed to the Medical Officer Examining
+Recruits. The recruiting officer promptly rejected him, so the letter
+was not presented. On his way home Barbellion opened it and read his
+death sentence. “On the whole, I am amazed at the calm way in which I
+take this news.” At first he thought he would read up his disease in
+some System of Medicine, but the next day he wrote,
+
+    “I have decided never to find out what it is. I shall find out
+    in good time by the course of events. A few years ago the news
+    would have scared me. But not so now. It only interests me. I
+    have been happy, merry, quite high spirited today.”
+
+But this was soon followed by depression and despair, as the progress
+of the disease was attested by the occurrence of rapidly increasing
+incapacity to get about, to use his arm, and to see. At that time he
+was ignorant of the fact that his wife had been informed of the nature
+and outcome of his disease previous to their marriage, and he was very
+much concerned lest she should find out. Within a year he discovered
+that she had known from the beginning and he was “overwhelmed with
+feelings of shame and self-contempt and sorrow for her.”
+
+The last months of his life were made as comfortable as possible by
+funds subscribed by a few literary men who had become interested in
+him from the publication of some chapters of the book in the London
+_Mercury_, and by the royalties from the publishers of the “Journal” in
+book form.
+
+Barbellion's appearance, as described by his brother A. J., in the
+Preface to “The Last Diary,” was striking. He was more than six feet
+tall, thin as a rake, and looked like a typical consumptive. His head
+was large and crowned with thick brown hair which fell carelessly about
+his brow; his face pale and sharply pointed; eyes deepset, lustrous and
+wide apart; nose slightly irregular; mouth large and firm; and chin
+like a rock. “Few people, except my barber, know how amourous I am.
+He has to shave my sinuous lips.” He had an indescribable vividness
+of expression, great play of features, and a musical voice. His hands
+were strong and sensitive and he had a characteristic habit of beating
+the air with them in emphasising an argument. He moved and walked
+languidly, like a tired man, and stooped slightly, which gave him an
+attitude of studiousness.
+
+Barbellion's fame depends entirely upon “The Journal of a Disappointed
+Man.” “Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains” is commonplace and
+might have been done by any one of countless writers whose years
+transcend their reputations. “The Last Diary,” on the other hand, has a
+note of superficiality which is prejudicial to permanence. It suggests
+that it was done for effect and displays studious effort to be wise and
+philosophical. Although the book contains many beautiful specimens of
+sentiment and shows that Barbellion had enhanced his literary skill
+and added to his capacity for expression and sequential statement, it
+also shows that the processes of dissolution, physical and mental, were
+going on apace.
+
+So much for the outward facts of his life. The value of the record lies
+entirely in the sincerity and completeness of the “portrait in the
+nude” which the author has painted of himself and which furnishes the
+basis for a psychological study of the original.
+
+Three characteristics make the shape and colour of this portrait.
+Whether seen in one comprehensive glance as a composite picture, or
+subjected to a searching analysis of its separate parts, these three
+facts must be reckoned with in any estimate of his life or of his
+personality as a whole; or of the smallest act, thought, or emotion
+which entered into it. The features or leading motives which shaped the
+human study that Barbellion has given us in his diaries are what he
+calls ambition to achieve fame, a passion for the study of zoology, and
+a struggle against disease.
+
+Every life which raises its possessor above the level of the clod
+may be called a battleground. The battle, in Barbellion's case a
+hard-fought one, was between ambition which inspired and actuated him
+and disease which seriously handicapped him during most of his life and
+finally caused his death--not, however, until after the victory had
+been won, since the odds were between fame and sickness, not between
+life and death. Judged, therefore, solely by the strength of the forces
+involved in the conflict and not at all by the value of the stakes,
+Barbellion's struggle and early death may claim a little of the glory
+suggested in the lines “Oft near the sunset are great battles won.”
+
+That the second motive mentioned, the love of zoology, entered into the
+conflict only as an ally, and not even an essential one, of the desire
+to become famous, has a special psychological interest. Unquestionable
+and persistent as was this passion for the science, it did not seem
+to form the basis for his ambition nor even to be inextricably bound
+up with it, as is usually the case with persons possessed of one
+strongly marked talent or taste combined with a dominant ambition. When
+nature has favoured an individual with a gift in the way of desire
+and ability to do one thing particularly well he usually concentrates
+on it. In fact the desire to achieve success through the talent, and
+the impulse for self-expression along the line of the talent, are so
+closely related that it is impossible to disentangle them and to say
+where the impulse for self-expression ends and the ambition to succeed
+begins. Barbellion's diaries, however, present no such difficulty.
+Conscious from early childhood of a great attraction to zoology for
+the sheer love of the science, his early life-plan naturally took the
+form of a career as a zoologist. Thwarted by circumstances, he still
+held to the plan with an admirable persistence and a measure of success
+which, considering his handicaps in the way of illness and lack of
+opportunities for study and training, would have been satisfactory to a
+less ambitious man. Such success would not, however, have given him the
+fame which it was the ruling motive of his life to achieve. Whether or
+not it was the recognition of this that determined the direction of his
+ambition it is impossible to say. The fact that stands out with great
+clearness, after reading his diaries, is that the consuming passion of
+his life was the desire for fame for its own sake, to be known of men,
+and to stand out from the mass of humanity as a man of distinction,
+a successful man. This seemed to be the full measure of Barbellion's
+ambition, and in this he succeeded, since the diaries have made him
+famous as the author of a record which shows him to the world as the
+winner of a losing game with life, though not as a scientist or as a
+writer of distinction.
+
+A closer analysis of the particular qualities of Barbellion's ambition
+is the first step in an estimate of his personality.
+
+The urge to keep a journal may come from within or from without the
+individual. Barbellion does not tell us which it was with him. In late
+childhood he began making frequent records of his doings, which were
+those of a lonely romantic child interested in natural history. During
+the first three years there is no record of thought, but beginning with
+his sixteenth year it makes its appearance, and there is ample evidence
+that he was not only mature beyond his years, but ambitious as well. He
+says of himself,
+
+    “I was ambitious before I was breeched. I can remember wondering
+    as a child if I were a young Macaulay or Ruskin and secretly
+    deciding that I was. My infant mind even was bitter with those
+    who insisted on regarding me as a normal child and not as a
+    prodigy. Since then I have struggled with this canker for many a
+    day, and as success fails to arrive it becomes more gnawing.”
+
+That the “canker” was eating its way into his soul as life progressed
+and success seemed no nearer from day to day is evidenced by the
+statements:
+
+    “I owe neither a knee nor a bare grammercy to any man. All that
+    I did I did by my own initiative, save one exception. R. taught
+    me to love music.”
+
+    “I am daily facing the fact that my ambitions have overtaxed my
+    abilities and health. For years my whole existence has rested on
+    a false estimate of my own value, and my life has been revolving
+    around a foolish self-deception. And I know myself as I am at
+    last and I am not at all enamoured.”
+
+As the “Journal” progresses it becomes evident that the author's hopes
+for the realisation of his ambition rested entirely on its publication,
+and it is in the expressions concerning his hopes and fears in
+connection with the book that the struggle of the soul in its death
+grip with advancing disease and threatening failure is most poignantly
+expressed. Three years before he died he said,
+
+    “It is the torture of Tantalus to be so uncertain. I should be
+    relieved to know even the worst. I would almost gladly burn
+    my MSS. in the pleasure of having my curiosity satisfied. I
+    go from the nadir of disappointment to the zenith of hope and
+    back several times a week, and all the time I am additionally
+    harassed by the perfect consciousness that it is all petty and
+    pusillanimous to desire to be known and appreciated, that my
+    ambition is a morbid diathesis of the mind. I am not such a fool
+    either as not to see that there is but little satisfaction in
+    posthumous fame, and I am not such a fool as not to realise that
+    all fame is fleeting, and that the whole world itself is passing
+    away.”
+
+A few months later, after a reference to his infant daughter, he said,
+
+    “If only I could rest assured that after I am dead these
+    Journals will be as tenderly cared for--as tenderly as this
+    blessed infant! It would be cruel if even after I have paid
+    the last penalty, my efforts and sufferings should continue to
+    remain unknown or disregarded. What would I give to know the
+    effect I shall produce when published! I am tortured by two
+    doubts--whether these MSS. (the labour and hope of many years)
+    will survive accidental loss and whether they really are of
+    value. I have no faith in either.”
+
+Again he wrote:
+
+    “My Journal keeps open house to every kind of happening in
+    my soul. Provided it is a veritable autochthon--I don't care
+    how much of a taterdemalion or how ugly or repulsive--I take
+    him in and--I fear sponge him down with excuses to make him
+    more creditable in other's eyes. You may say why trouble
+    whether you do or whether you don't tell us all the beastly
+    little subterranean atrocities that go on in your mind. Any
+    eminently 'right-minded' _Times_ or _Spectator_ reader will
+    ask: 'Who in Faith's name is interested in your retrospective
+    muck-rakings--in fact, who the Devil are you?' To myself, a
+    person of vast importance and vast interest, I reply--as are
+    other men if I could but understand them as well. And in the
+    firm belief that whatever is inexorably true however unpleasant
+    and discreditable (in fact true things can never lack a
+    certain dignity), I would have you know Mr. _Times-_ and Mr.
+    _Spectator-_ reader that actual crimes have many a time been
+    enacted in the secrecy of my own heart and the only difference
+    between me and an habitual criminal is that the habitual
+    criminal has the courage and the nerve and I have not....”
+
+It is more than probable that the hope of getting the “Journal”
+published was suggested by acquaintance with “The Journal of
+Marie Bashkirtseff” when Barbellion was twenty-four years old. On
+encountering a quotation from her in a book on Strindberg at that time,
+he noted,
+
+    “It would be difficult in all the world's history to discover
+    any two persons with temperaments so alike. She is the very spit
+    of me. We are identical. Oh, Marie Bashkirtseff, how we should
+    have hated one another! She feels as I feel. We are of the
+    same self-absorption, the same vanity and corroding ambition.
+    She is impressionable, volatile, passionate--ill, so am I. Her
+    Journal is my Journal. She has written down all my thoughts
+    and forestalled me. Is there anything in the transmigration of
+    souls? She died in 1886. I was born in 1889.”
+
+Barbellion's own estimate of what he calls his ambition is well summed
+up in the following words:
+
+    “My life appears to have been a titanic struggle between
+    consuming ambition and adverse fortune. Behold a penniless youth
+    thirsting for knowledge introduced into the world out of sheer
+    devilment, with a towering ambition, but cursed with ill health
+    and a two-fold nature, pleasure loving as well as labour loving.”
+
+
+It would be interesting to find out in what way he was pleasure loving.
+As far as I can see from reading the “Journal,” the only pleasure that
+he sought was the occasional pleasure of contemplating nature, which
+was really a part of his work, and from hearing music.
+
+    “You can search all history and fiction for an ambition more
+    powerful than mine and not find it. No, not Napoleon, nor
+    Wilhelm II, nor Keats. No, I am not proud of it, not at all. The
+    wonder is that I remain sane, the possessed of such a demon.”
+
+In the same way it is difficult to find evidence of this colossal
+ambition, save his statement of it. In reality he was ambitious for one
+thing: call it favour, applause, publicity, notoriety, or what not. He
+wanted to do something in literature which would focus the vision of
+the world upon him, and to accomplish this he devoted an incredible
+energy and labour to the production of a diary which was the record of
+aggressive, directed, logical thinking. He may have had capacity for
+creative literature, or he may have developed such capacity, but he did
+not display it. His career can be compared with no other because of
+the immeasurable handicap of his illness. But if it were not for this
+illness, it would be interesting to compare him with Huysmans, who,
+working as a clerk in a Governmental office in Paris, produced a series
+of books which gave him a commanding and perhaps a permanent place in
+French literature.
+
+Unquestionably some resemblance exists between the passion for fame,
+or whatever it may be called, that Barbellion and Marie Bashkirtseff
+had in common, although in the case of the latter its relation to a
+definite talent was more evident. But that in either of the two cases
+it partook in any great measure of the nature of what is generally
+understood as ambition--the ambition, for instance, of Napoleon,
+Wilhelm II, or Keats to whom Barbellion compares himself--is not
+proved by either of their self-revelations. There is a quality well
+known to psychologists that may be described as the passion to attract
+attention, which is a distinguishing attribute of the neurotic
+temperament. It sometimes acts as an urge to the expression of a talent
+in case the possessor of the temperament is also the possessor of a
+talent--which is by no means infrequent and which was undoubtedly
+true in the case of Marie Bashkirtseff. It, however, exists in
+innumerable other cases where the neurotic has been gifted by nature
+with no special talent or ability for expression of any kind. The mere
+reiteration, therefore, of a passion to focus the attention of the
+world upon himself, while it would invite questions as to his balance
+or the lack of it, affords no proof of mental qualities upon which the
+hope of achieving such distinction might reasonably be placed.
+
+The next question which arises in relation to Barbellion's ambition
+or desire for distinction is: What were his intellectual possessions?
+And the first step in answering this question is the examination of
+his interests. By a man's admirations, as by his friends, you may know
+him. He identified himself, in a measure, with Keats; he had great
+admiration for Sir Thomas Browne; James Joyce was a writer after his
+own heart; and he admired Dostoievsky and Francis Thompson.
+
+Barbellion's objective intellect stands out rather clearly in his
+record, particularly as the evidence is written more forcibly between
+the lines than in his statements. Deduction, induction, and analysis
+are rather high. In fact, he possessed wisdom, ingenuity, caution, and
+perception; that is, the elements of objective thought. He showed no
+great ability to estimate the nature and bearing of his surroundings
+or to devise ways of dealing with them so as to turn them to his
+advantage, but had it not been for illness he might have done so. As to
+the actual results of his intellectual efforts, naturalists say he made
+some important contributions to their science; and, although these were
+trifling, they were in the right direction. His working life really
+ended at twenty-five, an age at which the working life of most men of
+science has scarcely begun.
+
+It is almost entirely upon his subjective thought, that is upon his
+estimate of himself, that the value of his record rests. Everyone
+in his progress through life and his intercourse with his fellows
+measures himself more or less deliberately against, and estimates his
+own capacity relatively to, theirs, not only with respect to wisdom,
+cleverness, or caution, but with respect to special accomplishments.
+Besides this relative estimate, he learns to form an absolute estimate
+of his intellectual powers. He knows what he can understand at once,
+what he has to study hard before he can understand, and what is wholly
+beyond his comprehension. Some people habitually underestimate their
+ability; others, the majority, overestimate it. It is very difficult
+to say, from the literary remains of Barbellion, whether he was of the
+latter class or not. He had literary taste, a prodigious appetite,
+and he displayed considerable capacity for assimilation. It is
+quite possible that, as the result of these, he might have revealed
+constructive imagination; but his life was very brief, it was riddled
+with illness, and he matured slowly.
+
+Barbellion's estimate of himself may be fairly judged by the epitome
+of his whole life which he made in an entry of August 1, 1917, in
+connection with his retirement from the staff of the British Museum:
+
+    “I was the ablest junior on the staff and one of the ablest
+    zoologists in the place, but my ability was always muffled by
+    the inferior work given me to do. My last memoir was the best
+    of its kind in treatment, method and technique--not the most
+    important--that ever was issued from the institution. It was
+    trivial because the work given me was always trivial, the idea
+    being that as I had enjoyed no academic career I was unsuited
+    to fill other posts then vacant--two requiring laboratory
+    training--which were afterwards filled by men of less powers
+    than my own. There was also poor equipment for work and I had
+    to struggle for success against great odds. In time I should
+    have revolutionised the study of Systematic Zoology, and the
+    anonymous paper I wrote in conjunction with R. in the _American
+    Naturalist_ was a rare _jeu d'esprit_, and my most important
+    scientific work. In the literary world I fared no better. I
+    first published an article at fifteen, over my father's name. My
+    next story was unexpectedly printed in the _Academy_ at the age
+    of nineteen. The American _Forum_ published an article, but for
+    years I received back rejected manuscript from every conceivable
+    kind of publication from _Punch_ to the _Hibbert Journal_.
+    Recently, there has been evidence of a more benevolent attitude
+    towards me on the part of London editors. A certain magnificent
+    quarterly has published one or two of my essays.... I fear,
+    however, the flood-tide has come too late.”
+
+In regard to one of the essays, he noted that it called forth
+flattering comment in _Public Opinion_, but that it did not impress
+anybody else, even E., his wife, who did not read the critique,
+although she read twice a pleasant paragraph in the press noticing some
+drawings of a friend.
+
+It was one of Barbellion's persecutory ideas that he was not
+appreciated at his full value.
+
+    “Ever since I came into the world I have felt an alien in this
+    life, a refugee by reason of some prenatal extradiction. I
+    always felt alien to my father and mother. I was different from
+    them. I knew and was conscious of the detachment. I admired
+    my father's courage and happiness of soul, but we were very
+    far from one another. I loved my mother, but we had little in
+    common.”
+
+When his mother warned him that he was in danger of being friendless
+all his life because of his preference for acerbities to amenities he
+replied, “I don't want people to like me. I shan't like them. Theirs
+will be the greater loss.”
+
+His family feeling seems to have been concentrated largely on his
+brother, A. J., who prefixed a brief account of his life and character
+to “The Last Diary.”
+
+Of him Barbellion said,
+
+    “He is a most delightful creature and I love him more than
+    anyone else in the wide world. There is an almost feminine
+    tenderness in my love.”
+
+There were times when, despite his habitual self-appreciation,
+Barbellion sold his stock fairly low, and especially after he had been
+in London for two or three years and realised what little progress
+he was making in the world and how small the orbit of his activity
+remained.
+
+    “I have more than a suspicion that I am one of those who grow
+    sometimes out of a brilliant boy into a very commonplace man.”
+
+In speaking of his personal appearance he said, “I am not handsome, but
+I look interesting, I hope distinguished”; and at another time,
+
+    “If sometimes you saw me in my room by myself, you would say
+    that I was a ridiculous coxcomb. For I walk about, look out of
+    the window, then at the mirror--turning my head sideways perhaps
+    so as to see it in profile. Or I gaze down into my eyes--my eyes
+    always impress me--and wonder what effect I produce upon others.
+    This, I believe, is not so much vanity as curiosity.”
+
+Naturally Barbellion's estimate of himself and of his potentialities
+varied from time to time, but he never rated his abilities lower than
+the sum total of his accomplishments would seem to justify, save in
+hours of extreme depression and discouragement. When twenty-one years
+of age he wrote,
+
+    “Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the
+    mystery and tears of things so that the commonest object, the
+    most familiar face--even my own--becomes ghostly, unreal,
+    enigmatic. I get into an attitude of almost total scepticism,
+    nescience, solipsism even, in a world of dumb, sphinx-like
+    things that cannot explain themselves. The discovery of how I am
+    situated--a sentient being on a globe in space overshadows me. I
+    wish I were just nothing.”
+
+A more hopeful note, and one that is of interest in that it foreshadows
+the plan of publication of the diary, is sounded after he had been
+working in the museum for less than a year.
+
+    “My own life as it unrolls itself day by day is a source of
+    constant amazement, delight and pain. I can think of no more
+    interesting volume than a distilled, intimate, psychological
+    history of my own life. I want a perfect comprehension at
+    least of myself. We are all such egoists that a sorrow
+    or hardship--provided it is great enough--flatters our
+    self-importance.”
+
+At the age of twenty-five Barbellion had reached the depth of
+depression and discouragement.
+
+    “I have peered into every aspect of my life and achievement and
+    everything I have seen nauseates me. My life seems to have been
+    a wilderness of futile endeavour. I started wrong from the very
+    beginning. I came into the world in the wrong place and under
+    the wrong conditions. As a boy I was preternaturally absorbed in
+    myself and preternaturally discontented. I harassed myself with
+    merciless cross examinations.”
+
+A year later he checked up on such moods and said,
+
+    “My sympathy with myself is so unfailing that I don't deserve
+    anybody else's. In many respects, however, this Journal I
+    believe gives the impression that I behave myself in the public
+    gaze much worse than I actually do.”
+
+Man is invariably judged finally by his conduct. Opinion is often
+formed of him from what he says, but the last analysis is a review and
+estimate of the several activities which together constitute conduct.
+Conduct is the pursuit of ends. The conduct that is conditioned by
+taking thought does not by any means embrace all one's activities. The
+biological discoveries of the latter half of the Nineteenth Century
+showed conclusively that the ultimate end to which all life is directed
+and toward which every living being strives is the continuation of the
+race to which the individual belongs. Life becomes, therefore, a trust,
+not a gift, and the only way in which the obligation it entails can
+be discharged is by transmitting life to a new generation. Barbellion
+had bodily characteristics which permit the biologist to say that his
+gonadal redex was dominant, and throughout the diary there are frequent
+entries showing that, despite his shyness, self-consciousness, and lack
+of “Facility” (using the word in its Scottish sense), the opposite sex
+made profound appeal to him. His conduct from early youth would seem to
+indicate that he held with the Divine Poet--
+
+  “--In alte dolcezze
+  Non si puo gioir, se non amando.”
+
+But his love was evanescent and he was continually asking himself if it
+was real or but the figment of desire.
+
+    “To me woman is _the_ wonderful fact of existence. If there be
+    any next world and it be as I hope it is, a jolly gossiping
+    place with people standing around the mantelpiece and discussing
+    their earthly experiences, I shall thump my fist on the table as
+    my friends turn to me on entering and exclaim in a loud voice,
+    'Woman!'”
+
+Here and there in the “Journal” there are entries which would indicate
+that his conduct with women transgressed conventions, though perhaps in
+harmony with custom. When he was twenty-five he went to see the “Irish
+Play Boy,” and sitting in front of him was a charming little Irish
+girl, accompanied by a man whose appearance and manner were repulsive.
+He flirted with her successfully. Later, haunted with the desire to
+meet her, he sent a personal advertisement to a newspaper hoping that
+her eye would encounter it. The advertisement and the money were
+returned, as it was suspected that he was a white slave trafficker.
+His admiration of the Don Juan type of man is evidenced by an entry in
+which he referred to his friendship with a bachelor of sixty, a devotee
+of love and strong drink.
+
+    “This man is my devoted friend and truth to tell I get on with
+    him better than I do with most people. I like his gamey flavour,
+    his utter absence of self-consciousness and his doggy loyalty
+    to myself. He may be depraved in his habits, coarse in his
+    language, boorish in his manners, ludicrous in the wrongness of
+    his views, but I like him just because he is so hopeless. If he
+    only dabbled in vice, if he had pale, watery ideas about current
+    literature, if he were genteel, I should quarrel.”
+
+The entries that show Barbellion's attitude toward what may be called
+the minor activities of social life are illuminating. These are the
+latest activities to be acquired and, in a way, testify to or set forth
+the individual's development or limitations.
+
+Companionship with one's fellows is necessary to the mental health of
+man, and it is of prime necessity that he should secure their good
+opinion. The loss of esteem and the knowledge that he is reprobated and
+held in contempt and aversion causes a stress that invariably has its
+baneful effect, particularly upon a sensitive, self-conscious youth.
+
+Barbellion was the type of individual who sits in ready judgment on
+his fellows, and oftentimes his judgment was violently prejudiced. He
+had little community feeling. As a youngster he was ostracised by his
+school fellows because he was different, and he felt alien. He never
+played games with them, but went off on long solitary rambles after
+school hours. Nor did he form intimacies with his masters.
+
+    “I presented such an invertebrate, sloppy, characterless
+    exterior that no one felt curious enough to probe further into
+    my ways of life. It was the same in London. I was alien to my
+    colleagues. Among them only R. has ventured to approach my life
+    and seek a communion with me. My wife and child seem at a remote
+    distance from me.”
+
+In another connection he says,
+
+    “A day spent among my fellows goads me to a frenzy by the
+    evening. I am no longer fit for human companionship. People
+    string me up to concert pitch. I develop suspicions of one that
+    he is prying, or of another that he patronises. Others make
+    me horribly anxious to stand well in their eyes and horribly
+    curious to know what they think of me. Others I hate and loathe
+    for no particular reason. There is a man I am acquainted with
+    concerning whom I know nothing at all. I should like to smash
+    his face in. I don't know why.”
+
+Barbellion retained many infantile traits in his adult years and these
+were displayed in his attitude and conduct toward people.
+
+At twenty-six he said,
+
+    “I have grown so ridiculously hypercritical and fastidious that
+    I will refuse a man's invitation to dinner because he has watery
+    blue eyes, or hate him for a mannerism or an impediment or
+    affectation in his speech. Some poor devil who has not heard of
+    Turner or Debussy or Dostoievsky I gird at with the arrogance
+    of a knowledgeable youth of seventeen.... I suffer from such a
+    savage _amour propre_ that I fear to enter the lists with a man
+    I dislike on account of the mental anguish I should suffer if he
+    worsted me. I am therefore bottled up so tight--both my hates
+    and loves ... if only I had the moral courage to play my part in
+    life--to take the stage and be myself, to enjoy the delightful
+    sensation of making my presence felt, instead of this vapourish
+    mumming. To me self-expression is a necessity of life, and what
+    cannot be expressed one way must be expressed in another. When
+    colossal egotism is driven underground, whether by a steely
+    surface environment or an unworkable temperament or, as in my
+    case, by both, you get a truly remarkable pain--the pain one
+    might say of continuously unsuccessful attempts at parturition.”
+
+This may seem adorned and artificial, but to me it is the most
+illuminating entry in the “Journal” and reveals many of his limitations.
+
+At twenty-eight he made the entry,
+
+    “The men I meet accept me as an entomologist and _ipso facto_,
+    an enthusiast in the science. That is all they know of me, and
+    all they want to know of me, or of any man. Surely no man's
+    existence was ever quite such a duplicity as mine. I smile
+    bitterly to myself ten times a day, as I engage in all the
+    dreary technical jargon of professional talk with them. How
+    they would gossip over the facts of my life if they knew! How
+    scandalised they would be over my inner life's activities, how
+    resentful of enthusiasm other than entomological!”
+
+It would have contributed to his peace of mind had he studied more
+closely the writings of the immortal physician of Norwich, from whom he
+believed he had spiritual descent:
+
+    “No man can justly censure or condemn another; because indeed
+    no man truly knows another. This I perceive in myself; for I am
+    in the dark to all the world; and my nearest friends behold me
+    but in a cloud. Those that know me superficially think less
+    of me than I do of myself; those of my near acquaintance think
+    more; God who truly knows me knows that I am nothing. Further
+    no man can judge another, because no man knows himself; for we
+    censure others but as they disagree from that humour which we
+    fancy laudable in ourselves, and commend others but for that
+    wherein they seem to quadrate and consent with us. So that in
+    conclusion, all is but that we all condemn, self-love.”
+
+Self-love, or over-appreciation of self, was Barbellion's most serious
+stumbling-block. He never got himself in the right perspective
+with the world, and it is unlikely, even though his brief life had
+been less tragic, that he would have succeeded in doing so. He was
+temperamentally unfit.
+
+Barbellion's friends say that he was courteous and soft mannered, but
+his own estimate of capacity for display of the amenities is so at
+variance with this that we are forced to believe the manner they saw
+was veneer.
+
+The following description of Lermontov by Maurice was, he averred, an
+exact picture of himself:
+
+    “He had, except for a few intimate friends, an impossible
+    temperament; he was proud; overbearing, exasperated and
+    exasperating, filled with a savage _amour-propre_, and he took
+    a childish delight in annoying; he cultivated 'le plaisir
+    aristocratique de deplair.'... He could not bear not to make
+    himself felt and if he was unsuccessful in this by fair means he
+    resorted to unpleasant ones.”
+
+Two years later he expressed much the same opinion of his social
+characteristics when he described himself as something between
+a monkey, a chameleon, and a jellyfish and made himself out an
+intellectual bully. He was honest enough not to omit an invariable
+trait of the bully--cowardice. He says,
+
+    “The humiliating thing is that almost any strong character
+    hypnotises me into complacency, especially if he is a
+    stranger.... But by Jove, I wreak vengeance on my familiars,
+    and on those brethren even weaker than myself. They get my
+    concentrated gall, my sulphurous fulminations, and would wonder
+    to read this confession.”
+
+In order that any community may exist and thrive each individual
+must do things for the common welfare. He must regulate his activity
+so as not to impair or jeopardise the property and self-respect of
+his neighbours. He must contribute to its existence and development
+by an active execution of deeds that draw more closely the bonds of
+fellowship and knit more securely the fabric of society. He must
+exercise self-restraint in those countless ways by which the conduct
+of a person in the presence of others is shorn of indulgences which he
+allows himself when alone, and he must perform those ceremonies and
+benevolences which constitute politeness and courtesy. The unwritten
+law which compels these in order that he may have a reputation for
+“normalcy” is even more inexorable than the written law which compels
+him to pay taxes and serve on juries and does not permit him to beat
+carpets or rugs in the open. Although Barbellion seemed to be very
+keen in participating in the defence of the country against external
+foes, his diary does not reveal that he had any desire to undertake
+municipal, political, or social duties. Illness may explain this, but
+illness did not keep him from recording the desire to do so or the
+regret that he was prevented from participation in the full life.
+
+Every estimate of Barbellion must take his illness into consideration.
+Readily might he subscribe to Sir Thomas Browne's statement, “For the
+world, I count it not as an inn, but an hospital; and a place not to
+live, but to die in.” In the first entries of the diary he speaks of
+being ill, and although the disease of which he died is not habitually
+associated with mental or emotional symptoms, it is nevertheless
+so horribly incapacitating and is accompanied by such distressing
+evidences of disturbed bodily functions that it invariably tinges
+the victim's thoughts with despondency and tinctures his emotional
+activities with despair.
+
+Barbellion capitalised his infirmity to an extraordinary degree. He
+says we are all such egotists that a sorrow or hardship, provided it is
+great enough, flatters our self-importance. We feel that a calamity by
+overtaking us has distinguished us above our fellows. Were it not for
+his illness his book would never have found a publisher, for it is not
+a psychological history of his own life--which he believed would make
+such an interesting volume--but a Pepysian record of his doings, which,
+taken _in toto_, is fairly drab. It was the display of equanimity,
+resignation, and courage when confronted with the inevitable, and the
+record of his thoughts during that time that give the book its value
+and vogue. He was constantly fighting disease and cognisant of his
+waning strength.
+
+    “I do not fear ill health in itself, but I do fear its possible
+    effect on my mind and character. Already my sympathy with myself
+    is maudlin. As long as I have spirit and buoyancy I don't care
+    what happens, for I know that so long I cannot be counted a
+    failure.”
+
+This is one of the keynotes of his character--that he shall not be
+counted a failure. The other--and it is the same--keynote, is that he
+shall be a success; that he will make a noise in the world.
+
+The entries after he had got a two-months' sick leave are pathetic. He
+was on the point of proposing marriage; he had been to see a well-known
+nerve specialist who said that a positive diagnosis could not be made;
+he had set out for his holiday at the seaside and had a most depressing
+time. When he returned to London he was no better; in fact he was much
+worse, and had thoughts of suicide. After he had found out the nature
+of his disease he expressed himself with great fortitude, saying,
+
+    “My life has become entirely posthumous. I live now in the grave
+    and am busy furnishing it with posthumous joys. I accept my fate
+    with great content, my one-time restless ambition lies asleep
+    now, my one-time furious self-assertiveness is anæsthetised
+    by this great war; the war and the discovery about my health
+    together have plucked out of me that canker of self-obsession
+    ... for I am almost resigned to the issue in the knowledge that
+    some day, someone will know, perhaps somebody will understand
+    and--immortal powers!--even sympathise, 'the quick heart
+    quickening from the heart that's still.'”
+
+Barbellion's account of his experience with physicians engenders
+sadness. He went from general practitioner to chest specialists,
+digestion specialists, ophthalmologists, neurologists, without ever
+getting the smallest intimation of the nature of his illness, until it
+had progressed to an advanced stage. For a long time, indeed, it seemed
+to baffle all the physicians who were consulted. One of the distresses
+of the diary is that it testifies that doctors are far from omniscient.
+Nearly always he was advised to go and live on the prairies; and, like
+all sufferers from incurable diseases, the quacks finally got him.
+
+With the spectre of disease always lurking in the background, when
+not taking an evident part in the drama of Barbellion's life, it is
+inevitable that his attitude toward death should colour his thoughts to
+a very marked degree. As early as 1912, when he was twenty-three years
+old, he wrote, “As an egoist I hate death because I should cease to be
+I”; and the next year,
+
+    “What embitters me is the humiliation of having to die, to
+    have to be pouring out the precious juices of my life into
+    the dull earth, to be no longer conscious of what goes on, no
+    longer moving abroad upon the earth creating attractions and
+    repulsions, pouring out one's ego in a stream. To think that the
+    women I have loved will be marrying and forget, and that the men
+    I have hated will continue on their way and forget I ever hated
+    them--the ignominy of being dead!”
+
+If this latter entry had been written a few years later, one might
+suspect the influence of Rupert Brooke. As the date stands, one can
+only infer that Barbellion, in spite of his much vaunted morbidness,
+possessed a little of the zest of life which so richly flavoured the
+genius of that young poet.
+
+The entries in the “Journal” after the nature of his disease had been
+made known to him express a marked difference in his attitude toward
+death. In 1917 he said,
+
+    “I ask myself; what are my views on death, the next world, God?
+    I look into my mind and discover I am too much of a mannikin to
+    have any. As for death, I am a little bit of trembling jelly of
+    anticipation. I am prepared for anything, but I am the complete
+    agnostic; I simply don't know. To have views, faith, beliefs,
+    one needs a backbone. This great bully of a universe overwhelms
+    me. The stars make me cower. I am intimidated by the immensity
+    surrounding my own littleness. It is futile and presumptuous
+    for me to opine anything about the next world. But I _hope_
+    for something much freer and more satisfying after death, for
+    emancipation of the spirit and, above all, for the obliteration
+    of this puny self, this little, skulking, sharp-witted ferret.”
+
+This, one might almost say, shows Barbellion at his best.
+
+A power of fancy which is displayed in few other connections throughout
+the book made him say, during the same year,
+
+    “What a delightful thing the state of death would be if the dead
+    passed their time haunting the places they loved in life and
+    living over again the dear delightful past--if death were one
+    long indulgence in the pleasures of memory! If the disembodied
+    spirit forgot all the pains of its previous existence and
+    remembered only the happiness! Think of me flitting about the
+    orchards and farmyards in----birdnesting, walking along the
+    coast among the seabirds, climbing Exmoor, bathing in streams
+    and in the sea, haunting all my old loves and passions, cutting
+    open with devouring curiosity Rabbits, Pigeons, Frogs, Dogfish,
+    Amphioxus; think of me, too, at length unwillingly deflected
+    from these cherished pursuits in the raptures of first love,
+    cutting her initials on trees and fences instead of watching
+    birds, day-dreaming over _Parker and Haswell_ and then bitterly
+    reproaching myself later for much loss of precious time. How
+    happy I shall be if Death is like this; to be living over again
+    and again all my ecstasies, over first times.... My hope is that
+    I may haunt these times again, that I may haunt the places, the
+    books, the bathes, the walks, the desires, the hopes, the first
+    (and last) loves of my life all transfigured and beatified by
+    sovereign Memory.”
+
+Nothing in the diaries illustrates more strikingly Barbellion's zest
+for living than these allusions to death. In the first decade of life,
+the average person gives no thought as to whether he will live or die;
+in the second decade he rarely becomes concerned with thoughts of death
+unless they are forced upon him by painful or persistent illness. In
+the third decade, when the fear of death is very common, Barbellion
+knew that he must soon die. This flair for life, which he must have
+possessed to a marked degree, is evidenced in his love of nature and in
+his appreciation of beauty and of literature to an immensely greater
+extent than in contact with his fellows. His pleasure in æsthetics was
+real and profound, and included an appreciation of sound, colour, and
+form, both in nature and in art. His capacity for the appreciation of
+beauty of sound was greater than for the beauty of colour or form.
+Although apparently he had never studied music, he said of Beethoven's
+Fifth Symphony that it “always worked me up into an ecstasy”; and after
+listening to music by Tschaikovsky, Debussy, and others that, “I am
+chock-full of all this precious stuff and scarcely know what to write.”
+
+Whether or not his suspicion that “my growing appreciation of the
+plastic art is with me only distilled sensuality” was true, the
+appreciation was unquestionably genuine, as shown by his comment on
+Rodin's “The Prodigal Son” that it was “Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
+done in stone. It was only on my second visit that I noticed the small
+pebble in each hand--a superb touch--what a frenzy of remorse!,” and
+on “The Fallen Angel” that “The legs of the woman droop lifelessly
+backwards in an intoxicating curve. The eye caresses it--down the
+thighs and over the calves to the tips of the toes--like the hind legs
+of some beautiful dead gazelle.”
+
+Above his appreciation of æsthetic beauty, however, Barbellion
+realised, theoretically at least, that the topmost levels of pleasure
+and pain are constituted of qualities dependent upon achievements of
+the moral order--of duty well done, of happiness conferred, of services
+rendered, of benefits bestowed; or of the antithesis, of remorse for
+abstention and neglect of these or for active misdeeds. He says in “The
+Last Diary,”
+
+    “Under the lens of scientific analysis natural beauty
+    disappears. The emotion of beauty and the spirit of analysis
+    and dissection cannot exist contemporaneously. But just as
+    man's scientific analysis destroys beauty, so his synthetic
+    art creates it. And man creates beauty, nature supplying the
+    raw materials. Because there is beauty in man's own heart, he
+    naïvely assumes its possession by others and so projects it into
+    nature. But he sees in her only the truth and goodness that are
+    in himself. Natural beauty is everyone's mirror.”
+
+Barbellion's strong sense of moral values was always coloured by his
+passion--which was almost a mania for receiving appreciation and
+applause. Although he denied wanting to be liked, respected, and
+admired, yet he clamoured for it. He displayed pain upon receiving the
+marks of disapprobation, and reproof he disliked and despised.
+
+He was singularly free from spontaneous disorder of will; that is, of
+delay, vacillation, and precipitation. The only evidence he gave of
+vacillation was about his marriage, and that showed his good judgment.
+He was much more inclined to precipitation than to vacillation, and
+for a neurotic individual he was strangely without obsession--that
+is the morbid desire to do some act which the would-be performer
+discountenances and struggles not to do.
+
+With all his sensitiveness, Barbellion seemed to have been not
+without an element of cruelty. This was of the refined, indirect sort
+and was chiefly noticeable in references to his wife. While he was
+contemplating a proposal of marriage he made an entry in his diary,
+
+    “I tried my best, I have sought every loophole of escape, but
+    I am quite unable to avoid the melancholy fact that her thumbs
+    are lamentable. Poor dear, how I love her! That is why I am so
+    concerned about her thumbs.”
+
+In speaking of his fiancée's letters, he once wrote,
+
+    “These letters chilled me. In reply I wrote with cold steel
+    short, lifeless, formal notes, for I felt genuinely aggrieved
+    that she should care so little how she wrote to me or how she
+    expressed her love. I became ironical with myself over the
+    prospect of marrying a girl who appeared so little to appreciate
+    my education and mental habits.”
+
+Two years later he added to this entry “What a popinjay!” But then
+two years later he was a confirmed invalid and she was making great
+sacrifice to take care of him.
+
+In another place he taunted her, after admitting her letters
+disappointed him with their coldness, and added, “Write as you would
+speak. You know I am not one to carp about a spelling mistake”; and at
+another time he recorded,
+
+    “My life here has quite changed its orientation. I am no longer
+    an intellectual snob. If I were E. and I would have parted ere
+    now. I never like to take her to the British Museum because
+    there all the values are intellectual.”
+
+Of his wife the diaries give a very vague picture. Once he exclaimed,
+“To think that she of all women, with a past such as hers, should be
+swept into my vicious orbit!” but no information is given regarding
+this past. The idea of marriage was in his thoughts for several years,
+but his attitude was one of doubt and vacillation. In 1914 he wrote:
+
+    “I wish I loved more steadily. I am always sidetracking myself.
+    The title of 'husband' scares me.”
+
+When he finally recorded his marriage as having taken place at the
+Registry Office he added,
+
+    “It is impossible to set down here all the labyrinthine ambages
+    of my will and feelings in regard to this event. Such incredible
+    vacillations, doubts and fears.”
+
+“The function of the private journal is one of observation, experiment,
+analysis, contemplation; the function of the essay is to provoke
+reflection,” wrote Amiel. Barbellion's observation was of himself and
+of nature; his experiment how to adjust himself to the world; his
+analysis almost exclusively of his ego; and his contemplation the
+mystery of life and death. A “sport” in the biological sense, that
+is, differing markedly from his immediate ancestors, he fell afoul of
+infection early in life. From the beginning it scarred and debilitated
+him.
+
+He was an egotist and proud of it. He did not realise that the ego
+is a wall which limits the view rising higher with every emotional
+or intellectual growth. There is a certain degree of greatness from
+which, when a man reaches it, he can always look over the top of the
+wall of his egotism. Barbellion never reached it. He was a man above
+the ordinary, capable of originality and of learning from experience,
+clever at his profession, apt at forming general ideas, sometimes
+refined and sometimes gross; a solitary, full of contradictions, ironic
+or ingenuous by fits, tormented by sexual images and sentimental ideas,
+and possessed by the desire to become famous, but haunted by the fear
+that he would not live to see his desire accomplished.
+
+He had the misfortune to be without faith or ability to acquire it, but
+in compensation he was given to an envious degree immunity to fear, and
+he endured disease and faced death with courage and resignation. If we
+contrast his thought and conduct with that of another egotist, Robert
+Louis Stevenson, after he came to know the number of days that remained
+for him, as thought and conduct are recorded in the “Vailima Letters,”
+Barbellion suffers from the comparison, for Stevenson was devoid of
+vanity and selfishness. But the comparison would not be a just one, for
+euphoria is a feature of the disease with which Stevenson contended,
+and despair of Barbellion's. Moreover, Stevenson was a Celt and had
+a sense of humour. Everyone likes to think that his distinguishing
+characteristic is a sense of humour. Barbellion believed he possessed
+it tremendously. He may have, but his books do not reveal it.
+
+He forced himself without academic training upon a most conservative
+institution, a close corporation, archaically conventionalised, and he
+gave earnest that he could mount the ladder of preferment quickly and
+gracefully.
+
+He saw himself with the lucidity of genius, but his admirers will not
+admit that he was the man he said he was. One admirer does.
+
+Would that he had added to his litany: _Defenda me, Dios, de me!_--The
+Lord deliver me from myself. Had he done so, he would have accomplished
+to a greater degree the object of life: to be happy and to make others
+happy.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IX
+          THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DIARIST: HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
+
+    “True serenity does not consist in indifference to the phenomena
+    of life amongst which we live. It consists of judging in an
+    elevated way men and facts. True serenity does not reign
+    apart from life. It is in the land of the hurricane that it
+    is a grand virtue to know how to remain calm. Possibly he who
+    can accomplish this will succeed in avoiding its perils, or
+    surmounting its consequences. Perhaps it is better to lose
+    one's foothold in the waves than it is to prosper in a solitude
+    without echo. Only solitude that has been wrought from the
+    tumult is precious.”--GEORGES DUHAMEL.
+
+
+No brief statement ever made applies more fittingly to Henri-Frédéric
+Amiel--more widely known now, one hundred years after his birth, than
+during his lifetime--than these words of one of the most promising
+young men of letters of France.
+
+Amiel says in his “Journal Intime”:
+
+    “There remains the question whether the greatest problems which
+    have ever been guessed on earth had not better have remained
+    buried in the brain which found the key to them, and whether the
+    deepest thinkers--those whose hand has been boldest in drawing
+    aside the veil, and their eye keenest in fathoming the mystery
+    beyond it--had not better, like the prophet of Iliom, have kept
+    for Heaven, and for Heaven alone, secrets and mysteries which
+    human language cannot truly express nor human intelligence
+    conceive.”
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+    “To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed,
+    pardoned, and sustained by a supreme power, to feel himself in
+    the right road, at the point where God would have him be--in
+    order with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and
+    calm. I have not got it. All that is, seems to me arbitrary and
+    fortuitous. It may as well not be, as be. Nothing in my own
+    circumstances seems to me providential. All appears to me left
+    to my own responsibility, and it is this thought which disgusts
+    me with the government of my own life. I longed to give myself
+    up wholly to some great love, some noble end; I would willingly
+    have lived and died for the ideal--that is to say, for a holy
+    cause. But once the impossibility of this made clear to me, I
+    have never since taken a serious interest in anything, and have,
+    as it were, but amused myself with a destiny of which I was no
+    longer the dupe.”
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+    “There is a great affinity in me with the Hindoo genius--that
+    mind, vast, imaginative, loving, dreamy, and speculative, but
+    destitute of ambition, personality, and will. Pantheistic
+    disinterestedness, the effacement of the self in the great
+    whole, womanish gentleness, a horror of slaughter, antipathy
+    to action--these are all present in my nature, in the nature
+    at least which has been developed by years and circumstances.
+    Still the West has also had its part in me. What I have found
+    difficult is to keep up a prejudice in favour of any form,
+    nationality, or individuality whatever. Hence my indifference
+    to my own person, my own usefulness, interest, or opinions
+    of the moment. What does it all matter? _Omnis determinatio
+    est negatio._ Grief localises us, love particularises us, but
+    thought delivers us from personality.... To be a man is a poor
+    thing, to be a man is well; to be _the_ man--man in essence and
+    in principle--that alone is to be desired.” (Written at the age
+    of fifty-four.)
+
+The “Journal Intime,” upon which alone Amiel's fame rests, is studded
+with such expressions, all of which go to prove that he was handicapped
+with an inability to participate in life. One may call it aboulia,
+or lack of will power; but it was not lack of will power. That the
+intellect which could produce such work was not directed into some
+practical channel during a long and healthy life naturally arouses a
+question; and this question has been answered by Amiel's admirers and
+his critics in various ways. The only conclusion, however, to which
+an unbiassed examination of his life and of his book can lead is the
+simple one that Amiel was born that way, just as some people are
+born Albinos, or, to put it in other words, that he was temperamentally
+unfit for practical life.
+
+[Illustration: HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL]
+
+Henri-Frédéric Amiel was born in Geneva September 27, 1821, and died
+there March 11, 1881. His ancestors were Huguenots who sought refuge in
+Switzerland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. There is no
+record that any of them achieved greatness or had greatness thrust upon
+them. Very little has been written of his parents, who died when he
+was twelve years old, or of his uncle and aunt, in whose house he was
+brought up apart from his two sisters. All those who have written about
+Amiel himself are singularly silent about his boyhood, so that we know
+practically nothing of the formative years of his life save that he was
+a sensitive, impressionable boy, more delicate than robust, disposed to
+melancholy, and with a deep interest in religious problems. In school
+and college he was studious but not brilliant; he had no interest in
+games or sports and made few intimacies, and these with men older
+than himself. When he was nineteen he came under the influence of a
+Genevan philologist and man of letters, Adolphe Picquet, whose lectures
+answered many a positive question and satisfied many a vague aspiration
+of this youth already in the meshes of mysticism. They exercised a
+decisive influence over his thought, filled him with fresh intuitions,
+and brought near to him the horizons of his dreams.
+
+When he was twenty he went to Italy and stayed more than a year, and
+while there he wrote several articles on Christian Art, and a criticism
+of a book by M. Rio. The next four years he spent in Germany, where
+he studied philosophy, philology, mythology, and history. After this
+he travelled about the university cities of Central Europe for two
+years, principally Heidelberg, Munich, and Vienna; and in 1849, when
+he was twenty-eight years old, he returned to Geneva and secured the
+appointment of Professor of Moral Philosophy in the Academy there.
+The appointment was made by the Democratic Party, which had just
+then come into control of the Government. The Aristocratic Party,
+which had had things their own way since the days following the
+restoration of Geneva's independence in 1814, would have nothing to do
+with intellectual upstarts, puppets of the Radical Party, so Amiel,
+by nature and conviction a conservative, found himself in the right
+pew, but the wrong church; and many of his friends thought that the
+discouragement which was manifest in his writings and in his conduct
+may, in a measure at least, have been due to the conflict between his
+discomfiture and his duty.
+
+He had few friends, but these he impressed enormously by his learning
+and his knowledge. He made no particular reputation as a professor
+or as a poet, and had it not been for the “Journal,” he would never
+have been heard of save by his friends and pupils. It is now forty
+years since the first volume of the book was published at Geneva. It
+had been put together from the thousands of sheets of diary which
+had come into the hands of his literary heirs. The Preface to the
+volume announced that this “Journal” was made up of his psychological
+observations and impressions produced on him by books. It was the
+confidant of his private and intimate thoughts; a means whereby
+the thinker became conscious of his own inner life; a safe shelter
+wherein his questionings of fate and future, the voice of grief, of
+self-examination and confession, the soul's cry for inward peace might
+make themselves freely heard.
+
+It made a great noise in the world and the reverberations of it will
+not cease.
+
+Some consider that the “Journal Intime” occupies a unique place in
+literature, not because it is a diary of introspection, but because
+of the tragedy which attended its production. This is the height of
+absurdity. There was no tragedy about its production. Amiel lived an
+unhealthy life, thwarted nature's laws, and nature exacted the penalty.
+N. J. Symons, in an article in the _Queen's Quarterly_, says, “To
+be gifted with the qualities of genius, yet to be condemned by some
+obscure psychosis to perpetual sterility and failure; to live and
+die in the despairing recognition of this fact; and finally to win
+posthumous fame by the analysis and confession of one's failure is one
+of the most puzzling and pathetic of life's anomalies.” It would be if
+it were true. But what were the qualities of genius that Amiel had? And
+how did he display the obscure psychosis? He discharged the duties of
+a professor from the time he was twenty-eight until he was sixty. He
+poetised pleasantly; he communed with nature and got much pleasure from
+it; and he had very definite social adaptability. His general level of
+behaviour was high. He was a diligent, methodical worker; he reacted
+in a normal way to conventional standards; he had few personal biases
+or peculiarities and none that drew particular attention to him; and
+he seemed to have adjusted himself without great difficulty to the
+incidences of life that he encountered.
+
+To say that such a man was the victim of some obscure psychosis is
+either to speak beyond the facts or to speak from the possession of
+some knowledge that is denied one familiar with his writings and what
+has been written about him.
+
+Unique the “Journal Intime” unquestionably is, in that it is the
+sincere confession of failure, both as a man and as a writer, of a
+man whose intellectual qualities justified his friends in expecting
+from him a large measure of success as both. Both admirers and critics
+agree that Amiel's failure was his refusal or his inability to act.
+This refusal to act was not the expression of some obscure psychosis,
+but was entirely consistent with his philosophy of life, which was
+arrived at through a logical process of thought. “Men's thoughts are
+made according to their nature,” says Bacon. It is to Amiel's nature,
+or temperament, or personality, that we must look for the answer to the
+question: To what can his confessed failure be charged?
+
+Any estimate of personality must weigh not only the capacity for
+dealing with thoughts, but the capacity for dealing with men and with
+things as well. Intellectual qualities are of value only in relation
+to the dynamic quality of the mind; emotional qualities must be
+measured by the reactions to the environment; and the individual, in
+the last analysis, must take his standing among his fellows upon his
+acts, not upon his thoughts. In a balanced personality act harmonises
+with thought, is conditioned and controlled by it. Purely impulsive
+action carried to the extreme means insanity, and in milder degrees
+it exhibits itself in all grades and forms of what is known as lack
+of self-control. Such action is too familiar to call for comment.
+But there is the opposite type of individual whose impulses are not
+impelling enough to lead to expression in outward form of either
+thoughts or emotions. Such thoughts and emotions are turned back
+upon themselves and, like a dammed-up stream, whirl endlessly around
+the spring, the ego, until the individual becomes predominantly
+introspective and egocentric.
+
+Amiel possessed the power of clear logical thought to a high degree,
+but he limited its expression largely to the introspective musings of
+the diary. Aside from his daily life, which was narrow but normal and
+conventional, it is to Amiel's deepest interests and admirations as
+revealed by his diary that one must look for light upon his emotional
+make-up. The things with which he occupied himself were extremely few:
+introspective literature, philosophy and religion, and contemplation
+of God and the hereafter. The diary covers the years of his life from
+twenty-seven to sixty, the entire fruitful span of most men's lives.
+During all of this time his interests showed little or no variation.
+Nowhere throughout the record do we find any evidence of interest in
+the developments which were shaping the course of the world's history.
+Still less do we find any indication of a desire or a conscience
+to participate in such history. Amiel evidently felt no urge to be
+an actor in the drama. He was not even a critic or an interested
+on-looker. Rather did he prefer to withdraw to a sheltered distance
+and forget the reverberations of the struggle in contemplation of
+abstractions.
+
+He lived in an era in which the world was revolutionised. The most
+deforming institution which civilisation has ever tolerated, slavery,
+was razed and dismantled; yet he never said a word about it. He was
+a witness of one of the greatest transformations that has ever been
+wrought, the making of things by machinery rather than by hand; and he
+never commented on it. His life was contemporaneous with the beginning
+of discovery in science, such as the origin of species and the general
+evolutionary doctrine associated with Darwin's name; and it seems only
+to have excited his scorn.
+
+    “The growing triumph of Darwinism--that is to say of
+    materialism, or of force--threatens the conception of justice.
+    But justice will have its turn. The higher human law cannot be
+    the offspring of animality. Justice is the right to the maximum
+    of individual independence compatible with the same liberty
+    for others;--in other words, it is respect for man, for the
+    immature, the small, the feeble; it is the guarantee of those
+    human collectivities, associations, states, nationalities--those
+    voluntary or involuntary unions--the object of which is to
+    increase the sum of happiness, and to satisfy the aspiration
+    of the individual. That some should make use of others for
+    their own purposes is an injury to justice. The right of the
+    stronger is not a right, but a simple fact, which obtains only
+    so long as there is neither protest nor resistance. It is like
+    cold, darkness, weight, which tyrannise over man until he has
+    invented artificial warmth, artificial light, and machinery.
+    Human industry is throughout an emancipation from brute
+    nature, and the advances made by justice are in the same way a
+    series of rebuffs inflicted upon the tyranny of the stronger.
+    As the medical art consists in the conquest of disease, so
+    goodness consists in the conquest of the blind ferocities and
+    untamed appetites of the human animal. I see the same law
+    throughout:--increasing emancipation of the individual, a
+    continuous ascent of being towards life, happiness, justice,
+    and wisdom. Greed and gluttony are the starting-point,
+    intelligence and generosity the goal.”
+
+Nor is there anything in the “Journal Intime” to indicate that he had
+ever heard of Pasteur, or Morton, or Simpson, who laid the foundation
+of a diseaseless world and a painless world. His diary is a record of
+his own thoughts, to be sure, but one's thoughts are engendered, in a
+measure at least, by what is going on in the world. An inhabitant of
+any other world whose knowledge of this could be obtained only from
+Amiel's book, would be left with an abysmal ignorance of the subject.
+He would learn something of the German philosophers and of French
+littérateurs and of Amiel's ideas of God and of infinity.
+
+Schopenhauer says that
+
+    “It is not by the unification of the intellect and the will that
+    man attains to higher truth, but by their dissociation. When
+    the intellect casts off the yoke of the will it rises above the
+    illusion of finite life and attains a vision of transcendent
+    truth. When one can contemplate without will, beyond, when
+    he can dissolve the life instinct in pure thought, then he
+    possesses the field of higher truth, then he is on the avenue
+    that leads to Nirvana.”
+
+Higher truth is possible only through the annihilation of the will,
+and if this annihilation is done after taking thought, that is after
+planning to do it and determining to do it, the price that one has to
+pay, or the penalty that is exacted, is an incapacity or diminished
+capacity for practical life. Amiel was a real mystic, not by choice,
+perhaps, but by birth. He was proud of it in his youth and early
+maturity; he questioned it in his late maturity; and regretted it in
+his senescence. When he was fifty years old he wrote,
+
+    “The man who gives himself to contemplation looks on at rather
+    than directs his life, is a spectator rather than an actor,
+    seeks rather to understand than to achieve. Is this mode of
+    existence illegitimate, immoral? Is one bound to act? Is such
+    detachment an idiosyncrasy to be respected or a sin to be
+    fought against? I have always hesitated on this point, and I
+    have wasted years in futile self-reproach and useless fits
+    of activity. My western conscience, penetrated as it is with
+    Christian morality, has always persecuted my Oriental quietism
+    and Buddhist tendencies. I have not dared to approve myself, I
+    have not known how to correct myself.... Having early caught
+    a glimpse of the absolute, I have never had the indiscreet
+    effrontery of individualism. What right have I to make a merit
+    of a defect? I have never been able to see any necessity for
+    imposing myself upon others, nor for succeeding. I have seen
+    nothing clearly except my own deficiencies and the superiority
+    of others.... With varied aptitudes and a fair intelligence, I
+    had no dominant tendency, no imperious faculty, so that while
+    by virtue of capacity I felt myself free, yet when free I could
+    not discover what was best. Equilibrium produced indecision and
+    indecision has rendered all my faculties barren.”
+
+If Amiel had been a real Christian, that is, if he had taken his
+orientation and orders from Christ, he would have had no doubt whether
+such a mode of existence was illegitimate and immoral or not. He could
+have found specific instruction telling him he was bound to act. He was
+a nominal Christian, but a _de facto_ Buddhist.
+
+Next to the output of a man's activity as shown by his work,
+his selection of recreational outlets for his emotional life is
+illuminating. What were Amiel's amusements? So far as the diary shows,
+day dreaming, poetising, fancy, and a contemplation of nature furnished
+the only outlets for his more organised emotional nature. For play in
+any form he apparently felt no need.
+
+There is a type of individual whose failure to bring his performance up
+to the standard which his intelligence would seem to warrant takes the
+form of inability to face concrete situations. Unable to adjust himself
+to his environment when realities present difficulties that call for
+solution, such an individual becomes burdened with a sense of his own
+inadequacy; and from this he is inclined to seek escape in impersonal
+abstractions, usually described by him as ideals. Mystic philosophy in
+some form is the frequent refuge of such tender souls from their own
+sense of inability to cope with life and its concrete problems.
+
+Throughout the record divergence between ideals and acts stands out.
+Idealism is everywhere pled as the basis of the hesitation to act. The
+conscious and foredoomed disparity between conception and realisation
+is made the excuse for the absence of effort.
+
+    “Practical life makes me afraid. And yet, at the same time, it
+    attracts me; I have need of it. Family life, especially, in
+    all its delightfulness, in all its moral depth, appeals to me
+    like a duty. Sometimes I cannot escape from the ideal of it. A
+    companion of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes;
+    within, a common worship, towards the world outside, kindness
+    and beneficence; educations to undertake, the thousand and one
+    moral relations which develop round the first--all these ideas
+    intoxicate me sometimes. But I put them aside, because every
+    hope is, as it were, an egg whence a serpent may issue instead
+    of a dove, because every joy missed is a stab, because every
+    seed confided to destiny contains an ear of grief which the
+    future may develop.”
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+    “I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any
+    presentiment of glory or happiness. I have never seen myself
+    in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father,
+    an influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this
+    absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs.
+    What dreams I have are vague and indefinite; I ought not to
+    live, for I am now scarcely capable of living.--Recognise your
+    place; let the living live; and you, gather together your
+    thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you
+    will be more useful so. Renounce yourself, accept the cup given
+    you, with its honey and its gall, as it comes. Bring God down
+    into your heart. Embalm your soul in him now, make within you
+    a temple for the Holy Spirit; be diligent in good works, make
+    others happier and better. Put personal ambition away from
+    you, and then you will find consolation in living or in dying,
+    whatever may happen to you.”
+
+Complaining of a restless feeling which was not the need for change, he
+said,
+
+    “It is rather the fear of what I love, the mistrust of what
+    charms me, the unrest of happiness.... And is there not another
+    reason for all this restlessness, in a certain sense of void--of
+    incessant pursuit of something wanting?--of longing for a truer
+    peace and a more entire satisfaction? Neighbours, friends,
+    relations--I love them all; and so long as these affections are
+    active, they leave in me no room for a sense of want. But yet
+    they do not _fill_ my heart; and that is why they have no power
+    to fix it. I am always waiting for the woman and the work which
+    shall be capable of taking entire possession of my soul, and of
+    becoming my end and aim.”
+
+Amiel's life was a constant negation. His ideals were all concerned
+with concepts of perfection, with the absolute, and being sane enough
+to realise the impossibility of attaining such perfection, he refused
+compromises. He would not play the game for its own sake, nor for the
+fine points. If he could not win all the points--and being sane he knew
+beforehand that he could not--he preferred not to play at all. But he
+made a virtue of his weakness and called it idealism. Had he possessed
+the courage to hitch his wagon to a star--and let the star carry him
+where it would; had he heeded the warning,
+
+  “And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
+  Is--the unlit lamp and the ungird loin”;
+
+or gone the way of thousands of practical idealists who have made their
+idealism an incentive to action and thereby left the world richer
+for having passed through it, he would have needed no excuse for his
+failure to attain perfection. On the contrary, he would have learned
+with the sureness of a hard-learned lesson that idealism is worth our
+loyalty only when it becomes an inspiration to living, and that it is
+worse than futile when it serves merely as a standard for thought or an
+excuse for failure.
+
+Amiel coddled his sensibilities for fear of rebuff; he hid his
+intellectuality in the diary lest he should suffer from the clear
+light of publicity; he denied life out of apprehension that life might
+bruise his ego. He told himself that he was protecting his idealism. In
+reality he was protecting his egoism. If he had been the victim of a
+psychosis he would not have recognised his limitations nor stated them
+so clearly. It was sanity that enabled him to see the impossibility
+of attaining the perfection of which he dreamed and wrote. It was
+cowardice, not a psychosis, which made him refuse to act in the face of
+this knowledge. Had he been a Roman Catholic, he might have rested upon
+the conception of absolute perfection offered in the authority of the
+Church and the life of the cloister. But being a Protestant, both by
+inheritance and by conscience, he had to think things out for himself;
+and the more he thought the wider became the breach between his
+conception of perfection and his hope of realising it. He was tortured
+by a conscience goading him to action and a temperament paralysing him
+with the fear that the end would fall short of anticipation. He lacked
+the moral courage to put his power to the test and be disappointed. He
+was without the stamina of the man who fights and runs away. He was too
+much of an egoist to risk a losing game, and in consequence he never
+tasted the sweet flavour of work well done--even though the end was
+apparent failure.
+
+The growing sense of inadequacy between the conscience to act and
+the temperament to deny action is written plainly in these random
+quotations from the “Journal” during the record of many years. At
+thirty he wrote,
+
+    “He who is silent is forgotten; he who abstains is taken at
+    his word; he who does not advance, falls back; he who stops is
+    overwhelmed, distanced, crushed; he who ceases to grow greater
+    becomes smaller; he who leaves off gives up; the stationary
+    condition is the beginning of the end--it is the terrible
+    symptom which precedes death. To live, is to achieve a perpetual
+    triumph; it is to assert oneself against destruction, against
+    sickness, against the annulling and dispersion of one's physical
+    and moral being. It is to will without ceasing, or rather to
+    refresh one's will day by day.”
+
+Ten years later when the conflict was closing in upon him he wrote,
+
+    “In me an intellect which would fain forget itself in things, is
+    contradicted by a heart which yearns to live in human beings.
+    The uniting link of the two contradictions is the tendency
+    towards self-abandonment, towards ceasing to will and exist
+    for oneself, towards laying down one's own personality, and
+    losing--dissolving--oneself in love and anticipation. What I
+    lack above all things is character, will, individuality. But, as
+    always happens, the appearance is exactly the contrary of the
+    reality, and my outward life the reverse of my true and deepest
+    aspiration. I whose whole being--heart and intellect--thirsts to
+    absorb itself in reality, in its neighbour man, in Nature and in
+    God--I, whom solitude devours and destroys--I shut myself up in
+    solitude and seem to delight only in myself and to be sufficient
+    for myself.”
+
+At forty-seven, when most men's work is at the high tide of
+realisation, he said,
+
+    “I have no more strength left, I wish for nothing; but that
+    is not what is wanted. I must wish what God wishes; I must
+    pass from indifference to sacrifice, and from sacrifice to
+    self-devotion. The cup I would fain put away from me is the
+    misery of living, the shame of existing and suffering as a
+    common creature who has missed his vocation; it is the bitter
+    and increasing humiliation of declining power, of growing
+    old under the weight of one's own disapproval, and the
+    disappointment of one's friends.”
+
+At fifty-four,
+
+    “What use have I made of my gifts, of my special circumstances,
+    of my half century of existence? What have I paid back to my
+    country?... Are all the documents I have produced ... anything
+    better than withered leaves?... When all is added up--nothing!
+    And worst of all, it has not been a life used up in the service
+    of some adored object, or sacrificed to any future hope.”
+
+Psychology teaches that too much emphasis cannot be laid in education
+upon the reconciliation of ideals and performance, nor too much effort
+devoted to the formation of habits of facing concrete situations
+squarely, reaching definite decisions, and thereby making efforts,
+however ineffective and crude, to link ideals to action. It has been
+proved that if natural dispositions are ignored or denied by the
+repression of normal primary instincts, disassociation of personality
+is likely to be the result. Amiel's ineffectiveness, his lack of
+dynamic quality, while in no sense a psychosis, may be considered as
+a personality defect. How far this defect may have been conditioned
+by his denial of the basic springs of human action cannot be stated.
+Neither can it, in any impartial estimate of his life and personality,
+be ignored. Next to the instinct of self-preservation, the instinct
+for the preservation of the race to which one belongs is the dominant
+impulse of the individual. No system of thought, no plan of life can
+ignore it and not pay the penalty. Amiel's diary is full of such
+denials, and they frequently carry with them the consciousness that he
+realised the death sentence to aspiration and realisation which he was
+reading to himself between the lines.
+
+Amiel was a shy, sensitive, solitary child. We know very little about
+his adolescent struggles and transition to heterosexual fixation.
+Indeed we do not know whether it ever came about, and that is where
+the chief hiatus in our knowledge of Amiel lies. As a youth he became
+intoxicated with philosophic idealism, and Hegel was for him the
+fountainhead of all philosophic thought.
+
+There is nothing in the diary to indicate that the normal love-making
+of healthy youth had any part in his thoughts or his life. Later,
+his sex consciousness colours the record to a great extent--indeed it
+might be said to give the colour to the book--but always in the guise
+of repressions, fears, hesitations, and longings for unattainable
+perfection, and finally of half-hearted regrets for his own denials.
+
+    “I am capable of all the passions, for I bear them all within
+    me. Like a tamer of wild beasts, I keep them caged and lassoed,
+    but I sometimes hear them growling. I have stifled more than one
+    nascent love. Why? Because with that prophetic certainty which
+    belongs to moral intuition, I felt it lacking in true life, and
+    less durable than myself. I choked it down in the name of the
+    supreme affection to come. The loves of sense, of imagination,
+    of sentiment--I have seen through and rejected them all; I
+    sought the love which springs from the central profundities of
+    being. And I still believe in it. I will have none of those
+    passions of straw which dazzle, burn up, and wither; I invoke,
+    I await, and I hope for the love which is great, pure, and
+    earnest, which lives and works in all the fibres and through
+    all the powers of the soul. And even if I go lonely to the end,
+    I would rather my hope and my dream died with me, than that my
+    soul should content itself with any meaner union.”
+
+This is the basis of monasticism in the Catholic Church, and it is, in
+my judgment, the most violent offence to God that can be given. Goethe
+says that he never wrote a new poem without having a new love affair.
+Amiel was intrigued by Goethe secondly only to Hegel. If he had copied
+Goethe more nearly in living, he might have said with him,
+
+  “Wonach soll man am Ende trachten?
+  Die Welt zu Kennen und nicht zu Verachten.”
+
+There have been books made up of beautiful quotations from Amiel's
+“Journal Intime,” which are supposed to help people live, to mitigate
+pain, to disperse apprehension, and to assuage misery. They are not a
+patch on the Bible or on the writings of Socrates.
+
+“The oracle of today drops from his tripod on the morrow,” said John
+Morley. Will this apply to Amiel? Is he a passing fashion? And why
+has his popularity grown? The best answer to these questions is found
+in the nature of his audience. To what kind of people does Amiel
+appeal? To the contemporary purveyors of cloudy stuff; to mystics;
+to the tender-minded; to those who prefer the contemplation of far
+horizons to travelling the road just ahead. He does not appeal to
+anyone with fighting blood, whether he be facing the conflict with the
+glorious self-confidence of healthy untried youth, the magnetism of
+past success, the tried measure of his own limitations and powers, the
+scars of honest defeat, or the pluck of the one who fights a losing
+fight with more courage and idealism than he would have mustered for a
+winning one.
+
+Amiel's tragedy was that he outraged nature's unique law and nature
+exacted the penalty. If the world had a few thousand Amiels and they
+got the whip hand, it might cease to exist.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER X
+            GEORGES DUHAMEL: POET, PACIFIST, AND PHYSICIAN
+
+
+The world is thronged with people who are busying themselves with
+world ordering. They may be divided into two great groups: those who
+believe that it is to be brought about by revolution; and those who are
+convinced that it is to be accomplished by following the instructions
+given by the Master to the lawyer who asked the question: “Which is
+_the_ great commandment in the law?” The former are called Bolshevists;
+the latter Pacifists; and both terms are habitually used derisively.
+Amongst the latter there are few more conspicuous in France than
+Georges Duhamel, a physician by profession, a littérateur by choice,
+who at thirty-eight years of age finds himself in a commanding position
+in French letters.
+
+I have recently had the opportunity of an interview with this brilliant
+young man, and it occurs to me to present a summary of his aspirations
+and an estimate of his accomplishments.
+
+His history is brief. Early success, like a happy country, does not
+furnish history. He was born in Paris in 1884, the son of a physician
+and the grandson of a farmer. This evolution from farmer to littérateur
+in three generations Duhamel says is common in France, indeed in all
+Central Europe. His tastes seem to have been largely influenced, if
+not formed, by the setting and atmosphere with which his father's
+profession surrounded his early life. Until he was mobilised in 1914
+Duhamel had not practised medicine. Even as a youth he had experienced
+the literary urge and felt that he would eventually succumb to it. He,
+however, devoted himself to the sciences and to medicine in the firm
+belief that such study provides the best preparation for the vocation
+of literature. In this M. Duhamel is in full accord with another famous
+theoretical world orderer, Mr. H. G. Wells, but in disagreement with a
+practical one, Mr. Charles E. Hughes.
+
+“One does not learn life from letters, but from life, through seeing
+suffering and death,” said he when asked to speak of the factors that
+influenced him to abandon medicine for letters.
+
+In the midst of his studies as a youth he had what he now calls rather
+a strange adventure.
+
+    “I spent much time in the society of friends: writers, painters
+    and sculptors. All of us were seized with a strong desire to
+    shrink from society as it was constituted. Although we were not
+    all Fourierites, we decided to form a phalanstery in which we
+    could live a community life, each one taking part in the work
+    and in the joy of living in an atmosphere adapted to our tastes
+    and our professions. We agreed to make our living by means of
+    manual work, and to abolish the relation of master and servant.
+    We decided to adopt the trade of typography, which would permit
+    us to advance our art. Through mutual economies we bought a
+    printing press and our first books were published by 'L'Abbaye
+    de Creteil,' as our little publishing house was called. The
+    phalanstery was disbanded for financial reasons, but we had a
+    taste of an agreeable life, independent, oftentimes difficult,
+    but in many respects quite ideal.”
+
+When asked about his earliest literary productions and why he essayed
+poetry rather than prose, he replied,
+
+    “Generally speaking, all writers begin with poetry and gradually
+    forsake metre. Our little group wanted to initiate a great
+    literary epoch and we believed that this could be done only by
+    creating an atmosphere favourable to intellectual work.”
+
+He might have borrowed Socrates' reply when Cebes asked the same
+question: “For I reflect that a man who means to be a poet has to use
+fiction and not facts for his poems.” M. Duhamel's training had been in
+facts, and his greatest success in letters has been in the recording
+of facts. His smallest success has been in establishing postulates
+based upon them.
+
+[Illustration: GEORGES DUHAMEL] From a drawing by _Ivan Opffer_ in _THE
+BOOKMAN._
+
+In 1909 M. Duhamel received his degree in medicine and shortly after
+appeared the four plays which, with his poetry, “Des Légendes, des
+Batailles,” a collection of verse published by “L'Abbaye” in 1907;
+“L'Homme en Tête,” in 1909; “Selon ma Loi,” in 1910; and “Compagnons,”
+in 1912, gave him a definite place in the literary hierarchy. These
+plays were “La Lumière,” which appeared in 1911; “Dans l'Ombre des
+Statues,” in 1912; “Le Combat,” a symbolic drama in _vers libres_, in
+1912; and “L'Œuvre des Athlètes” in 1920. All of these were produced on
+the Paris stage and all save the last have appeared in translations by
+Sasha Best in _Poet Lore_, Boston, in 1914 and 1915.
+
+These dramas, as well as his early poetry, show the influence of Walt
+Whitman. His message is conveyed through the medium of symbolism, his
+method being to create types rather than individual studies, and his
+purpose to bring art closer to the masses. The result, as might have
+been expected, is drama of no great popularity.
+
+Almost simultaneously with his work as poet and dramatist M. Duhamel
+achieved prominence as a critic. For some years he was critic of
+poetry for _Le Mercure de France_, and his articles contributed to
+that publication were collected in book form in 1914 under the title
+of “Les Poètes et la Poésie.” His earliest critical work, however, was
+a collaboration with M. Charles Vildrac, called “Mots sur la Technique
+Poétique.” “Propos Critique,” published in 1912, is largely devoted to
+comments on the efforts of the younger and, at that time, comparatively
+unknown writers, and it is of special interest that many of these
+writers are now famous.
+
+“Paul Claudel: le philosophe--le poète--l'ecrivain--le dramaturge,”
+published in 1913, is considered by some of Duhamel's admirers as the
+best of his critical works, marked as it is by the same gifts of
+analysis and charm of style which distinguished his briefer critical
+writings.
+
+It is, however, chiefly of his work since the beginning of the war, and
+the direction which his ideas and aims have taken under the influence
+of the war, that this article is concerned.
+
+When the war broke out it found Georges Duhamel--then about thirty
+years of age--intent upon his literary work: poetry, criticism,
+interpretation, which had put him in the first rank of littérateurs of
+his country. Mobilised in the Medical Corps he first went to Verdun and
+found himself in the thick of the carnage; but he was soon transferred
+to the Marne where in the comparative quiet of a hospital he was able
+to make the observations and write the reflections which have carried
+his name throughout the civilised world. During the four years of the
+war he produced four remarkable volumes: “Vie des Martyrs” (The New
+Book of Martyrs), “Civilisation,” “Possession du Monde” (The Heart's
+Domain), and “Entretiens dans le Tumulte” (Interviews in the Tumult),
+four of the most noteworthy and important books inspired by the war.
+
+Plunged at once into the great war hopper whose purpose was to reduce
+all human material to a homogeneous mass that would furnish energy for
+the war machine, Duhamel preserved his perspective and his individual
+outlook both upon the war and upon life. Nothing illustrates this so
+strikingly as some of his stories in “Civilisation,” gathered from
+scenes with which he came into contact after he had become a seasoned
+soldier.
+
+No stronger proof is needed of the essential wholesomeness and strength
+of Duhamel's make-up than the fact that while these stories, and those
+of “Vie des Martyrs,” were inspired by the horrors of the war, they do
+not depict horrors, nor do they create an atmosphere of horror. It is
+not the picture of healthy men in the flower of youth, in the vigour
+of virility fed to the war machine and left lacerated and broken,
+that Duhamel impresses upon the imaginations of his readers. It was
+thus that he had seen them in the first days of the siege of Verdun,
+in an improvised ambulance where from minute to minute new torments
+developed to increase their previous torments, while the fragile roof
+over their heads became a great resounding board for the projectiles
+of the siegers and the assieged. He had, however, the vision to see
+them in another light, and he was filled with pity and admiration for
+the French poilu. It is these two emotions, rather than horror, which
+make the atmosphere and colour of the two books of war stories. He
+sensed the significance of pain and saw the reactions of strong men to
+suffering. He saw man in his agony give the lie to the most misleading
+of all statements: that man is born equal. For neither in living nor in
+dying is there equality. Men are equal, we trust, before God, and they
+are alleged to be equal before the law, but after that equality of man
+does not exist.
+
+It is this book particularly that makes Duhamel the interpreter of
+the poor, the obscure, the stupid, the inarticulate. With an unerring
+intuition he reaches the soul. His sympathies are so large, his
+understanding so comprehensive, and his reflection of them so complete,
+that his readers suffer with the suffering. It seems impossible to
+depict the sufferings of these poor martyrs, sent like droves of cattle
+to be struck down for what purpose they knew not, more accurately and
+convincingly than he does. With the reader's sympathy thus awakened,
+one wonders that the individual can be deprived of his own right to
+judge whether the cause is great enough for him to lay down his all; to
+be crushed by the chariots of the god of war.
+
+M. Duhamel, in “Vie des Martyrs,” has succeeded in making his martyrs
+immortal. To him has been given in a superlative degree that seeing
+eye, that understanding heart, that power of vision which, perhaps more
+than any other gift, enriches life, since it enables the fortunate
+possessor to rid himself of the trammels of his own narrow existence
+and live the lives of many.
+
+He has made a contribution to behaviouristic psychology in these little
+stories, or better said sketches from life, that will endure. He has
+been able to convey to unenlightened man the difference between the
+_bon_ and the _mauvais blessé_ and to show that it is soul difference
+as well as bodily difference. He has portrayed in simple colours the
+desire to live, and the determination to live, factors which physicians
+know are most important in forecasting the chances of recovery of every
+sick man. And with it all there is tenderness, which the author has had
+the power to convey through delicacy of style that makes prose poetry
+of much of his narrative of the thoughts, aspirations, sentiments, and
+plans of individual men who, from their appearance and position, are
+the most commonplace of the commonplace. There is no anger, violence,
+hatred, or despair in any of his pictures. There is sometimes irony,
+but it is of so gentle a nature that it strengthens the impression of
+sympathy with his characters, rather than suggesting judgment of them.
+
+“A human being suffers always in his flesh alone, and that is why
+war is possible,” says M. Duhamel in “Civilisation.” This is one of
+those marvellous epitomes of human conduct, of which he has framed
+many. It is vouchsafed to but few to understand and suffer another's
+pain. To the majority of mankind it is denied. Were it not so, the
+fellow-feeling that makes us wondrous kind would displace greed.
+
+There are so many remarkable features of M. Duhamel's war books, such,
+for instance, as what may be called the thesis of “Vie des Martyrs”:
+that men suffer after their own image and in their own loneliness; or
+of “Civilisation”: that consciousness has outrun life; that it has
+created for itself reactions and inhibitions so intricate and profound
+that they cannot be tolerated by life, that I was keen to learn how
+these attitudes had developed. When questioned, this is what he said:
+
+    “I am forced to divide things in the way practiced in the
+    sciences; that is to say, not to confuse the study of facts with
+    conclusions drawn from them. In these two books I showed as
+    faithfully as I could the life and sufferings of soldiers during
+    the war. In the latter two (“The Heart's Domain” and “Interviews
+    in the Tumult”) I drew conclusions from the facts established
+    in the first two. This procedure seemed to me the best way to
+    handle anti-war propaganda. The weakness of most books results
+    from the fact that the idea or subject is confused with other,
+    regrettably often sentimental, considerations. The procedure
+    employed in the sciences seems to be more orderly, and therefore
+    more convincing for the exposition of my ideas. These books
+    awoke a great echo, because they corresponded closely to the
+    state of mind of sensible men who are bent on doing everything
+    to make war impossible. Because of this I was looked upon as
+    a Pacifist, and I regard this as an honour. I have never been
+    politically active nor do I belong to any political group.
+    However I am a Pacifist and an Internationalist. I believe that
+    it is only the individual that can be an Internationalist.
+    A nation will never be Internationalist for the reason that
+    Pacifism and Internationalism are indissolubly bound up with
+    individualism.”
+
+M. Duhamel's work cannot, therefore, be considered solely in the light
+of its literary qualities. By his own admission he is a writer with a
+purpose, and this purpose is the suppression of war. In the interview
+he stated that this purpose fills all of his work and “will be, I
+believe, the axis of my work all my life.”
+
+Regarding the four war books in this light, a sincere critic can hardly
+escape the conviction that the author has accomplished the first part
+of his task with immeasurably greater success than the latter part. Of
+the convincing appeal of the two books which aim only to present vivid
+and truthful pictures of the sufferings of the soldiers during the war
+there can be no question. But of the author's power as a propagandist
+against war, as expressed in the two latter books, it is by no means
+easy to form so satisfactory an estimate.
+
+Duhamel does not believe that the war developed a _modus vivendi_ for
+the world. He thinks it left us where it found us, only exhausted.
+Unless something is devised while this exhaustion is being overcome,
+the conflict will be taken up again. He believes that a revolution is
+necessary, but not a revolution in the sense of the term that applies
+to the affairs of Russia or Ireland.
+
+When Duhamel is read in the light of history, especially of the last
+one hundred and twenty-five years, one is less hopeful than if he were
+ignorant of history. If any _ex cathedra_ statement is justifiable
+it would seem to be this: the world war flowed more or less directly
+from the revolutionary movement which began with the dissemination of
+the doctrine of the French philosophers, especially Rousseau, toward
+the end of the Eighteenth Century. His discourse “On the Origin of
+Inequality Amongst Men” is the fountainhead of modern socialism and the
+source from which the ferment that brought about the world revolution
+emanated. Rousseau's thesis was that civilisation had proven itself to
+be the curse of humanity and that man in his primitive state was free
+and happy.
+
+    “The first time he knew unhappiness was when convention stepped
+    in and said 'you must not do this and you must not do that,' and
+    the State stepped in and said 'this is private property.' The
+    first man who bethought himself of saying 'this is mine,' and
+    found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder
+    of civil society. What crimes, what wars, what murders, what
+    miseries and horrors would he have spared the human race who,
+    snatching away the spade and filling in the ditches, had cried
+    out to his fellows: 'beware of listening to this impostor; you
+    are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to
+    all and the earth to no one.'”
+
+It was the dissemination of this doctrine and the writings of Voltaire
+which led to the “Feast of Reason,” and the publication of the
+“Encyclopédie” that led to the world volcanic eruption of 1789, which
+had its repetition in 1914.
+
+It seems that most of these ideas were to be found in the writings of
+Adam Weishaupt, an apostate Catholic, who founded the secret society
+known as the “Illiminati” in 1776. It is interesting to compare some of
+his statements with Duhamel's aspirations.
+
+    “When men united themselves into nations, national love took the
+    place of universal love. With the division of the globe into
+    countries benevolence restricted itself behind boundaries that
+    it was never again to transgress. It became a virtue to spread
+    out at the expense of those who did not happen to be under our
+    dominion. In order to attain this goal it became permissible to
+    despise foreigners and to deceive and offend them. This virtue
+    was called patriotism. Patriotism gave birth to localism, to
+    the family spirit, and finally to egoism. Thus the origin of
+    states or governments of civil society was the seed of discord
+    and patriotism found its punishment in itself. Do away with this
+    love of country, and men will once more learn to know and love
+    each other as men; there will be no more partiality; the ties
+    between hearts will unroll and extend.”
+
+Duhamel wants to develop this relationship between men, but he wants to
+do it in a very different way.
+
+This moral revolution will be accomplished when men love one another,
+and when they reward good for evil. Even though this had not been
+shouted from the housetops and whispered through the lattice, in
+every tongue and in every clime for the past twenty centuries, we
+should still feel that M. Duhamel is in error, for these precepts are
+at variance with the teachings of biology, the science for which M.
+Duhamel has so much respect. You might just as well ask a man who is
+drowning not to struggle as to ask a man to return good for evil--that
+is unless he is doing it as a stunt, an artefact, or in redemption of
+the promise to be saved. It is against nature. First teach him to put a
+new valuation on life and to get new standards of what makes life worth
+living. Then M. Duhamel will have a foundation to build upon.
+
+That M. Duhamel is no less earnest than sincere in his purpose is
+proved by his lectures through Europe during the last few years, as
+protagonist for the suppression of war; and also by the fact that
+he was one of the co-founders of “Clarté,” so named for the book by
+Barbusse, which is a group of men who preach anti-militarism, the
+intellectual solidarity of nations, and the social equality of all
+citizens.
+
+“Possession du Monde” is by virtue of its title a frank avowal of
+its aim to set forth the author's idea of finding some satisfactory
+substitute for the world possession for which the war was fought. It is
+the effort of a wholesome, buoyant, sympathetic man, after having been
+brought into contact with the horrors of the war, to find a substitute
+for orthodox religion; the expression of an emotionally religious man
+without a creed. M. Duhamel, who was brought up a Catholic, lost all
+religion, he said, when he was fifteen years old.
+
+The panacea which Duhamel offers in this book for human suffering
+and world ills is the conscious striving for happiness by means of a
+sort of “culture of the soul.” He puts a personal construction upon
+happiness and holds that it is and should be the object of all humanity
+and of the whole world of living things. He quotes Maeterlinck to the
+effect that “As man is created for health, so was man created for
+happiness.” This soul culture is rather an attitude of feeling toward
+things than an attitude of thought. There is no attempt to think out
+any of the problems which have puzzled men for ages. Neither is there
+any denying of them. He simply says substantially: I am a practical
+man. Of course I take things as they are--or as they seem to be--but I
+take the best that is in them. I take the sunshine, the flowers, the
+wisdom of the ages, the art that has come down to us, the science,
+human love, the fine qualities of friendship, work, play, my sorrows
+and adversities, even religion--but I take only what is good out
+of them all; and I take that temperately, sanely, according to the
+limitations which nature and circumstances have imposed. And I am
+happy. You can do likewise and you can be happy.
+
+But can I take poverty and want, and particularly can I take them with
+equanimity while my neighbour or brother is swaggering with riches,
+some of which he has robbed me because he is stronger or cleverer than
+I? Duhamel's formula for achieving happiness, as well as his conception
+of what constitutes happiness, only fits the average man, and it has
+been proven countless thousands of times that there is no such person.
+It is sufficient, perhaps, for people who feel normally and do not
+think for themselves. So it may be sufficient for the present for a
+mass of people who want to be led--if they are pious and healthy.
+
+But how about the people who are different, or who are not healthy,
+or who think they are safer custodians of wealth and power than their
+so-called brothers? It brings no help to the people who are tortured
+by an insistent need to think things out for themselves, or else to
+find something which will answer their questions as to the why. Nor
+does it tell those who are handicapped, physically, mentally, or even
+temperamentally, how they can overcome their handicaps so as to, as it
+were, extract the honey from the flowers. The world is full of people
+with all degrees of unusualness and abnormality. One may ignore them,
+but no scheme of things can deny them. Duhamel uses them by preference
+as a basis for his fiction.
+
+In his conception of happiness Duhamel reads himself and his own
+emotions into all things. He avers that the algæ growing in a tank of
+water with nothing but a few grains of dust and sunlight are happy
+because they subsist and work out their humble joy. Has any sentient
+soul told him he was happy under parallel circumstances? That is the
+question. He reads his own philosophy into the algæ. To him to be
+living as nature intended one to live is to be happy. But who can say?
+Just here I am reminded of a quotation from Anatole France of which
+Duhamel makes use in this book: “Men have cut each others' throats
+over the meaning of a word.” People might argue forever over the
+meaning of the word “happiness” and never get anywhere.
+
+Duhamel says that happiness is the ultimate end of life and that
+religion is the search for happiness in a life to come after this.
+Everybody wants to be happy in this life and some people expect to
+be happy in a life after this--of these two assertions there can be
+no doubt. But Duhamel says there is no life after this, and that the
+sole object of life is to be happy in this world. He does, however,
+speak of “saving the soul,” and he implies his belief in God. He says
+substantially that the plants are happy because they are fulfilling
+their destiny, or doing what God meant them to do; and implies that man
+will be happy if he does the same. Very likely. But shall he strive to
+fulfill his destiny--to do what God meant him to do--merely in order
+to be happy? Or shall he strive to fulfill his destiny--and happiness
+will follow incidentally? Which should be his conscious end, happiness
+or the fulfilment of his destiny? Most religious people would say the
+latter. Duhamel says the former. But, for working purposes they are
+about the same, except that, for people who are at all temperamental
+or who meet with many discouragements, it is frequently difficult to
+strive for a happiness which seems elusive. Whereas, such people, if
+they are spiritually minded, can always find a stimulus in trying to do
+what they were intended to do. And if they believe in God the stimulus
+becomes greater. And if they can believe that the soul grows through
+every honest effort--that nothing is ever lost, whether the result
+appears to be success or failure--and that the limits of its growth
+are not bounded by what their senses can tell them in this life, their
+capacity for striving becomes sometimes amazing. How else account for
+the man who expends ten times the effort in playing a losing game that
+he would have spent in one that promised an easy success?
+
+That the soul will find its greatest happiness in the contemplation
+of itself, is Duhamel's belief. “He is the happiest man who best
+understands his happiness; for he is of all men most fully aware that
+it is only the lofty idea, the untiring courageous human idea, that
+separates gladness from sorrow,” he quotes from Maeterlinck. A man
+should think about his soul at least once every day. But it would
+be safe to say that for one man who finds happiness in a life of
+contemplation ten find it in a life of action. The wholesome, sane,
+average, happy men--of whom Duhamel is an excellent example--are mostly
+men of action. The very existence of this book is a contradiction of
+his happiness of contemplation theory as applied to himself. It may
+well be questioned whether Duhamel would have written “Possession du
+Monde” if he had not been the kind of man who finds happiness in giving
+expression to every emotion. Besides self-study is safe only for strong
+natures. Self-analysis was the undoing of the man in one of Duhamel's
+best books, “Confession de Minuit.”
+
+Finally, what is “happiness”? Is it merely a feeling? Gladness? If
+that were all, and the ultimate end of life, would not the logical
+conclusion be that the happiest--and therefore the most successful--man
+would be the joyful maniac?
+
+The publication of M. Duhamel which has the greatest popularity is the
+one that his admirers would wish he had not written: “Possession du
+Monde.” It is a protest against the evaluation of life commercially,
+and a plea for a moral or spiritual standard. This is a topic for an
+epoch maker, and one who has not a vision or a plan should not essay
+it. M. Duhamel may have both, but he does not reveal them. He displays
+only the wish that the world should be better. In the jargon of the
+Freudian, it is a wish-fulfilment that does not realise. It is neither
+well done nor convincing, and it has been well and convincingly done
+by many writers, and still we have not profited by it. Amiel did it;
+Maeterlinck did it; Karr did it; and “others too numerous to mention.”
+They may have had some effect upon individuals, but the history of
+the past eight years shows that they had no effect upon the world
+at large, its evolution, or devolution. Moreover, there is a note
+of unction and self-satisfaction running through the book that is
+displeasing, if not offensive. It is quite true, or likely to be true,
+that “to think about the soul, to think about it at least once in the
+confusion of every crowded day, is indeed the beginning of salvation,”
+but there is a book in which this is said in a more convincing way than
+M. Duhamel can ever hope to say it.
+
+Viewed from a literary standpoint alone, the book is in keeping with,
+if not quite up to, the standard of his other works. His prose is
+always musical, and he often creates an atmosphere rather than an
+edifice. He is never emphatic, mandatory, severe, superlative. He is
+soft, gentle, often ironical, but always human.
+
+Two remarkable pieces of fiction constitute Duhamel's output since the
+four war books: “Les Hommes Abandonnés” (Abandoned Men) and “Confession
+de Minuit” (Midnight Confession). The first contains eight histories
+which try to prove that when men are gathered together in a crowd they
+are abandoned by the individual soul. It is an illustration on the
+reverse side in favour of individualism.
+
+“Confession de Minuit” is particularly significant as being named
+by the author in the interview as his favourite work. “As a human
+research I believe that it is the one with the most meaning,” he said
+of this novel; and it is, therefore, a matter of self-congratulation
+on the part of the writer that he found this book to be the one
+which interpreted to him the author's particular genius in the most
+convincing and interesting light The story has its bearing upon the
+author's theories because it illustrates more clearly than any of his
+other works a statement made by him in the interview:
+
+    “People often reproach me with being interested only in my
+    stories with sick people or with children. Healthy men do
+    not register the motives which govern them. When one studies
+    a sick person one is able to see the relations between moral
+    characteristics which in the healthy man exist, but are hidden.”
+    However, I hold that the average man, healthy, typical, scarcely
+    exists in literature, and that the most interesting creations
+    from the human point of view had for their subjects men who were
+    unbalanced--from Hamlet to Leopold Bloom; from Raskolnikov to
+    Dorian Gray.
+
+“Confession de Minuit” is the self-revelation of a man who was
+decidedly unbalanced. As a bit of art work the book is unique and
+remarkable. Almost the unity of a short-story is preserved without
+recourse to any of the usual machinery of the ordinary novel, such as
+plot, action, or conversation, except a very little of the most casual
+nature. To a person who reads fiction for character delineation this
+absence of trappings is a distinct gain.
+
+“Confession de Minuit” is the story of a man than whom a more
+uninteresting person could hardly be found in life; and yet as told by
+the man himself, Duhamel sustains the interest of the reader in the
+recital of pitiful weakness from the first page to the last without one
+lapse into dryness or loss of sympathy for the character, with whom, in
+the flesh, it would have been hard to feel any sentiment besides pity.
+It opens with the incident which causes the man to lose his position
+as a small clerk in an office through an utterly senseless--although
+perfectly harmless--performance: yielding to a sudden impulse to touch
+the ear of his employer just to assure himself that the employer
+was really made of flesh and blood, as himself. As society, or in
+this case the employer, is more afraid of an insane person than of a
+criminal, the reader does not share the man's feeling of injustice
+because he is first confronted with a revolver and then thrown speedily
+and bodily out of the office where he had been a faithful worker for
+several years; although he is able to pity the victim. The story,
+as told by the man himself, traces his rapid deterioration through
+progressive stages of self-pity, self-absorption, and inability to get
+hold of himself, to make an effort to re-establish himself, or even
+to seek advice or sympathy, until the last night when he pours out
+his “confession” to a stranger, with the statement that, on account
+of his failure in every relation in life, he is never going home to
+his old mother who has supported him with her small income and her
+needlework--nor is he ever going anywhere else, so far as the reader
+can see. He does not commit suicide. In fact, the story leaves one with
+the impression that he is merely “going crazy.” Whether or not he is
+insane when the recital begins with the commission of the insane act is
+a matter for neither the novelist nor the critic to state.
+
+The great art of the writer lies in his ability to sustain interest at
+a high level in a pure character study of what is frequently described
+as a “shut-in personality.”
+
+This novel seems to have been written without reference to the author's
+happiness or “cult of the soul” theory. It might almost be construed
+as a contradiction of it. One might put a fatalistic construction upon
+it, if one did not take a material point of view of health and disease.
+I do not see how anyone could get away from the conviction that the
+man who makes the “Midnight Confession” of his own pitiful failure
+in life is a victim of either his own mental limitations, or else of
+his particular environment, or of both. The only other way in which
+anyone might account for his utter inability to get hold of life or to
+stand up against his first discouragement is the refuge of the Radical
+Socialist--that society gave him no chance, the concrete illustration
+being the cruel way in which constituted authority, or his employer,
+treated his first downward step. But if the author had intended to
+condemn the employer and to excuse the man he would hardly have
+selected for this step an act which would so readily arouse a question
+as to the man's sanity, nor would he have followed the incident with
+a story in which the only development was rapidly increasing loss of
+touch with the outside world. No philosophy, or religion, or cult could
+have helped this man, who was handicapped with a nature so weak that it
+could not resist an impulse which would have been suppressed instantly
+by any well-balanced person; nor could it have given him the strength
+to withstand the simple discouragements that are the inevitable lot of
+all men. He simply was not able to cope with something--define it as
+one may.
+
+One moral the story teaches. And that is the nobility of sympathy with
+even the weakest, most despised, and least interesting of human beings.
+
+M. Duhamel consecrates his life to the prevention of war. It is a noble
+gesture. He is gifted, sane, articulate, and temperamentally adapted
+and adjusted to the task. Were he a platonist and not a neo-platonist,
+I am sure greater success would crown his efforts. Twenty-five hundred
+years ago a man who penetrated the mysteries of life and death more
+deeply than anyone before or since said to his pupils who had gathered
+to speed him to the Great Beyond, the ship having returned from Delos
+and the Eleven having decided to release Socrates from his fetters:
+
+    “The body fills us with passions and desires, and fears, and all
+    manner of phantoms and much foolishness; and so, as the saying
+    goes, in very truth we can never think at all for it. It alone
+    and its desires, cause war and factions and battles for the
+    origin of all wars is the pursuit of wealth.”
+
+Until that pursuit can be substituted, the labours of M. Duhamel and
+his co-founders of “Clarté” are likely to be in vain.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XI
+    EVEN YET IT CAN'T BE TOLD--THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT D. H. LAWRENCE
+
+
+About twenty years ago a brilliant, unbalanced, young Austrian Jew
+wrote a book, “Sex and Character,” whose purpose was to show that woman
+had played a greater rôle in the world than her possessions warranted,
+that she was inherently devoid of morality, and that men should cease
+to procreate. In the autumn of 1903 its author, Otto Weininger, then
+twenty-three years old, shot and killed himself in the house in Vienna
+in which Beethoven had died. The author's awful theme and his tragic
+end caused the book to be widely read and even more widely discussed.
+Amongst those impressed by it was a boy of humble but uncommon
+parents, bred in the coal-fields of mid-England where he had led a
+strenuous life struggling with the sex question, contending with the
+stream of consciousness as it became swollen with the tributaries of
+puberty--“Oh, stream of hell which undermined my adolescence.” While
+still a youth he felt the influence of another Austrian mystic of the
+same faith, Sigmund Freud, who maintains that the unconscious is the
+real man, that its energiser and director is the libido, and that
+the conscious is the artificed, the engendered man whose tenant and
+executive is the ego. By day and by night this exceptionally gifted and
+burdened boy took his grist to these two mystic millers. To comfort
+himself, to keep up his courage in the dark on his journeys to the mill
+and from it, he read the Bible, the poetry of Walt Whitman and Robert
+Browning, and the prose of Thomas Hardy. From the Old Testament he got
+an unsurpassed capacity for narrative and metaphor, while the “grey
+poet” whetted his appetite for worship and exaltation of the human
+body. Well might he say of Whitman, as Dante said of Virgil:
+
+  “Tu sè'lo mio maestro e il mio autore
+  Tu sè'solo colui, da cui io tòlsi
+  Lo bèllo stile che m'à fatto onore.”
+
+Thus D. H. Lawrence, like Jeshurun, waxed fat and kicked, forsook
+God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his Salvation.
+And he began to pour forth his protest in a series of books, each a
+little more lawless than its predecessor, culminating in “The Rainbow.”
+The book was suppressed by the Government of his own country, but
+the censors of our “free country,” who pronounced “Jurgen” a book
+prejudicial to public morals, allowed “The Rainbow” to be published
+here. Perhaps that is the reason “Jurgen” has been published in England
+without molest. After that, when Mr. Lawrence wished to circulate his
+contributions to world-purification and progress, which many call
+pornography, he resorted to the camouflage of “published privately for
+subscribers only.”
+
+My information is that Mr. Lawrence is not so widely read in the United
+States as are many of his contemporaries, Mr. Compton Mackenzie or
+Mr. Frank Swinnerton, for example. But there is a Lawrence cult here
+and it is growing, particularly amongst those who like to be called
+Greenwich Villagers, the breath of whose nostrils is antinomianism,
+especially sex antinomianism. Moreover, he has a way of interpolating
+between his salacious romances and erotic poetry books of imagination,
+observation, and experience, such as “Bay” and “Twilight in Italy,”
+that are couched in language whose swing and go few can withstand.
+These are replete with descriptions of sense-stirring scenery and
+analyses of sex-tortured souls, analyses which give lyric expression
+to the passions of the average man, who finds their lurid and ecstatic
+depiction diverting. Finally, Mr. Lawrence is striving to say
+something--something of sex and self which he believes the world should
+know; indeed, which is of paramount importance to it--and his manner
+of saying it has been so seductive that there are probably many who,
+like myself, have been clinging to him, as it were, buying his books
+and reading him with the hope that eventually he would succeed.
+
+The time limit given him by one of his admirers and well-wishers has
+expired. In taking leave of him I purpose to set down my reasons for
+severing the emotional and intellectual thread that has kept us--even
+though so very loosely, and to him, quite unawaredly--together.
+
+This renders unavoidable a line or two about criticism. I accept
+Matthew Arnold's estimate of the function of criticism, “to make known
+the best that is thought and known in the world,” providing that the
+critic also exposes the poor and meretricious which is being palmed
+off as “just as good,” or which is bidding for estimate, high or low.
+A guide should not only show the traveller upon whose eyes the scales
+still rest, or who has set out on a journey before the dawn, the
+right road, but he should also warn him of perilous roads and specify
+whether the peril is from bandits, broken bridges, or bellowing bulls.
+It is needless to say that the guide should have travelled the road
+and should know it and its environment well, and that his information
+should be recent.
+
+The road that Mr. D. H. Lawrence has been travelling for the past
+decade and more, and making the basis for descriptions of his trips, is
+well known to me. I have worked upon it, laughed upon it, cried upon it
+for more than a quarter of a century. My information of it is recent,
+for there, even now, I earn my daily bread. It is the road leading from
+Original Sin to the street called Straight. All must travel it. Some
+make the journey quickly; some laboriously. Some, those who have morbid
+sex-consciousness in one form or another, inadequate or deviate genetic
+endowment, are unable to finish the journey at all.
+
+[Illustration: D. H. LAWRENCE]
+
+Mr. Lawrence seems to have learned early that he could not fulfill
+his own nature passionately, and he has been struggling all his life to
+find the way in which fulfilment lies. It is generally believed that
+“Sons and Lovers” is largely autobiographical and that the writer is to
+be identified with Paul. In that book he gave ample testimony that he
+could not fulfill himself because of the conflict between mother-love
+and uxorial love; for we may venture to catalogue Paul's consortional
+experiences under that heading, even though he had no marriage lines.
+He has never been able to define just how he expected to fulfill his
+nature, but one may legitimately conclude from some of his recent
+publications that he believes, if the strings of the lyre of sensuality
+can be made taut enough and twanged savagely enough, the tone produced
+will constitute not only fulfilment and happiness, but an eternity of
+ecstasy, a timeless extension of that indescribable exaltation that
+Dostoievsky was wont to experience in moments preceding his epileptic
+seizures, which is so vividly described by him and which made such
+an impression upon his thoughts and so influenced his imagery. Mr.
+Lawrence apparently believes that fulfilment will be meditated by one
+“who will touch him at last on the root and quicken his darkness and
+perish on him as he has perished on her.” When this happens,
+
+  “We shall be free, freer than angels, ah, perfect”;
+
+and,
+
+    “After that, there will only remain that all men detach
+    themselves and become unique Conditioned only by our pure single
+    being, having no laws but the laws of our own being.”
+
+Finally:
+
+  “Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled.”
+
+    “Ideas and ideals are the machine plan and the machine
+    principles of an automatonised Psyche which has been so
+    prejudicial to human progress and human welfare. We must get
+    rid of them both.”
+
+In fact, it is a world without ideals for which Mr. Lawrence is
+clamouring and which he maintains he is in process of creating. It must
+be allowed that he is working industriously to do it, but most people,
+I fancy, will continue to believe that his world will not be a fit
+place to live in should he be able to finish his task. Meanwhile he
+is doing much to make the world less livable than it might otherwise
+be, particularly for those who are not competent to judge whether any
+of Mr. Lawrence's contentions are tenable or any of his statements in
+harmony with the evidence of science.
+
+“Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious” contains more misinformation in
+a small space than almost any recent book save the “Cruise of the
+Kawa.” It may reasonably be expected that anyone who writes upon
+psychoanalysis and the unconscious today and expects a hearing should
+know something about biology. But no biologist would accept such
+dogmatic statements as
+
+    “Life begins now, as always, in an individual living creature.
+    In the beginning of the individual living creature is the
+    beginning of life, every time and always. And life has no
+    beginning apart from this.... There is no assignable and no
+    logical reason for individuality.”
+
+To give such sentences the semblance of truth there should have
+been added, “so far as I know.” It is misleading to follow up such
+statements by saying, “having established so much,” etc. A poet may be
+permitted to say that “The young bull in the field has a wrinkled and
+sad face.” Indeed, he may abandon all morphology and animal behaviour
+and make the graceful serpent rest its head upon its shoulder! But the
+man who invades the field of science should, at least, practise some
+accuracy of expression, even though he give himself the latitude of
+poetic license.
+
+“The White Peacock” was Mr. Lawrence's first novel. It was favourably
+received. Letty, the principal character, is the trial portrait of all
+his later heroines. Her creator, in his youth and inexperience, did
+not know how to make her “carry on,” but she is the _anlage_ for all
+his female characters, their immoralities and bestialities. Her story
+is a simple one. Her mother, a lady of fine character, has been put to
+the acid test by the moral defalcation of her father, a drunkard and
+wastrel with charm. Leslie, a young man with money and social position,
+commonplace, emotionally shallow, spiritually inelastic, unimaginative,
+but intelligent and straightforward, wooes the temperamental, volatile,
+romantic Letty. The appeal which Leslie did not make to her is made by
+George, a young farmer “stoutly built, brown-eyed and fair-skinned,”
+whom Letty finds “ruddy, dark and with greatly thrilling eyes” and
+whom she calls her bull. Meanwhile George and Letty's brother form
+a friendship which is in dimmest outline the prototype of that
+extraordinary relationship existing between Gerald Crich and Rupert
+Birkin in “Women in Love.”
+
+The book shows the influence of Thomas Hardy, after whom Lawrence
+in his early youth sedulously patterned himself. In those days he
+was concerned with the photographic description of rustic scenes and
+particularly the lives of farmers and miners--which he knew from
+experience--and showed a sensitive appreciation of natural beauty.
+But the interest of the book is in the fact that it contains trial
+pictures of most of his later characters. George is Tom Brangwen of
+“The Rainbow”; Leslie, grown up and more arrogant, is Gerald in “Women
+in Love” and Gerald Barlow in “Touch and Go”; Cyril, more experienced
+and daring, is called Rupert Birkin when he is introduced again. In
+all of Lawrence's books the same characters appear. They vary only
+in having different standards and different degrees of immorality.
+The environment is always the same--a mining town; a countryside
+pitted with collieries; farms teeming with evidence of vegetable and
+animal life which is described with such intensity that the reader
+feels he is witnessing a new era of creation; mean drab houses; and
+squalid pubs. Into these and the schoolhouses and churches he puts his
+sex-tortured men and hyper-sexed women and surges them with chaotic
+vehemence of invitation and embrace and with the aches, groans, and
+shrieks of amorous love.
+
+His second novel, “The Trespassers,” shows the author to have, in
+addition to a sensitive and impassioned apprehension of nature, great
+capacity for describing the feelings of commonplace people. Helena,
+headstrong, determined, emancipated, self-sufficient, falls in love
+with her music teacher, Sigmund, a man of forty who had married when
+seventeen a matter-of-fact young woman who gave him many children which
+he ill-supported while she slaved and became sour and slatternly.
+Helena notices that Sigmund is tired and suggests that they spend a few
+days together in the Isle of Wight. She makes the plans, finds a nice
+motherly person who will take them into her cottage more for company
+than money, and, though this seems to be her first adventure, she acts
+with the certainty which attends experience. The scenery and tools
+that Mr. Lawrence uses so skilfully are all here: moonlight and its
+effect to produce ecstasy; bathing and lying naked on the sand or the
+grass and gazing approvingly at the body; lovely flowers and plants;
+and above all, a knowledge of the effects of baffled eroticism, of
+collision between primitive simple passion and artificial fantasying
+aberrant passion. Like Hermione Roddice of “Women in Love,” Helena's
+genetic instincts are abnormal. She has her Louisa, ten years her
+senior, whom she treats with indifference, cruelty, or affection, as it
+pleases her. Early in the history of man the prototype of Helena and
+Hermione was known. Shuah's second son, it is alleged, was the first
+example. The Lord slew Onan as soon as he deliberately violated the
+first and most essential principle of nature, but this drastic measure
+did not eradicate the biologic aberration, for it has displayed itself
+in the human species from that day to this, and even today gives more
+concern to parents and pedagogues than any other instinct deviation.
+Fortunately novelists, until the advent of Mr. Lawrence, have not
+featured this infirmity.
+
+Even in these juvenile days, Mr. Lawrence left very little to the
+imagination. Helena and Sigmund, lying on the cold wet beach in the
+twilight, enveloped in the Scotch mist (parenthetically it may be
+said that his heroes and heroines are wholly insensitive to bodily
+discomfort when they are in the throes of concupiscence) were
+practising the “Overture to Love,”
+
+    “and when Helena drew her lips away she was much exhausted.
+    She belonged to that class of dreaming women with whom passion
+    exhausts itself at the mouth. Her desire was accomplished in a
+    real kiss. She then wanted to go to sleep. She sank away from
+    his caresses, passively, subtly drew back from him.”
+
+The next morning Sigmund goes into the sea, and this gives the author
+opportunity to display the burning passion which the sight and
+contemplation of the male human body seems to cause in him.
+
+    “He glanced at his wholesome maturity, the firm plaiting of
+    his breasts, the full thighs, creatures proud in themselves,
+    and said 'She ought to be rejoiced at me, but she is not. She
+    rejects me as if I were a baboon under my clothing.'”
+
+When Mr. Lawrence convinced himself that he could write a more
+panoplied description of erotic ecstasy than that with which he
+afflicted Helena, he wrote the description of Ursula's encounter with
+the moon in “The Rainbow.” Indeed the real motive of “The Trespassers”
+is a trial portrait of Ursula; and while making up his mind as to
+the size of the canvas and the colours that he would use in painting
+that modern Messalina, Mr. Lawrence gave the world “Sons and Lovers,”
+which more than any other of his books, gave him a reputation for an
+understanding of the strange blood bonds that unite families and human
+beings, and for having an unusual, almost exquisite discrimination in
+the use of language.
+
+From boyhood Mr. Lawrence seems to have been possessed of a demon who
+whispered to him by day and shrieked to him by night, “Be articulate,
+say it with words,” and the agony of his impotence is heartrending,
+as frustration after frustration attends his efforts. He tries it
+in prose, then in verse. Gradually, from taking thought, from sex
+experience and from hasty perusal of scientific and mystic literature,
+there formulated in his mind a concrete thought, which in time
+engendered a conviction, finally an obsession. A brief exposition of
+the mental elaboration and the Laocoon grip that it took on him follows:
+
+The Greeks, fanning the embers of Egyptian civilisation and getting no
+fire for their torch, said,
+
+    “Let there be an ideal to which all mankind shall bow the knee.
+    Let consciousness and all its manifestations be expressed in
+    terms of ideals and ideas or in conduct that expresses them, and
+    finally let everything that tends to hinder such expression,
+    such as the sensual and animal in man be subdued and repressed.”
+
+Christianity went a step further and said,
+
+    “Not only shall ideals be exalted, but pure spirituality and
+    perfection--man's goal--can only be obtained by the annihilation
+    of what are called Animal Instincts.”
+
+[Illustration: D. H. LAWRENCE] From a drawing by _Jan Juta._
+
+Christianity's promoters and well-wishers realised, however, that
+the continuance of the race depended upon the gratification of these
+appetites, and so laws and conventions were made under whose operation
+they could be legitimately indulged, there being small hope that the
+wish expressed by Sir Thomas Browne, the author of “Religio Medici” and
+a flock of children, that man might procreate as do the trees, should
+ever be gratified. In civilised lands the conquest of the lower self
+has been objective. Man has moved from a great impulse within himself,
+the unconscious. Once the conquest has been effected, the conscious
+mind turns, looks, and marvels:
+
+  “E come quei che con lena affannata
+  Uscito fuor del pelago alla riva,
+  Si volge all'acqua perigliosa, e guata.”
+
+This self-conscious mental provoking of sensation and reaction in the
+great affective centres is called sentimentalism or sensationalism.
+The mind returns upon the affective centres and sets up in them a
+deliberate reaction. These are passions exploited by the mind. Or the
+passional motive may act directly, and not from the mental provocation,
+and these reactions may be reflected by a secondary process down into
+the body. This is the final and most fatal effect of idealism, because
+it reduces everything to self-consciousness into spuriousness, and it
+is the madness of the world today. It is this madness that Mr. Lawrence
+has sworn to cure. He is going to do it by conquering what he calls
+the lower centres, by submitting the lowest plane to the highest.
+When this is done there will be nothing more to conquer. Then all is
+one, all is love, even hate is love, even flesh is spirit. The great
+oneness, the experience of infirmity, the triumph of the living spirit,
+which at last includes everything, is then accomplished. Man becomes
+whole, his knowledge becomes complete, he is united with everything.
+Mr. Lawrence has mapped out a plan of the sympathetic nervous system
+and has manipulated what biologists call the tropisms in such a way as
+to convince himself that he has laid the scientific foundation for his
+work, but as there is scarcely a page or paragraph in his little book
+that does not contain statements which are at variance with scientific
+facts, it is unnecessary to say that his science will not assist him
+in his propaganda nearly so much as his fiction. Like Weininger, he
+finally eliminates women. As he puts it: “Acting from the last and
+profoundest centres, man acts womanless.” It is no longer a question
+of race continuance. It is a question of sheer ultimate being, the
+perfection of life nearest to death and yet furthest away from it.
+Acting from these centres man is an extreme being, the unthinkable
+warrior, creator, mover, and maker. “And the polarity is between man
+and man.”
+
+That sentence contains to him who can read it aright the whole truth of
+Mr. D. H. Lawrence. To some that brief statement has the luminousness
+and significance of the writing on the wall. Anyone who reads Mr.
+Lawrence's later books attentively--and I appreciate that it is some
+task to do it--will understand it; and those who, like myself, have
+devoted themselves to study of aberrations, genesic and mental, as they
+display themselves in geniuses, psychopaths, and neuropaths, as well as
+in ordinary men, will sense it correctly.
+
+Mr. Lawrence thinks there are three stages in the life of man: the
+stage of sexless relations between individuals, families, clans, and
+nations; the stage of sex relations with an all-embracing passional
+acceptance, culminating in the eternal orbit of marriage; and finally,
+the love between comrades, the manly love which only can create a new
+era of life. One state does not annul the other; it fulfills the other.
+Such, in brief, is the strange venture in psychopathy Mr. Lawrence
+is making, and contributions to it up to date are “Women in Love,”
+“Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious,” and “Aaron's Rod.” “The Prussian
+Officer,” “The Rainbow,” “The Lost Girl,” “Look, We Have Come Through”
+were merely efforts to get his propaganda literature into shape.
+
+The Adam and Eve of Mr. Lawrence's new creation are Tom Brangwen and
+his wife; and to understand their descendants (and no one, not even
+Mr. Lawrence, can understand them fully) one must study the parents.
+Tom, the youngest of the Brangwen family, as a boy is rather heavy
+and stupid intellectually, sensitive to the atmosphere around him,
+brutal perhaps, but at the same time delicate, very delicate. He does
+not get on in school, so he leaves precipitously when he is fifteen,
+after having laid open the master's head with a slate, but not before
+he has formed a masochistic friendship with a warm clever frail boy.
+Sex desire begins soon to torment him. His first experience causes his
+sensibilities to rebel, and the second is a failure because of his
+self-consciousness and the dominancy of a budding inferiority complex.
+He is on the way to anæsthetising desire by brandy drinking, to which
+he periodically gives himself, when one day he meets on the street a
+demure lady whose curious absorbed flitting motion arrests him and
+causes a joy of pain to run through him.
+
+    “She had felt Tom go by almost as if he had brushed her. She
+    had tingled in body as she had gone up on the road. Her impulse
+    was strong against him because he was not of her sort. But one
+    blind instinct led her to take him, to have him, and then to
+    relinquish herself to him. It would be safety. Also he was young
+    and very fresh.”
+
+Her passional reactions are not from the mind. They are spontaneous
+and know no inhibition. After a second quite casual meeting, Tom
+goes to the vicarage where she, a Polish lady, is housekeeper since
+her husband, a doctor obliged to leave his country for political
+reasons, had died and left her and her baby daughter in dire want.
+“Good evening,” says Tom, “I'll just come in a minute”; and having
+entered, he continues, “I came up to ask if you'd marry me.” He
+arouses an intensity of passion in her that she cannot, or wishes
+not, to withstand. But Tom is conventional and so they are married.
+The description of his marital lust is lurid to the last degree, and
+finally after one great debauch “he felt that God had passed through
+the married pair and made Himself known to them.” Tom is largely brawn
+and brute, though he has a vein of sentiment, and finally he yields
+to drink and meets a violent death, leaving two sons, a namesake who
+is attracted to his own sex, Fred who suffers the tortures of a
+mother-sapped spirit, and Anna, his stepdaughter.
+
+Anna hates people who come too near her until she meets Will Brangwen,
+the son of Tom's brother who had flagrantly offended matrimonial
+convention. She is fascinated by this æsthetic serious self-satisfied
+youth with a high-pitched voice, who sings tenor and who is interested
+in church architecture and ritualism. Anna hurls herself at Will's head
+and tells him in no uncertain tones of her all-consuming love before
+he makes any protests. She arranges the wheat shocks in the moonlight
+so that they will propitiate her purpose, but only passionate caresses
+and a proposal of marriage result. This disappoints her, but the men
+of the Brangwen family, though consumed with elemental passion, are
+sex-slackers compared with the women. Will goes into states of ecstasy
+sitting motionless and timeless, contemplating stained-glass windows
+and other religious symbols, and she hates him violently.
+
+    “In the gloom and mystery of the church his soul lived and ran
+    free, like some strange, underground thing, abstract. In this
+    spirit he seemed to escape and run free of her.”
+
+They are happy only when in the throes of conjugality. She is
+profoundly fecund and has periods of ecstasy when she thinks God has
+chosen her to prove the miracle of creation. In her exaltation, big
+with child as she is, she dances naked in her bedroom, to the Creator
+to Whom she belongs.
+
+In order to develop the now widely disseminated Freudian ideas about
+the love of the eldest girl for the father, the antagonism between the
+mother and daughter, etc., Will falls in love with his oldest child,
+Ursula. “His heart grew red-hot with passionate feeling for the child”
+when she is about a year old. “Her father was the dawn wherein her
+consciousness woke up wide-eyed, unseeing, she was awakened too soon.”
+The writer, master as he is of the mysteries of perversion, uses this
+sympathy and Will's extrauxorial vagaries and wanderings to cause,
+vicariously, a welling-up of passion in Anna. After a revolting scene
+with a grisette, Will goes home to his wife who immediately detects
+that there is a change in him, that he has had a new experience. She
+is excited to wild lubricity, and “he got an inkling of the vastness
+of the unknown sensual store of delight she was.” But this is the book
+of Ursula. The spontaneous passions of the grandmother and mother are
+incidental.
+
+Ursula goes through with the son of the old Polish clergyman Baron the
+same sort of experience that her father went through with the flapper
+that he picked up at the movie, only not with such _slancio_. The
+purpose of this episode is to point out the intensity of love in the
+female and her clamour for the dominant male. When Ursula finds that
+Skrebensky is a slacker,
+
+    “She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two
+    breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a
+    quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the
+    moon. She wanted the moon to fill into her, she wanted more,
+    more communion with the moon, consummation.”
+
+Since Ursula has not met the one-hundred-per-cent male, and as “her
+sexual life flamed into a kind of disease within her,” Mr. Lawrence now
+brings her into relations with a finely portrayed Lesbian, Winifred
+Inger. The description of their first real contact in the bungalow at
+night and their night bath is willfully and purposely erotic. Ursula,
+tired of Winifred, plans to marry her to her uncle, Tom. When they meet
+“he detected in her a kinship with his own dark corruption. Immediately
+he knew they were akin.” One might safely say that Mr. Lawrence had
+before him, or in his mind's eye, when he penned the description of
+Tom, the photograph of one of his fellow-poets of a generation ago whom
+the English public found necessary to put in the Reading Gaol.
+
+    “His manner was polite, almost foreign, and rather cold.
+    He still laughed in his curious, animal fashion, suddenly
+    wrinkling up his wide nose, and showing his sharp teeth. The
+    fine beauty of his skin and his complexion, some almost waxen
+    quality, hid the strange, repellant grossness of him, the slight
+    sense of putrescence, the commonness which revealed itself in
+    his rather fat thighs and loins.”
+
+It is in the chapter “The Bitterness of Ecstasy” that Mr. Lawrence
+takes off the brakes. In London, whither she has gone with Skrebensky,
+Ursula decides to solve the riddle of the Sphinx. She goes about it in
+the conventional Brangwen way by biting him, clawing him, and generally
+tearing him to pieces. It seems good to him and he likes her and wants
+to marry her. One day, after they have had some tall bouts of love at
+Richmond, she tells him that she won't marry him and he has a grand
+crisis of hysteria. She is sorry she has hurt him. She hails a cab and
+takes the sobbing wooer home, and the lecherous cabby is moved nearly
+to violence by the radiation of passion from Ursula. She senses danger
+and persuades Tony to walk. She knows then that he is but a simulacrum
+of man, and when she has gone home she decides that she will not marry.
+Finally, however, she gives in and the date is more or less arranged.
+Then comes the _grande finale_ with the scene wonderfully set in the
+moonlight by the seashore. There she makes an onslaught on him that is
+tigress-like to the last degree, throws him on the sand, devours him,
+wrings him like a dirty rag, shows him that he is no good, and hurls
+him from her, a sucked lemon. He sneaks away and offers himself to his
+Colonel's daughter, is accepted, and is off to India, leaving “the need
+of a world of men for her.”
+
+Then comes “The Rainbow,” a parody of Freud's exposition of the dream
+of being trampled upon by horses. Ursula finds after a time that the
+customary result has followed her experiences, so she writes a letter
+to Skrebensky saying she'll be good and go out and marry him. She goes
+for a walk in the mist and the rain, into the wood where the trees
+are all phallic symbols “thrust like stanchions upright between the
+roaring overhead and the sweeping of the circle underfoot.” She begins
+to hallucinate, to feel her subconsciousness take possession of her,
+and the sight of a group of horses fills her bestial soul with a hope
+that she might finally be possessed in such a way as would give her
+satisfaction, that she might get “some fantastic fulfilment in her
+life.” She goes into a state of delirium and several weeks later, when
+it has passed, she finds that she has miscarried. This is followed by
+a mild dementia; she thinks she is moral and will be good, but as she
+gets strong she sees the rainbow, which is Eros kindling the flames
+again.
+
+    “And she saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the
+    old brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the
+    world built up in a living fragment of Truth, fitting to the
+    overarching heaven.”
+
+Mr. Lawrence, exhausted with the perpetration of these sensual delights
+and disappointed with the distrusts of the flesh, turned for a short
+time to nature to refresh his spirit and bathe his soul. He sensed
+frustration despite the unleashment of passion; he realised that
+sublimation had eluded him, and so he turned to primitive life and
+primitive people, the peasants of Italy. Soon his torments began to
+creep up again in “Twilight in Italy.” The roused physical sensations
+will not subside. They penetrate pastoral scenes and emanate from
+sylvan scenery.
+
+After having refreshed himself, he gave the world “The Lost Girl,”
+whose genesic aberrations are comparatively mild, and whose antics
+with the half-gipsy, half-circus folk are rather amusing. Some of Mr.
+Lawrence's early admirers were encouraged to look for his reformation,
+especially after the appearance of a thin book of poems entitled “Bay.”
+Even in this, here and there, the inhibited and mother-sapped spirit
+crops out, as in the poem called “The Little Town in the Evening,” but
+for the most part the verses are founded on sane ideas, even ideals,
+truths, and morality. Most of them are poems of the war, wonderful pen
+pictures and silhouettes, such as “Town,” a London transformed by the
+war as no picture or prose description could render it, ending,
+
+  “It is well,
+  That London, lair of sudden
+  Male and female darknesses
+  Has broken her spell.”
+
+In previous volumes of poems, particularly in “Amores” and in “Look,
+We Have Come Through,” he had published verse which was highly
+appraised by competent critics, and hailed by a small group steeped in
+preciosity, as epoch-making. However, if most of his poems have any
+central or dominant idea, he is unable to express it. They are the
+verbal manifestations of moods expressed symbolically, allegorically;
+of sensuous desires, satisfactions, and satieties “seeking polarity,”
+to borrow his favourite expression. Nearly everything is passion with
+Mr. Lawrence, or suggestive of passion. The pure lily is a phallic
+symbol, the bee sucking honey from a flower is a ravisher of innocence,
+the earth itself bursts asunder periodically in the throes of secret
+sensuality. Only the sea is free from the trammels of lust, and it is
+
+  “Sworn to a high and splendid purposelessness
+  Of brooding and delighting in the secret of life's going.”
+
+“New Poems,” published in this country in 1920, did not fame or defame
+him, although “Piano,” “Intime,” “Sickness,” and “Twenty Years Ago”
+might well have done the former, and “Seven Seals” the latter.
+
+The lull did not last long, and it was only a lull before a storm,
+a hurricane, a tornado which spent its force and destruction upon
+the author and made him the outlaw, if not the outcast, of English
+literature. “Women in Love” is the adventure of two sisters, Ursula
+and Gudrun Brangwen, the Brangwens whose frightful passions we have
+now known for three generations, and two men of breeding, wealth,
+and culture, Gerald Crich, a Sadist by inheritance and natural
+inclination, and Rupert Birkin, an intellectual, apparently male, but
+contradicted in this by his instinct and by his conduct, whose purpose
+and ambition is to fall into the long African process of purely sensual
+understanding.
+
+The portrait of Rupert Birkin is superb. No excerpt could convey Mr.
+Lawrence's capacity for characterisation as well as the paragraph which
+describes him:
+
+    “He was thin, pale and ill-looking. His figure was narrow but
+    nicely made. He went with a slight trail of one foot, which
+    came only from self-consciousness. His nature was clever and
+    separate. He did not fit at all in the conventional occasion.
+    He affected to be quite ordinary, perfectly and marvellously
+    commonplace. And he did it so well, taking the tone of his
+    surroundings, adjusting himself quickly to his interlocutor and
+    his circumstance, that he achieved a verisimilitude of ordinary
+    commonplaceness that usually propitiated his onlookers for a
+    moment, disarmed them from attacking his singleness. He did not
+    believe in any standards of behaviour though they are necessary
+    for the common ruck. Anyone who is anything can be just himself
+    and do as he likes. One should act spontaneously on one's
+    impulses--it's the only gentlemanly thing to do, provided you
+    are fit to do it.”
+
+Hermione Roddice, daughter of a Derbyshire baron, a tall slow reluctant
+woman, with a weight of fair hair and pale long face that she carries
+lifted up in the Rossetti fashion, and that seems almost drugged as if
+a strange mass of thoughts coil in the darkness within her allowing her
+no escape, is in love with him. “She needed conjunction with Rupert
+Birkin to make her whole and, she believed, happy. But the more she
+strove to bring him to her, the more he battled her back.”
+
+Gerald Crich, whose gleaming beauty and maleness is like a young
+good-natured smiling wolf, flashes upon Gudrun Brangwen and she
+succumbs at once, just as the Polish lady did when Gudrun's grandfather
+got sight of her from the tail of his eye. The first time Gerald and
+Rupert meet “There was a pause of strange enmity between the two men
+that was very near to love.” Going up in the train to London together,
+they have a talk about ideals, the object and aim of life. This gives
+Rupert time to formulate his thought that Humanity does not embody the
+utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter.
+There will be a new embodiment in a new way. Let humanity disappear as
+quickly as possible. They are introduced into bohemia; that is, the
+haunts of the semi-abandoned and the perverted. Birkin shares a flat
+with Halliday, a degenerate “with a moving beauty of his own,” and his
+friends. Just how far this group expresses Mr. Lawrence's own views
+of art and philosophy, in their discussion of wood carvings of the
+primitive negroes of West Africa, we need not attempt to estimate, but
+that need not deter us from saying that the description of a gathering
+around the fireplace in a state of complete nudity is indecent and
+disgusting, even though Mr. Lawrence thinks this kind of thing marks a
+milestone on the way to that which he calls “Allness.”
+
+A large portion of the book is, in my judgment, obscene, deliberately,
+studiously, incessantly obscene. Obscenity, like everything else, has
+its gradations, its intensities, its variations, and the author of this
+book knows how to ring the changes upon obscenity in a way that would
+make Aretino green with envy. For instance, the so-called wrestling
+scene between Rupert and Gerald is the most obscene narrative that I
+have encountered in the English language--obscene in the etymological
+sense, for it is ill-omened, hence repulsive; and in the legal sense,
+for it tends to corrupt the mind and to subvert respect for decency
+and morality. The major part of Hermione's conduct with Rupert is in
+the realm of perversion, and Rupert in his speech to her conveys by
+innuendo what Mr. Lawrence knows the laws of his country would not
+permit him to say directly. The Marquis de Sade was a mere novice
+in depicting the transports of lust that result from inflicting
+injury or causing humiliation compared with Mr. Lawrence; and as for
+Sacher-Masoch, who worked on the other side of the shield, he merely
+staked out the claim for a young Britisher to cultivate.
+
+Hermione says that if we could only realise that in the spirit we are
+all one, all equal in spirit, all brothers there, the rest would not
+matter. There would then be no more struggle for power and prestige,
+the things which now destroy. This drives Rupert to violence. He denies
+it savagely. We are alike in everything _save_ spirit. In the spirit he
+is as separate as one star from another; as different in quality and
+quantity. Establish a state on that. This destroys the last vestige of
+Hermione's restraint and facilitates the consummation of voluptuous
+ecstasy at last. With a beautiful ball of lapis lazuli, a paper weight,
+she smashes his skull while he is sitting in her boudoir.
+
+A second blow would have broken his neck had he not shied it with a
+volume of Thucydides (a deft touch to make the immortal Greek save the
+prototype of the Superman that Mr. Lawrence is introducing while he
+buries Greek idealism).
+
+    “She must smash it, it must be smashed before her ecstasy was
+    consummated, fulfilled forever. A thousand lives, a thousand
+    deaths matters nothing now, only the fulfilment of this perfect
+    ecstasy.”
+
+But he gets away from her.
+
+“Then she staggered to the couch, and lay down, and went heavily to
+sleep”; and he wanders into the wet hillside that is overgrown and
+obscure with bushes and flowers. Here Mr. Lawrence gives a classic
+description of masochistic lust.
+
+    “He took off his clothes and sat down naked among the primroses
+    ... but they were too soft. He went through the long grass to
+    a clump of young fir trees, that were no higher than a man.
+    The soft-sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs
+    against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly,
+    and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles.
+    There was a thistle which pricked him vividly, but not too much,
+    because all his movements were discriminate and soft. To lie
+    down and roll in the sticky young hyacinths, to lie on one's
+    belly and cover one's back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft
+    as a breath, softer and more delicate and more beautiful than
+    the touch of any woman; and then to sting one's thighs against
+    the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel
+    the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and
+    then to clasp the silvery birch trunk against one's breast, its
+    smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges--this was
+    good, this was all very good, very satisfying.”
+
+And this is the man who Mr. Lawrence would have us believe was
+Inspector of Schools in England in the beginning of the Twentieth
+Century! The idea that he wants a woman is now absurd. This is his idea
+of bliss. He knows where to plant himself, his seed: along with the
+trees in the folds of the delicious fresh-growing leaves. This is his
+place, his marriage place.
+
+It may interest Mr. Lawrence to know that this procreative idea of
+Birkin's is not original with him. Many years ago I encountered a
+man in the Kings Park State Hospital who was of the same belief and
+addicted to the same practice.
+
+It would not be convincing if only æsthetes, intelligentsia, artists,
+and the like had revolutionary ideas. Gerald, a man of business, an
+executive, a coal baron, aggressive, capable, also had them, inherited
+from his mother, acquired from Birkin and “made in Germany” where he
+had been sent to school. He makes love to Ursula by expounding his
+theories of life:
+
+    “If only man was swept off the face of the earth, creation would
+    go on so marvellously, with a new start, non-human. Man is one
+    of the mistakes of creation--like the ichthyosauri. If only we
+    were gone again, think what lovely things would come out of the
+    liberated days; things straight out of the fire.”
+
+He wants her without contract, understood or stated:
+
+    “There is a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond
+    responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there
+    I should want to meet you--not in the emotional, loving
+    plane--but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms
+    of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two
+    utterly strange creatures. I should want to approach you and
+    you me.--And there could be no obligation, because there is no
+    standard for action there, because no understanding has been
+    reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman--so there can be no
+    calling to book, in any form whatsoever--because one is outside
+    the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One
+    can only follow the impulse, take that which lies in front, and
+    responsible for nothing, asked for nothing, giving nothing, only
+    each taking according to the primal desire.”
+
+In other words, sheer savagery, and the worst African variety at that!
+
+One of Mr. Lawrence's obsessions is that he can distinguish between
+the sexual writhings of his characters, depending upon the environment
+in which they writhe and the immediate exciting cause. This justifies
+him in describing the same writhe over and over with a different
+setting. Of the five hundred pages, at least one hundred are devoted
+to descriptions of the sensations that precede and accompany ecstasy
+provoked and induced by some form of unhealthy sexual awareness.
+
+It is impossible to give even a brief synopsis of “Women in Love.” One
+chapter, however, must be mentioned, for in a way it is the crux of the
+book. For some time Birkin has been trying to state his case to Ursula
+and stave off her clamour for consummation. He wants sex to revert
+to the level of the other appetites, to be regarded as a functional
+process, not as fulfilment. He wants her to give him her spirit.
+
+    “He knew he did not want further sensual experience, he thought.
+    His mind reverted to the African statues in Halliday's rooms.
+    They displayed their thousand upon thousand of years of sensual
+    knowledge, purely unspiritual. Thousands of years ago that
+    which was imminent in himself must have taken place in these
+    Africans. This is what was imminent in him; the goodness, the
+    holiness, the desire for creation and productive happiness
+    must have lapsed, leaving the single impulse for knowledge in
+    one sort, mindless, progressive knowledge through the senses,
+    knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge in
+    disintegration and dissolution. Is the day of our creative life
+    finished or are we not ready for the sensual understanding, the
+    knowledge in the mystery of dissolution? The man Ursula would
+    take must be quaffed to the dregs by her, he must render himself
+    up to her. She believed that love surpassed the individual. She
+    believed in an absolute surrender to love. He didn't.”
+
+They then have a violent verbal altercation in which Ursula tells
+him what she thinks of his obscenity and perverseness in words that
+admit of no misunderstanding. She then leaves him in a state of wrath
+and resentment after having thrown the topaz engagement ring, bought
+from a second-hand dealer, in his face. But her ardour conquers her
+righteousness and she goes back to him, saying, “See what a flower I
+found you.” And then it is settled quietly and as if they were normal
+humans. They go to a hotel and there they have super-corporeal contact
+that beggars description. As far as can be made out, there is no
+consortion in the ordinary sense. It is neither love nor passion.
+
+    “She had established a rich new circuit, a new current of
+    passional electric energy, between the two of them released
+    from the darkest poles of the body and established in
+    perfect circuit, and she had done this in some mysterious
+    ways by tracing the back of his thighs with her sensitive
+    fingertips, his mysterious loins and his thighs. Something more
+    mystically-physically satisfying than anything she had imagined
+    or known--though she had had some experience--was realised. She
+    had thought that there was no source deeper than the phallic
+    source, but now from the strange marvellous flanks and thighs
+    came the flood of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches.”
+
+They laughed and went to the meal provided. And this is what they had:
+
+    “There was a venison pasty, of all things, a large broad-faced
+    cut ham, eggs and cresses, and red beet root, and medlars and
+    apple tart, and tea.”
+
+There is a deep, dark significance in this meal, which the Freudian
+will understand perfectly, but which to the uninitiated will seem quite
+meaningless, even after Ursula says, “What _good_ things. How noble it
+looks.”
+
+There is a lot more about the full mystic knowledge that she gets from
+his suave loins of darkness, the strange, magical current of force in
+his back and his loins, that fills with nausea. They finish by driving
+to Sherwood Forest, taking all their clothes off and beginning anew
+their effort for fulfilment.
+
+    “She was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence
+    of mystic, palpable, real utterance.”
+
+I have neither the strength nor the inclination to follow Gudrun in her
+search for her amatory _Glückeritter_, or to hear further exposition of
+the _credo_ of the strange freak of nature that Mr. Lawrence strives
+to apotheosise. Suffice it to say that the precious quartette go off
+to the Tyrol, Ursula and Birkin having gone through the formality of
+marriage; Gudrun and Gerald dispensing with it. And there Gudrun begins
+writhings which are designed to put all the others in the shade. And in
+a way they do, because Gerald's violent death is required to facilitate
+her supreme moment. They introduce a super-degenerate Loerke, a
+sculptor, who represents the rock bottom of all life to Gudrun.
+
+    “There was the look of a little wastrel about him that intrigued
+    her, and an old man's look, that interested her, and then,
+    besides this, an uncanny singleness, that marked out an artist
+    to her. He had come up from a street Arab. He was twenty-six,
+    had thieved, sounded every depth. He saw in Gudrun his
+    soul-mate. He knew her with a subconscious, sinister knowledge,
+    devoid of illusions and hopes. The degradation of his early
+    life also attracted her. He seemed to be the very stuff of
+    the underworld of life. There was no going beyond him. Birkin
+    understood why they should like him, the little obscene monster
+    of the darkness that he is. He is a Jew who lives like a rat, in
+    the river of corruption.”
+
+Birkin and Ursula come back for Gerald's funeral. Birkin does some
+soliloquising, the burden of which is “He should have loved me. I
+offered him.” He is sure Gerald would have been happy if he had
+accepted. When Ursula wants to know if she is not enough for him, he
+says,
+
+    “No, to make life complete, really complete, I wanted eternal
+    union with a man too, another kind of love.”
+
+    “It is a perversity,” she said.
+
+    “Well----,” he said.
+
+    “You can't have two kinds of love. Why should you?” she said.
+
+    “It seems as if I can't,” he said. “Yet I wanted it.”
+
+    “You can't have it because it's wrong, impossible,” she said.
+
+    “I don't believe that,” he answered.
+
+And that is the unvarying and final answer of the advocates of the
+enigmatic aberration whose doctrines Mr. Lawrence is trying to foist
+upon an unsuspecting English-reading public.
+
+In “Aaron's Rod” Mr. Lawrence returns to the theme of “The Rainbow”
+and “Women in Love.” His ardour, fortunately, has cooled somewhat, but
+his psychology is more at variance with facts and his philosophy more
+mystic than in either of these. Aaron Sisson, a miner's checkweighman,
+with a talent for music, marries when twenty, an over-sexed young woman
+of better social position than himself. Though he soon betrays her,
+they manage to live, with their three children, an average family life
+for twelve years. He then determines that he will not be the instrument
+and furnisher of any woman. He rebels against the sacrament by which we
+live today; namely, that man is the giver, woman the receiver. He can
+not and will not tolerate the life centrality of woman. Man's contact
+with woman should be for procreational purposes, but man should blend
+his spirit with man: “Born in him was a spirit which could not worship
+woman, and would not.”
+
+So he sets up the Christmas tree for the children, goes out to buy
+candles for it, and never returns. Instead, he falls in with a
+family group of inverts which the little mining towns always seem to
+have--a man of perverted type; his fiancée, a Lesbian, the daughter
+of a promiscuous Hermione and her complaisant husband; and several
+others--and they proceed to have a mild orgy in the ugly midland
+mining town, “in which it is remarkable how many odd or extraordinary
+people there are to be found.” Aaron gets a position as flutist in an
+orchestra, and at the opera he meets Mr. Lilly, who, though married, is
+by nature of inverted genesic instinct. He is Aaron's downfall.
+
+It is to be noted that there is a deep symbolism in the names that
+Mr. Lawrence selects for his heroes and heroines. Aaron is sure
+that he never wanted to surrender himself to his wife, nor to his
+mother, nor to anybody. But he falls ill, and Lilly cares for him and
+nurses him like a mother, and then goes off to Italy--Aaron after
+him like a hound after the scent. We are introduced to a choice lot
+of males in Florence, all portraits of exiled Britishers who find
+it suits their tastes, which their country calls their infirmities,
+to live there, and easily recognisable by anyone who has lived in
+Florence. We are regaled with their philosophy and with Mr. Lawrence's
+reflections on art and Sixteenth Century music. Finally, to show
+Aaron's charm and concupiscense, the author throws a modern brooding
+Cleopatra--Anthony-less--across his path. She is an American woman
+from the Southern States whose father was once Ambassador to France.
+Aaron capitulates at the second interview and then despises himself.
+But again he falls a few days later, and then he realises that there
+is nothing left for him but flight, flight to Lilly and abandonment of
+the love idea and the love motive. Life submission is his duty now,
+and when he looks up into Lilly's face, at the moment resembling a
+Byzantine Eikon, and asks, “And to whom shall I submit?” the reply
+comes, “Your soul will tell you.”
+
+And my soul tells me that he who submits himself to reading the
+doctrines promulgated by D. H. Lawrence deserves his punishment.
+Moreover, I maintain that, both from the artistic and the psychological
+standpoints, Mr. Lawrence's performances are those of a neophyte and a
+duffer. He can make words roar and sing and murmur, and by so doing he
+can make moral, poised, God-fearing, sentiment-valuing man creep and
+shudder, indeed, almost welcome the obscurity of the grave, so that he
+will not have to meet his fellow again in the flesh. He libels and he
+bears false witness against man. There are persons in the world such
+as Mr. Lawrence describes. So are there lepers and lunatics. We do not
+talk about them as if the whole world were made up of them; and we do
+not confidently look for world reformers or world orderers among them.
+
+Mr. Lawrence is a self-appointed crusader who is going to destroy
+European civilisation and at the same time revivify that of six
+thousand and more years ago. He is the most shining avatar of mysticism
+the Twentieth Century has yet produced, and the most daring champion
+of atavism in twenty centuries. He is using a medium to facilitate his
+manifestations and embodiments of which he is a consummate master,
+viz., fiction. But his statements, both when he uses the language of
+science, and when he uses that of fiction, are at variance with truth
+and fact; and he has not furnished, nor can he furnish, a particle
+of evidence to substantiate his thesis: enhancement of the awareness
+and potency “of that other basic mind, the deepest physical mind” by
+sensuous satisfaction or through sexual ecstasy. His “broodings and
+delightings in the secret of life's goings” are anathema.
+
+During the past decade biology has accumulated a convincing amount of
+evidence to show that sex intergrades, or imperfect sex separation and
+differentiation frequently exist, and furthermore it may be produced
+experimentally. These facts justify the belief that individuals
+with the convictions and conduct of Birkin result from a definite
+developmental condition, which is the fundamental cause of the peculiar
+sex reactions. Such persons are actually different from fully expressed
+males or females, and their peculiar condition is permanent, present
+from childhood to old age, and uninfluenceable by any measures;
+pedagogy or punishment, mandate or medicine.
+
+My experience as a psychologist and alienist has taught me that
+pornographic literature is created by individuals whose genesic
+endowment is subnormal _ab initio_, or exhausted from one cause or
+another before nature intended that it should be, and that those who
+would aid God and nature in the ordering of creation are sterile, or
+approximately so. This is a dispensation for which we cannot be too
+grateful.
+
+There are two ways of contemplating Mr. Lawrence's effort. Has he a
+fairly clear idea of what he is trying to say, of what he is trying
+to put over; or is he a poetic mystic groping in abysmal darkness? I
+am one of those who is convinced that he knows just what he wants to
+accomplish, and that he could make a statement of it in language that
+anyone could understand, did the censor permit him. Public opinion
+is adequate to deal with the infractions of taste and ethics that he
+has perpetrated, and it is quite safe to leave him finally to that
+judiciary.
+
+Mr. Lawrence once wrote, “The Americans are not worthy of their
+Whitman. Miracle that they have not annihilated every word of him.” To
+which I would make rejoinder, “The Britishers have not deserved D. H.
+Lawrence. Pity it is that they do not annihilate every trace of him.”
+
+Ten years have gone since Henry James, walking up and down the charming
+garden of his picturesque villa in Rye, discussing the most promising
+successors of Hardy, Meredith, and Conrad, said to me, “The world is
+sure to hear from a young man, D. H. Lawrence.” It has heard from him.
+He has sown in glory and raised in corruption. He has triumphed,
+and his triumph has stained English literature. He has debased an
+unusual talent and devoted his splendid endowment of artistry to
+spoking the wheel of evolutionary progress, even to spinning it in a
+reverse direction. He has arrived, and in arriving has brought with
+him a sweltering, suffocating South African atmosphere, difficult
+and dangerous for one of his former admirers to breathe, who as he
+withdraws from it ventures to call the attention of others to its
+noxiousness.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XII
+    THE JOY OF LIVING--AND WRITING ABOUT IT: JOHN ST. LOE STRACHEY
+
+
+Twenty-five years ago, browsing among the second-hand book-shops of
+Shaftesbury Avenue, my attention was arrested by a sombre volume
+entitled “From Grave to Gay,” by J. St. Loe Strachey.
+
+Until then I had not heard of Mr. Strachey, and though I admit it with
+reluctance, I had not even heard of his famous cousin, Henry Strachey,
+who was private secretary to Lord Clive. But the subtitle of his
+book: “Concerned with Certain Subjects of Serious Interest, with the
+Puritans, with Literature and with the Humours of Life, Now for the
+First Time Collected and Arranged,” intrigued me. Those were the very
+subjects, I had convinced myself, with which I was concerned, for did
+they not give spice to life and make for surcease of its burdens? “Now
+for the First Time Collected and Arranged” I construed to be a belief
+on the part of the writer that from time to time he could substitute
+for the word “first” the other numerals in progressive order. Whether
+or not he has been able to do so, I have not determined, but every
+one knows that he became “editor and sole proprietor” of the London
+_Spectator_ and has occupied a conspicuous place in journalism for
+the past quarter of a century. And now he recounts his life, or such
+parts of it as seem to him will permit others to understand how and
+why he has carried on, and he calls it “The Adventure of Living: A
+Subjective Autobiography,” stressing “the influences that have affected
+my life and for good or evil made me what I am.” He emphasises that the
+interesting thing about a human being is not what he is, but how he
+came to be what he is, which naturally includes what he does and why he
+does it.
+
+Mr. Strachey came to be what he is from his heredity, aided and
+guided--after it had formulated itself in the organism to which, a few
+months later, the name John St. Loe was given--by Mrs. Salome Leaker,
+the family nurse. Once the reader gets her name out of the realm of
+risibility, he falls in love with her. A face radiant with a vivid
+intelligence, a nature eager and active, a fiery temper--reserved
+almost entirely for grown-ups--an appreciation for good literature and
+art, which, although she had been brought up in illiteracy, she had
+developed by self-education and “threw quotations from the English
+classics around her in a kind of hailstorm,” supplemented a genuine
+love of children and abounding common sense.
+
+    “There was no nonsense in her nursery as to over-exciting our
+    minds or emotions, or that sort of thing. She was quite prepared
+    to read us to sleep with the witches in 'Macbeth' or the death
+    scene in 'Othello.' I can see her now, with her wrinkled, brown
+    face, her cap with white streamers awry over her black hair
+    beginning to turn grey. In front of her was a book, propped up
+    against the rim of a tin candlestick shaped like a small basin.
+    In it was a dip candle with a pair of snuffers. That was how
+    nursery light was provided in the later 'sixties and even in
+    the 'seventies. As she sat bent forward, declaiming the most
+    soul-shaking things in Shakespeare between nine and ten at
+    night, we lay in our beds with our chins on the counterpane,
+    silent, scared, but intensely happy. We loved every word and
+    slept quite well when the play was over.”
+
+The pen picture of Mrs. Salome Leaker, and the photograph, are of the
+book's best. It is not unlikely that Mr. Strachey owes his worldly
+success and pleasure quite as much to his nurse as to “the famous men,
+and our fathers who begat us,” of whom his father, “though without a
+trace of anything approaching pride, was never tired of talking.”
+
+[Illustration: J. ST. LOE STRACHEY] From a drawing by _W. Rothenstein._
+
+In his early childhood he was subject to occasional experiences--a
+sense of spiritual isolation with poignancy amounting to awe. Although
+he devotes several pages to them he does not succeed in describing
+his sensations, but in characterising them. One day while standing
+in a passage he suddenly had a sensation of being alone, not merely
+in the house, but in the world, the universe. With this came a sense
+of exaltation and magnification of personality so ample that it was
+difficult to describe. He felt then, though he was only six, that his
+soul had become naked. The effect on him was intensely awe-inspiring,
+so much so as to be disturbing in a high degree. Though not terrified,
+he experienced a kind of rawness and sensitiveness of soul, such as
+when a supersensitive mucous membrane is touched roughly by a hand or
+instrument. In addition to this awe and sensitiveness, was a sudden
+realisation of the appalling greatness of the issues of living, not
+only of the imminence but of the ineffable greatness of the whole of
+which he was a part. He felt that what he was “in for” as a sentient
+human being was immeasurably great. It was thence that the sense of
+awe came, thence the extraordinary sensitiveness, thence the painful
+exhilaration, the spiritual sublimation. “As a human being I was not
+only immortal but _capax imperii_,--a creature worthy of a heritage so
+tremendous.”
+
+Mr. Strachey defines his state as one of _isolement_, and further
+defines it as ecstasy. The latter term has probably been borrowed from
+current psychoanalytic terminology. It is purely a subjective term, and
+as this is a subjective autobiography, satisfies his needs, though it
+puts us only a little way on the road to understanding.
+
+No objective description of this state has been worked out. A
+scheme for it would be elaborate and require more patience than the
+behaviourists have so far displayed. They know some things in an exact
+way about organic reactions to simplified laboratory situations. They
+have never followed out the life history of any of the reactions
+they describe, either exactly or in tentative descriptive terms.
+Autobiographic writings furnish rich material for an objective
+psychologist. Mr. Strachey, for instance, has an unusual memory,
+has never suffered any serious breaks in his reaction system, and
+would seem not to be subject to any wealth of parallel reactions.
+The objective psychologists may, in the not distant future, work
+out a description of _isolement_ in terms of organic reactions, and
+their life histories in terms of organic memory. I do not see how a
+highly organised intelligence in such a setting--reminiscent father,
+tradition-ladened background, cultivated and uncultivated mysticism of
+his nurse--could have failed to develop some such moments.
+
+It is quite likely that the main outlines of Mr. Strachey's
+intelligence as a working mechanism had been laid down, even at this
+early age. It was said of him that when a little more than two and a
+half years old, when his family was starting on a long journey to Pau,
+he insisted that his father should take with him Spenser's “Faerie
+Queene!” He must have had in late childhood a rich freight of memories.
+An elaborate and delicate set of reaction mechanism, spontaneously
+called forth these definite movements of detachment in the interests
+of further internal organisation. Moreover, it seems to me entirely a
+normal experience, in view of the fact that there was so much incentive
+to fantasy and so little progress beyond mere normal ecstasy.
+
+It is a fearsome thing to contemplate how little fruit the arrival of
+powers of abstraction bring with them. Immediately Mr. Strachey was
+plunged into the artificial region of letters and politics, he made no
+effective contacts with scientific and social thinking of his period.
+His whole mental career from this standpoint was a gradually elaborated
+detachment, significant mainly for its richness, brilliancy, and
+generally prevailing consistency.
+
+One other psychic experience he records, a dream during an afternoon
+nap: His wife came to him with a telegram in her hand which related
+that his son had been killed in a hunting accident in France. The
+incident of this telepathic dream from the objective standpoint is not
+very significant. The dreamer had plenty of reasons for apprehension
+over the welfare of his son, who was in a country where hazards were of
+frequent enough occurrence to make some time identity between dream and
+occurrence possible. The form of the hazard in the dream could probably
+have been traced at the time to some recent event or hearsay, and was
+gratuitously attached to the state of apprehension which came to the
+surface in the dream state.
+
+The story of one who for a third of a century has been in British
+journalism while the world was being recast and remoulded must of
+necessity be rich in the raw material of “human interest,” as well as
+of history and politics. But it is not this material which the author
+of the subjective autobiography has chosen to present. It is with the
+adventure of his own life that he would interest the reader. He says,
+
+    “Every life is an adventure, and if a sense of this adventure
+    cannot become communicated to the reader, any one may feel sure
+    that it is the fault of the writer, not of the facts.”
+
+He quotes Sir Thomas Browne's advice to a son about to write an account
+of his travels in Hungary
+
+    “not to trouble about methods of extracting iron and copper from
+    the ores, or with a multitude of facts and statistics, but not
+    to forget to give a full description of the 'Roman alabaster
+    tomb in the barber's shop at Pesth.'”
+
+The alabaster tomb in the barber's shop, rather than high politics
+or even high literature, is the goal which he has set before him in
+writing this book. The test by which he invites judgment of it is the
+power to enthrall the imagination of the reader with the sense of
+adventure.
+
+The “supreme good luck to be born the second son of a Somersetshire
+squire and to be brought up in a Somersetshire country-house” was
+reinforced by the influence of parents to whose qualities he pays
+tribute in a chapter devoted to memories of his parents, and in another
+devoted to the stories told him as a child by his father. These stories
+serve to cloak the genealogical facts that always flavour so keenly,
+to the adventurer himself, the zest of his adventure. In this case
+they leave the reader free to trace, should he possess a relish for
+such a trail, through the rattling rust of ancient armour, the spell
+of great country houses and other symbols of authority. One may also
+trace Mr. Strachey's hereditary urge for literature, for there was a
+certain ancestor who “almost certainly knew Shakespeare” and “had a
+considerable amount of book-writing to his credit,” including “two or
+three pamphlets written by him and published as what we should now call
+'Virginia Company propaganda.'” No light is thrown upon the heritage,
+guardian angel, or kind fate which was responsible for providing the
+adventurer at the outset of his journey with the most fortunate of all
+possessions, the temperament to “take the good the gods provide,” and
+for relieving him of all encumbrances in the way of “inferiority” and
+other complexes, which have become so fashionable a part of the modern
+adventurer's equipment.
+
+If, indeed, anything in the way of good fortune was wanting in the
+gifts of fate to the author of the autobiography, he was more than
+compensated by a disposition which made it easy for him to appreciate
+the good qualities of others, even of his mother-in-law--that usually
+most unappreciated of all human relations--and to live in unimpaired
+serenity in her family. Of her we are told that
+
+    “she was an admirable talker and full of clear and interesting
+    memories. I had no sooner entered the Simpson house and family
+    than I found that there were a hundred points of sympathy
+    between us. She had known everybody in London who was worth
+    knowing ... and had visited most of the political country
+    houses in England on the Whig side, and most of the neutral
+    strongholds.”
+
+Aside from the chapters on his parents and old nurse, only a few
+glimpses are given of a normal and happy childhood passed in the
+good old days when ladies still had time to cultivate the art of
+correspondence--of which he says, “I have no time to dwell on my
+mother's most intimate friendship with Lady Waldegrave and with their
+habit of writing daily letters to each other.” The salient point of his
+childhood seems to be that he was saturated with precocity and filial
+piety. He was not quite so strong as other boys and was not sent to
+public school, and “the irony of accident,” he says, “had designed my
+mental equipment to be of a kind perfectly useless for the purposes
+of the preliminary Oxford examinations.” Knowledge of literature, a
+power of writing, a not inconsiderable reading in modern history, and
+a commendable grasp of mathematics were of no use whatever for the
+purpose of matriculation. So the youthful Strachey turned to Latin and
+Greek and finally entered Balliol as an unattached student. The first
+discord in the harmony of his relations with life was sounded when he
+became a student at Balliol, where he did not get on well with the Dons.
+
+    “I can say truthfully that I never received a word of
+    encouragement, of kindly direction, or of sympathy of any sort
+    or kind from any of them in regard to work or anything else. The
+    reason, I now feel sure, was that they believed that to take
+    notice of me would have only made me more uppish.”
+
+His recollections of Jowett, the Master of Balliol, are tempered by the
+successes and the good fortune that have come to him in the intervening
+forty years, but he remains convinced that “the Master of Balliol
+evidently felt the Stracheyphobia very strongly, or perhaps I should
+say felt it his duty to express it very strongly.” The sarcasm that
+Jowett poured upon him on his return to Balliol after his first year
+as an unattached student still rankles. But in those early days there
+must have been an atmosphere of self-sufficiency, complacency, possibly
+one might be justified in saying conceit, that dissolved the testy
+Master's inhibitions.
+
+Mr. Strachey is never tired of emphasising the good fortune of his
+friendships.
+
+    “I have no doubt I was considered odd by most of my
+    contemporaries, but this oddness and also my inability to play
+    football or cricket never seemed to create, as far as I could
+    see, any prejudice. Indeed I think that my friends were quite
+    discerning enough and quite free enough from convention to be
+    amused and interested by a companion who was not built up in
+    accordance with the sealed pattern.”
+
+Nothing better illustrates his mental endowment and his cultural
+equipment as estimated by himself than this statement:
+
+    “In my day we would talk about anything, from the Greek feeling
+    about landscape to the principles the Romans would have taken
+    as the basis of actuarial tables, if they had had them. We
+    unsphered Plato, we speculated as to what Euripides would have
+    thought of Henry James, or whether Sophocles would have enjoyed
+    Miss ----'s acting, and felt that it was of vital import to
+    decide these matters.”
+
+Good old days, indeed! We can imagine what the fate of the student at
+Harvard, let us say, would be today if he shaped his talk to indicate
+that “the most important thing in the world” was talk of this kind.
+
+At an early age Mr. Strachey yielded to the urge of poetry writing, and
+even had a book of verses printed by a local publisher, of which he
+says:
+
+    “The thing that strikes me most, on looking back at my little
+    volume of verse, is its uncanny competence, not merely from the
+    point of view of prosody, but of phraseology and what I may
+    almost term scholarship.”
+
+_Omne ignotum pro magni-_ (or _miri_) _fico_. In spite of this he felt
+no great desire to adopt poetry-making as his profession.
+
+    “Possibly I thought the trade was a bad one for a second son who
+    must support himself. It is more probable that I instinctively
+    felt that although it was so great a source of joy to me,
+    poetry was not my true vocation. Perhaps, also, I had already
+    begun to note the voice of pessimism raised by the poets of the
+    seventies, and to feel that they did not believe in themselves.”
+
+“The pivot of my life has been _The Spectator_, and so _The Spectator_
+must be the pivot of my book.” His connection with it began when he was
+about twenty-six, after he had settled in London to study for the Bar.
+The book opens with an account of the spectacular success of his first
+adventure of writing for this journal. Armed with a formal introduction
+from his father, who had been a friend of the joint editors, Mr. Hutton
+and Mr. Townsend, and a frequent contributor to the paper, Mr. Strachey
+called at _The Spectator_ office in Wellington Street and listened to
+the well-worn story--no less true thirty years ago than it is today--of
+“more outside reviewers than they could possibly find work for,” and
+received, out of friendship for his father alone, the choice of five
+volumes to notice. One of them was an edition of “Gulliver's Travels,”
+and it was destined to play a leading rôle in the adventure of John
+St. Loe Strachey. Nothing daunted by the indifferent encouragement,
+he promptly despatched the completed reviews, and in due time again
+presented himself at the office for the sole purpose of returning the
+books. Great was his amazement when, instead of a lukewarm reception,
+he was immediately asked to select anything he would like to review,
+from a new pile of books. When he protested that he had not come to ask
+for more books to review, he learned that the position of the editors
+had been entirely changed by the review of “Gulliver's Travels,” and
+“they hoped very much that I should be able to do regular work for _The
+Spectator_. I was actually hailed as 'a writer and critic of the first
+force.'” Even a stronger head might have been turned by such praise
+from such a source.
+
+This, however, was only the first chapter of his successful adventure
+with _The Spectator_. Shortly afterwards, he received a letter from Mr.
+Hutton asking him to write a couple of leaders a week and some notes
+while Mr. Townsend was away for a holiday. His first leader brought a
+delighted response from Mr. Townsend, who requested him to remain as
+his assistant while Mr. Hutton was away, and soon afterward suggested,
+
+    “with a swift generosity that still warms my heart, that if
+    I liked to give up the Bar, for which I was still supposing
+    myself to be reading, I could have a permanent place at _The
+    Spectator_, and even, if I remember rightly, hinted that I
+    might look forward to succeeding the first of the two partners
+    who died or retired, and so to becoming joint editor or joint
+    proprietor.”
+
+His second political leader, entitled the “Privy Council and the
+Colonies,” brought down even bigger game than the first. Fate, always
+the ally of Mr. Strachey, so arranged that Lord Granville, then
+Colonial Secretary, had been prevented by a fit of gout from preparing
+a speech which he was to deliver when he received the Agents-General of
+the self-governing Colonies, and he supplied the hiatus by beginning
+his speech with the words: “In a very remarkable article which appeared
+in this week's _Spectator_”--and then going on “to use the article as
+the foundation of his speech,” with the result that Mr. Hutton was
+“greatly delighted, and almost said in so many words that it wasn't
+every day that the editors of _The Spectator_ could draw Cabinet
+Ministers to advertise their paper.”
+
+So the “first two leaders had done the trick.” Still, as the young
+adventurer was soon to learn, it was possible for an aspirant to
+success to get by both editors, and even a Cabinet Minister, and
+still fail of entire recognition from the most critical member of
+_The Spectator_ staff. Even this distinction, however, Mr. Strachey
+was destined promptly to achieve. “The last, the complete rite of
+initiation at _The Spectator_ office,” occurred one day as he was
+talking over articles, when
+
+    “a large, consequential, not to say stout black tom-cat slowly
+    entered the room, walked around me, sniffed at my legs in
+    a suspicious manner, and then, to my intense amazement and
+    amusement, hurled himself from the floor with some difficulty
+    and alighted upon my shoulder.... The sagacious beast had
+    realised that there was a new element in the office, and
+    had come to inspect it and see whether he could give it his
+    approval. When that approval was given, it was conceded by all
+    concerned that the appointment had received its consecration.”
+
+And so, having received the unqualified endorsement of the office cat,
+the future “editor and sole proprietor” of _The Spectator_, within a
+few weeks of his introduction to the office, had his career mapped
+out for him. That Mr. Strachey has been content with that career this
+subjective autobiography is likely to convince the most sceptical.
+
+Two chapters are devoted to an estimate of Meredith Townsend, who was
+successively his chief, his partner, and later--after Mr. Strachey
+became “sole proprietor and editor-in-chief”--merely leader-writer for
+_The Spectator_. The sketch of Mr. Townsend, which will undoubtedly
+appeal more to British than to American readers, is vivid and
+sympathetic, bringing into high relief the rather picturesque side of
+an altogether lovable and thoroughly practical personality--although
+any weak points which he may have displayed as leader-writer are not
+blurred over. His fairness, both toward his junior partner and toward
+those who differed with him, is emphasised, as well as his sound
+philosophy, his wit, his capacity for felicitous epigram, and his
+mental directness and forcefulness.
+
+Mr. Strachey has the same pleasure in recalling his early days with
+_The Spectator_ that the aged courtesan is alleged to have in telling
+of her youthful _amours_.
+
+    “When an occasion like this makes me turn back to my old
+    articles, I am glad to say that my attitude, far from being one
+    of shame, is more like that of the Duke of Wellington. When
+    quite an old man, somebody brought him his Indian dispatches to
+    look over. As he read, he is recorded to have muttered: 'Damned
+    good! I don't know how the devil I ever managed to write 'em.'”
+
+When Mr. Strachey became “proprietor, editor, general manager,
+leader-writer, and reviewer” of _The Spectator_ he naturally asked
+himself: “What is the journalist's function in the State, and how am
+I to carry it out?” After reflection and deliberation he decided that
+the journalist must be the watch-dog of society, and this in full
+recognition of the fact that the watch-dog is generally disliked, often
+misunderstood, and burdened with a disagreeable job, even with its
+compensations. He defends the watch-dog for barking,
+
+    “in a loud and raucous way, even for biting occasionally. It is
+    good for the dog and it is good for the one who is barked at or
+    bitten, though the latter, like the boy who is being flogged for
+    his good, neither sees it nor admits it.”
+
+Mr. Strachey recites a specific instance of his watch-dog methods in
+dealing with Cecil Rhodes, whose methods of expanding the British
+Empire seemed to _The Spectator_ dangerous and inconsistent with the
+sense of national honour and good faith. He therefore
+
+    “warned the British public that Rhodes, if not watched, would
+    secretly buy policies behind their backs and that the party
+    machine, when in want of money, would with equal secrecy sell
+    them. And I proved my point, incredible as it may seem.”
+
+Mr. Strachey says that he could, of course, mention other examples of
+the way in which this particular watch-dog gave trouble and got himself
+heartily disliked, but recounting them would touch living people. Mr.
+Strachey does not bow the knee to archaic conventions like “_De mortuis
+nil nisi bonum_.”
+
+Next to the watch-dog function of the journalist is that of publicity.
+Publicity is one of the pillars of society, and while this has long
+been recognised in America, Mr. Strachey says, it is only very recently
+that it has come to be thoroughly appreciated in his country. Publicity
+is as important a thing as the collection and preservation of evidence
+at a trial, but it is not the whole of journalism. Comment is an
+important part, and infinitely more important apparently in Britain
+than in this country. The journalism of comment may be divided into two
+parts: judicial, and the journalism of advocacy. It is the former that
+Mr. Strachey has practised or that he has meant to practise.
+
+On the ethics of newspaper proprietorship he thinks that it makes for
+soundness that newspaper proprietors should be pecuniarily independent.
+It is also most important that they should be men whose money is
+derived from their newspapers, and not from other sources. A great
+newspaper in the hands of a man who does not look to it for profit, but
+owns it for external reasons, is a source of danger. In view of this
+opinion, it is interesting to recall that the control of the greatest
+newspaper in the world has recently passed, in great part, into the
+hands of a man who possesses a considerable portion of one of America's
+greatest fortunes.
+
+The chapters of Mr. Strachey's book which should have been most
+interesting are those entitled “Five Great Men,” in which he discusses
+Lord Cromer, John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt, Cecil Rhodes, and Joseph
+Chamberlain. Many will find them the most disappointing, particularly
+those who knew in the flesh any of these great men. They would be less
+disappointing, perhaps, if they were not so palpably self-laudatory.
+Mr. Strachey had a profound admiration for Lord Cromer and he shared it
+with thousands of his countrymen and Egyptian well-wishers the world
+over. Recalling a visit to Lord Cromer in Cairo, he says:
+
+    “Inexperienced as I then was in public affairs, it was a matter
+    of no small pleasure and of no small amount of pride to find my
+    own special opinions, views, and theories as to political action
+    plainly endorsed by an authority so great. In not a single case
+    was I disappointed or disillusioned either with what had been my
+    own views or with what were Lord Cromer's.”
+
+This reminds strangely of Mr. Strachey's opinion of the Dons in his
+youthful days at Oxford. Future biographers of Lord Cromer will have
+to note the fact that “he was, with the single exception of my cousin,
+Lytton Strachey, the most competent reviewer I ever had,” and that
+“he wrote a review every week for _The Spectator_ on some important
+book,” also that “he took an immense amount of trouble to realise and
+understand _The Spectator_ view, and to commit me to nothing which he
+thought I might dislike.”
+
+In the same way, Mr. Strachey tells with great relish how he won the
+approval of Roosevelt with his tact and discretion when the President
+invited him to be present at one of his Cabinet meetings, and of
+Roosevelt's admiration when Mr. Strachey went with him in floods of
+rain for a ride on a dark November evening. In curious contrast to his
+statement that on this occasion he was mounted on a superb Kentucky
+horse procured from the cavalry barracks, “a creature whose strength
+and speed proved how well deserved is the reputation of that famous
+breed,” is the photograph of Mr. Strachey on his pony at the end of
+the chapter, from which one would not readily gather that he had been
+selected by Mr. Roosevelt to accompany him “on these afternoon winter
+rides” as a test of men.
+
+Mr. Strachey says that the bed-rock of his political opinions is a
+whole-hearted belief in the principles of democracy, and he defines
+his conception of democracy as being
+
+    “not devotion to certain abstract principles or views of
+    communal life which have the label 'democratic' placed upon
+    them, but a belief in the justice, convenience and necessity of
+    ascertaining and abiding by the lawfully and constitutionally
+    expressed Will of the Majority of the People.”
+
+He states his belief in the referendum
+
+    “in order to free us from the evils of log-rolling and other
+    exigencies of the kind which Walt Whitman grouped under the
+    general formula of 'the insolence of elected persons.'”
+
+He admits, however, that a whole-hearted belief in the democratic
+principles need not prevent one from having strong views on special
+points of policy, and one of his special points of policy is in regard
+to Ireland.
+
+    “I objected to Home Rule as bad for the Empire, bad for the
+    United Kingdom, and bad in an even extremer degree for Ireland
+    herself. If, however, it should be determined that some measure
+    of Home Rule must be passed, then the existence of the two
+    Irelands must be recognised in any action which should be
+    determined upon. When, therefore, the support which the Unionist
+    party decided on giving to Mr. Lloyd George at the end of the
+    war made some form of Home Rule seem almost inevitable, I
+    strongly advocated the division of Ireland as the only way of
+    avoiding a civil war in which the merits would be with Northern
+    Ireland.”
+
+One who comes to this delightful narrative as an admirer of the author
+may feel, on taking leave of it, that what Mr. Strachey has said of a
+famous fellow editor, William T. Stead, might also be said of him:
+
+    “Stead, though a man of honest intent, and very great ability,
+    was also a man of many failings, many ineptitudes, many
+    prejudices and injustices. Further, there was an element of
+    commonness in his mental attitude, as in his style.”
+
+Yet this would not be quite fair or accurate. Mr. Strachey is a man
+of honest intent and very great ability, but there is no element of
+“commonness” in his mental attitude. His admirers would not admit that
+he is a man of many failings and many injustices. The word “some”
+should be substituted for “many,” in any case. But then there are his
+pronunciamentos on Ireland and his recollections of Cecil Rhodes.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XIII
+         THE KING OF GATH UNTO HIS SERVANT: MAGAZINE INSANITY
+
+
+For one who has devoted a considerable portion of his life to a study
+of the human mind in dissolution there are few things more diverting
+than popular disquisitions on the subject of insanity. If popular
+comments and interpretations regarding other subjects--world politics,
+for instance--are as apropos and penetrating as are those on mental
+disorder, the less readers are guided by them the more instructed they
+may expect to be.
+
+I have recently read in an important magazine an article entitled
+“Up from Insanity” which has all the qualities that a contribution
+intended to be instructive and helpful should not have. It reeks
+with misinformation, not only misstatement of facts, but unwarranted
+inferences and unjustifiable and illogical conclusions.
+
+The Editor of that distinguished and dignified periodical says: “It
+is a revealing narrative, genuine down to the latest detail.” And so
+it is. It reveals the writer's incapacity to grasp the fundamental
+principles of psychology, established experimentally and empirically,
+and which have taken their place amongst the eternal truths of the
+world; and it reveals that the writer, whether because of his previous
+mental disorder, or willfully, is quite ignorant of what has been
+accomplished by countless students and innumerable workers in the field
+of psychiatry by way of throwing some light upon the mysteries of the
+normal mind.
+
+“I am almost a pioneer in the field of written experience of insanity,”
+he writes; and yet Mr. Clifford Beers' book, “A Mind that Found
+Itself,” and “The Autobiography of a Paranoic,” two comparatively
+recent works that are most illuminating and have had a great effect
+in concentrating the attention of the public on insanity as a social
+problem, must have been known to him.
+
+    “It is a privilege conferred upon few men in the world to return
+    from the dark and weird adventure [meaning insanity] to live a
+    normal life.”
+
+Considering that upward of one-third of all insane individuals recover,
+there is no other interpretation to be put upon this statement than
+that the writer of it does not know whereof he speaks.
+
+    “A friend of mine lost his mind from thinking too much about his
+    income tax.”
+
+This may be an attempt at facetiousness on the part of the writer.
+No physician who has dealt with the insane has ever encountered an
+individual made insane by “thinking too much.” If so, he has been
+silent about it.
+
+    “I suppose, first of all, you would like to know how it feels to
+    be insane. Well, it is indeed a melancholy situation.”
+
+It is, indeed, a melancholy situation if you have melancholia, but if
+you have mania, and especially if you have certain forms in which your
+self-appreciation is enhanced and your belief in your potencies and
+possessions quickened to an immeasurable degree, it is far from being a
+melancholy sensation. It is a sensation of power and possession which
+renders its possessor incapable of believing that any such thing as
+depression exists in the world.
+
+    “Lately a movement has arisen to change the name of insane
+    asylums to 'mental hospitals.' We now recognise former madmen
+    as merely sick people. We used to think of insane people
+    as wild-eyed humans gnawing at prison bars or raving in a
+    straight-jacket.”
+
+The casual reader might infer from this that “lately” means within
+the past few years, and yet three generations have come and gone
+since Conolly, Hack, Tuke and others initiated the movement which
+accomplished this.
+
+    “It was inconceivable to a well-known New York publisher that
+    an insane man could play golf, go to Africa, or talk about his
+    experiences.”
+
+The mental and emotional make-up of “well-known New York publishers” is
+enigmatic. There is general agreement on that point, but if there is
+one amongst them who believes that an insane man cannot play golf, he
+could readily divorce himself from the conviction by driving past any
+hospital for the insane. There he will see a golf course and some of
+the patients playing, though he will not be able to distinguish them
+from “regular” golfers. As for an insane man talking about his golf
+or his experiences in Africa, no New York publisher, well-known or
+otherwise, would need proof to convince him that an insane man can do
+that.
+
+    “On my way through New York I called on a celebrated specialist
+    who told me that I had only six months to live and told me to go
+    out and hunt, roam the world and make the best of the passing
+    hours. Six months later that great physician died insane.”
+
+It is to be assumed that the celebrated specialist was a specialist
+in diseases of the mind. If that is so, the writer is in error. No
+celebrated alienist of New York has died insane within the past quarter
+of a century. In the second place, there has never been a celebrated
+alienist in New York who would fit the description,
+
+    “forty, rich, famous, living in an elegant home amid exquisite
+    surroundings on University Heights with his wife, one of the
+    most beautiful women I ever looked upon, a statuesque blonde of
+    astounding loveliness.”
+
+save in the last qualification. Each one of them has had a beautiful
+wife, but none “a statuesque blonde of astounding loveliness.”
+
+If the writer consulted a physician who made that statement to him,
+he had the misfortune not only to be insane himself but to seek the
+counsel of a physician who was also insane.
+
+The writer of the article says that he will attempt seriously to show
+that the centre of the will is distinct from the centre of the mind,
+and is a separately functioning organ; but in the stress of relating
+his experiences he forgot to do so. In fact, there would be no more
+satisfactory way of estimating his mental possessions and equilibrium
+than from an examination of this written document.
+
+Those who are experienced with the insane give great diagnostic weight
+to their writings, not only the orthography and the syntax, but the
+sequence of thought, the rhythm of expression, the continuity of
+narrative, the pertinency of reference, the credibility of citation or
+example, the discursiveness of the narrative, and the way in which the
+writer develops and finally presents the central thought or idea. All
+these and other features of the written document are evidences to which
+he gives great weight. “Up from Insanity” is neither sequential in
+thought nor in narrative. Nearly every paragraph furnishes evidence of
+the distractibility of the writer's mind, and the discursiveness of the
+entire article amounts almost to rambling. It is marked with journalese
+jargon which reminds me of the newspaper accounts of the kidnapping or
+spiriting from Cuba of Señorita Cisneros.
+
+The pith of the human document that we are discussing is that “every
+man's strength wells up from some centre deeper in him than the brain.”
+It does. A man's personality at any moment is the sum total of all
+the reactions of every cell or physiological unit in his body; but
+acceptance of this fact does not alter the universally accepted belief
+that the brain is the organ of mind. To have it said by a psychopathic
+individual that his restoration to a normal mental state came after
+he had observed “that a double nerve centre at the base of the spine
+had been aroused and the function of these centres brought balance and
+poise and strength, which was instantly reflected in every movement
+and thought, and that these basic nerve centres are the centre of the
+will,” neither proves that there is such a centre nor makes it at all
+probable that it exists.
+
+Why such humanistic and scientific puerilities as these should have
+been taken seriously is not easy to understand.
+
+Our knowledge concerning the human mind is not by any means complete
+or satisfactory, but there are certain things about it which we know.
+For instance, we know that there is a conscious mind and a subconscious
+mind. The discovery in 1866 of the “subliminal consciousness” of the
+psychologist (the “unconscious mind” of the psychoanalyst), was called
+by William James the greatest discovery in modern psychology. We know
+that the person the individual thinks he is is the equivalent of his
+conscious mind. The man that he really is is the man his unconscious
+mind makes him. The face that he sees when he looks in the glass is the
+face that goes with his conscious mind. The face that others see is
+the one that fits his unconscious mind. Anyone who would observe the
+revelations of that unconscious mind in literature can readily gratify
+his wish by reading the “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” that
+remarkable presentation by James Joyce.
+
+Many believe today that a man's ego or individuality is the equivalent
+of this unconscious mind; that therein lies the power of genius,
+the source of vision, the springs of inspiration that gush forth in
+prophecy, in artistic creation, in invention.
+
+We are now engaged in investigating this subliminal consciousness,
+or unconscious mind, with every means at our disposal, and year by
+year we are making headway. Our progress is not adequate, perhaps,
+to satisfy the impatient and the impulsive, but with each succeeding
+decade there is a distinct achievement. Nevertheless, in the
+half-century during which we have been working at the matter in a
+methodical--perhaps one might almost say a scientific--way, we have
+discovered things about the mind which are truly epoch-making.
+
+It is evident that the writer of the article, “Up from Insanity,”
+has never been insane. He is a psychopathic individual who has had
+distressing episodes. At times these episodes have parallelled with
+considerable closeness the features of definite mental diseases such as
+manic depressive insanity, at other times they seem to have resembled
+the features of dementia præcox; but he never was the victim of either
+one. He inherited an unstable nervous system which displayed itself in
+youth as a shut-in, markedly sensitive, anti-social personality. Like
+the majority of individuals so burdened, he was subject to periods of
+excitation, at which times he did things at top speed. Neurologists
+call this a “hypo-manic state,” that is, a state that resembles mania
+in miniature. Such states would be followed by periods of inadequacy,
+of retardation of mental and physical activity, and of depression.
+
+After a severe attack which he suffered when he was twenty-one, he
+had what is called in polite circles a “nervous breakdown,” the chief
+symptoms being abortive delusions of reference. He thought that certain
+parts of his body had changed so materially that it was necessary to
+hide them from the gaze of onlookers. It made him sick to look at his
+own face. He had to wear coloured glasses in order that others might
+not read his secret from his eyes, and his sense of relationship with
+everything constituting the external world was disordered disagreeably.
+Accompanying this there were a series of symptoms which constitute
+“feeling badly,” and all the functions of the body that were concerned
+with nutrition were disordered, so that he became weak and lost flesh.
+Oftentimes his depression of spirits was so great that he convinced
+himself he wanted to die, but he did not embrace a good opportunity to
+accomplish this end when it was offered to him. In fact, he struggled
+so valiantly with the run-away horse that he checked him and “slid from
+his back ingloriously,” physically exhausted. It would be interesting
+to know why sliding off the back of a horse who has run away and
+whose frenzy has been subdued by the rider should be an inglorious
+dismounting. Of course it might be more glorious to tame him to such
+a degree that his master could stand upon his back and direct his
+capriciousness with a glance or a silken cord, but surely there is
+nothing inglorious about any kind of dismount from the back of a horse
+who has been transformed from a gentle to a wild animal.
+
+Nevertheless, the experience was a beneficial one. When he reviewed
+his prowess he realised that he had imposed his will-power, mediated
+by muscle, upon the animal, and it occurred to him, a victim of
+aboulia like the majority of psychopathic individuals, that to impose
+a similar will-power upon himself would be a salutary procedure. With
+this discernment came other revelations. One was that he had always
+been lacking in concentration and was easily distracted--psychopathic
+hallmarks which can be effaced to a remarkable degree, in many
+instances, by training. The first fruit of his labour in this direction
+was the discovery that Dr. Cook had been understudying Ananias,
+Munchausen, _et al._
+
+In another part of his article he says, with consummate familiarity,
+“You are from Missouri when it comes to asking you to accept new
+thoughts.” He may be assured that one of his readers is not. New
+thoughts are as acceptable to this reader as breath to his nostrils;
+but he would claim citizenship in that State if asked to accept it as
+an indication of perspicacity to have discovered that Dr. Cook was a
+fake.
+
+Despite the fact that the writer of the article had “developed the
+sixth sense to a startling degree,” which assured him success as a
+journalist, he was chafing under his impotencies when he met a former
+medium who “had given up that life since her marriage.” Unlike the
+celebrated specialist's wife, who was the most beautiful creature
+he had ever seen up to the time he met his own wife, this one was
+“the most insignificant little woman I ever saw.” Whether it was her
+experience gained as a medium, or as the wife of a rich lumberman of
+the Middle West, that prompted her to shy the alleged lunatic, fearing
+he would bore her with a narrative of his troubles, or whether she
+did not want to rake up her past, cannot be gathered from the meagre
+narrative. However, he got from her this nugget of wisdom:
+
+    “To be really successful you must get in touch with the great
+    reservoir of experience.”
+
+From “one of the country's greatest physicians,” the like of which are
+his personal friends, he got a paraphrase of the Scripture:
+
+    “Learn a lesson from the flowers of the field, be humble and
+    modest, be natural and play a man's part.”
+
+It was then that calm repose settled upon him, and his nervous energy
+returned to the old channels and nourished him.
+
+If Mr. E. J. had only appended a few of his dreams to his human
+document, there would be very little difficulty in pointing out the
+emotional repression that was at the bottom of all his mental symptoms.
+That he conforms to a certain well-known type of psychic fixation
+there is very little doubt. He has always been bereft, because he has
+a feeling of being spiritually or mentally alone. He never learned to
+be independent in mind, but always looked for an uncritical, soothing,
+maternal sort of love from people who were not ready or willing to give
+it. He has not changed materially. Now that his so-called recovery has
+come, and being unable to find what he demands, he takes refuge in the
+next best thing, and plays at obtaining it vicariously; he convinces
+himself that he is going to devote himself to doing for others “all the
+little kindnesses that life offers.”
+
+The layman who would get some knowledge of insanity should avoid such
+confessions as that of E. J. If he would make acquaintance with the
+self-coddling of a neurotic individual who delights in self-analysis,
+self-pity, and exaggeration of his symptoms, and who is a fairly
+typical example of juvenile fixation, his purpose will be accomplished
+by reading this and similar articles. There is, however, a safer and
+more satisfactory way of securing such information, and that is by
+reading the writings of Pierre Janet. There he will find the obsessed,
+the hysteric, the aboulic, the neurasthenic individual discussed in
+masterly fashion, and he will find the presentation unmixed with
+mediæval mysticism and puerile platitudes, unflavoured with specious
+“uplift” sentiment and psychological balderdash.
+
+On the other hand, he may get real enlightenment from “The Jungle of
+the Mind,” published recently in the same magazine, providing he closes
+his eyes to the editorial comment and refuses to read the letter “of a
+physician of reputation” which sets forth that “according to all our
+text-book symptoms of dementia præcox she was surely that.”
+
+The purpose of such editorial comment must be either to suggest that
+the enigmatic dissolution of the mind to which Schule gave the name
+“precocious dementia” may eventuate in recovery, or to show that
+doctors make mistakes. If it is the former, it needs a lot of proof; if
+the latter, none whatsoever. Though students of mental pathology know
+little or nothing of the causes of the mental disorders of hereditarily
+predisposed individuals who get wrecked on the cliffs of puberty, or of
+the alterations and structure of the tissues that subserve the mind,
+they know, as they know the temperaments of their better halves, the
+display, the types, the paradigms of the disease. And the lady who has
+recently contributed some notes on a disfranchisement from the state of
+_non compos mentis_ to the _Atlantic Monthly_ with such subtle display
+of proficiency in the literary art, may be assured that the doctors who
+averred she had dementia præcox added one more error to a list already
+countless. With the daring of one who hazards nothing by venturing an
+opinion, I suggest that she merely made a journey into a wild country
+from whose bourne nearly all travellers return. The country is called
+“Manic-Depressive Insanity.”
+
+A young woman of gentle birth develops, while earning her bread in
+uplift work, “nervous prostration,” that coverer of a multitude of
+ills. Her sister's home, to which she goes, brings neither coherence
+nor tranquillity. In fact, she gathers confusion rapidly there, and
+seeks to get surcease of it in oblivion. After three attempts at
+suicide, she is sent to a sanitarium. Six months of that exhausts
+her financial resources. This, with increasing incoherency and
+fading actuality, necessitate transfer to a state hospital, and
+there she remains three years, going through the stages of violence,
+indifference, tranquillity, resignation, and finally the test of work
+and recreation, culminating happily in probational discharge and
+resumption of previous work.
+
+This is the record of thousands in this country and in every civilised
+country. The variety of insanity which she had (and it is the commonest
+of all the insanities) nearly always terminates in recovery--that
+is, from the single attack. There is, of course, the likelihood of
+recurrence. How to avoid that is what we are keen to learn from mental
+hygienists and from those taught by experience. If this disenfranchised
+lady will tell us ten years hence what she has done to keep well and
+how her orientation has differed from that of the ten years following
+puberty, she will make a human document of value intellectually, not
+emotionally, as this one is. Meanwhile, should she be disposed to do
+something for future psychopaths, she may record the experiences
+of her life from childhood to the period of full development, and
+particularly of the decade following her fifth year. If she will do
+this with the truthfulness of James Joyce, the chasteness of Dorothy
+M. Richardson, and the fullness of Marie Bashkirtseff, it may be said
+of her: “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected
+praise.”
+
+It may be literature to describe one's fellow inmates of a psychopathic
+hospital, to portray their adult infantilisms, to delineate their
+schizophrenias, to recount their organised imageries, but it does not
+contribute an iota to our knowledge of insanity, how to prevent it, and
+how to cure it.
+
+We need intrepid souls who will bare their psychic breasts and will
+tell us, without fear or shame, of their conventionalised and primitive
+minds: how the edifice was constructed, the secrets of the architect,
+and of the builder. If Dostoievsky had been insane, not epileptic, the
+literature of psychiatry would today be vastly more comprehensive.
+
+
+                                THE END
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75230 ***
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+      The Doctor Looks at Literature  | Project Gutenberg
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+
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+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75230 ***</div>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe50" id="cover">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/cover.jpg" alt="cover" title="bcover">
+</figure>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="tnote">
+                         <p class="center p2 big2">TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:</p>
+
+<p>In the plain text version text in <em>italics</em> is enclosed by underscores
+(_italics_), <span class="smcap">Small Capitals</span> are represented in upper case as in SMALL
+CAPS and the sign ^ before any letter or text, like ^e, represents "e"
+as a superscript.</p>
+
+<p>A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated
+variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used
+has been kept.</p>
+
+<p>Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.</p>
+
+<p>The original cover art has been modified by the transcriber and is
+granted to the public domain.</p>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="tb x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h1 class="p4">THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT LITERATURE</h1>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES OF LIFE AND LETTERS</p>
+
+<p class="center">BY</p>
+<p class="center big3">JOSEPH COLLINS</p>
+
+<p class="center">AUTHOR OF “THE WAY WITH THE NERVES,”<br> 
+“MY ITALIAN YEAR,” “IDLING IN ITALY,” ETC.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe5" id="title_page-ilo">
+  <img class="w100 p4" src="images/title_page-ilo.jpg" alt="ikotp" title="tpilo">
+</figure>
+
+<p class="center p6">NEW YORK<br>
+<span class="big1">GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY</span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center p4" >COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="center p4 big1" >THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT LITERATURE. I</p>
+
+<p class="center p1" >PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center p4 big1" ><em>In Memoriam</em></p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p class="center big2 p2">PEARCE BAILEY</p>
+
+<p class="center">DEVOTED COLLEAGUE<br>
+LOYAL COADJUTOR<br>
+INDULGENT FRIEND</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" >ACKNOWLEDGMENT</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The author wishes to express his thanks to the editors
+of the <em>North American Review</em>, the <i>New York Times</i>
+and the <em>Literary Digest International Book Review</em>
+for permission to elaborate material used by them into
+certain chapters of this volume.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center p4 big2" >CONTENTS</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<table class="autotable">
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdc"><small>CHAPTER</small></td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdc"><small>PAGE</small></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 2em;">I</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Psychology and Fiction</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="padding-right: 1em;"><a href="#Page_15">15</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 2em;">II</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Ireland's Latest Literary Antinomian: James Joyce</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="padding-right: 1em;"><a href="#Page_35">35</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 2em;">III</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Feodor Dostoievsky: Tragedist, Prophet, and Psychologist</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="padding-right: 1em;"><a href="#Page_61">61</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 2em;">IV</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Dorothy Richardson and Her Censor</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="padding-right: 1em;"><a href="#Page_96">96</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 2em;">V</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Marcel Proust: Master Psychologist and Pilot of<br>
+the “Vraie Vie”</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="padding-right: 1em;"><a href="#Page_116">116</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 2em;">VI</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Two Literary Ladies of London: Katherine Mansfield and<br>
+Rebecca West</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="padding-right: 1em;"><a href="#Page_151">151</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 2em;">VII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Two Lesser Literary Ladies of London: Stella Benson<br>
+and Virginia Woolf</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="padding-right: 1em;"><a href="#Page_181">181</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 2em;">VIII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Psychology of the Diarist: W. N. T. Barbellion</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="padding-right: 1em;"><a href="#Page_191">191</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 2em;">IX</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Psychology of the Diarist: Henri-Frédéric Amiel</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="padding-right: 1em;"><a href="#Page_219">219</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 2em;">X</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Georges Duhamel: Poet, Pacifist, and Physician</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="padding-right: 1em;"><a href="#Page_237">237</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 2em;">XI</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Even Yet It Can't Be Told—the Whole Truth<br>
+about D. H. Lawrence</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="padding-right: 1em;"><a href="#Page_256">256</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 2em;">XII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Joy of Living and Writing about It: John St.<br>
+Loe Strachey</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="padding-right: 1em;"><a href="#Page_289">289</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 2em;">XIII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The King of Gath unto His Servant: Magazine Insanity</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="padding-right: 1em;"><a href="#Page_307">307</a> </td>
+</tr>
+ 
+</table>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center p4 big2" >ILLUSTRATIONS</p>
+</div>
+
+
+ 
+<table class="autotable">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdc"><small>PAGE</small></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">JAMES JOYCE</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 1.7em;"><a href="#Page_37">37</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">FEODOR DOSTOIEVSKY</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 1.7em;"><a href="#Page_63">63</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">MARCEL PROUST IN 1890</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 1.7em;"><a href="#Page_119">119</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">A PAGE OF CORRECTED PROOF SHOWING MARCEL PROUST'S METHOD<br>
+OF REVISION</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 1.7em;"><a href="#Page_127">127</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">KATHERINE MANSFIELD</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 1.7em;"><a href="#Page_153">153</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">REBECCA WEST</span><br>
+<span style="padding-left: 2em">Photograph</span> by <em>Yevonde, London</em></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 1.7em;"><a href="#Page_173">173</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">STELLA BENSON</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 1.7em;"><a href="#Page_183">183</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 1.7em;"><a href="#Page_221">221</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">GEORGES DUHAMEL</span><br>
+<span style="padding-left: 2em">From a Drawing</span> by <em>Ivan Opffer</em> in <em>THE BOOKMAN</em></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 1.7em;"><a href="#Page_239">239</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">D. H. LAWRENCE</span></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 1.7em;"><a href="#Page_259">259</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">D. H. LAWRENCE</span><br>
+<span style="padding-left: 2em">From a drawing</span> by <em>Jan Juta</em></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 1.7em;"><a href="#Page_267">267</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">J. ST. LOE STRACHEY</span><br>
+<span style="padding-left: 2em">From a Drawing</span> by <em>W. Rothenstein</em></td>
+<td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: top; padding-right: 1.7em;"><a href="#Page_291">291</a> </td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+ 
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span></p>
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="half-title p6b">
+THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT LITERATURE</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span></p>
+
+<p class="center p2 big2" >THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT LITERATURE</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" >CHAPTER I<br>
+<small>PSYCHOLOGY AND FICTION</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Few words attract us like the word psychology. It has the
+call of the unknown, the lure of the mysterious. It is used
+and heard so frequently that it has come to have a definite
+connotation, but the individual who is asked to say what it is
+finds it difficult either to be exact or exhaustive. Psychologists
+themselves experience similar difficulty. Psychology means the
+science of the soul, but we have no clearer conception of the
+soul today than Aristotle had when he wrote his treatise on it.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Palmer states that William James once said that
+psychology was “a nasty little subject,” and that “all one cares
+to know lies outside.” Doubtless many who have far less
+knowledge of it have often felt the same way. The present fate
+of psychology, or the science of mental life, is to be handled
+either as a department of metaphysics, or as subsidiary to so-called
+intelligence testing. The few remaining true psychologists
+are the physiological psychologists and a small group of
+behaviourists. In this country Woodworth, who takes the
+ground of utilising the best in the arsenal of both the intro-spectionists
+and the behaviourists, and calls the result
+“dynamic psychology,” leads the former; and Watson the latter.</p>
+
+<p>Psychology has no interest in the nature of the soul, its
+origin or destiny, or in the reality of ideas. Nor does it concern
+itself with explanation of mental phenomena in terms of forces<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span>
+which can neither be experienced nor inferred from experience.
+It is concerned with the facts of mental life and with describing,
+analysing, and classifying them. When it has done this it
+hands the results over to the logician who occupies himself
+with them from a purposeful rather than a causal point of view;
+and he makes what he may of them, or he puts them at the
+disposal of fellow scientists who use them to support conjectures
+or to give foundation to theories.</p>
+
+<p>It is universally admitted that when we want to get a true
+picture of human life: behaviour, manners, customs, aspirations,
+indulgences, vices, virtues, it is to the novelist and historian
+that we turn, not to the psychologist or the physiologist.
+The novelists gather materials more abundantly than the psychologists,
+who for the most part have a parsimonious outfit
+in anything but morbid psychology. Psychologists are the most
+indolent of scientists in collecting and ordering materials, James
+and Stanley Hall being outstanding exceptions.</p>
+
+<p>Fiction writers should not attempt to carry over the results
+of psychological inquiries as the warp and woof of their work.
+They should study psychology to sharpen and discipline their
+wits, but after that the sooner they forget it the better. The
+best thing that fiction writers can do is to depict the problematic
+in life in all its intensity and perplexity, and put it up
+to the psychologists as a challenge.</p>
+
+<p>In the fifty years that psychology has had its claims as a
+science begrudgingly allowed, there have arisen many different
+schools, the most important of which are: (1) Those that
+claim that psychology is the science of mental states, mental
+processes, mental contents, mental functions. They are the
+“Functionalists.” There is an alternative to the consciousness
+psychology—the psychology of habit—touched on its edges by
+Professor Dewey in “Habit and Conduct.” And (2) those that
+claim the true subject matter of psychology is not mind or
+consciousness, but behaviour. They refuse to occupy themselves
+with “consciousness,” and for introspection they substitute<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span>
+experiment and observation of behaviour. Their theoretical
+goal is the prediction and control of behaviour. They are
+the “Behaviourists.” The literature infused with interest in
+psychological problems—fiction, criticism, and to a small extent
+social economics—has little connection with the older psychology
+based on subjectivities, except as it takes over the
+vagaries of technique and terminology of the psychoanalysts.
+The literature of greatest merit seems to avail itself most
+profitably of definite psychological materials when it turns to
+the behaviourist type. Indeed, it is with this school that the
+novelist most closely allies himself. Or it was, until the “New
+Psychology” seduced him.</p>
+
+<p>This last school claims that consciousness and all it implies
+is a barren field for the psychologist to till. If he is
+to gather a crop that will be an earnest of his effort, he must
+turn to the unconscious, which we have with us so conspicuously
+eight hours out of every twenty-four that even the most
+benighted recognise it, and which is inconspicuously with us
+always, looking out for our self- and species-preservation,
+conditioning our ends, and shaping our destinies.</p>
+
+<p>The New Psychology, which is by no means synonymous
+with the teachings of Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna, regards
+the human mind as an intricate and complex mechanism
+which has gradually evolved through the ages to suit the
+needs of its possessor. The adaptation has, however, not been
+perfect, and the imperfections reveal themselves in frequent,
+startling, and embarrassing lapses from the kind of mind which
+would best enable its possessor to adjust himself to the conditions
+and demands of modern civilisation. It recognises that
+it deals with a mind which sometimes insists upon behaving
+like a savage, but which is nevertheless the main engine of the
+human machinery, human personality, from which society expects
+and exacts behaviour consistent with the ideals of advanced
+civilisation. The practical psychologist realises that
+he has to cope with this wayward mind, and if he is to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span>
+be of service in effecting a reconciliation between it and the
+requirements of civilisation, he cannot ignore it, spank it, or
+coerce it by calling it bad names. He must understand it first;
+then he may train it. The trouble with the New Psychology,
+whether it is “New Thought” or one of the mutually antagonistic
+schools of psychoanalysis, is that it almost inevitably
+runs off into what James terms “bitch-philosophy.”  </p>
+
+<p>Through this tangled web of vagaries there is a thin thread
+of work that is not only fiction, but literature; and this is
+usually characterised by obvious parade of psychological
+technique.</p>
+
+<p>Just as civilised man's body has been evolved gradually
+from more primitive species and has changed through the various
+stages of evolution to meet the changing conditions of the
+environment and necessities, so has his mind. In this advance
+and transformation the body has not lost the fundamental
+functions necessary for the preservation of the physical being.
+Neither has the mind. But both the body and the mind, or
+the physical and psychical planes of the individual, have been
+slowly developed by environment and life in such a way that
+these fundamental functions and instincts have been brought
+more and more into harmony with the changing demands of
+life. This process, outwardly in man's circumstances and his
+acts, inwardly in his ability to shape one and perform the
+other, constitutes civilisation. It is doubtful if the instincts
+are quite as definite as some of our professors, McDougall and
+his followers, claim, and they lack utility when used as a basis
+for social interpretation either in essays or fiction.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Loeb's forced movements as a basis for a structure of
+interests is far more plausible. It is the interplay of interests,
+rather than of instincts, which is the clay our practical activities
+are pottered from, and should be the reliable source of materials
+for literature. Whenever fiction cuts itself down to
+instincts it becomes ephemeral as literature.</p>
+
+<p>The two fundamental and primitive instincts of all living<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span>
+organisms, civilised man included, are the nutritional urge and
+the creative urge, or the instinct of self-preservation and that
+of the preservation of the species. To these there is added,
+even in the most primitive savages, the herd instinct, which
+leads men to form groups or tribes, to fight and labour for the
+preservation of them, and to conform to certain standards or
+symbols of identification with the tribe. The Freudians do not
+recognise the herd instinct as anything but sublimated bi-sexuality,
+attributing the tendency to regard the opinion of
+one's associates to the psychic censor, instead of to an instinct.
+These three instincts are recognised in their commonest and
+most normal expression today as the tendency to provide for
+oneself and one's family; the tendency to marry and rear children
+under the best conditions known; and the tendency to
+regard the opinion of one's associates and to be a consistent
+member of the social order to which one acknowledges
+adherence.</p>
+
+<p>It is small wonder, then, that the realist and the romanticist,
+whose arsenal consists of observation and imagination, find
+in narration of dominancy and display of these instincts and
+tendencies the way to the goal for which they strive: viz.,
+interest of others, possibly edification. Certain novelists,
+Mr. D. H. Lawrence for instance, pursue discussion of the
+fundamental ones with such assiduity and vehemence that the
+unsophisticated reader might well suspect that life was made
+up of the display and vagaries of these essences of all living
+beings. But without cant or piety it may be said there is such
+a thing as higher life, spiritual life, and readers of psychoanalytic
+novels must keep in mind the fact that the Freudian
+psychology denies the reality of any such higher life, accounting
+for the evidences of it which are unescapable in terms of
+“subliminations,” such as “taboos.” Though these three instincts
+form the basis upon which the whole of man's mental
+activity is built, they by no means form its boundary. At some
+prehistoric period it is possible that they did, but during countless<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span>
+ages man's mind has been subject to experiences which
+called for other mental activity than the direct and primitive
+expression of these urges, and he has had to use his mental
+machinery as best he could to meet these demands. He had
+no choice. He could not scrap his old machinery and supply
+his mind with a new equipment better fitted to do the complex
+work civilisation demanded.</p>
+
+<p>The result is that the working of these instincts on the
+experience presented to the mind has brought about innumerable
+complications. These are known in the New Psychology
+as mental complexes. They have been to some modern
+novelists what the miraculous food given to Israel in the
+Wilderness was—their sole nutriment. Complexes, or conflicts
+resulting from adaptation of the primitive mental machinery
+to more intricate and varied processes than those with which it
+was originally intended to cope, determine much of man's
+mental life.</p>
+
+<p>To understand the workings of a mind is like trying to
+unravel a tangled skein of thread. The two main difficulties
+are: (1) That up to this time our mental training, our perceptions,
+our consciousness, our reason, have been exercised for
+the specific purpose of maintaining ourselves in the world.
+They have not been concerned with helping us to understand
+ourselves; (2) That there are parts of our minds whose existence
+we do not recognise, either because we will not or because
+we cannot, for the reason that they have come to be regarded
+as being in conflict with other parts which we have long admitted
+as having the first claim to recognition. In other words,
+not having known how to adapt certain parts of our mental
+machinery to the newer purposes for which we needed them,
+we have tried to suppress them or ignore them. In doing so
+we have only deceived ourselves, because they are still connected
+up with the main engine and influence all of the latter's
+output, harmoniously or jarringly—sometimes to the extent of
+interfering seriously with its working.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span></p>
+
+<p>The work of the practical psychologist is to learn how to
+overcome these two difficulties and to teach others how to use
+the knowledge. This is the task novelists frequently set themselves,
+and some, Willa Cather in “Paul's Case” and Booth
+Tarkington in “Alice Adams,” accomplish it admirably. Like
+the teacher and the priest, they have learned that surplus energy
+of the mind may be diverted from the biologically necessary
+activities into other fields of useful and elevating effort. They
+have learned that the second difficulty can be best overcome
+by facing the truth about our minds, however unpleasant and
+unflattering it may at first sight appear to be. Recognition
+of the existence of the two primitive urges, the instincts of self-preservation
+and of the preservation of the race, is the first
+step toward appreciation of their reasonable limitations and
+the extent to which they may be brought into harmony with the
+requirements of a well-balanced life.</p>
+
+<p>This leads us to refer for a moment to a tremendous force
+which, in any discussion of the working of the instincts, cannot
+be ignored. It is a constant effort or tendency, lying behind
+all instincts, to attain and maintain mental, emotional, and
+spiritual equilibrium. The tendency is expressed by the interaction,
+usually automatic and unconscious, which goes on
+between complexes and tends to establish the equilibrium. At
+the same time the working of individual instincts tends to
+upset it. Whenever the automatic process is suspended to any
+great degree, as by the cutting off from the rest of the mind
+of one complex, the result is a one-sided development which
+causes mental disturbances and often eventually mental derangement.
+As the instincts and complexes incline to war
+among themselves, there is a stabilising influence at work tending
+to hold us in mental equilibrium and thus to keep us balanced
+or sane. No one in the domain of letters has understood
+this force and its potentialities like Dostoievsky. “The Possessed”
+is a chart of that sea so subject to storm and agitation.
+The effort toward integration is perhaps a true instinct, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span>
+rests on a sound physiological basis, so well described by
+Sherrington. It furnishes a genuine theme for description of
+life's activities, and well-wrought studies of integration and
+disintegration take highest rank in fiction.</p>
+
+<p>With all their prolixity, the Victorian novelists managed to
+depict progress in one direction or another. This is more than
+can be said of most modern novelists, who are exhausted when
+they have succeeded in a single analysis, and commit the crass
+literary error of seeking to explain, when all that the most acute
+psychologist could possibly do would be to catch at a pattern, a
+direction, and an outcome, as mere description—problem
+rather than explanation being the dramatic motive.</p>
+
+<p>While the novelist's business is to see life and his aspiration
+is to understand what he sees, many novelists of today are, by
+their work, claiming to understand life in a sense that is not
+humanly possible. Human conduct affords the best raw material
+for the novelist. If he represents this in such a way that
+it seems to reflect life faithfully he is an artist; but the psychological
+novelist goes further and feels bound to account for
+what he represents. Ordinarily he accounts for it in one of
+three ways: (1) by the inscrutability of Providence—as many
+of the older novelists did; (2) by theories of his own; (3) by
+the theories of those whose profession to understand life and
+conduct he accepts. In short, he must have a philosophy of
+life. The mistake many novelists are making is to confuse
+such a philosophy of life with an explanation of mental processes
+and a formula for regulating them. Neither philosophy
+nor psychology is an exact science. If a novelist wishes to
+describe an operation for appendicitis or a death from a gastric
+ulcer, he can easily get the data necessary for making
+the description true to fact. But if he aspires to depict the
+conduct, under stress, of a person who has for years been a
+prey to conflicting fear and aspiration, or jealousy and remorse,
+or hatred and conscience, what psychologist can give<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span>
+him a formula for the correct procedure? Who can predict
+the reactions of his closest friend under unusual conditions?</p>
+
+<p>With our earnest realistic novelist ready to sit at the feet
+of science and avail himself of its investigations—prepared, as
+Shaw would say, to base his work on a genuinely scientific
+natural history—there is danger of his basing it, too, upon
+psychology which is not “genuinely scientific,” because its
+claims cannot be substantiated by experience. While the
+novelist is in such a receptive state along comes a scientist,
+hedged also with that special authority which physicians possess
+in the eyes of many laymen, and offers the complete outfit
+of knowledge and (as he assures the novelist) inductively
+derived theory that the novelist has been sighing for. This is
+Freud. He or his disciples can explain anything in the character
+and conduct line while you wait. If you want to know
+why a given person is what he is, or why he acts as he does,
+Freud can tell you. His outfit is not, ostensibly, “metaphysical,” 
+like much of the older psychology that our novelist encountered
+in college days. It is human, concrete, and surprisingly
+easy to understand. A child can grasp the main
+principles. Our novelist tests out a few of them on life as he
+has known it and finds that they seem to work. If he is not
+completely carried off his feet, he may grin at some of the
+formulas as he might at a smutty joke, but his own observations
+concerning the excessively mothered boy and his reading
+of some of the great dramas of the world are to him sufficient
+evidence of their soundness; and he bases the behaviour of
+his characters upon them with the same assurance of their
+accuracy that he would have in basing the account of a surgical
+operation and its results upon the data supplied him by a
+surgeon who had successfully performed hundreds of exactly
+similar operations and watched their after effects.</p>
+
+<p>One of the rudimentary instincts of human nature is curiosity,
+an urge to investigate the unknown, the mysterious.
+It is mystery that constitutes romance. It is the unknown that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span>
+makes romance of one's future, fate, fortune, mind—at least
+that part of the mind which we do not understand and which
+is always taking us by surprise and playing us tricks.
+Curiosity is forced movement developed along the lines of interest.
+It is quite likely to follow the line of least resistance,
+and just now there is little resistance to sex curiosity. Those
+who find fascination in the New Psychology today found the
+old psychology of a quarter of a century ago a stupid bore.
+The old psychology dealt exclusively with what is now called
+the “conscious mind:” with analysing the concept of directed
+thought, with measuring the processes of the mind which
+we harnessed, or believed we harnessed, and drove subject to
+our wills to do our work. The old psychology was academic,
+dry, as proper and conventional as the C Major scale, without
+mystery, without thrills, and therefore without interest, except
+to the psychologist.</p>
+
+<p>The New Psychology is different. And this “difference” is
+exactly why it has proved to be almost as effective bait to the
+feminine angler after romance which may serve her as caviar
+to the prosaic diet of every-day existence as are spiritualism
+and the many other cults and new religions whose attraction
+and apparent potency are now explainable by what we understand
+of this very psychology—or the science of the mind.
+There is no reason to suppose that the current doctrines of the
+subconscious will do more for civilisation or art than the older
+doctrines of consciousness. The fact that they seize the
+popular fancy and are espoused with enthusiasm is of no particular
+significance, since the very same attitude was an accompaniment
+of the older doctrines.</p>
+
+<p>It would be difficult to exaggerate the prevalent interest in
+psychology. I shall cite three indications of it: The pastor
+of one of the large and influential churches in New York asked
+me a short time ago if I would give a talk on Psychology before
+the Girls' Club of his church. When I suggested that some
+other subject might be more fitting and helpful, he replied that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span>
+all the girls were reading books on psychology, that he was
+sure none or few of them understood what they read, and
+that he was convinced that their indulgence was unhealthy.
+Should one go into any large general book-shop in New York
+or elsewhere and survey the display, he will find that a conspicuous
+department is devoted to “Books on Advanced Thinking,” 
+and upon inquiry he will find that it is the most popular
+department of the store. The most uniform information that
+a psychiatrist elicits from the families of youths whose minds
+have undergone dissolution is that for some time previous to
+the onset of symptoms they displayed a great interest in
+books on philosophy and psychology, and many of them had
+taken up psychoanalysis, or whatever passes under that name;
+joined some League of the Higher Illumination; or gone in
+for “mental fancy work” of some kind.</p>
+
+<p>Before taking up specific illustrations of psychology in
+modern fiction, I wish to say to amateurs interested in the
+study of psychology, that frank recognition of their own unconscious
+minds or of the part of their instinctive life or memories
+which may have been intentionally or automatically
+pushed out of consciousness, does not call for digging into the
+unconscious through elaborate processes of introspection or
+through invoking the symbolism of dreams. Even were it
+done, the result would probably reveal nothing more startling
+than would a faithful account of the undirected thoughts which
+float uninvited through the mind during any idle hour. For
+most normal persons such thoughts need neither to be proclaimed
+nor denied. The involuntary effort toward equilibrium
+of a normal mind will take adequate care of them. The
+study of such mental conditions and processes in abnormal
+individuals, however, is often of great service to the psychologist
+and facilitates understanding of the workings of both the
+normal and the unbalanced mind.</p>
+
+<p>I also desire to call attention to the value of an objective
+mental attitude if one would conserve mental equilibrium and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span>
+keep the working mind at its highest point of health and productivity.
+One of the greatest safeguards of mental equilibrium
+is the desire for objective truth. This is an indication that
+the mind is seeking for harmony between itself and the external
+world, and it has a biological basis in the fact that such
+harmony between the organism and the external world makes
+for security. The desire for objective truth is a straight pathway
+between the ego-complex and the ideal of a rational unified
+self. Parallel with this rational self there is an ethical
+self which has freed itself from the complexes caused by the
+conflict between the egoistic instincts and the external moral
+codes, and uses the rational self to secure harmony of thought
+and action based on self-knowledge. These two ideals may
+be pursued consciously and may be made the main support of
+that complete and enlightened self-consciousness which is
+essential for the most highly developed harmonious personality.</p>
+
+<p>For a time it seemed to the casual observer that the New
+Psychology was so steeped in pruriency that it could not be
+investigated without armour and gas mask. Happily such
+belief is passing, and many now see in it something more than
+the dominancy and vagaries of the libido, which convention
+has insisted shall veil its face and which expediency has suggested
+shall sit at the foot of the table rather than at the head.
+It has awakened a new interest in the life of the spirit, which
+is in part or in whole outside consciousness, and it has finally
+challenged the statement of the father of modern psychology,
+Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.” </p>
+
+<p>The religionist advises us to “Get right with God.” At
+least he is bidding for integration of interests. The humanist
+in literature who tries to get life going right with its memories
+is doing the same thing. To be on good terms with memory
+is happiness; to be on bad terms with it is tragedy. Both are
+fields for literary workmanship. The more the individual
+works up his memories in contact with his experiences, the
+more objective he becomes. On “Main Street” everybody<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span>
+remembers everything about everybody else and thinking becomes
+objective, with aspects no finer than the daily experiences
+of the thinkers. There is no chance for romance and
+adventure because the memories of the few who erred by
+embarking on adventurous ways are so vivid in the minds of
+their neighbours, and so often rehearsed by them, as to inhibit
+the venturesome. Instead of mental equilibrium between vital
+and struggling interests, there is only inertia. This makes a
+good theme for a sporadic novel, but it is not a basis for a
+school of novelists. Mr. Lewis set himself a task that he could
+perform. On a level where life is richer and memories are
+crowded out by sensational experiences the task is harder.</p>
+
+<p>It is a mistake to think that psychology is all introspection
+and conjecture of the unconscious. Mental life in the broadest
+sense is behaviour, instinctive and intelligent. Few have shown
+themselves more competent to observe, estimate, and describe
+such behaviour than the author of “Main Street.” That novel
+was a study of temperament, a portrayal of environment, and
+an attempt to estimate their interaction and to state the result.
+It was recognised by those who had encountered or experienced
+the temperament and who had lived, voluntarily or
+compulsorily, in the environment, to be a true cross-section of
+life focussed beneath a microscopic lens, and anyone who examined
+it had before him an accurate representation of the
+conscious experiences of at least two individuals, and a suggestion
+of their unconscious experiences as well. This permitted
+the reader, even suggested to him, to compare them
+with his own sensations and ideas. Thus it was that emotions,
+sentiments, and judgments were engendered which, given expression,
+constituted something akin to public opinion. The
+result was a beneficence to American literature, for the purpose
+of the writer was known, and it was obvious to the
+knowing that he had accomplished it.</p>
+
+<p>In “Babbitt” Mr. Lewis set himself a much more limited
+task. The picture is life in a Middle Western city of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span>
+U. S. A. It is as accurate as if it had been reflected from a
+giant mirror or reproduced from a photographic plate. George
+F. Babbitt is signalled by his fellow townsmen as an enviable
+success from a financial and familiar point of view. Nevertheless
+he grows more discontent with life as prosperity overtakes
+him. The burden of his complaint is that he has never
+done a single thing he wanted to in his whole life. It is hard to
+square his words with his actions, but he convinces himself.
+So having run the gamut of prosperity, paternity, applause,
+wine, women, and song—in his case it is dance, not song—without
+appeasement, he finally gets it vicariously through
+observing his son who not only knows what he wants to do, but
+does it. He summarises what life has taught him in a few
+words: “Don't be scared of the family. No, nor of all Zenith.
+Nor of yourself, the way I've been. Go ahead, old man! The
+world is yours!”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lewis' purpose was to describe the behaviour of a
+certain type of man in a certain kind of city, of which the
+world is full. He gives the former a definite heredity, an education
+with an amalgam of sentiment, a vague belief that
+material success spells happiness, that vulgar contact with
+one's fellows constitutes companionship, and that Pisgah
+sights of life are to be had by gaining a social elevation just
+beyond the one occupied. Then he thwarts his ambition to
+become a lawyer with an incontrovertible outburst of sex and
+sentimentality, and all his life he hears a bell tolling the
+echoes of his thwarted ambition. He feels that he has been
+tricked by circumstance and environment, and that display
+of chivalry to his wife and loyalty to his chum were wasted.
+They were indeed, for they had been offered, like the prayers of
+the hypocrites, in clubs and in corners of the street, and displayed
+for his own glory.</p>
+
+<p>Materialism was Babbitt's undoing. It destroyed the framework
+on which man slings happiness and contentment, and
+which is called morality and idealism. When that went he became<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span>
+a creature of Mr. Karel Capek's creation. Mr. Babbitt,
+in common with countless benighted parents, cherished a delusion.
+He believed that filial love, so-called, is an integral
+part of an offspring's make-up. It is an artefact, an acquisition,
+a convention: it is a thing like patriotism and creed.
+One is born with a certain slant toward it and as soon as he
+becomes a cognisant, sentient organism he realises that it is
+proper to have it and to display it. In fact he is made to do
+so during his formative years; thus it becomes second nature.
+And that is just what it is—second nature. Parental love is
+first nature. If this were a disquisition on love, instead of on
+novelists, I should contend that there are two kinds of love:
+a parent's love for its child, especially the mother's; and a
+believer's love for God. When Mr. Babbitt wallows in the
+trough of the waves of emotion because he doesn't get the
+affection and recognition from his children which is his due, he
+alienates our sympathy and Mr. Lewis reveals the vulnerable
+tendon of his own psychology.</p>
+
+<p>Were I the dispenser of eugenic licenses to marry, I should
+insist that everyone contemplating parenthood should have
+read the life history of the spider, especially the female of the
+species, who is devoured by her offspring. All novelists should
+study spiders first-hand. Filial love, or the delusion of it,
+furnishes the material for some of the finest ironies and
+deepest tragedies of life, and as Mr. Lewis adopts it as a
+medium for characterisation quite free from the teaching of
+the Freudians who would make it a fundamental instinct, the
+reader is entitled to expect from him a more reasonable treatment
+of the subject.</p>
+
+<p>Babbitt's tragedy in the failure of his children's affection
+is the tragedy of millions of parents the world over. There
+is hardly a note that would be more sure of wide appeal.
+But it cannot be explained by the mere fact that, despite
+the Decalogue, no person of reason will ever “honour” where
+honour is not merited. It is hard to pity Babbitt because<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span>
+he could not commandeer the filial respect and honour which
+he had failed to inspire. If this were all, the situation would
+be simple. But, like countless other deluded parents, Babbitt
+believes that merely by bringing children into the world
+he has staked out a claim on their love, just as the child
+has a claim on the love of those who brought him into the
+world. And in this belief lies the irony and the tragedy:
+in the disparity between tradition and fact; between reason
+and instinct. The tradition or convention that filial love corresponds
+to parental love probably had its origin in the mind
+of the parent who would have liked to supply the child with
+such reciprocal instinct—a love that would transcend reason
+and survive when respect and honour had failed—but nature
+has not kept pact with the parental wish. In the realisation
+and acceptance of the truth lies the Gethsemane that each
+parent must face who would mount to higher heights of parenthood
+than the planes of instinct. Hence the universal
+appeal: the reason why the reader sympathises with Babbitt
+even while condemning him. He has forfeited the right to what
+he might have claimed—honour and affection—to fall back
+upon more elemental rights which were a figment of the imagination.
+Mr. Lewis' psychology would have struck a truer
+note if he had differentiated more clearly between the universal
+parent tragedy and Babbitt's own failure as a parent.</p>
+
+<p>With the regeneration or civic orientation of Babbitt I
+am not concerned—that is in the field of ethics. But, as a student
+of literary art and craftsmanship, it seems to me the
+sawdust in Mr. Lewis' last doll.</p>
+
+<p>To depict the display of Babbitt's consciousness as Mr.
+Lewis has done is to make a contribution to behaviourism, to
+make a psychological chart of mental activity. One may call
+it realism if one likes, because it narrates facts, but it is first
+and foremost a narrative of the activities and operation of
+the human mind.</p>
+
+<p>“Babbitt” may be construed as the American intelligence of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span>
+Mr. Lewis' generation turning on its taskmaster. All men who
+live by writing, and have any regard for fine art and “belles
+lettres,” or any ideals for which, in extremity, they might be
+willing to get out alone with no support from cheering multitudes
+and do a little dying on barricades, live and work with
+the Babbitt iron in their souls. Mr. Lewis probably had his
+full dose of it. He had been an advertising copy-writer, selling
+goods by his skill with a pen, to Babbitts, and for Babbitts.
+He had been sub-editor for a time of one of those magazines
+which are owned and published by Babbitts and tricked out
+and bedizened for a “mass circulation” of Babbitts. He hated
+Babbitt. When he saw the favourable opportunity he meant
+to turn Babbitt inside out and hold him up to scorn. But Mr.
+Lewis is not savage enough, and his talent is not swinging and
+extravagant enough, and he has not humour enough, to make
+him a satirist. He is a photographic artist with an incomparable
+capacity for the lingo of “one hundred per cent Americans.” 
+As he gets deeper and deeper into the odious and
+contemptible Babbitt, he begins to be sorry for him, and at the
+end he is rather fond of him—faithfully telling the facts about
+him all the while. He pities Babbitt in Babbitt's sense of
+frustration by social environment and circumstances, and
+admires him for telling his son not to let himself be similarly
+frustrated.</p>
+
+<p>To call such a book “an exceedingly clever satire” and its
+leading character “an exceedingly clever caricature” is, it
+seems to me, to confess unacquaintance with one's countrymen
+or unfamiliarity with the conventional meaning of the words
+“satire” and “caricature.” Such admission on the part of the
+distinguished educator and critic who has recently applied these
+terms to it is most improbable.</p>
+
+<p>If a photograph of a man is caricature and a phonographic
+record of his internal and externalised speech constitutes satire,
+then “Babbitt” is what the learned professor says it is.</p>
+
+<p>There is a type of novel much in evidence at present called<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span>
+psychological, which is reputed to depict some of the established
+principles of psychology. It should be called the psychoanalytic
+novel, and psychoanalysis is only a step-child of
+psychology. There are hundreds of such novels. Some of
+them are considered at length later. Here I shall mention
+only one; “The Things We Are,” by John Middleton Murry.
+The story is of a young man, Boston by name, who has been
+unfitted for the experiences of adult life by excess of maternal
+love—the most familiar of all the Freudian themes. The narrative
+is developed largely through description of successive
+states of mind of the subject, with only the necessary thread
+of story carried by recounting outward events. After the death
+of his mother, Boston finds himself unable to take hold of life
+and dogged with a sense of the futility of all things. He tries
+various kinds of uncongenial work as cure for the sense that
+life is but a worthless experience, all of which fail. Finally
+he retires to a suburban inn to live on his income, and there,
+through the kindly human contact of the innkeeper and his
+wife, he experiences the awakening of a latent artistic impulse
+for expression and narration. He finds himself believing that
+he could give years to becoming the patient chronicler of the
+suburb which has provided him such beneficial retreat. Even
+his small peep at community and family life gives Mr. Boston
+uplift and expansion, and makes more significant the greatest
+of the Commandments. He sends for his one London friend,
+a literary man, who brings with him the young woman to
+whom he is practically engaged. The recently released libido
+of Mr. Boston focusses and remains focussed upon her. He
+interests her and finally wins her, and the long “inhibited”
+Mr. Boston finds himself in “normal” love. The environment
+prepared him and “he effected a transformation” on
+Felicia—in the language of the psychoanalyst. The thesis of
+the story is that for this particular kind of neurotic suffering,
+“suppression of the libido,” cure lies in “sublimation of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span>
+libido,” best effected by art and love in this case, after work,
+social service, and religion have been tried and failed.</p>
+
+<p>The psychology of the sick soul is a science in itself, and is
+known as psychotherapy. There are many sick souls in the
+world—far more than is suspected. Very few, comparatively,
+of them are confined in institutions or cloistered in religious
+retreats or universities. The majority of them toil to gain their
+daily bread. They are the chief consumers of cloudy stuff and
+mystic literature. The purveyors of the latter owe it to them
+not to deceive them about psychoanalysis. As a therapeutic
+measure it has not been very useful. The novelist should be
+careful not to give it more potentiality for righteousness than
+it possesses.</p>
+
+<p>It is the history of panics, epidemics, revivals, and other
+emotional episodes that they always recur. The present generation
+is fated to be fed on novels embodying the Freudian
+theories of consciousness and personality. Like certain bottles
+sent out from the pharmacist, they should have a label “poison:
+to be used with care.” The contents properly used may be
+beneficial, even life saving. They may do harm, great harm.
+Freudianism will eventually go the way of all “isms,” but
+meanwhile it would be kind of May Sinclair, Harvey J. O'Higgins
+<em>et al</em> to warn their readers that their fiction is based on
+fiction. A man's life may be determined for him by instincts
+which are beyond the power of his reason to influence or
+direct, but it has not been proven. It is hypothesis, and application
+of the doctrine is inimical to the system of ethics to
+which we have conformed our conduct, or tried to conform it,
+with indifferent success, for the past nineteen hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>It is often said that man will never understand his mate.
+There are many things he will never understand. One of
+them is why he is attracted by spurious jewels when he can
+have the genuine for the same price. Ten years ago, or thereabouts,
+a jewel of literature was cast before the public and
+was scorned. I recall but one discerning critic who estimated<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span>
+it justly, Mr. Harry Dounce. Yet “Bunker Bean” is
+one of the few really meritorious American psychological
+novels of the present generation. It is done with a lightness
+of touch worthy of Anthony Hope at his best; with an insight
+of motives, impulses, aspirations, and determinations equal
+to the creator of “Mr. Polly”; and with a knowledge of child
+psychology that would be creditable to Professor Watson.</p>
+
+<p>There are few more vivid descriptions of the workings of
+the child mind than that given by Mr. Harry Leon Wilson in
+the account of Bunker's visit to “Granper” and “Grammer,” 
+and the seduction of his early childhood by the shell from the
+sea. Dickens never portrayed infantile emotions and reactions
+with greater verisimilitude than Mr. Wilson when knowledge
+of the two inevitables of life—birth and death—came, nearly
+simultaneously, to Bunker's budding mind.</p>
+
+<p>If journals whose purpose is to orient and guide unsophisticated
+readers, and to illuminate the road that prospective
+readers must travel, would give the “once over” to books
+when they are published and the review ten years later, it
+would mark a great advance on the present method. If such a
+plan were in operation at the present time “Bunker Bean”
+would be a best seller and “If Winter Comes” would be substituting
+in the coal famine.</p>
+
+<p>Force or energy in a new form has come into fictional literature
+within the past decade, and I propose to consider it as it
+is displayed in the writings of those who are mostly responsible
+for it: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, and
+to consider some of the younger English novelists from the
+point of view of psychology.</p>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" >CHAPTER II<br>
+<small>IRELAND'S LATEST LITERARY ANTINOMIAN: JAMES JOYCE</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“The supreme question about a work of art is out of
+how deep a life does it spring.” —<span class="smcap">Stephen Dædalus.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Ireland has had the attention of the world focussed on
+her with much constancy the past ten years. She has
+weathered her storms; she has calmed her tempests; and she
+is fast repairing the devastations of her tornadoes. None but
+defamers and ill-wishers contend that she will not bring her
+ship of state successfully to port and that it will not find
+safe and secure anchorage. During her perilous voyage one
+of her rebellious sons has been violently rocking the boat of
+literature. His name is James Joyce and his craft has had
+various names: first “The Dubliners,” and last “Ulysses.” </p>
+
+<p>A few intuitive sensitive visionaries may understand and
+comprehend “Ulysses,” James Joyce's mammoth volume, without
+previous training or instruction, but the average intelligent
+reader will glean little or nothing from it, save bewilderment
+and disgust. It should be companioned with a key and a
+glossary like the Berlitz books. Then the attentive and diligent
+reader might get some comprehension of Mr. Joyce's
+message, which is to tell of the people whom he has encountered
+in his forty years of sentiency; to describe their behaviour
+and speech; to analyse their motives; and to characterise
+their conduct. He is determined that we shall know
+the effect the “world,” sordid, turbulent, disorderly, steeped
+in alcohol and saturated with jesuitry, had upon an emotional
+Celt, an egocentric genius whose chief diversion has been
+blasphemy and keenest pleasure self-exaltation, and whose
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span>
+life-long important occupation has been keeping a note-book
+in which he has recorded incident encountered and speech
+heard with photographic accuracy and Boswellian fidelity.
+Moreover, he is determined to tell them in a new way, not in
+straightforward, narrative fashion with a certain sequentiality
+of idea, fact, occurrence; in sentence, phrase, and paragraph
+that is comprehensible to a person of education and culture;
+but in parodies of classic prose and current slang, in perversions
+of sacred literature, in carefully metred prose with studied
+incoherence, in symbols so occult and mystic that only the
+initiated and profoundly versed can understand; in short, by
+means of every trick and illusion that a master artificer, or
+even magician, can play with the English language.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said of the writings of Tertullian, one of the
+two greatest church writers, that they are rich in thought, and
+destitute of form, passionate and hair-splitting, elegant and
+pithy in expression, energetic and condensed to the point of
+obscurity. Mr. Joyce was devoted to Tertullian in his youth.
+Dostoievsky also intrigued him. From him he learned what
+he knows of <em>mise en scene</em>, and particularly to disregard the
+time element. Ibsen and Hauptmann he called master after he
+had weaned himself from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.
+But he calls no one master now; even Homer he calls <em>comare</em>.
+It is related that “A.E.” once said to him, “I'm afraid you have
+not enough chaos in you to make a world.” The poet was a
+poor prophet. Mr. Joyce has made a world, and a chaotic one
+in which no decent person wants to live.</p>
+
+<p>It is likely that there is no one writing English today who
+could parallel his feat, and it is also likely that few would
+care to do it were they capable. This statement requires that
+it be said at once that Mr. Joyce has seen fit to use words and
+phrases which the entire world has covenanted not to use and
+which people in general, cultured and uncultured, civilised and
+savage, believer and heathen, have agreed shall not be used
+because they are vulgar, vicious, and vile. Mr. Joyce's reply
+to this is: “This race and this country and this life produced
+me—I shall express myself as I am.” </p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe25" id="ilo_fp39">
+  <img class="w100 p2" src="images/ilo_fp39.jpg" alt="ilop37" title="p37ilo">
+  <figcaption class="caption p2b"><span class="allsmcap">JAMES JOYCE</span></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 37]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>An endurance test should always be preceded by training.
+It requires real endurance to finish “Ulysses.” The best training
+for it is careful perusal or reperusal of “A Portrait of
+the Artist as a Young Man,” the volume published six or
+seven years ago which revealed Mr. Joyce's capacity to externalise
+his consciousness, to set it down in words. It is the
+story of his own life before he exiled himself from his native
+land, told with uncommon candour and extraordinary revelations
+of thought, impulse, and action, many of them of a nature
+and texture which most persons do not feel free to reveal, or
+which they do not feel it is decent and proper to confide to
+the world.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span></p>
+<p>The facts of Mr. Joyce's life with which the reader who
+seeks to comprehend his writings should be familiar are: He
+was one of many children of South Ireland Catholic parents.
+In his early childhood his father had not yet dissipated their
+small fortune and he was sent to Clongowes Wood, a renowned
+Jesuit College near Dublin, and remained there until it seemed
+to his teachers and his parents that he should decide whether
+or not he had a vocation; that is whether he felt within himself,
+in his soul, a desire to join the order. Meanwhile he had experienced
+the profoundly disturbing impulses of pubescence;
+the incoming waves of genesic potency had swept over him,
+submerged him, and carried him into a deep trough of sin,
+from which, however, he was extricated, resuscitated, and
+purged by confession, penitence, and prayer. But the state
+of grace would not endure. He lost his faith, and soon his
+patriotism, and he held those with whom he formerly worshipped
+up to ridicule, and his country and her aspirations up
+to contumely. He continued his studies in the Old Royal
+University of Dublin, notwithstanding the abject poverty of
+his family. He was reputed to be a poet then, and many of
+the poems in “Chamber Music” were composed at this period.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span>
+He had no hesitation in admitting the reputation, even contending
+for it. “I have written the most perfect lyric since
+Shakespeare,” he said to Padraic Colum; and to Yeats, “We
+have met too late; you are too old to be influenced by me.” If
+belief in his own greatness has ever forsaken him in the years
+of trial and distress that have elapsed between then and now,
+no one, save possibly one, has heard of it. Mr. William
+Hohenzollern in his sanguine moments was never as sure of
+himself as Mr. James Joyce in his hours of despair.</p>
+
+<p>After graduation he decided to study medicine, and, in fact,
+he did pursue the study for two or three years, one of them
+in the medical school of the University of Paris. Eventually
+he became convinced that medicine was not his vocation, even
+though funds were available for him to continue his studies,
+and he decided to take up singing as a profession, “having a
+phenomenally beautiful tenor voice.” These three novitiates
+furnished him with all the material he has used in the four
+volumes that he has published. Matrimony, parentage, ill-health,
+and a number of other factors put an end to his musical
+ambitions. He taught for a brief time in Dublin and wrote
+the stories that are in “Dubliners,” which his countrymen
+baptised with fire; and began the “Portrait.” But he couldn't
+tolerate “a place fettered by the reformed conscience, a country
+in which the symbol of its art was the cracked looking-glass of a
+servant,” so he betook himself to a country in the last explosive
+crisis of paretic grandeur. In Trieste he gained his daily bread
+by teaching Austrians English and Italian, having a mastery
+of the latter language that would flatter a Padovian professor.
+The war drove him to the haven of the expatriate, Switzerland,
+and for four years he taught German, Italian, French, English,
+to anyone in Zurich who had time, ambition, and money to
+acquire a new language. Since the Armistice he has lived in
+Paris, first finishing the book which is his <em>magnum opus</em> and
+which he says and believes represents everything that he has
+to say or will have to say, and he is now enjoying the fame<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span>
+and the infamy which its publication and three editions within
+two years have brought him.</p>
+
+<p>As a boy Mr. Joyce's cherished hero was Odysseus. He approved
+of his subterfuge for evading military service; he envied
+him the companionship of Penelope; and all his latent vengeance
+was vicariously satisfied by reading of the way in which
+he revenged himself on Palamedes. The craftiness and resourcefulness
+of the final artificer of the siege of Troy made
+him permanently big with envy and admiration. But it was
+the ten years of his hero's life after he had eaten of the lotus
+plant, that wholly seduced Mr. Joyce and appeased his emotional
+soul. As years went by he realised that his own experiences
+were not unlike those of the slayer of Polyphemus and the
+favourite of Pallas-Athene, and after careful deliberation and
+planning he decided to write an Odyssey. In early childhood
+Mr. Joyce had identified himself with Dædalus, the Athenian
+architect, sculptor, and magician, and in all his writings he
+carries on in the name of Stephen Dædalus. Like the original
+Dædalus, his genius is great, his vanity is greater, and he can
+brook no rival. Like his prototype, he was exiled from his
+native land after he had made a great contribution to the
+world. Like him, he was received kindly in exile, and like him,
+also, having ingeniously contrived wings for himself and used
+them successfully, he is now enjoying a period of tranquillity
+after his sufferings and his labour.</p>
+
+<p>“Ulysses” is the record of the thoughts, antics, vagaries,
+and actions—more particularly the thoughts—of Stephen Dædalus,
+an Irishman, of artistic temperament; of Leopold Bloom,
+an Irish-Hungarian Jew, of scientific temperament and perverted
+instincts; and of his wife, Marion Tweedy, daughter
+of an Irish major of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers stationed in
+Gibraltar, and a Jewish girl. Marion was a concert singer
+given to coprophilly, especially in her involutional stages,
+spiritual and physical. Bloom's acquired perversion he attempted<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span>
+to conceal by canvassing for advertisements for <em>The
+Freeman</em>.</p>
+
+<p>Dublin is the scene of action. The events—those that can
+be mentioned—and their sequence are:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“The preparation for breakfast, intestinal congestion, the
+bath, the funeral, the advertisement of Alexander Keyes, the
+unsubstantial lunch, the visit to Museum and National Library,
+the book-hunt along Bedford Row, Merchants' Arch,
+Wellington Quay, the music in the Ormond Hotel, the altercation
+with a truculent troglodyte, in Bernard Kierman's premises,
+a blank period of time including a car-drive, a visit to a
+house of mourning, a leave-taking, ... the prolonged delivery
+of Mrs. Nina Purefoy, the visit to a disorderly house
+... and subsequent brawl and chance medley in Beaver
+Street, nocturnal perambulation to and from the cabman's
+shelter, Butt Bridge.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And these are some of the things they thought and talked of:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship,
+woman, prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light
+of arc and glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic
+trees, exposed corporation emergency dustbuckets, the
+Roman catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation,
+Jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past
+day, the maleficent influence of the presabbath, Stephen's
+collapse.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mr. Joyce is an alert, keen-witted, educated man who has
+made it a life-long habit to jot down every thought that he has
+had, drunk or sober, depressed or exalted, despairing or hopeful,
+hungry or satiated, in brothel or in sanctuary, and likewise
+to put down what he has seen or heard others do or say—and
+rhythm has from infancy been an enchantment of the
+heart. It is not unlikely that every thought he has had,
+every experience he has ever encountered, every person he
+has ever met, one might say everything he has ever read in
+sacred or profane literature, is to be encountered in the obscurities<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span>
+and in the franknesses of “Ulysses.” If personality
+is the sum total of all one's experiences, all one's thoughts and
+emotions, inhibitions and liberations, acquisitions and inheritances,
+then it may truthfully be said that “Ulysses” comes
+nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any
+book I know.</p>
+
+<p>He sets down every thought that comes into consciousness.
+Decency, propriety, pertinency are not considered. He does
+not seek to give them orderliness, sequence, or conclusiveness.
+His literary output would seem to substantiate some of Freud's
+contentions. The majority of writers, practically all, transfer
+their conscious, deliberate thought to paper. Mr. Joyce transfers
+the product of his unconscious mind to paper without
+submitting it to the conscious mind, or if he submits it, it is
+to receive approval and encouragement, perhaps even praise.
+He holds with Freud that the unconscious mind represents the
+real man, the man of Nature, and the conscious mind the
+artificed man, the man of convention, of expediency, the slave
+of Mrs. Grundy, the sycophant of the Church, the plastic
+puppet of Society and State. For him the movements which
+work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and
+visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside. “Peasant's heart”
+psychologically is the unconscious mind. When a master
+technician of words and phrases set himself the task of revealing
+the product of the unconscious mind of a moral monster,
+a pervert and an invert, an apostate to his race and his
+religion, the simulacrum of a man who has neither cultural
+background nor personal self-respect, who can neither be
+taught by experience nor lessoned by example, as Mr. Joyce
+did in drawing the picture of Leopold Bloom, he undoubtedly
+knew full well what he was undertaking, how unacceptable
+the vile contents of that unconscious mind would be
+to ninety-nine out of a hundred readers, and how incensed
+they would be at having the disgusting product thrown in their
+faces. But that has nothing to do with the question: has the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span>
+job been done well; is it a work of art? The answer is in the
+affirmative.</p>
+
+<p>The proceedings of the council of the gods, with which the
+book opens, are tame. Stephen Dædalus, the Telemachus of
+this Odyssey, is seen chafing beneath his sin—refusal to
+kneel down at the bedside of his dying mother and pray for
+her—while having an <em>al fresco</em> breakfast in a semi-abandoned
+turret with his friend Buck Mulligan (now an esteemed physician
+of Dublin), and a ponderous Saxon from Oxford whose
+father “made his tin by selling jalap to the Zulus,” who applauds
+Stephen's sarcasms and witticisms. Stephen has a
+grouch because Buck Mulligan has referred to him, “O, it's
+only Dædalus whose mother is beastly dead.” This Stephen
+construes to be an offense to him, not to his mother. Persecutory
+ideas are dear to Stephen Dædalus. In his moody
+brooding this is how he welds words:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning
+peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore
+and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by
+lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The
+twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harp-strings
+merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded
+words shimmering on the dim tide.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Meanwhile his sin pursues him as “the Russian gentleman
+of a particular kind” pursued Ivan Karamazov when delirium
+began to overtake him. He recalls his mother, her secrets,
+her illness, her last appeals. While breakfasting Buck and
+Stephen plan a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids,
+with the latter's wage of schoolmaster which he will receive
+that day. Later Buck goes in the sea while Stephen animadverts
+on Ireland's two masters, the Pope of Rome and the
+King of England, and recites blasphemous poetry.</p>
+
+<p>Stephen spends the forenoon in school, then takes leave of
+the pedantic proprietor, who gives him his salary and a paper
+on foot and mouth disease. Telemachus embarks on his voyage,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span>
+and the goddess who sails with him communes with him
+as follows:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no
+more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I
+am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide,
+that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs.
+Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was
+aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By
+knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he
+was and a millionaire, <em>maestro di color che sanno</em>. Limit of
+the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can
+put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door.
+Shut your eyes and see.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is the first specimen of the saltatory, flitting, fugitive,
+on-the-surface purposeless thought that Stephen produces as he
+walks Sandymount Strand. From this point the book teems
+with it and with Bloom's autistic thoughts. It is quite impossible
+to give a synopsis or summary of them. It must
+suffice to say that in the fifteen pages Mr. Joyce devotes to
+the first leg of the voyage that will give him news of Ulysses,
+an hour's duration, a film picture has been thrown on the
+screen of his visual cortex for which he writes legends as fast
+as the machine reels them off. It is Mr. Joyce's life that is
+thus remembered: his thoughts, ambitions, aspirations, failures,
+and disappointments; the record of his contacts and their
+engenderment—what was and what might have been. On
+casual examination, such record transformed into print looks
+like gibberish, and is meaningless. So does shorthand. It is
+full of meaning for anyone who knows how to read it.</p>
+
+<p>The next fifty pages are devoted to displaying the reel of
+Mr. Leopold Bloom's mind, the workings of his psycho-physical
+machinery, autonomic and heteronomic, the idle and purposeful
+thoughts of the most obnoxious wretch of all mankind,
+as Eolus called the real Ulysses. While he forages for
+his wife's breakfast, prepares and serves it, his thoughts and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span>
+reflections are answers to the question “Digman, how camest
+thou into the realms of darkness?” for no burial honours yet
+had Irish Elpenor received.</p>
+
+<p>Then follows a picture of Dublin before the revolution, its
+newspapers, and the men who made them, with comment and
+characterisation by Stephen Dædalus, interpolations and
+solicitations by Leopold Bloom. Naturally the reader who
+knew or knew of William Brayden, Esquire, of Oakland,
+Sandymount, Mr. J. J. Smolley whose speech reminds of Edmund
+Burke's writings, or Mr. Myles Crawford whose witticisms
+are founded on Pietro Aretino, would find this chapter
+more illuminating, though not more entertaining, than one
+who had heard of Dublin for the first time in 1914. Nor does
+it facilitate understanding of the conversation there to know
+the geography of an isle afloat where lived the son of Hippotas,
+his six daughters, and six blooming sons.</p>
+
+<p>Bloom continues his apparently purposeless and obviously
+purposeful thoughts after the Irish Læstrygonians had stoned
+him, for another fifty pages. Everything he sees and everyone
+he encounters generate them. They are connected, yet they are
+disparate. I choose one of the simplest and easiest to quote:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“A procession of whitesmocked men marched slowly towards
+him along the gutter, scarlet sashes across their boards. Bargains.
+Like that priest they are this morning: we have sinned,
+we have suffered. He read the scarlet letters on their five
+tall white hats: H. E. L. Y. S. Wisdom Hely's. Y lagging
+behind drew a chunk of bread from under his foreboard,
+crammed it into his mouth and munched as he walked. Our
+staple food. Three bob a day, walking along the gutters,
+street after street. Just keep skin and bone together, bread
+and skilly. They are not Boyl: no: M'Glade's men. Doesn't
+bring in any business either. I suggested to him about a
+transparent show cart with two smart girls sitting inside
+writing letters, copybooks, envelopes, blotting paper. I bet
+that would have caught on. Smart girls writing something
+catch the eye at once. Everyone dying to know what she's<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span>
+writing. Get twenty of them round you if you stare at nothing.
+Have a finger in the pie. Women too. Curiosity. Pillar of
+salt. Wouldn't have it of course because he didn't think of it
+himself first. Or the inkbottle I suggested with a false stain
+of black celluloid. His ideas for ads like Plumtree's potted
+under the obituaries, cold meat department. You can't like
+'em. What? Our envelops. Hello! Jones, where are you
+going? Can't stop, Robinson, I am hastening to purchase the
+only reliable inkeraser <em>Kansell</em>, sold by Hely's Ltd., 85 Dame
+Street. Well out of that ruck I am. Devil of a job it was
+collecting accounts of those convents. Tranquilla convent.
+That was a nice nun there, really sweet face. Wimple suited
+her small head. Sister? Sister? I am sure she was crossed
+in love by her eyes. Very hard to bargain with that sort of a
+woman. I disturbed her at her devotions that morning. But
+glad to communicate with the outside world. Our great day,
+she said, Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Sweet name
+too: caramel. She knew, I think she knew by the way she.
+If she had married she would have changed. I suppose they
+really were short of money. Fried everything in the best
+butter all the same. No lard for them. My heart's broke
+eating dripping. They like buttering themselves in and out.
+Molly tasting it, her veil up. Sister? Pat Claffey, the pawn-broker's
+daughter. It was a nun they say invented barbed
+wire.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Man may not think like this, but it is up to the psychologist
+to prove it. So far as I know he does. Lunatics do, in
+manic “flights”; and flights of ideas are but accentuations of
+normal mental activity.</p>
+
+<p>The following is a specimen of what psychologists call
+“flight of ideas.” To the uninitiated reader it means nothing.
+To the initiated it is like the writing on the wall.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Bloom. Flood of warm jimjam lickitup secretness flowed
+to flow in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow, invading.
+Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores
+to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy the feel the warm the. Tup.
+To pour o'er sluices pouring gushes. Flood, gush, flow, joy-gush,
+tupthrop. Now! Language of love.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span></p>
+
+<p>In the next section Stephen holds forth on ideals and literature
+and gives the world that which Mr. Joyce gave his fellow
+students in Dublin to satiety, viz. his views of Shakespeare,
+and particularly his conception of Hamlet. “Shakespeare is
+the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their
+balance,” one of his cronies remarked. Even in those days
+Mr. Joyce's ideas of grandeur suggested to a student of
+psychiatry who heard him talk that he had the mental disease
+with which that symptom is most constantly associated,
+and to another of his auditors that he had an <em>idée fixe</em>, and
+that “the moral idea seems lacking, the sense of destiny, of
+retribution.” They never hurt Mr. Joyce—such views as
+these. The armour of his <em>amour propre</em> has never been
+pierced; the belief in his destiny has never wavered. The
+meeting in the National Library twenty years ago gives him
+opportunity to display philosophic erudition, dialectic skill, and
+artistic feeling in his talk with the young men and their
+elders. It would be interesting to know from any of them,
+or from Mr. T. S. Eliot, if the following is the sort of grist
+that is brought to the free-verse miller, and can poetry be
+made from it.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers. <em>Isis Unveiled.</em> Their
+Pali book we tried to pawn. Crosslegged under an umbrel
+umbershoot he thrones an Aztec logos, functioning on astral
+levels, their oversoul, mahamahatma. The faithful hermetists
+await the light, ripe for chelaship, ringroundabout him. Louis
+H. Victory. T. Caulfield Irwin. Lotus ladies tend them i' the
+eyes, their pineal glands aglow. Filled with his god he
+thrones, Buddh under plantain. Gulfer of souls, engulfer.
+He souls, she souls, shoals of souls. Engulfed with wailing
+creecries, whirled, whirling, they bewail.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In contrast with this take the following description of the
+drowned man in Dublin Bay as a specimen of masterly realism:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies.
+At one he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin Bar.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span>
+Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes,
+silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow,
+bobbing landward, a pace a pace a porpoise. There he is.
+Hook it quick. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor.
+We have him. Easy now. Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul
+brine.... Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust....
+Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the
+stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snorting to
+the sun.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There are so many “specimens” of writing in the volume
+that it is quite impossible to give examples of them. Frankness
+compels me to state that he goes out of his way to scoff
+at God and to besmirch convention, but that's to show he is
+not afraid, like the man who defied God to kill him at 9.48 p.m.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote
+it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later),
+the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of
+catholics call <em>bio boia</em>, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in
+all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold
+too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet,
+there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous
+angel, being a wife unto himself.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Dædalus family and their neighbourhood—their pawn-brokers,
+shopkeepers, spiritual advisers; the people they despised,
+those they envied, the Viceroy of Ireland, now come in
+for consideration. Mr. Dædalus is a sweet-tempered, mealy-mouthed
+man given to strong drink and high-grade vagrancy
+who calls his daughters “an insolent pack of little bitches since
+your poor mother died.” Their appearances and emotional
+reactions, and their contacts with Stephen and Bloom who
+are passing the time till they shall begin the orgy which is the
+high-water mark of the book, are instructive to the student of
+behaviouristic psychology.</p>
+
+<p>Readers of Dostoievsky rarely fail to note the fact that
+occurrences of a few hours required hundreds of pages to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span>
+narrate. The element of time seems to have been eliminated.
+It is the same in “Ulysses.” This enormous volume of seven
+hundred and thirty-two pages is taken up with thoughts of two
+men during twelve hours of sobriety and six of drunkenness.
+I do not know the population of Dublin, but whatever it may
+be, a vast number of these people come into the ken of Dædalus
+and Bloom during those hours, and into the readers'; for it is
+through their eyes and their ears that we see and hear what
+transpires and is said. And so the trusting reader accompanies
+one or both of them to the beach, and observes them in revery
+and in repose; or to a café concert, and observes them in ructions
+and in ruminations. A countryman of Mr. Joyce, Edmund
+Burke, said “custom reconciles us to everything,” and
+after we have accompanied these earthly twins, Stephen and
+Leopold, thus far, we do not baulk at the lying-in hospital or
+even the red light district, though others more sensitive and less
+tolerant than myself would surely wish they had deserted the
+“bark-waggons” when the occupants were invited into the
+brothel.</p>
+
+<p>The book in reality is a moving picture with picturesque
+legends, many profane and more vulgar. For a brief time
+Mr. Joyce was associated with the “movies,” and the form in
+which “Ulysses” was cast may have been suggested by experiences
+with the Volta Theatre, as his cinematograph enterprise
+was called.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Joyce learned from St. Thomas Aquinas what Socrates
+learned from his mother: how to bring thoughts into the
+world; and from his boyhood he had a tenderness for rhythm.
+It crops out frequently in “Ulysses.” </p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“In Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of holy
+Michan. There rises a watchtower beheld of men afar. There
+sleep the mighty dead as in life they slept, warrior and princes
+of high renown. A pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring
+waters, fishful streams where sport the gunnard, the plaice, the
+roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse, the dab,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span>
+the brill, the flounder, the mixed coarse fish generally and
+other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to
+be enumerated. In the mild breezes of the west and of the
+east the lofty trees wave in different directions their first class
+foliage, the wafty sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, the exalted
+planetree, the eugenic eucalyptus and other ornaments of
+the arboreal world with which that region is thoroughly well
+supplied. Lovely maidens sit in close proximity to the roots
+of the lovely trees singing the most lovely songs while they
+play with all kinds of lovely objects as for example golden
+ingots, silvery fishes, crans of herrings, drafts of eels, codlings,
+creels of fingerlings, purple seagems and playful insects. And
+heroes voyage from afar to woo them, from Eblana to
+Slievemargy, the peerless princes of unfettered Munster and
+of Connacht the just and of smooth sleek Leinster and of
+Cruachan's land and of Armagh the splendid and of the noble
+district of Boyle, princes, the sons of kings.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>At other times he seems to echo the sonorous phrasing of
+some forgotten master: Pater or Rabelais, or to paraphrase
+William Morris or Walt Whitman, or to pilfer from the Reverend
+William Sunday.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a
+round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested
+stronglimbed frankeyed red-haired freely freckled shaggybearded
+widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed
+brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced, sinewyarmed
+hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells
+and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was
+likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong
+growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar
+to the mountain gorse (<em>Ulex Europeus</em>). The widewinged
+nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected,
+were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity
+the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The
+eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery
+were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. A powerful
+current of warm breath issued at regular intervals from the
+profound cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic resonance the
+loud strong hale reverberations of his formidable heart thundered<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span>
+rumblingly causing the ground, the summit of the lofty
+tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and
+tremble.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The chapter from which these quotations are taken, when
+the friends turn into Barney Kiernan's to slake their thirst,
+shows Mr. Joyce with loosed tongue—the voluble, witty,
+philosophic Celt, with an extraordinary faculty of words. If
+an expert stenographer had taken down the ejaculations as
+they spurted from the mouth of Tom and Jerry, and the
+deliberations of Alf and Joe, and the other characters of impulsive
+energy and vivid desire, then accurately transcribed
+them, interpolating “says” frequently, they would read like
+this chapter.</p>
+
+<p>Conspicuous amongst Mr. Joyce's possessions is a gift for
+facile emotional utterance. The reader feels himself affected
+by his impulses and swept along by his eloquence. He is
+scathingly sarcastic about Irish cultural and political aspirations;
+loathsomely lewd about their morals and habits; merciless
+in his revelations of their temperamental possessions and
+infirmities; and arbitrary and unyielding in his belief that
+their degeneration is beyond redemption. Like the buckets
+on an endless chain of a dredger, the vials of his wrath are
+poured time after time upon England and the British Empire
+“on which the sun never rises,” but they are never emptied.
+Finally he embodies his sentiment in paraphrase of the Creed.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell
+upon earth and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived
+of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered
+under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled
+like bloody hell, the third day he arose again from the bed,
+steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till further orders
+whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>He recounts his country's former days of fame and fortune,
+but he doesn't foresee any of the happenings of the past three
+years.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be
+here today instead of four, our lost tribes? And our potteries
+and textiles, the finest in the whole world! And our wool that
+was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal and our flax and our
+damask from the looms of Antrim and our Limerick lace,
+our tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough
+and our Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquand
+de Lyon and our woven silk and our Foxford tweeds and
+ivory raised point from the Carmelite convent in New Ross,
+nothing like it in the whole wide world. Where are the Greek
+merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the
+Gibraltar now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and
+Tyrian purple to sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen?
+Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even Giraldus Cambrensis, Wine,
+peltries, Connemara marble, silver from Tipperary, second to
+none, our farfamed horses even today, the Irish hobbies, with
+King Philip of Spain offering to pay customs duties for the
+right to fish in our waters. What do the yellowjohns of
+Anglia owe us for our ruined trade and our ruined hearths?
+And the beds of the Barrow and Shannon they won't deepen
+with millions of acres of marsh and bog to make us all die of
+consumption.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Nowhere is his note-book more evident than in this chapter.
+Krafft-Ebing, a noted Viennese psychiatrist, said a certain
+disease was due to civilisation and syphilisation. Mr. Joyce
+made note of it and uses it. The <em>Slocum</em> steamboat disaster in
+New York, which touched all American hearts twenty years
+ago; the prurient details of a scandal in “loop” circles of Chicago;
+a lynching in the South are referred to as casually by
+Lenehan, Wyse <em>et al</em> while consuming their two pints, as if
+they were family matters.</p>
+
+<p>That the author has succeeded in cutting and holding up
+to view a slice of life in this chapter and in the succeeding one—Bloom
+amongst the Nurse-girls—it would be idle to deny.
+That it is sordid and repulsive need scarcely be said. It has
+this in common with the writings of all the naturalists.</p>
+
+<p>The author's familiarity with the Dadaists is best seen in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span>
+his chapter on the visit to the Lying-in Hospital. Some of it
+is done in the pseudostyle of the English and Norse Saga; some
+in the method adopted by d'Annunzio in his composition of
+“Nocturne.” He wrote thousands and thousands of words on
+small pieces of paper, then threw them into a basket, and
+shuffled them thoroughly. With a blank sheet before him
+and a dripping mucilage brush in one hand, he proceeded to
+paste them one after another on the sheet. A sample of
+the result is:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little
+perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as
+most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be
+studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine
+erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's
+ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when
+by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being
+equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation
+more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far
+forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for
+that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be
+absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign
+of omnipollent nature's incorrupted benefaction.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Tired of this, he paraphrases the Holy Writ.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened
+and there nighed them a mickle noise as of many that sat
+there at meat. And there came against the place as they stood
+a young learning knight yclept Dixon. And the traveller
+Leopold was couth to him sithen it had happed that they had
+had ado each with other in the house of misericord where this
+learning knight lay by cause the traveller Leopold came there
+to be healed for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear
+wherewith a horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him
+for which he did do make a salve of volatile salt and chrism
+as much as he might suffice. And he said now that he should
+go into that castle for to make merry with them that were
+there.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span></p>
+
+<p>When this palls, he apes a satirist like Rabelais, or a mystic
+like Bunyan. Weary of this, he turns to a treatise on embryology
+and a volume of obstetrics and strains them through
+his mind. One day some serious person, a disciple or a benighted
+admirer, such as M. Valery Larbaud, will go through
+“Ulysses” to find references to toxicology, Mosaic law, the
+Kamustra, eugenics, etc., as such persons and scholars have
+gone through Shakespeare. Until it is done no one will believe
+the number of subjects he touches is marvellous, and
+sometimes even the way he does it. For instance this on
+birth control:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Murmur, Sirs, is eke oft among lay folk. Both babe and
+parent now glorify their Maker, the one limbo gloom, the
+other in purge fire. But, Gramercy, what of those Godpossibled
+souls that we nightly impossibilise, which is the sin
+against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of Life.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is worthy of note also that Mr. Joyce defines specifically
+the sin against the Holy Ghost, which for long has been a
+stumbling block to priest and physician. He does not agree
+with the great Scandinavian writer toward whom he looked
+reverently in his youth. Ella Rentheim says to Borkman,
+“The Bible speaks of a mysterious sin for which there is no
+forgiveness. I have never understood what it could be; but
+now I understand. The great, unpardonable sin is to murder
+the love-life in a human soul.” </p>
+
+<p>The object of it all is to display the thought and erudition
+of Stephen Dædalus, “a sensitive nature, smarting under the
+lashes of an undivined and squalid way of life”; and the emotions,
+perversions, and ambitions of Leopold Bloom, a devotee
+of applied science, whose inventions were for the purpose of</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“rendering obsolete popguns, elastic airbladders, games of
+hazard, catapults. They comprised astronomical kaleidoscopes,
+exhibiting the twelve constellations of the Zodiac from<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span>
+Aries to Pisces, miniature mechanical orreries, arithmetical
+gelatine lozenges, geometrical to correspond with zoological
+biscuits, globemap playing balls, historically costumed dolls.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is particularly in the next chapter, one of the strangest
+of literature, that Mr. Joyce displays the apogee of his art.
+Dædalus and Bloom have passed in review on a mystic stage
+all their intimates and enemies, all their detractors and sycophants,
+the scum of Dublin, and the spawn of the devil. Mr.
+Joyce resurrects Saint Walpurgis, galvanises her into life after
+twelve centuries' death intimacy with Beelzebub, and substituting
+a squalid section of Dublin for Brocken, proceeds to
+depict a festival, the devil being host. The guests in the flesh
+and of the spirit have still many of their distinctive corporeal
+possessions, but the reactions of life no longer exist. The
+chapter is replete with wit, humour, satire, philosophy, learning,
+knowledge of human frailties, and human indulgences,
+especially with the brakes of morality off. And alcohol or
+congenital deficiency takes them off for most of the characters.
+It reeks of lust and filth, but Mr. Joyce says life does, and
+the morality he depicts is the only one he knows.</p>
+
+<p>In this chapter is compressed all of the author's experiences,
+all his determinations and unyieldingness, and most of the
+incidents that gave a persecutory twist to his mind, made
+him an exile from his native land, and deprived him of the
+courage to return. He does not hesitate to bring in the ghost
+of his mother whom he had been accused of killing because
+he would not kneel down and pray for her when she was
+dying, and to question her as to the verity of the accusation.
+But he does not repent even when she returns from the spiritual
+world. In fact, the capacity for repentance is left out of Mr.
+Joyce's make-up. It is as impossible to convince Mr. Joyce that
+he is wrong about anything on which he has made up his mind
+as it is to convince a paranoiac of the unreality of his false
+beliefs, or a jealous woman of the groundlessness of her suspicions.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span>
+It may be said that this chapter does not represent
+life, but I venture to say that it represents life with photographic
+accuracy as Mr. Joyce has seen it and lived it; that every
+scene has come within his gaze; that every speech has been
+heard or said; and every sentiment experienced or thrust upon
+him. It is a mirror held up to life—life which we could sincerely
+wish and devoutly pray that we were spared; for it is
+life in which happiness is impossible, save when forgetfulness
+of its existence is brought about by alcohol, and in which
+mankind is destitute of virtue, deprived of ideals, deserted
+by love.</p>
+
+<p>To disclaim it is life that countless men and women know
+would be untrue, absurd, and libellous. I do not know that
+Mr. Joyce makes any such claim, but I claim that it is life
+that he has known.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Joyce had the good fortune to be born with a quality
+which the world calls genius. Nature exacts a galling income
+tax from genius, and as a rule she co-endows it with unamenability
+to law and order. Genius and reverence are antipodal,
+Galileo being the exception to the rule. Mr. Joyce has no
+reverence for organised religion, for conventional morality,
+for literary style or form. He has no conception of the word
+obedience, and he bends the knee neither to God nor man.
+It is interesting and important to have the revelations of such
+a personality, to have them first hand and not dressed up.
+Heretofore our only avenues of information concerning them
+led through asylums for the insane, for it was there that revelations
+were made without reserve. I have spent much time and
+money in my endeavour to get such revelations, without great
+success. Mr. Joyce has made it unnecessary for me to pursue
+the quest. He has supplied the little and big pieces of material
+from which the mental mosaic is made.</p>
+
+<p>He had the profound misfortune to lose his faith, and he
+cannot rid himself of the obsession that the Jesuits did it for
+him. He is trying to get square by saying disagreeable things<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span>
+about them and holding their teachings up to scorn and obloquy.
+He was so unfortunate as to be born without a sense of duty,
+of service, of conformity to the State, to the community, to
+society; and he is convinced he should tell about it, just as
+some who have experienced a surgical operation feel that they
+must relate minutely all its details, particularly at dinner parties
+and to casual acquaintances.</p>
+
+<p>Not ten men or women out of a hundred can read “Ulysses”
+through, and of the ten who succeed in doing it for five of them
+it will be a <em>tour de force</em>. I am probably the only person
+aside from the author that has ever read it twice from beginning
+to end. I read it as a test of Christian fortitude: to
+see if I could still love my fellow-man after reading a book
+that depicts such repugnance of humanity, such abhorence
+of the human body, and such loathsomeness of the possession
+that links man with God, the creative endowment. Also the
+author is a psychologist, and I find his empiric knowledge supplements
+mine acquired by prolonged and sustained effort.</p>
+
+<p>M. Valery Larbaud, a French critic who hailed “Ulysses”
+with the reverence with which Boccaccio hailed the Divine
+Comedy, and who has been giving conferences on “Ulysses” in
+Paris, says the key to the book is Homer's immortal poem. If
+M. Larbaud has the key he cannot spring the lock of the door
+of the dark safe in which “Ulysses” rests, metaphorically, for
+most readers. At least he has not done so up to this writing.</p>
+
+<p>The key is to be found in the antepenultimate chapter of
+the book; and it isn't a key, it's a combination, a countryman
+of Mr. Joyce's might say. Anyone who tries at it long enough
+will succeed in working it, even if he is not of M. Larbaud's
+cultivated readers who can fully appreciate such authors as
+Rabelais, Montaigne, and Descartes.</p>
+
+<p>The symbolism of the book is something that concerns only
+Mr. Joyce, as nuns do, and other animate and inanimate things
+of which he has fugitive thoughts and systematised beliefs.</p>
+
+<p>After the Cheu-sinese orgy, Bloom takes Stephen home, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span>
+unfortunately they awaken Marion, for she embraces the occasion
+to purge her mind in soliloquy. Odo of Cluny never
+said anything of a woman's body in life that is so repulsive as
+that which Mr. Joyce has said of Marion's mind: a cesspool
+of forty years' accumulation. Into it has drained the inherited
+vulgarities of Jew and gentile parent; within it has accumulated
+the increment of a sordid, dissolute life in two countries,
+extending over twenty-five years; in it have been compressed
+the putrid exhalations of studied devotion to sense gratification.
+Mr. Joyce takes off the lid and opens the sluice-way
+simultaneously, and the result is that the reader, even though
+his sensitisation has been fortified by reading the book, is
+bowled over. As soon as he regains equilibrium he communes
+with himself to the effect that if the world has many Marions
+missionaries should be withdrawn from heathen countries and
+turned into this field where their work will be praised by man
+and rewarded by God.</p>
+
+<p>Mental hygiene takes on a deeper significance to one who
+succeeds in reading “Ulysses,” and psychology has a larger
+ceinture.</p>
+
+<p>Much time has been wasted in conjecturing what Mr.
+Joyce's message is. In another connection he said, “My ancestors
+threw off their language and took another. They allowed
+a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy
+I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they
+made? No honourable and sincere man has given up his life,
+his youth, and his affections to Ireland from the days of Tone
+to those of Parnell but the Irish sold him to the enemy or
+failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another.
+Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.” </p>
+
+<p>“Ulysses” is in part vendetta. He will ridicule Gaelic renaissance
+of literature and language; he will traduce the Irish
+people and vilify their religion; he will scorn their institutions,
+lampoon their morals, pasquinade their customs; he will stun
+them with obscene vituperation, wound them with sacrilege and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span>
+profanity, immerse them in the vitriolic dripping from the
+“tank” that he seeks to drive over them; and for what purpose?
+Revenge. Those dissatisfied with the simile of the fury of a
+scorned woman should try “Ulysses.” </p>
+
+<p>Mr. Joyce has made a contribution to the science of psychology,
+and he has done it quite unbeknownst to himself, a
+fellow-countryman might say. He has shown us the process of
+the transmuting of thought to words. It isn't epoch making
+like “relativity,” but it will give him notoriety, possibly immortality.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are
+volitional and are the portals of discovery.” —<span class="smcap">Stephen
+Dædalus.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" >CHAPTER III<br>
+<small>FEODOR DOSTOIEVSKY: TRAGEDIST, PROPHET, AND PSYCHOLOGIST</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>A hundred years ago, in Moscow, a being manifested
+its existence, who in the fullness of extraordinary vision
+and intellectuality heralded a religious rebirth, became the
+prophet of a new moral, ethical, and geographical order in the
+world, and the prototype of a new hero. Time has accorded
+Feodor Mikhailovitch Dostoievsky the position of one of the
+greatest writers of the nineteenth century, and as time passes
+his position becomes more secure. Like the prophet of old,
+during life he was fastened between two pieces of timber—debts
+and epilepsy—and sawn asunder by his creditors and his
+conscience. Posterity links his name with Pushkin and Tolstoi
+as the three great writers of their times. They are to
+the Russian Renaissance what Leonardo, Michelangelo, and
+Raphael were to the Italian Renaissance.</p>
+
+<p>It is appropriate now, the centenary of his birth, to make a
+brief statement of Dostoievsky's position as a writer or novelist,
+and in so doing estimate must be made of him as a prophet,
+preacher, psychologist, pathologist, artist, and individual.
+Though he was not schooled to speak as expert in any of these
+fields, yet speak in them he did, and in a way that would have
+reflected credit upon a professor. It is particularly the field
+of morbid psychology, usually called psychiatry, that Dostoievsky
+made uniquely his own. He described many of the
+nervous and mental disorders, such as mania and depression,
+the psychoneuroses, hysteria, obsessive states, epilepsy, moral
+insanity, alcoholism, and that mysterious mental and moral
+constitution called “degeneracy” (apparently first hand, for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span>
+there is no evidence or indication that he had access to books
+on mental medicine), in such a way that alienists recognise
+in his descriptions masterpieces in the same way that the
+painter recognises the apogee of his art in Giotto or Velázquez.</p>
+
+<p>Not only did he portray the mental activity and output of
+the partially and potentially insane, but he described the conduct
+and reproduced the speech of individuals with personality
+defects, and with emotional disequilibrium, in a way that has
+never been excelled in any literature. For instance, it would
+be difficult to find a more comprehensive account of adult infantilism
+than the history of Stepan Trofimovitch, a more accurate
+presentation of the composition of a hypocrite than
+Rahkitin, of “The Brothers Karamazov.” No one save Shakespeare
+has shown how consuming and overwhelming jealousy
+may be. That infirmity has a deeper significance for anyone
+familiar with the story of Katerina Ivanovna. Indeed Dostoievsky
+is the novelist of passions. He creates his creatures
+that they may suffer, not that they may enjoy from the reactions
+of life, though some of them get pleasure in suffering.
+Such was Lise, the true hysteric, who said, “I should like some
+one to torture me, marry me and then torture me, deceive me
+and then go away. I don't want to be happy.” </p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe25" id="ilo_fp65">
+  <img class="w100 p2" src="images/ilo_fp65.jpg" alt="ilop65" title="p651ilo">
+  <figcaption class="caption p2b"><span class="allsmcap">FEODOR DOSTOIEVSKY</span></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Like Baudelaire and Nietzsche, whom he resembled morally
+and intellectually, Dostoievsky was an intellectual romantic
+in rebellion against life. His determination seemed to be to
+create an individual who should defy life, and when he had
+defied it to his heart's content “to hand God back his ticket,” 
+having no further need of it as the journey of existence was at
+an end. There is no place to go, nothing to do, everything
+worth trying has been tried and found valueless, and wherever
+he turns his gaze he sees the angel standing upon the sea and
+upon the earth avowing that there shall be time no longer; so
+he puts a bullet in his temple if his name is Svidrigailov, or
+soaps a silken cord so that it will support his weight when
+one end is attached to a large nail and the other to his neck,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span>
+if it is Stavrogin. Dostoievsky as a littérateur was obsessed
+with sin and expiation. He connived and laboured to invent
+some new sin; he struggled and fought to augment some old
+one with which he could inflict one of his creation, and then
+watch him contend with it, stagger beneath it, or flaunt it in the
+world's face. After it has wrought havoc, shipwrecked the
+possessor's life, and brought inestimable calamity and suffering
+to others, then he must devise adequate expiation. Expiation
+is synonymous with sincere regret, honest request for
+forgiveness, and genuine determination to sin no more, but
+Dostoievsky's sinners must do something more; they must
+make renunciation in keeping with the magnitude of their
+sins, and as this is beyond human expression they usually kill
+themselves or go mad.</p>
+
+<p>He had planned for his masterpiece “The Life of a Great
+Sinner,” and the outline of it from his note-book deposited in
+the Central Archive Department of the Russian Socialist
+Federative Soviet Republic, has now been published. The
+hero is a composite of the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, covetousness,
+lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth, plus the sin against
+the Holy Ghost. No one has yet succeeded in defining that
+sin satisfactorily, but it is what Dostoievsky's antinomian heroes
+were trying to do, especially such an one as Stavrogin. Another
+noteworthy feature about them is that they were all sadistic or
+masochistic: they got pleasure varying from an appreciative
+glow to voluptuous ecstasy and beyond, from causing pain
+and inducing humiliation, or having it caused in them by
+others.</p>
+
+<p>This was a conditioning factor of conduct of all his antinomian
+heroes, and unless it be kept in mind when reading of
+them, their antics and their reflections are sometimes difficult of
+comprehension. He makes one of them, one of the most intellectual
+and moral, Ivan Karamazov, say “You know we
+prefer beating-rods and scourges—that's our national institution....
+I know for a fact there are people who at every<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span>
+blow are worked up to sensuality, which increases progressively
+at every blow they inflict.” </p>
+
+<p>It is difficult for a psychiatrist, after reading Dostoievsky's
+novels, to believe that he did not have access to the literature
+of insanity or have first-hand knowledge of the insane, and the
+criminologist must wonder where he got his extraordinary
+knowledge of the relation between suffering and lust. It may
+be that the habits of the Emperor Cheou-sin Yeow-waug were
+known to him, just as those of Caligula and Claudius were
+known to him.</p>
+
+<p>It is not with the passions of the body or of the senses alone
+that his heroes contend, but with those of the mind. The fire
+that burns within them is abstraction, and the fuel that replenishes
+it is thought—thought of whence and whither. By it the
+possessors are lashed to a conduct that surpasses that of hate,
+jealousy, lubricity, or any of the baser passions as the light of
+an incandescent bulb surpasses that of a tallow candle. They
+are all men of parts, either originally endowed with great intelligence
+or brought to a certain elevation of intellectuality
+by education. Their conduct, their actions, their misdeeds,
+their crimes are the direct result of their argumentation, not
+of concrete, but of abstract things, and chiefly the nature and
+existence of God, the varieties of use that an individual may
+permit his intelligence, free-will, free determination, and of
+the impositions of dogma founded on faith and inspiration
+which seem contrary to reason and science.</p>
+
+<p>All his heroes are more or less insane. Herein lies Dostoievsky's
+strength and his weakness in character creation.
+None of them could be held fully responsible in a court
+of justice. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings the
+Lord ordained strength, but there is no writing to show that
+out of the mouths of the insane comes wisdom. Not that insanity
+is inimical to brilliant, even wise, utterance; but the
+pragmatic application of wisdom to life calls for sanity.</p>
+
+<p>Dostoievsky himself was abnormal. He was what the physician<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span>
+calls a neuropathic and psychopathic individual. In
+addition, he had genuine epilepsy, that is, epilepsy not dependent
+upon some accidental disease, such as infection, injury,
+or new growth. He was of psychopathic temperament
+and at different times in his life displayed hallucination, obsession,
+and hypochondria.</p>
+
+<p>He wrote of them as if he were the professor, not the possessor.
+The psychopathic constitution displays itself as:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“An unstable balance of the psychic impulses, an overfacile
+tendency to emotion, an overswift interchange of mental
+phases, an abnormally violent reaction of the psychic mechanism.
+The feature most striking to the beholder in the character
+of such sufferers is its heterogeneous medley of moods
+and whims, of sympathies and antipathies; of ideas in turn
+joyous, stern, gloomy, depressed and philosophical; of aspirations
+at first charged with energy then dying away to nothing.
+Another feature peculiar to these sufferers is their self-love.
+They are the most naïve of egoists; they talk exclusively and
+persistently and absorbedly of themselves; they strive always
+to attract the general attention, to excite the general interest
+and to engage everyone in conversation concerning their personality,
+their ailments and even their vices.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Scores of his characters had such constitution, and in none
+is it more perfectly delineated than in Katerina Ivanovna,
+though Lise Hohlakov, of the same novel, had wider display
+of the hysteria that grew on this fertile soil.</p>
+
+<p>The facts of Dostoievsky's life that are important to the
+reader who would comprehend his psychopathic creations are
+that his father, surgeon to the Workhouse Hospital at Moscow,
+was a stern, suspicious, narrow-minded, gloomy, distrustful
+man who made a failure of life. “He has lived in the
+world fifty years and yet he has the same opinions of mankind
+that he had thirty years ago,” wrote Feodor when seventeen
+years old. His mother was tender-minded, pious, and
+domestic, and died early of tuberculosis. Although much has
+been written of his boyhood, there is nothing particularly interesting<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</span>
+in it bearing on his career save that he was sensitive,
+introspective, unsociable, and early displayed a desire to be
+alone. The hero of the book “Youth” relates that in the
+lowest classes of the gymnasium he scorned all relations with
+those of his class who surpassed him in any way in the sciences,
+physical strength, or in clever repartee. He did not hate such
+a person nor wish him harm. He simply turned away from
+him, that being his nature. These characteristics run like a
+red thread through the entire life of Dostoievsky. A tendency
+to day-dreaming was apparent in his earliest years, and he
+gives graphic accounts of hallucination in “An Author's Diary.” 
+At the age of sixteen he was admitted to the School of Engineering
+and remained there six years. During the latter part
+of his student days he decided upon literature as a career.
+Before taking it up, however, he had a brief experience with
+life after he had obtained his commission as engineer, which
+showed him to be totally incapable of dealing with its every-day
+eventualities, particularly in relation to money, whose
+purpose he knew but whose value was ever to remain a secret.
+It was then that he first displayed inability to subscribe or to
+submit to ordinary social conventions; indeed, a determination
+to transgress them.</p>
+
+<p>From his earliest years the misfortunes of others hurt him
+and distressed him, and in later life the despised and the rejected,
+the poor and the oppressed, always had his sympathy
+and his understanding. God and the people, that is the Russian
+people, were his passion. “The people have a lofty instinct
+for truth. They may be dirty, degraded, repellent, but
+without them and in disregard of them nothing useful can
+be effected.” The intellectuals who held themselves aloof
+from the masses he could not abide, and atheists, and their
+propaganda socialism, were anathema. He demanded of men
+who arrogated to themselves a distinction above their fellow
+men, “who go to the people not to learn to know it, but condescendingly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span>
+to instruct and patronise it,” not only repentance,
+but expiation by suffering.</p>
+
+<p>His first important literary contribution was entitled “Poor
+Folk.” He was fortunate enough to be praised by his contemporaries
+and particularly by Bielinsky, an editor and great
+critic, who saw in the central idea of the story corroboration
+of his favourite theory, viz.: abnormal social conditions distort
+and dehumanise mankind to such an extent that they lose
+the human form and semblance. As the result of this publication,
+Dostoievsky made the acquaintance of the leading literary
+lights of St. Petersburg, many of whom praised him too
+immoderately for his own good, as he produced nothing worthy
+of his fame until many years after the event in his life which
+must be looked upon as the beginning of his mental awakenment—banishment
+and penal servitude in Siberia.</p>
+
+<p>Toward the middle of the nineteenth century the doctrines of
+the Frenchman, Charles Fourier, were having such acceptance
+in this country, where the North American Phalanx in New
+Jersey and the Brook farm in Massachusetts were thriving, as
+to encourage the disciples of that sentimental but wholly mad
+socialist in other lands, particularly in Russia, that their hopes
+of seeing the world dotted with <em>Phalansteres</em> might be fulfilled.
+Dostoievsky later stated most emphatically that he never believed
+in Fourierism, but nibbling at it nearly cost him his life.
+In fact, all that stood between him and death was the utterance
+of the word “Go,” which it would seem the lips of the executioner
+had puckered to utter when the reprieve came. Dostoievsky
+was suspected of being a Revolutionary. One evening
+at the Petrashevsky Club he declaimed Pushkin's poem
+on Solitude:</p>
+
+<p>
+“My friends, I see the people no longer oppressed,<br>
+And slavery fallen by the will of the Czar,<br>
+And a dawn breaking over us, glorious and bright,<br>
+And our country lighted by freedom's rays.” <br>
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span></p>
+
+<p>In discussion he suggested that the emancipation of the peasantry
+might have to come through a rising. Thus he became
+suspected. But it was not until he denounced the censorship
+and reflected on its severity and injustice that he was taken
+into custody. He and twenty-one others were sentenced to
+death. He spent four years in a Siberian prison and there
+became acquainted with misery, suffering, and criminality that
+beggars description.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“What a number of national types and characters I became
+familiar with in the prison; I lived into their lives and so I believe
+I know them really well. Many tramps' and thieves'
+careers were laid bare to me, and above all the whole wretched
+existence of the common people. I learnt to know the Russian
+people as only a few know them.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>After four years he was, through the mediation of powerful
+friends, transferred for five years to military service in
+Siberia, chiefly at Semipalatinsk. In 1859 he was permitted
+to return to St. Petersburg, and in the twenty years that followed
+he published those books upon which his fame rests;
+namely, “Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot,” “The Possessed,” 
+“The Journal of an Author,” and “The Brothers
+Karamazov.” In 1867 he was obliged to leave Russia to
+escape imprisonment for debt, and he remained abroad, chiefly
+in Switzerland, for four years.</p>
+
+<p>In his appeal to General Todleben to get transferred from
+the military to the civil service and to be permitted to employ
+himself in literature, he said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Perhaps you have heard something of my arrest, my trial
+and the supreme ratification of the sentence which was given
+in the case concerning me in the year 1849. I was guilty and
+am very conscious of it. I was convicted of the intention
+(but only the intention) of acting against the Government;
+I was lawfully and quite justly condemned; the hard and painful
+experiences of the ensuing years have sobered me and
+altered my views in many respects, but then while I was still<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span>
+blind I believed in all the theories and Utopias. For two years
+before my offense I had suffered from a strange moral disease—I
+had fallen into hypochondria. There was a time even
+when I lost my reason. I was exaggeratedly irritable, had a
+morbidly developed sensibility and the power of distorting the
+most ordinary events into things immeasurable.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>While Dostoievsky was in prison his physical health improved
+very strikingly, but, despite this, his epilepsy, which had
+previously manifested itself only in vague or minor attacks,
+became fully developed. Attempts have been made to prove
+that prison life and particularly its hardships and inhumanities
+were responsible in a measure for Dostoievsky's epilepsy;
+but such allegations are no more acceptable than those which
+attribute it to his father's alcoholism. His epilepsy was a part
+of his general make-up, a part of his constitution. It was an
+integral part of him and it became an integral part of his
+books.</p>
+
+<p>The phenomena of epilepsy may be said to be the epileptic
+personality and the attack with its warning, its manifestations,
+and the after-effects. The disease is veiled in the same mystery
+today as it was when Hercules was alleged to have had it.
+Nothing is known of its causation or of its dependency, and all
+that can truthfully be said of the personality of the epileptic
+is that it is likely to display psychic disorder, evanescent or
+fixed. Attacks are subject to the widest variation both as to
+frequency and intensity, but the most enigmatic things about
+the disease are the warnings of the attack, and the phenomena
+that sometimes appear vicariously of the attack—the epileptic
+equivalent they are called. Dostoievsky had these <em>auræ</em> and
+equivalents in an unusual way and with extraordinary intensity,
+and narration of them as they were displayed in the
+different characters of his creation who were afflicted with
+epilepsy, and of their effects and consequences is an important
+part of every one of his great books. Dostoievsky would seem<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span>
+to have been of the belief that a brain in which some of the
+mechanisms are disordered may yet remain superior both intellectually
+and morally to others less affected, and that the
+display of such weakness or maladjustment may put the possessor
+in tune with the Infinite, may permit him to blend momentarily
+with the Eternal Harmony, to be restored temporarily
+to the Source of its temporal emanation. Although he
+describes this in his “Letters,” as he experienced it, he elaborates
+it in his epileptic heroes, and in none so seductively as in
+“The Idiot.” He makes Prince Myshkin say:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“He thought amongst other things how in his epileptic
+condition there was one stage, just before the actual attack,
+when suddenly in the midst of sadness, mental darkness and
+oppression his brain flared up, as it were, and with an unwonted
+outburst all his vital powers were vivified simultaneously.
+The sensation of living and of self-consciousness
+was increased at such moments almost tenfold. They were
+moments like prolonged lightning. As he thought over this
+afterward in a normal state he often said to himself that all
+these flashes and beams of the highest self-realisation, self-consciousness
+and “highest existence” were nothing but disease,
+the interruption of the normal state. If this were so, then
+it was by no means the highest state, but, on the contrary,
+it must be reckoned as the very lowest. And yet he came at
+last to the very paradoxical conclusion: What matter if it is a
+morbid state? What difference can it make that the tension
+is abnormal, if the result itself, if the moment of sensation
+when remembered and examined in the healthy state proves
+to be in the highest degree harmony and beauty, and gives an
+unheard-of and undreamed-of feeling of completion, of balance,
+of satisfaction and exultant prayerful fusion with the
+highest synthesis of life? If at the last moment of consciousness
+before the attack he had happened to say to himself
+lucidly and deliberately “for this one moment one might give
+one's whole life,” then certainly that moment would be worth
+a lifetime. However, he did not stand out for dialectics;
+obfuscation, mental darkness and idiocy stand before him as
+the obvious consequences of those loftiest moments.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is a question for the individual to decide whether one
+would give his whole life for a moment of perfection and bliss,
+but it is probable that no one would without assurance that
+some permanent advantage, some growth of spirit that could
+be retained, some impress of spirituality that was indelible,
+such as comes from an understanding reading of “Hamlet” or
+a comprehended rendering of “Parsifal,” would flow from it
+or follow it. But to have it and then come back to a world
+that is “just one damn thing after another” it is impossible to
+believe. Dostoievsky was right when he said that Myshkin
+could look forward to obfuscation, mental darkness, and imbecility
+with some certainty, for physicians experienced with
+epilepsy know empirically that the unfortunates who have
+panoplied warnings, and especially illusions, are most liable
+to become demented early. But that all epileptics with such
+warnings do not suffer this degradation is attested by the life
+of Dostoievsky, who was in his mental summation when death
+seized him in his sixtieth year.</p>
+
+<p>Another phenomenon of epilepsy that Dostoievsky makes
+many of his characters display is detachment of the spirit
+from the body. They cease to feel their bodies at supreme
+moments, such as at the moment of condemnation, of premeditated
+murder, or planned crime. In other words, they
+are thrown into a state of ecstasy similar to that responsible
+for the mystic utterances of St. Theresa, or of insensibility to
+obvious agonies such as that of Santa Fina. He not only
+depicts the phenomena of the epileptic attack, its warnings, and
+its after-effects in the most masterful way, as they have never
+been rendered in literature, lay or scientific, but he also
+describes many varieties of the disease. Before he was exiled,
+in 1847, he gave a most perfect description of the epileptic constitution
+as it was manifested in Murin, a character in “The
+Landlady.” The disease, as it displays itself in the classical
+way, is revealed by Nelly in “The Insulted and Injured,” but
+it is in Myshkin, in “The Idiot,” that we see epilepsy transforming<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span>
+the individual from adult infantilism, gradually,
+almost imperceptibly, to imbecility, the victim meantime displaying
+nobility and tender-mindedness that make the reader's
+heart go out to him.</p>
+
+<p>The first fruits of Dostoievsky's activities after he had obtained
+permission to publish were inconsequential. It was not
+until the appearance of “Letters from a Deadhouse,” which
+revealed his experiences and thoughts while in prison, and the
+volume called “The Despised and the Rejected,” that the
+literary world of St. Petersburg realised that the brilliant
+promise which he had given in 1846 was realised. Some of
+his literary adventures, especially in journalism, got him into
+financial difficulties, and he began to write under the lash, as
+he described it, and against time.</p>
+
+<p>In 1865 appeared the novel by which he is widely known,
+“Crime and Punishment,” in which Dostoievsky's first great
+antinomian hero, Raskolnikov, a repentant nihilist, is introduced
+to the reader. He believes that he has a special right
+to live, to rebel against society, to transgress every law and
+moral precept, and to follow the dictates of his own will
+and the lead of his own thought. Such a proud, arrogant,
+intellectual spirit requires to be cleansed, and inasmuch as the
+verity, the essence of life, lies in humility, Dostoievsky makes
+his hero murder an old pawnbroker and his sister and then
+proceeds to put him through the most excruciating mental
+agony imaginable. At the same time his mother and sister
+undergo profound vicarious suffering, while a successor of
+Mary Magdalene succours him in his increasingly agonised
+state and finally accompanies him to penal servitude. Many
+times Raskolnikov appears upon the point of confessing his
+crime from the torments of his own conscience, but, in reality,
+Svidrigailov, a strange monster of sin and sentiment, and the
+police officer, Petrovitch, a forerunner of Sherlock Holmes,
+suggest the confession to him, and between the effect of their<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span>
+suggestion and the appeal of Sonia, whose love moves him
+strangely, he confesses but does not repent. He does not
+repent because he has done no sin. He has committed no
+crime. The scales have not yet fallen from his eyes. That is
+reserved for the days and nights of his prison life and is to be
+mediated by Sonia's sacrificial heroism.</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting to contemplate Dostoievsky at the state
+of development when he wrote “Crime and Punishment,” or
+rather the state of development of his idea of free will. Raskolnikov
+has the same relation to Stavrogin of “The Possessed”
+and to Kirillov, the epileptic of the same book, as one of the
+trial pictures of the figures in the Last Supper has to Leonardo's
+masterpiece. Dostoievsky apparently was content to
+describe a case of moral imbecility in its most attractive way,
+and then when he had outlined its lineaments, to leave it and
+not adjust it to the other groupings of the picture that was
+undertaken. It would seem that his interest had got switched
+from Raskolnikov to Svidrigailov, who has dared to outrage
+covenants and conventions, laws and morality, and has measured
+his will against all things. Svidrigailov knows the difference
+between good and evil, right and wrong; indeed he realises
+it with great keenness, and when he finds that he is up against
+it, as it were, and has no escape, he puts the revolver to his
+temple and pulls the trigger. Death is the only thing he has
+not tried, and why wait to see whether eternity is just one little
+room like a bathhouse in the country, or whether it is something
+beyond conception? Why not find out at once as everything
+has been found out? Svidrigailov is Dostoievsky's symbol
+of the denial of God, the denial of a will beyond his own.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“If there is a will beyond my own, it must be an evil will
+because pain exists. Therefore I must will evil to be in harmony
+with it. If there is no will beyond my own, then I must
+assert my own will until it is free of all check beyond itself.
+Therefore I must will evil.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span></p>
+
+<p>Raskolnikov represents the conflict of will with the element
+of moral duty and conscience, and Svidrigailov represents its
+conflict with defined, deliberate passion. This same will in
+conflict with the will of the people, the State, is represented by
+Stavrogin and Shatov, while its conflict with metaphysical and
+religious mystery is represented by Karamazov, Myshkin, and
+Kirillov. Despite the fact that they pass through the furnace
+of burning conflicts and the fire of inflaming passions, the
+force of dominant will is ever supreme. Their human individuality,
+as represented by their ego, remains definite and
+concrete. It is untouched, unaltered, undissolved. Though
+they oppose themselves to the elements that are devouring
+them, they continue to assert their ego and self-will even when
+their end is at hand. Myshkin, Alyosha, and Zosima submit to
+God's will but not to man's.</p>
+
+<p>“Crime and Punishment” and “The Brothers Karamazov”
+are the books by which Dostoievsky is best known in this
+country, and the latter, though unfinished, was intended by
+him to be his great work, “a work that is very dear to me for
+I have put a great deal of my inmost self into it,” and it has
+been so estimated by the critics. Indeed, it is the summary
+of all his thoughts, of all his doubts, of all his fancies, and such
+statement of his faith as he could formulate. It is saturated
+in mysticism and it is a <em>vade mecum</em> of psychiatry. It is the
+narrative of the life of an egotistic, depraved, sensuous monster,
+who is a toad, a cynic, a scoffer, a drunkard, and a profligate,
+the synthesis of which, when combined with moral
+anæsthesia, constitutes degeneracy; of his three legitimate
+sons and their mistresses; and of an epileptic bastard son who
+resulted from the rape of an idiot girl.</p>
+
+<p>The eldest son, Dimitri, grows up unloved, unguided, unappreciated,
+frankly hostile to his father whom he loathes and
+despises, particularly when he is convinced that the father has
+robbed him of his patrimony. He has had a rake's career, but
+when Katerina Ivanovna puts herself unconditionally in his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span>
+power to save her father's honour he spares her. Three months
+later, when betrothed to her, he has become entangled in Circe's
+toils by Grushenka, for whose favour Fyodor Pavlovitch, his
+father, is bidding.</p>
+
+<p>The second son, Ivan, half brother to Dimitri, whose mother
+was driven to insanity by the orgies staged in her own house
+and by the lusts and cruelties of her husband, is an intellectual
+and a nihilist. He is in rebellion against life, but he has
+an unquenchable thirst for life, and he will not accept the
+world. To love one's neighbours is impossible; even to conceive
+of it is repugnant. He will not admit that all must
+suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, and he insists “while
+I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures.” He
+does not want forgiveness earned for him vicariously. He
+wants to do it himself. He wants to avenge his suffering,
+to satisfy his indignation, even if he is wrong. Too high
+a price is asked for harmony; it is beyond our means to
+pay so much to enter on it. “And so,” he says to his younger
+brother, the potential Saint Alyosha, “I hasten to give back
+my entrance ticket. It's not God that I don't accept, only I
+most respectfully return Him the ticket.” </p>
+
+<p>Dostoievsky speaks oftener out of the mouth of Ivan than of
+any of his other characters. When some understanding Slav
+like Myereski shall formulate Dostoievsky's religious beliefs it
+will likely be found that they do not differ materially from
+those of Ivan, as stated in the chapter “Pro and Contra” of
+“The Brothers Karamazov.” He sees in Christ the Salvation
+of mankind, and the woe of the world is that it has not accepted
+Him.</p>
+
+<p>The third brother, Alyosha, is the prototype of the man's
+redeemer—a tender-minded, preoccupied youth, chaste and
+pure, who takes no thought for the morrow and always turns
+the other cheek, and esteems his neighbour far more than
+himself. At heart he is a sensualist. “All the Karamazovs are
+insects to whom God has given sensual lust which will stir up<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span>
+a tempest in your blood,” said Ivan to Alyosha when he was
+attempting to set forth his philosophy of life. But this endowment
+permits him the more comprehensively to understand the
+frailties of others and to condone their offences. The monastic
+life appeals to him, but he is warded off from it by Father
+Zosima, the prototype of Bishop Tikhon, in “Stavrogin's Confession,” 
+whose clay was lovingly moulded by Dostoievsky,
+but into whose nostrils he did not blow the breath of life.
+This monk, who had been worldly and who, because of his
+knowledge, forgives readily and wholly, is a favourite figure
+of Dostoievsky, and one through whom he frequently expresses
+his sentiments and describes his visions. His convictions,
+conduct and teaching may be summarised in his own
+words:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Fear nothing and never be afraid; and don't fret. If only
+your penitence fail not, God will forgive all. There is no sin,
+and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will
+not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin
+so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a
+sin which could exceed the love of God? Think only of repentance,
+continual repentance, but dismiss fear altogether.
+Believe that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that He
+loves you with your sin, in your sin. It has been said of old
+that over one repentant sinner there is more joy in heaven
+than over ten righteous men. Go, and fear not. Be not bitter
+against men. Be not angry if you are wronged. Forgive the
+dead man in your heart what wrong he did you. Be reconciled
+with him in truth. If you are penitent, you love. And
+if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all
+things are saved by love. If I, a sinner, even as you are, am
+tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will
+God. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem
+the whole world by it, and expiate not only your own sins but
+the sins of others.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Alyosha is Dostoievsky's attempt to create a superman. He
+is the most real, the most vital, the most human, and, at
+the same time, the most lovable of all his characters. He is the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span>
+essence of Myshkin and Stavrogin and Karamazov and Father
+Zosima, the residue that is left in the crucible when their
+struggles were reduced, their virtues and their vices distilled.
+He is Myshkin whose mind has not been destroyed by epilepsy,
+he is Stavrogin who has seen light before his soul was sold to
+the devil, he is Ivan Karamazov redeemed by prayer and good
+works, he is the apotheosis of Father Zosima. “He felt clearly
+and as it were tangibly that something firm and unshakable
+as the vault of heaven had entered into his soul. It was as
+though some idea had seized the sovereignty of his mind—and
+it was for all his life and for ever and for ever.” In other
+words, Alyosha realises in a mild form and continuously that
+which Myshkin realises as the result of disease and spasmodically.
+Alyosha goes into a state of faith, of resignation, of
+adjustment with the Infinite, and Myshkin goes into dementia
+via ecstasy.</p>
+
+<p>As a peace-maker, adjuster, comforter, and inspiration he
+has few superiors in profane literature. His speech at the
+Stone of Ilusha embodies the whole doctrine of brotherly love.</p>
+
+<p>Dimitri's hatred of his father becomes intense when they
+are rivals for Grushenka's favours, so that it costs him no pang
+to become potentially a parricide on convincing himself that
+the father has been a successful rival. Psychologically he
+represents the type of unstable, weak-willed, uninhibited being
+who cannot learn self-control. Such individuals may pass unmarked
+so long as they live in orderly surroundings, but as
+soon as they wander from the straight path they get into
+trouble. Their irritability, manifested for the smallest cause,
+may give rise to attacks of boundless fury which are further
+increased by alcohol, and the gravest crimes are often committed
+in these conditions. The normal inhibitions are entirely
+absent; there is no reflection, no weighing of the costs.
+The thought which develops in the brain is at once translated
+into action. Their actions are irrational, arbitrary, dependent
+upon the moment, governed by accidental factors.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span></p>
+
+<p>Despite overwhelming proof, Dimitri denies his guilt from
+the start. It is an open question if the motive of this denial is
+repentance, shame, love for Grushenka, or fear. The three
+experts of the trial each has his own opinion. The first two
+declare Dimitri to be abnormal. The third regards him as
+normal. The author himself has made it easy to judge of
+Dimitri's state of mind. Though on the boundary line of
+accountability, he is not in such a pathological condition as
+to exclude his free determination; however, he is not fully
+responsible for the crime, and extenuating circumstances have
+to be conceded by the judge.</p>
+
+<p>Smerdyakov, the illegitimate child of the idiot girl whom
+Karamazov <em>pere</em> raped on a wager and who eventually murders
+his father (vicariously, as it were, his morality having
+been destroyed by Ivan), is carefully delineated by Dostoievsky.
+He is epileptic. Not only are the disease and its
+manifestations described, but there is a masterly presentation
+of the personality alteration which so often accompanies its
+progress. In childhood he is cruel, later solitary, suspicious,
+and misanthropical. He has no sense of gratitude and he
+looks at the world mistrustfully. When Fyodor Pavlovitch
+hears he has epilepsy he takes interest in him, sees to it that
+he has treatment, and sends him to Moscow to be trained as
+cook. During the three years of absence his appearance
+changes remarkably. Here it may be remarked that though
+Dostoievsky lived previous to our knowledge of the rôle that
+the ductless glands play in maintaining the appearance and
+conserving the nutritional equilibrium of the individual, he
+gives, in his delineation of Smerdyakov, an extraordinarily
+accurate description of the somatic and spiritual alteration
+that sometimes occurs when some of them cease functioning.
+It is his art also to do it in a few words, just as it is his art
+to forecast Smerdyakov's crime while discussing the nature
+and occurrence of epileptic-attack equivalents, which he called
+contemplations.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span></p>
+
+<p>The way he disentangles the skeins from the confused mass
+of putridity, disease, and crime of which this novel is constituted,
+has been the marvel and inspiration of novelists the
+world over for the past fifty years. Dimitri wants to kill his
+father for many reasons, but the one that moves him to meditate
+it and plan it is: Grushenka, immoral and unmoral, will
+then be beyond the monster's reach; Grushenka whose sadism
+peeps out in her lust for Alyosha and who can't throw off
+her feeling of submission for the man who had violated her
+when she was seventeen. Dimitri loves Grushenka and
+Grushenka loves Dimitri “abnormals with abnormal love
+which they idealised.” During an orgy which would have
+pleased Nero, Dimitri lays drunken Grushenka on the bed,
+and kisses her on the lips.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“'Don't touch me,' she faltered in an imploring voice.
+'Don't touch me till I am yours.... I have told you I am
+yours, but don't touch me ... spare me.... With them
+here, with them close you mustn't. He's here. It's nasty
+here.'”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>He sinks on his knees by the bedside. He goes to his father's
+house at a propitious time and suitably armed for murder;
+he hails him to the window by giving the signal that he has
+learned from Smerdyakov would apprise him of the approach
+of Grushenka; but before he can strike him Smerdyakov,
+carrying out a plan of his own, despatches him, and Dimitri
+flees. The latter half of the book is taken up with the trial of
+Dimitri and the preliminaries to it, which give Dostoievsky an
+opportunity to pay his respects to Jurisprudence and to medicine
+and to depict a Slav hypocrite, Rahkitin. Smerdyakov
+commits the crime to find favour in the eyes of his god
+Ivan. He knows that Ivan desired it, suggested it, and went
+away knowing it was going to be done—at least that is the
+impression the epileptic mind of Smerdyakov gets—and under
+that impression he acts when he despatches his father with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span>
+the three-pound paper weight. The unprejudiced reader will
+feel the sympathies that have gradually been aroused for
+Smerdyakov because of his disease fade as he reads of the
+plan that the murderer made, and when he has hung himself
+after confessing to Ivan. In proportion as they recede for the
+valet, they will be rearoused for Ivan whose brain now gives
+away under the hereditary and acquired burden. This gives
+Dostoievsky the opportunity to depict the prodromata and
+early manifestations of acute mania as they have never, before
+or since, been depicted in lay literature.</p>
+
+<p>Description of the visual hallucination which Ivan has in
+the early stages, that a “Russian gentleman of a particular
+kind is present,” and the delusion that he is having an interview
+with him, might have been copied from the annals of an
+asylum, had they been recorded there by a master of the narrative
+art. It is one of the first, and the most successful attempts
+to depict dual personality, and to record the beliefs and convictions
+of each side of the personality. He listens to his <em>alter
+ego</em> sit in judgment upon him and his previous conduct, and
+is finally goaded by him to assault, as was Luther under similar
+though less dramatic circumstances. “Voices,” as the
+delirious and insane call them, have never been more accurately
+rendered than in the final chapters of the Ivan section
+of the book.</p>
+
+<p>An exhaustive psychosis displaying itself in intermittent
+delirium, and occurring in a profoundly psychopathic individual,
+is the label that a physician would give Ivan's disorder.
+Alyosha saw in it that God, in whom Ivan disbelieved, and His
+truth were gaining mastery over his heart, which still refused
+to submit.</p>
+
+<p>“The Idiot” was one of Dostoievsky's books which had a
+cold reception from the Russian reading public, but which has
+been, next to “The Brothers Karamazov” and “Crime and Punishment,” 
+the most popular in this country. The basic idea is
+the representation of a truly perfect and noble man, and it is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span>
+not at all astonishing that Dostoievsky made him an epileptic.
+He had been impressed, he said, that all writers who had sought
+to represent Absolute Beauty were unequal to the task. It is
+so difficult, for the beautiful is the ideal, and ideals have long
+been wavering and waning in civilised Europe. There is only
+one figure of absolute beauty, Christ, and he patterns Prince
+Myshkin upon the Divine model. He brings him in contact
+with Nastasya Filipovna, who is the incarnation of the evil
+done in the world, and this evil is represented symbolically by
+Dostoievsky as the outrage of a child. The nine years of
+brooding which had followed the outrage inflicted upon Nastasya
+as a child by Prince Tosky had imprinted upon her face
+something which Myshkin recognises as the pain of the world,
+and from the thought of which he cannot deliver himself, and
+which he cannot mitigate for her. She marries him after agonies
+of rebellion, after having given him to her <em>alter ego</em> in
+virginal state, Aglaia Epanchin, and then takes him away to
+show her power and demonstrate her own weakness; but she
+deserts him on the church steps for her lover Rogozhin, who
+murders her that night. Myshkin, finding Rogozhin next
+morning, says more than “Forgive them, Father, they know not
+what they do.” He lies beside him in the night and bathes his
+temples with his tears, but fortunately in the morning when
+the murderer is a raving lunatic a merciful Providence has
+enshrouded Myshkin in his disease.</p>
+
+<p>As Dimitri Merejkowski, the most understanding critic and
+interpreter of Dostoievsky who has written of him, truthfully
+says, his works are not novels or epics, but tragedies. The
+narrative is secondary to the construction of the whole work,
+and the keystone of the narrative is the dialogue between the
+characters. The reader feels that he hears real persons talking
+and talking without artifice, just as they would talk in real
+life; and they express sentiments and convictions which one
+would expect from individuals of such inheritance, education,
+development, and environment, obsessed particularly with the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span>
+injustices of this world and the uncertainties of the world to
+be, concerned day and night with the immortality of the soul,
+the existence of God, and the future of civilisation.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that he does not describe the appearance of
+his characters, for they depict themselves, their thoughts and
+feelings, their faces and bodies, by their peculiar forms of
+language and tones of voice. Although he does not dwell on
+portraiture, he has scarcely a rival in delineation, and his
+portraits have that quality which perhaps Leonardo of all who
+worked with the brush had the capacity to portray, and which
+Pater saw in the <em>Gioconda</em>; the revelation of the soul and its
+possibilities in the lineaments. The portrait of Mlle. Lebyadkin,
+the imbecile whom the proud Nikolay Stavrogin married,
+not from love or lust, but that he might exhaust the list of
+mortifications, those of the flesh, for himself, and those of
+pride for his family; that he might kill his instincts and become
+pure spirit, is as true to life as if Dostoievsky had spent his
+existence in an almshouse sketching the unfortunates segregated
+there. The art of portraiture cannot surpass this picture
+of Shatov, upon whose plastic soul Stavrogin impressed his
+immoralities in the shape of “the grand idea” and who said to
+Stavrogin in his agony, “Sha'n't I kiss your foot-prints when
+you've gone? I can't tear you out of my heart, Nikolay
+Stavrogin:”</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“He was short, awkward, had a shock of flaxen hair, broad
+shoulders, thick lips, very thick overhanging white eyebrows,
+a wrinkled forehead, and a hostile, obstinately downcast, as it
+were shamefaced, expression in his eyes. His hair was always
+in a wild tangle and stood up in a shock which nothing could
+smooth. He was seven or eight and twenty.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is not as a photographer of the body that Dostoievsky
+is a source of power and inspiration in the world today, and
+will remain so for countless days to come—for he has depicted
+the Russian people as has no one else save Tolstoi, and his pictures<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</span>
+constitute historical documents—but as a photographer of
+the soul, a psychologist. Psychology is said to be a new science,
+and a generation ago there was much ado over a new development
+called “experimental psychology,” which was hailed as
+the key that would unlock the casket wherein repose the secrets
+of the mind; the windlass that would lift layer by layer the
+veil that has, since man began, concealed the mysteries of
+thought, behaviour, and action. It has not fulfilled its promise.
+It would be beyond the truth to say that it has been sterile, but
+it is quite true to say that the contributions which it has
+made have been as naught compared with those made by
+abnormal psychology. Some, indeed, contend that the only
+real psychological contributions of value have come from a
+study of disease and deficiency, and their contentions are
+granted by the vast majority of those entitled to opinion.</p>
+
+<p>Dostoievsky is the master portrayer of madness and of
+bizarre states of the soul and of the mind that are on the borderland
+of madness. Not only has he depicted the different
+types of mental alienation, but by an intuition peculiar to his
+genius, by a species of artistic divination, he has understood
+and portrayed their display, their causation, their onset—so
+often difficult to determine even for the expert—and finally the
+full development of the disease. Indeed, he forestalled the description
+of the alienists. “They call me a psychologist,” says
+Dostoievsky; “it is not true. I am only a realist in the highest
+sense of the word, that is I depict all the soul's depth. Arid
+observations of every-day trivialities I have long ceased to
+regard as realism—it is quite the reverse.” </p>
+
+<p>It is the mission of one important branch of psychology to
+depict the soul's depth, the workings of the conscious mind, and
+as the interior of a house that one is forbidden to enter is best
+seen when the house has been shattered or is succumbing to the
+incidences of time and existence, so the contents of the soul are
+most discernible in the mind that has some of its impenetralia
+removed by disease. It was in this laboratory that Dostoievsky<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</span>
+conducted his experiments, made his observations, and recorded
+the results from which he drew conclusions and inferences.
+“In my works I have never said so much as the
+twentieth part of what I wished to say, and perhaps could
+actually have said. I am firmly convinced that mankind knows
+much more than it has hitherto expressed either in science or
+in art. In what I have written there is much that came from
+the depth of my heart,” he says in a letter to a friendly critic,
+to which may be added that what he has said is in keeping
+with the science of today, and is corroborated by workers in
+other fields of psychology and psychiatry.</p>
+
+<p>“The Possessed,” in which Dostoievsky reached the high-water
+mark of personality analysis, has always been a stumbling
+block to critics and interpreters. The recent publication
+by the Russian Government of a pamphlet containing
+“Stavrogin's Confession” sheds an illuminating light on the
+hero; and even second-hand knowledge of what has gone on in
+Russia, politically and socially, during the past six years facilitates
+an understanding of Pyotr Stepanovitch, Satan's impresario,
+and of Kirillov, nihilist.</p>
+
+<p>The task that Dostoievsky set himself in “The Possessed”
+was not unlike that which the Marquis de Sade set himself in
+“Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue,” and Sacher-Masoch
+in “Liebesgeschichten”; viz., to narrate the life of an unfortunate
+creature whose most important fundamental instinct was
+perverted and who could get the full flavour of pleasure only
+by inflicting cruelty, causing pain, or engendering humiliation.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Every unusually disgraceful, utterly degrading, dastardly,
+and above all, ridiculous situation in which I ever happened to
+be in my life, always roused in me, side by side with extreme
+anger, an incredible delight.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Stavrogin was apparently favoured by fortune: he had
+charm, education, wealth, and health. In reality he was
+handicapped to an incalculable degree. After a brilliant brief<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span>
+career in the army and in St. Petersburg society, he withdrew
+from both and associated with the dregs of the population
+of that city, with slip-shod government clerks, discharged
+military men, beggars of the higher class, and drunkards
+of all sorts. He visited their filthy families, spent days
+and nights in dark slums and all sorts of low haunts. He
+threw suspicion of theft on the twelve-year-old daughter of
+a woman who rented him a room for assignations that he
+might see her thrashed, and a few days later he raped her.
+The next day he hated her so he decided to kill her and
+was preparing to do so when she hanged herself. This is not
+featured in the novel as it now stands. Until the publication
+of “Stavrogin's Confession” interpreters of Stavrogin's personality
+who maintained that he was a sadist were accused of
+having read something into his character that Dostoievsky
+did not intend him to have. After committing this “greatest
+sin in the world,” he determined to cripple his life in the most
+disgusting way possible, that he might pain his mother, humiliate
+his family, and shock society. He would marry
+Marya, a hemiplegic idiot who tidied up his room. After the
+ceremony he went to stay with his mother, the granddame of
+their province. He went to distract himself, which included
+seducing and enslaving Darya, Shatov's sister, a ward of his
+mother, and a member of the family.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, apropos of nothing, he was guilty of incredible
+outrages upon various persons and, what was most enigmatic,
+these outrages were utterly unheard of, quite inconceivable,
+entirely unprovoked and objectless. For instance, one day at
+the club, he tweaked the nose of an elderly man of high rank in
+the service. When the Governor of the club sought some
+explanation Stavrogin told him he would whisper it in his ear.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“When the dear, mild Ivan Ossipovitch hurriedly and trustfully
+inclined his ear Stavrogin bit it hard. The poor Governor
+would have died of terror but the monster had mercy on
+him, and let go his ear.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span></p>
+
+<p>The doctor testified that he was temporarily unbalanced, and
+after a few weeks' rest and isolation he went abroad for four
+years and there Lizaveta Nikolaevna, Shatov's wife, and several
+others succumbed, and he also met his old tutor's son,
+Pyotr Stepanovitch, his deputy in the Internationale, who from
+that moment became his apologist, his tool, his agent, and
+finally the instrument of his destruction. The gratification of
+Stavrogin's perverted passion, the machinations of the Republicans
+and nihilists, and the revelations of Shatov's limitations
+and of Mr. Kirillov's nihilistic idealism are the threads of the
+story. Shatov was the son of a former valet of Stavrogin's
+mother who had been expelled from the University after some
+disturbance, a radical with a tender heart, who had held
+Stavrogin up as an ideal.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“He was one of those idealistic beings common in Russia
+who are suddenly struck by some overmastering idea which
+seems, as it were, to crush them at once and sometimes for
+ever. They are never equal to coping with it, but put passionate
+faith in it, and their whole life passes afterward, as it were,
+in the last agonies under the weight of the stone that has fallen
+upon them and half crushed them.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Shatov's overmastering idea was that Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch
+could do no wrong, and the stone that crushed him was
+Nikolay's misdeeds. Mr. Kirillov, the engineer, believed that
+he who conquers pain and terror will become a god.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Then there will be a new life, a new man, everything will
+be new ... then they will divide history into two parts:
+from the gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the
+annihilation of God to the transformation of the earth and of
+man physically. Man will be God and will be transformed
+physically and all men will kill themselves.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>“He who kills himself only to kill fear will become a god
+at once.” Kirillov believed or feared that eternal life was now,
+not hereafter. There are moments when time suddenly stands<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</span>
+still for men, and it was fear that it might become eternal that
+he could not tolerate. In Dostoievsky's books there is always
+one contemptible character, a sanctimonious hypocrite, a fawning
+holier-than-thou, a pious scandal monger, a venomous
+volunteer of first aid to the morally injured. In this book his
+name is Liputin, an elderly provincial official.</p>
+
+<p>These are the chief figures of the drama.</p>
+
+<p>When Shatov had been killed; when Kirillov's promise:
+namely, that he would commit suicide on request, had been
+exacted; when Stavrogin's imbecile wife and her brother
+Lebyadkin had been despatched; when Lisa, who was abducted
+by Stavrogin on the eve of her marriage and then
+abandoned, had been knocked on the head and killed by the
+mob because she was Stavrogin's woman who “had come to
+look at the wife he had murdered”; when Shatov's wife had
+come back to him and borne Stavrogin's child in his presence;
+when Stepan Trofimovitch had displayed his last infantile
+reaction and his son Peter, the Russian Mephistopheles, had
+made a quick and successful get-away, Stavrogin wrote to
+Darya and suggested that she go with him to the Canton of
+Uri, of which he was a citizen, and be his nurse. Darya, for
+whom humiliation spelled happiness, consented and Varvara
+Petrovna, hearing of the plan, succumbed to the sway of
+maternal love and arranged to go with them.</p>
+
+<p>The day they had planned to begin their journey Stavrogin
+was not to be found, but search of the loft revealed his body
+hanging from a hook by means of a silken cord which had
+been carefully soaped before he slung it around his neck.</p>
+
+<p>At the inquest the doctors absolutely and emphatically rejected
+all idea of insanity.</p>
+
+<p>“The Possessed” has been the most enigmatic of the writer's
+books because critics could not agree as to the motives of
+Stavrogin's crimes and conduct. With the publication of
+“Stavrogin's Confession” the riddles were solved. In the book
+as originally planned (and modified at the request of the publisher<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</span>
+of the periodical in which the novel originally appeared),
+Stavrogin, instead of hanging himself, went to Our Lady
+Spasso-Efimev Monastery and confessed himself to Bishop
+Tikhon. Dostoievsky recruited his spiritual <em>menschenkenners</em>
+from the ranks of those who, in youth, had played the game
+of life hard, transgressed, and repented. Tikhon was one of
+them, a strange composite of piety and worldliness chained to
+his cell by chronic rheumatism and alcoholic tremours.</p>
+
+<p>Stavrogin had been obsessed by a phrase from the Apocalypse:
+“I know thy works; that thou art neither hot nor cold.
+I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm,
+and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my
+mouth.” He would be lukewarm no longer. He handed
+Tikhon three little sheets of ordinary small-sized writing paper
+printed and stitched together. It was entitled “From Stavrogin”
+and was a confession of his sins. He couldn't dislodge
+from his mind the vision of the little girl Matryosha. He
+identified her with photographs of children that he saw in shop
+windows. A spider on a geranium leaf caused the vision of her
+as she killed herself to rise up before him, and this vision came
+to him now every day and every night</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“not that it comes itself, but that I bring it before myself and
+cannot help bringing it although I can't live with it. I know
+I can dismiss the thought of Matryosha even now whenever I
+want to. I am as completely master of my will as ever. But
+the whole point is that I never wanted to do it; I myself do
+not want to, and never shall.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Tikhon suggested that he would be forgiven if his repentance
+was sincere, and told him he knew an old man, a hermit
+and ascetic of such great Christian wisdom that he was beyond
+ordinary understanding. He suggested that Stavrogin should
+go to him, into retreat, as novice under his guidance, for five
+years, or seven, for as many as were necessary. He adjured
+him to make a vow to himself so that by this great sacrifice he<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</span>
+would acquire all that he longed for and didn't even expect, and
+assured him that he could not possibly realise now what he
+would obtain from such guidance and isolation and repentance.</p>
+
+<p>Stavrogin hesitated and the Bishop suddenly realised that he
+had no intention of repenting. It dawned upon him that Stavrogin's
+plan was to flaunt his sin in the face of God as he had
+previously flaunted it in the face of society, and in a voice
+which penetrated the soul and with an expression of the most
+violent grief Tikhon exclaimed,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Poor lost youth, you have never been so near another and
+a still greater crime as you are at this moment. Before the
+publication of the 'Confession,' a day, an hour perhaps before
+the great step, you will throw yourself on another crime,
+as a way out, and you will commit it solely in order to avoid
+the publication of these pages.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Stavrogin shuddered with anger and almost with fear and
+shouted “You cursed psychologist!,” and left the cell without
+looking at Tikhon.</p>
+
+<p>The annihilation of the sense of time in Dostoievsky's
+stories was first dwelt upon by Merejkowski, and it has been
+much discussed by all of his serious commentators. Events
+occur and things take place within a few hours in his books
+which would ordinarily take months and years. The reason
+for this timeless cycle of events may be sought in the experiences
+that the author had in the moments preceding his attacks
+of epilepsy in which he had thoughts and emotions which a
+lifetime would scarcely suffice to narrate.</p>
+
+<p>Dostoievsky is the greatest of subjective writers because he
+goes deepest and is the most truthful. His books are narratives
+of sins and crimes and descriptions of attempts at
+expiation. He didn't invent sins, he took them from life; he
+presented those he had committed and seen committed. He
+invented only the expiation, and some of that, it must be
+admitted, he experienced. His sinners are never normal mentally.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</span>
+They are never insane legally, but all of them are insane
+medically.</p>
+
+<p>Dostoievsky himself was far from “normal” mentally, aside
+from his epilepsy, though he made approximation to it as he
+grew older. His mind was a garden sown with the flower seeds
+of virtue and the thistle seeds of vice. All of them germinated.
+Some became full blown, others remained stunted and
+dwarfed.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I have invented a new kind of enjoyment for myself,” he
+wrote to his brother, “a most strange one—to make myself
+suffer. I take your letter, turn it over in my hand for several
+minutes, feel if it is full weight, and having looked on it sufficiently
+and admired the closed envelope, I put it in my pocket.
+You won't believe what a voluptuous state of soul, feeling and
+heart there is in that!”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>That is the <em>anlage</em> of masochism. In the outline of “The
+Life of a Great Sinner,” the novel whose completion would
+permit him to die in peace, for then he should have expressed
+himself completely, one sees the wealth of detail taken by the
+author from his boyhood and early manhood. The hero of the
+“Life” was unsociable and uncommunicative; a proud, passionate,
+and domineering nature. So was Dostoievsky. So
+here was to be apotheosis of individualism, consciousness of his
+superiority, of his determination, and of his uniqueness.
+Dostoievsky wrote of himself in 1867, “Everywhere and in
+everything I reach the furthest limits; I have passed beyond
+the boundaries of all life.” </p>
+
+<p>The most inattentive reader of his “Letters” will be reminded
+of Dostoievsky when they read that the hero of the “Life”
+“surprised everybody by unexpectedly rude pranks,” “behaved
+like a monster,” “offended an old woman,” and that he
+was obsessed with the idea of amassing money; and the alternative
+stages of belief and disbelief of the hero are obviously
+recollections of his own trials. “I believe I shall express the
+whole of myself in it” he wrote of it to a friend, and no one<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</span>
+familiar with his books and his life can read the outline of it
+and doubt that he would have succeeded. Wherever Dostoievsky
+looked he saw a question mark and before it was
+written “Is there a God? Does God exist?” He was determined
+to find the answer. He had found Christ abundantly
+and satisfactorily, but the God of Job he never knew, nor had
+He ever overthrown him or compassed him with His net.</p>
+
+<p>Dostoievsky was a rare example of dual personality. His
+life was the expression of his ego personality (and what a life
+of strife and misery and unhappiness it was!), revealed with
+extraordinary lucidity in his “Letters” and “The Journal of
+an Author”; and his legacy to mankind is the record of his
+unconscious mind revealed in his novels. The latter is the life
+he would have liked to live, and in it he depicts the changes in
+man's moral nature that he would have liked to witness. His
+contention was that man should be master of his fate, captain
+of his soul. He must express his thought and conviction in
+action and conduct, particularly in his relation to his fellow-man.
+He must take life's measure and go to it no matter what
+it entails or how painful, unpleasant, or disastrous the struggle,
+or the end.</p>
+
+<p>Many thoughtful minds believe that Dostoievsky has shown
+us the only salvation in the great crisis of the European conscience.
+The people, it matters not of what nationality, still
+possess the strength and equilibrium of internal power. The
+conviction that man shall not live as a beast of burden still
+survives in the Russian people and is shared with them by the
+masses throughout the civilised world. Salvation from internal
+anarchy was his plea, and it is the plea that is today being
+made by millions in other lands than his.</p>
+
+<p>As a prophet he foresaw the supremacy of the Russian
+people, the common people succoured to knowledge, faith, and
+understanding by liberty, education, and health, and by conformation
+to its teaching the Renaissance of the Christian<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</span>
+faith, which shall be a faith that shall show man how to live
+and how to die, and which shall be manifest in conduct
+as well as by word of mouth; primacy of the Russian church;
+and the consummation of European culture by the effort and
+propaganda of Russia. “Russia is the one God-fearing nation
+and her ultimate destiny shall be to make known the Russian
+Christ for the salvation of lost humanity.” No one can say
+at this day that his prophecies may not come true, and to the
+student of history there may seem to be more suggestive indication
+of it in the Russia of today than in that of half a century
+ago; for from a world in ferment unexpected distillations may
+flow. But to the person who needs proof Russia is silent now.
+Dostoievsky's doctrines have not dropped as the rain, nor has
+his speech been distilled as the dew, though he published the
+name of the Lord and ascribed greatness unto our God. Indeed,
+the fate that has overtaken Russia would seem to deny
+the possibility of the fulfillment of his prophecies either for his
+country or his people.</p>
+
+<p>As a narrator of the events of life here, and of the thoughts
+of life here and hereafter, he has had few peers of any nation
+or language. That he did it in a disorderly way must be
+admitted; that the events of his tragedies had little time incidence
+is obvious to the most casual reader; that the reader
+has to bring to their perusal concentration and application is
+beyond debate; and that his characters are “degenerates,” 
+using that word in its biological sense, there is no doubt. But
+despite these defects, Dostoievsky succeeds in straining the
+essence of the Russian's soul through his unconscious to his
+conscious mind, and then expressing it; and his books are the
+imperishable soul-prints of his contemporaneous countrymen.
+Not only does he stand highest in literary achievement of all
+men of his time, but he is a figure of international significance
+in the world of literature. His life and struggle was Hauptmann's
+song,</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Always must the heart-strings vibrate in the breath of the
+world's sorrow, for the world's sorrow is the root of heaven's
+desire.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>He foresaw with clairvoyancy the necessity of making
+religion livable, not professed with the lips and scorned in
+action, but a code or formulation that would combine Life,
+Love, and Light pragmatically; and although he was not able
+to formulate his thought or to express it clearly and forcibly,
+to synthetise and codify it, as it were, formulators of the new
+religion, of Christianity revivified or dematerialised, will consult
+frequently and diligently the writings of Feodor Dostoievsky.</p>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" >CHAPTER IV<br>
+<small>DOROTHY RICHARDSON AND HER CENSOR</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>The novelists are behind the naturalists in the recording
+of minutiæ. Many of the latter have set down the life
+history of certain species of birds in exhaustive detail—every
+flip of the tail, every peck preceding the grand drama of courtship
+and marriage, every solicitude of paternity, every callousness
+of guardianship.</p>
+
+<p>An analogous contribution to realism in the domain of
+fiction has been made by Dorothy M. Richardson, an interesting
+figure in English literature today. She has written six
+books about herself. When one considers that her life has
+been uneventful, one might say drab, commonplace, and restricted,
+this is an accomplishment deserving of note and
+comment.</p>
+
+<p>Critics and connoisseurs of literary craftsmanship have
+given her a high rating, but they have not succeeded in introducing
+her to the reading public. She is probably the least
+known distinguished writer of fiction in England, but she has
+a certain public both in her own country, and in this in which
+all her novels have been republished.</p>
+
+<p>Her influence on the output of English fiction since the
+publication of “Pointed Roofs,” in 1913, is one of the outstanding
+features in the evolution of novel-writing during the present
+decade. Since Flaubert set the pace for a reaction against
+the conception of the realistic novel as the faithful transcription
+of life as perceived by the novelist; and his followers
+introduced into novel-writing a more subtle art than that of
+mere transcription of life, by making the hypothetical consciousness<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</span>
+through which the story is presented a determining
+factor in its essence, this factor has been assuming a more and
+more important rôle. The autobiographical novel, tracing its
+lineage straight back to Rousseau, has become a prevailing
+fashion in fiction. It remained, however, for Miss Richardson
+to give the example—aside from James Joyce and Marcel
+Proust—of a novel in which the consciousness of the writer
+should assume the leading rôle in a drama that just missed
+being a monologue. Miss Richardson has made, not herself
+in the ordinary sense of the word, but her subjective consciousness,
+the heroine of her narrative; and the burden of it has
+been to present the development of this consciousness, or
+energy, directly to the reader in all its crudity and its dominancy.
+The result is a novel without plot, practically without
+story interest. It is a question what influence this “artistic
+subjectivism,” as Mr. J. Middleton Murry has called it, will
+have upon the fiction of the future. Of its influence upon that
+of the present there can be no question.</p>
+
+<p>Her technique is intensive, netting in words the continuous
+flow of consciousness and semi-consciousness. She is first and
+foremost a symbolist, an exponent of autistic thinking, a recorder
+of the product of what is called by the popular psychology
+her “unconscious mind,” which has got by the “censor,” 
+a mythical sort of policeman who, in her case, often
+sleeps on his post, or is so dazed by the supply from her unconscious
+he cannot carry on.</p>
+
+<p>This recently rechristened official, from the baptismal font
+of the Freudians, is responsible for much literature of questionable
+value. Latterly he has become something of a radical
+and has been permitting stuff to get by on many wires and
+postal avenues that seems to those whose “censors” have been
+doing duty in the name of Reason or <em>Amour Propre</em> to be, if
+not immoral, at least indecent. Miss Richardson's “censor”
+is a Socialist, but he is not a Red. He hasn't much time for
+appearances and diplomacy, and he has so many fish to fry<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</span>
+that he cannot have all his time taken up with putting his best
+foot forward. Therefore Miriam Henderson doesn't believe
+in the religion of her forebears, she isn't strong for the National
+cause, and she doesn't hark to any party cry. She
+doesn't like her mother, and it is the tendency of the modern
+“censor” to emphasise that; but to “pater” her allegory and
+her ordered stream of thought are uniformly kind and indulgent.
+Her “censor” early in life warned her that he was no
+parent of shams and if she wanted to live a peaceful life she
+must be unconventional. So Miriam determined to be
+“different.” She is unsociable. She cannot think of anyone
+who does not offend her. “I don't like men and I loathe
+women. I am a misanthrope. So is pater.” He further
+assured her that “freedom” is the gateway and roadway to
+happiness, and to travel thereon, with a little money to satisfy
+the self-preservative urge, constituted the joy of life. Up to
+this point Miriam and the “censor” got on famously. It was
+when he announced that he was determined not to exhaust himself
+keeping down her untutored passions that she revealed a
+determination that staggered him. The “censor” capitulated.
+The result is that Miss Richardson's books are of all symbolic
+literature the least concerned with the sinfulness of the
+flesh, therefore furthest removed from comedy.</p>
+
+<p>Miriam Henderson—who is Dorothy M. Richardson, the
+narrator of her own life—is the third of four daughters of a
+silly, inane, resigned little mother and an unsocial father of
+artistic temperament, the son of a tradesman whose ruling
+passion is to be considered a country gentleman. His attitude
+toward life and his efforts to sustain it have culminated in
+financial ruin, and Miriam finds herself at the age of eighteen,
+all reluctant and unprepared, confronted with the necessity of
+depending upon her own efforts for a living—unless she can
+achieve escape, as do two of her sisters, in marriage. She
+meets the situation bravely—cowardice is not one of her faults—and
+the six books contain a statement of her struggles against<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</span>
+circumstance and a psychological analysis of her personality.
+As self is less able to accept compromises or to make adaptations
+in her case than in that of the average mortal, the conflict
+is fierce; but it is soul struggle, not action.</p>
+
+<p>Miriam's first tilt with life, recorded in “Pointed Roofs,” 
+is as a governess in a small German boarding-school, from
+which she is politely dismissed, without assigned reason, at
+the close of the first term. Her second, in “Backwater,” is as
+a teacher of drab youngsters in a North London school. After
+less than a year, ennui, restlessness, and discontent compel her
+to resign without definite outlook or prospects. She finds
+herself, in “Honeycomb,” established as governess to two
+children in the country home of a prosperous Q.C. The situation
+suddenly becomes unendurable after a few months—for
+no stated reason—and she eagerly seeks escape in her mother's
+illness. In “The Tunnel” she at last finds a “job” to her taste
+when she becomes assistant in the office of several London
+dentists, and denizen of a hall bedroom in a dismal Bloomsbury
+rooming-house. In “Interim” she loses her opportunity of
+marrying a wholesome Canadian by flirting with a Spanish
+Jew. And in “Deadlock” she puts forth her first tentative
+efforts to write and becomes engaged to a man with whom she
+believes herself to be in love, but of whom she does not intellectually
+approve.</p>
+
+<p>Her next novel is likely to be called “Impasse,” for meanwhile,
+in real life, Miss Richardson has married and a new
+element has been introduced into her life which she will not
+be able to keep from tincturing and tinting her “unconscious,” 
+but which she will not be able to get past her “censor.” It
+would not surprise us either should she switch from this series
+and cast her next book in the form of an episode or short story.
+Revelations of impulses, thoughts, determinations have been
+considered “good form” in literature when they were one's own,
+but when they were another's, submitted to the narrator's
+judgement or reason, especially a wife's or a husband's, it has<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</span>
+been considered bad taste either to narrate or to publish them.
+Moreover the alleged facts are always questioned.</p>
+
+<p>In the six books, whose titles are symbolic and which were
+originally meant to be grouped under the one head of
+“Pilgrimage”—her adventure of life—the author has presented
+what might be described as a cinema of her mind, not
+particularly what the New Psychology calls, with all the assurance
+of infallibility, the “unconscious mind.” She has the
+faculty of taking a canvas and jotting down everything she
+sees in a landscape and then finishing it in the studio in such a
+way as to convince the person who has seen similar landscapes
+or who has an eye for scenic beauty that her work is nearly
+perfect. She does it by a skillful blending of the mind products
+of purposeful and autistic thinking.</p>
+
+<p>The autonomic mechanism of man displays the closest approximation
+to perpetual motion that exists. It never rests.
+As yet we do not know how far thought is conditioned by the
+autonomic nervous system, but we know that the mind is never
+idle any more than the heart or the lungs. Constantly a stream
+of thoughts flows from it or through it. These thoughts vary
+in quality and quantity, and their variations have formed endless
+and bitter discussions of psychologists. Whenever the
+waking mind is not entirely occupied with directed thoughts,
+it is filled with a succession of more or less vivid or vague
+thoughts, often popularly referred to as “impressions,” which
+seem to arise spontaneously and are usually not directed
+toward any recognised end or purpose. A significant feature
+of them is the prominence of agreeable impressions concerning
+oneself, people or things—or thoughts of these as one would
+wish them to be, rather than as they are known to be. It is
+these autistic, or wishful thoughts, which, constantly bubbling
+up to the surface of consciousness like the water of a spring,
+give colour to personality. They reveal it more luminously
+than anything else—unless one goes still deeper and lays bare
+the thoughts at the hidden source of the spring, thus penetrating<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</span>
+the unconscious itself, as the Freudians claim to do
+through the symbolism of dreams.</p>
+
+<p>Whether Miriam Henderson, proceeding in this fashion,
+revealed more of her real self than did Marie Bashkirtseff, or
+Anatole France in “Le Petit Pierre,” “La Vie en Fleur” and
+the other charming books with which he has been ornamenting
+his old age, is an open question. However, Dorothy M. Richardson
+has established a reputation as one of the few Simon-pure
+realists of modern English literature.</p>
+
+<p>Another faculty which is developed to an exceptional degree
+in Miriam is what psychologists call the association of cognitions
+and memories. The “Wearin' of the Green” on a hand
+organ while she is big with thoughts of what her trip to a
+foreign land may bring her makes her think of</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“rambles in the hot school garden singing 'Gather roses while
+ye may,' hot afternoons in the shady north room, the sound
+of turning pages, the hum of the garden beyond the sun-blinds,
+meeting in the sixth form study ... Lilla with her black hair
+and the specks of bright amber in the brown of her eyes, talking
+about free-will.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Then she stirs the fire and back her thoughts whisk to her
+immediate concerns.</p>
+
+<p>Music more than anything else calls into dominancy these
+associated recollections. Listening to the playing of one of
+the schoolgirls at the German school she suddenly realises:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“That wonderful light was coming again—she had forgotten
+her sewing—when presently she saw, slowly circling, fading
+and clearing, first its edge, and then, for a moment the whole
+thing, dripping, dripping as it circled, a weed-grown mill-wheel....
+She recognised it instantly. She had seen it somewhere
+as a child—in Devonshire—and never thought of it since—and
+there it was. She heard the soft swish and drip of the
+water and the low humming of the wheel. How beautiful ...
+it was fading.... She held it—it returned—clearer this time
+and she could feel the cool breeze it made, and sniff the fresh<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</span>
+earthly smell of it, the scent of the moss and the weeds shining
+and dripping on its huge rim. Her heart filled. She felt a
+little tremour in her throat. All at once she knew that if she
+went on listening to that humming wheel and feeling the freshness
+of the air, she would cry. She pulled herself together,
+and for a while saw only a vague radiance in the room and the
+dim forms grouped about. She could not remember which
+was which. All seemed good and dear to her. The trumpet
+notes had come back, and in a few minutes the music ceased....
+Someone was closing the great doors from inside the
+schoolroom.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It would be difficult to find in literature a better illustration
+of revival of unconscious or “forgotten” memory than this. An
+extraordinary thing about it is that these and similar revivals
+are preceded by an aura or warning in the shape of a light,
+similar to the warnings that Dostoievsky had before having an
+epileptic attack during which he experienced ecstasy so intense
+and overpowering that had it lasted more than a few seconds
+the human mechanism would have broken beneath the display.
+Miriam's ecstasy is of a milder sort, and the result is like
+that which the occupant of a chamber with drawn blinds and
+sealed windows might experience should some magic power
+stealthily and in a mysterious way flood it gradually with sunshine
+and replace the stale atmosphere with fresh air.</p>
+
+<p>Many can testify from personal experience the power that
+music has to influence purposeful thinking. It would not
+astonish me to hear that Einstein had solved some of the intricate
+problems of “relativity” under the direct influence of
+the music of Beethoven, Wagner, or Liszt. It is the rod with
+which most temperamental persons smite the rock of reality
+that romance may gush out and refresh those who thirst for it.
+Miriam often wields the rod in her early days to the reader's
+intense delight.</p>
+
+<p>While giving Miss Richardson her full measure of praise
+as recorder of her unconscious mental activity in poetic and
+romantic strain, we must not overlook her unusual capacity<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</span>
+to delineate the realities of life, as they are anticipated and
+encountered.</p>
+
+<p>The description of her preparation for going away in the
+first chapter of “Pointed Roofs” is perfect realism: the
+thoughts of a young girl in whom a conflict between self-depreciation
+and self-appreciation is taking place. This is
+marvellously portrayed in the narration of her thoughts and
+apprehensions of her ability to teach English in the German
+school to which she is journeying. It is a fool's errand to be
+going there with nothing to give. She doubts whether she
+can repeat the alphabet, let alone parse and analyse.</p>
+
+<p>This mastery of realism is displayed throughout the series.
+The inwardly rebellious governess in the country house of
+prosperous people is made vivid in her setting when she says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“There was to be another week-end. Again there would be
+the sense of being a visitor amongst other visitors; visitor was
+not the word; there was a French word which described the
+thing, 'convive,' 'les convives' ... people sitting easily about
+a table with flushed faces ... someone standing drunkenly
+up with eyes blazing with friendliness and a raised wineglass
+... women and wine, the rose of Heliogabalus; but he was a
+Greek and dreadful in some way, convives were Latin, Roman;
+fountains, water flowing over marble, white-robed strong-faced
+people reclining on marble couches, feasting ... taking
+each fair mask for what it shows itself; that was what this
+kind of wealthy English people did, perhaps what all wealthy
+people did ... the maimed, the halt, the blind, <em>compel</em> them
+to come in ... but that was after the others had refused.
+The thing that made you feel jolliest and strongest was to forget
+the maimed, to <em>be</em> a fair mask, to keep everything else out
+and be a little circle of people knowing that everything was
+kept out. Suppose a skeleton walked in? Offer it a glass of
+wine. People have no right to be skeletons, or if they are to
+make a fuss about it. These people would be all the brighter
+if they happened to have neuralgia; some pain or emotion
+made you able to do things. Taking each fair mask was a fine
+grown-up game. Perhaps it could be kept up to the end?<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</span>
+Perhaps that was the meaning of the man playing cards on his
+death-bed.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The author has the gift of narration, too, of making a picture
+with a few sweeps of the brush. In “Pointed Roofs”
+Miriam gives a synopsis of her parents and their limitations
+in a few words, which is nearly perfect. She does it by narration
+of her thoughts in retrospection, which is another striking
+feature of her technique.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“She thought sleepily of her Wesleyan grandparents, gravely
+reading the 'Wesleyan Methodist Recorder,' the shop at Babington,
+her father's discontent, his solitary fishing and reading,
+his discovery of music ... science ... classical music in
+the first Novello editions ... Faraday ... speaking to
+Faraday after lectures. Marriage ... the new house ...
+the red brick wall at the end of the garden where young peach-trees
+were planted ... running up and downstairs and singing
+... both of them singing in the rooms and the garden
+... she sometimes with her hair down and then when visitors
+were expected pinned in coils under a little cap and wearing a
+small hoop ... the garden and lawns and shrubbery and the
+long kitchen-garden and the summer-house under the oaks beyond
+and the pretty old gabled 'town' on the river and the
+woods all along the river valley and the hills shining up out of
+the mist. The snow man they both made in the winter—the
+birth of Sarah and then Eve ... his studies and book-buying—and
+after five years her own disappointing birth as the third
+girl, and the coming of Harriet just a year later ... her
+mother's illness, money troubles—their two years at the sea to
+retrieve ... the disappearance of the sunlit red-walled garden
+always in full summer sunshine with the sound of bees in it
+or dark from windows ... the narrowings of the house-life
+down to the Marine Villa—with the sea creeping in—wading
+out through the green shallows, out and out till you were more
+than waist deep—shrimping and prawning hour after hour for
+weeks together ... poking in the rock pools, watching the
+sun and the colours in the strange afternoons ... then the
+sudden large house at Barnes with the 'drive' winding to the
+door.... He used to come home from the City and the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</span>
+Constitutional Club and sometimes instead of reading 'The
+Times' or the 'Globe' or the 'Proceedings of the British Association'
+or Herbert Spencer, play Pope Joan or Jacoby with
+them all, or Table Billiards and laugh and be 'silly' and take
+his turn at being 'bumped' by Timmy going the round of the
+long dining-room table, tail in the air; he had taken Sarah
+and Eve to see 'Don Giovanni' and 'Winter's Tale' and the new
+piece, 'Lohengrin.' No one at the tennis-club had seen that.
+He had good taste. No one else had been to Madame Schumann's
+Farewell ... sitting at the piano with her curtains
+of hair and her dreamy smile ... and the Philharmonic Concerts.
+No one else knew about the lectures at the Royal Institution,
+beginning at nine on Fridays.... No one else's
+father went with a party of scientific men 'for the advancement
+of science' to Norway or America, seeing the Falls and
+the Yosemite Valley. No one else took his children as far as
+Dawlish for the holidays, travelling all day, from eight until
+seven ... no esplanade, the old stone jetty and coves and
+cowrie shells....” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Nature was in a satirical mood when she equipped Miriam
+for her conflict. Early the casual reader recognises her as the
+kind of girl who is socially difficult and who seems predestined
+to do “fool things.” The psychologist looks deeper and sees a
+tragic jest. Plain in appearance, angular in manner, innocent
+of subtlety, suppleness, or graciousness of body or soul, with a
+fine sensitiveness fed by an abnormal self-appreciation, which
+she succeeds in covering only at the cost of inducing in it a
+hot-house growth, Miriam Henderson enters upon the task of
+an unskilled wage-earner with a mind turned inward and possessed
+by that modern and fashionable demon politely known
+as a “floating libido.” Dogged, if not actually damned, by her
+special devil, Miriam is driven in frenzied and blinded unrest
+from one experience to another, in vain efforts to appease its
+insistent demands, placing the blame for her failure to achieve
+either success or happiness everywhere except where it belongs.</p>
+
+<p>Tortured by romantic sentimentalism unrelieved by a glimmer
+of imagination or humour; over-sexed but lacking the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</span>
+magnetism without which her sex was as bread without yeast;
+with a desire for adulation so morbid that it surrounded itself
+with defences of hatred and envy, Miriam's demon drove or
+lured her through tangled mazes of the soul-game, and checkmated
+every effort to find herself through her experiences.</p>
+
+<p>In “Pointed Roofs,” even through the wall of self, the reader
+catches the charm with which the German school held Miriam,
+in the music floating through the big <em>saal</em>, the snatches of
+schoolgirl slang and whimsical wisdom, and Fraulein Pfaff
+with her superstitions, her rages, her religiosity, and her sensuality.
+But this is the background of the picture, just as the
+background of the home which she had so clingingly left had
+been the three light-hearted sisters with their white plump
+hands and feminine graces, the tennis, the long, easy dreamy
+days; and the foreground had been Miriam cherishing a feeling
+of “difference” toward the feminine sisters, feeding her smarting
+self-love by her fancied resemblance to her father who
+hated men and loathed women, and dreaming of the “white
+twinkling figure coming quickly along the pathway between the
+rows of hollyhocks every Sunday afternoon.” </p>
+
+<p>The “high spot” in her experience at the German school is
+revealed in the answer to the question: Why could not Miriam
+get on with “tall Fraulein Pfaff smiling her horse smile”?
+Miriam leaves the school cloaked in injured innocence. But
+the cloak is no mask for the native wit of the schoolgirls.
+They know—and Miriam knows—that the answer is the old
+Swiss teacher of French upon whom the Fraulein herself has
+designs. Even before he is revealed reading poetry to the class
+with a simper while Miriam makes eyes at him, or in a purported
+chance encounter alone in the <em>saal</em>, the girls have
+twitted Miriam in a way that would have warned a more
+sensible girl that she was venturing upon dangerous ground.
+But Miriam's demon had made her insensible to such hints, just
+as it had robbed her of the common sense which would have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</span>
+made her understand, even without warnings, that she could
+not work for a woman and “go vamping” on her preserves.</p>
+
+<p>If Miriam's flirtation with the Swiss professor had been in a
+spirit of frolicsomeness it would have presented at least one
+hopeful symptom. But Miriam is incapable of frolicking—abnormally
+so. The absence of the play impulse in her is
+striking, as is the lack of spontaneous admirations or enthusiasms
+for people or things. Her impressions are always in
+terms of sensuous attraction or repulsion—never influenced by
+appeal to intellect, æsthetic taste, admiration, or ambition.
+Other girls exist for her, not as kindred spirits, but as potential
+rivals—even her sisters—and she is keen to size them up solely
+by qualities which she senses may make them attractive to
+the other sex. The exceptions to this are certain German girls
+whose over-sentimental make-up furnishes easy material for
+Miriam's starved libido.</p>
+
+<p>The next picture is at her country home where a dance has
+been staged, in Miriam's own consciousness, especially as a
+temporary farewell appearance of the “white twinkling figure,” 
+now materialised into Ted. Ted appears on programme time
+bringing with him a strange young man with a German name
+and manner of speech, with whom she promptly goes off spooning
+in a dark conservatory, where she is discovered by Ted.
+She hopes the scene will stir Ted to emulation. But it does not.
+When she returns to the light Ted has gone home. And that
+seems to be the last of him. The strange young man is keen
+to announce his departure the coming day for foreign parts.
+So Miriam is left to set off for her next school without further
+adventures in love-making, and the reader is left to wonder
+whether she is not one of the girls who are incurably given to
+taking their Teds more seriously than they intend to be taken.</p>
+
+<p>In “Backwater” Miriam is a teacher of little girls in a
+Bambury Park school kept by three quaint refined little old
+English women—a palatable contrast to the coarseness of
+Fraulein Pfaff—for nine months. She is successful as a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</span>
+teacher, but finds her situation unendurable and resigns. The
+emotional shallowness of the girls and their lower middle-class
+mothers with aspirations to “get on” are dreary, but hardly
+sufficiently dismal to provoke the black despair and unreasoning
+rage which cause her to cry out in her moments of revolt,
+“But why must I be one of those to give everything up?”
+There is no masculine element connected with the school life,
+as there had been with that of the German school. She contrasts
+herself with her sisters who have made adaptations to
+life, two having become engaged and the third having settled
+happily into a position as governess. But Miriam can not
+settle, nor adapt. Her demon will not permit.</p>
+
+<p>A girl of nineteen, brought up in middle-class culture, without
+previous experiences except as teacher in two girls' schools,
+becomes governess, as “Honeycomb” relates, in the country
+home of a Q. C., upon the introduction of friends of a future
+brother-in-law. From the day of her arrival her wishful thinking
+revolves around the man of the family. She loathes teaching
+the children and fails to hide from them her boredom. By
+lampooning the eccentricities and stupidities of Mrs. Corrie she
+betrays her hatred of women, her besetting “inferiority complex,” 
+which, in this instance, is partly justified by the adult
+infantilism of the lady and her absorbing attachment to a
+woman of questionable morality. Without anything to which
+to tie it on the other side, Miriam constructs—as a spider
+might a web out of her own unconscious self—a bridge of
+affinity between herself and the Q. C., placing such significance
+as her demon prompts upon his insignificant words or looks,
+until he snubs her at dinner when she attempts to take too
+leading a part in the conversation. Immediately she hates it
+all, with the collapse of her bridge, and is ready to throw up
+her “job” and all it implies.</p>
+
+<p>Romance would seem remote from a hall bedroom in a
+sordid London rooming-house and the duties of first aid to a
+firm of dentists. But this is where Miriam finds it, for a time<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</span>
+at least. The central figure is one of the dentists in whom
+her autistic thoughts discover a lonely sensitive man eager for
+the sympathetic understanding which Miriam is ready to offer.
+The boredom of teaching gives place to ecstasy in the discharge
+of the details, often repellent, which go to fill up the “strange
+rich difficult day.” Her drab existence becomes a charmed
+life until Miriam's libido, which has been running away with
+her like a wild horse, shies right across the road at the first
+young girl she sights within the orbit of the dentist. Judging
+from the reaction of the latter, the explosion of jealousy and
+hatred that took place in Miriam's mind must have found
+outward expression, for he retreats behind a barrier of an
+“official tone,” which infuriates Miriam into demanding an
+explanation and brings in reply to her demand a letter from
+him beginning: “Dear Miss Henderson—You are very persistent”;
+and concluding “foolish gossip which might end by
+making your position untenable.” For the first time Miriam
+admits her folly, saying,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I have nothing now but my pained self again, having violently
+rushed at things and torn them to bits. It's all my fault
+from the very beginning.... I make people hate me by
+<em>knowing</em> them and dashing my head against the wall of their
+behaviour.... I did not know what I had. Friendship is fine,
+fine porcelain. I have sent a crack right through it.... Mrs.
+Bailey (her landlady) ... numbers of people I never think
+of would like to have me always there.... At least I have
+broken up his confounded complacency.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>When Miriam's dingy lodging-house becomes a boarding-house
+new food comes to her creative urge in the form of daily
+association with masculine boarders. Her resolution in the
+early pages of “Interim” to take “no more interest in men,” 
+collapses like a house of cards upon the first onslaught. A
+close companionship develops between her and a Spanish Jew
+of more than unconventional ideas and habits. But her special
+devil is soon busy again, and Miriam discovers romance in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</span>
+presence in the house of a young Canadian who is studying in
+London. When he comes into the dining-room where Miriam
+is sitting with other boarders after dinner, and sits down with
+his books to study:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“He did not see that she was astonished at his coming nor
+her still deeper astonishment in the discovery of her unconscious
+certainty that he would come. A haunting familiar
+sense of unreality possessed her. Once more she was part of a
+novel; it was right, true like a book for Dr. Heber to come in
+in defiance of every one, bringing his studies into the public
+room in order to sit down quietly opposite this fair young English
+girl. He saw her apparently gravely studious and felt
+he could 'pursue his own studies' all the better for her presence....
+Perhaps if he remained steadily like that in her
+life she could grow into some semblance of his steady reverent
+observation. He did not miss any movement or change of
+expression.... It <em>was</em> glorious to have a real, simple homage
+coming from a man who was no simpleton, coming simple,
+strong and kindly from Canada to put you in a shrine....” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And yet all he does is to look at her! She goes for a walk
+and</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“the hushed happiness that had begun in the dining-room half
+an hour ago seized her again suddenly, sending her forward
+almost on tiptoe. It was securely there; the vista it opened
+growing in beauty as she walked; bearing within her in secret
+unfathomable abundance the gift of ideal old-English rose and
+white gracious adorable womanhood given her by Dr. Heber.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>When he goes to church she interprets it as a symptom of
+falling in love, but if it is, the further progress of the disease
+is along lines which would baffle even those who have specialised
+in the study of the malady in fiction and poetry through
+ages. He goes back to Canada, along with his companion
+students, without saying a word to his fellow-boarder and
+leaves to the landlady the difficult task of warning Miriam that
+her association with the Spanish Jew has furnished a subject
+of gossip in the house, and that another boarder has confided<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</span>
+to her that Dr. Heber had “made up his mind to speak,” but
+that he had been scared by Miriam's flirtation with the little
+Jew.</p>
+
+<p>Miriam never questions the correctness of the landlady's
+diagnosis, nor the authenticity of her information. Still less
+does she doubt her own interpretation of the wholesome direct-minded
+Canadian's silent looks in her direction.</p>
+
+<p>Finally a man comes into her life who literally proposes
+marriage. He is a young Russian Jew student, small of stature
+and suggestive of an uncanny oldness. Under his influence she
+begins translating stories from the German and seems to find
+some of the beneficial possibilities of “sublimation” in the
+task. The test is not a true one, however, because this little
+stream into which the current of her libido is temporarily
+turned is too closely associated with the main channel—Shatov—and
+when she becomes engaged to him the translation
+seems to be forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>“Deadlock” is the conflict between instinct and taste, involved
+in marrying a man with whom she is in love but who
+arouses a revolt of her inherited traditions and intellectual
+and æsthetic biases; or between her ego instinct and her herd
+instinct. There the reader takes leave of her at the end of the
+sixth volume.</p>
+
+<p>A far more serious deadlock than that presented by her
+engagement is the deadlock imposed upon Miriam by nature in
+creating her a woman and endowing her with qualities which
+keep her in a state of revolt against her Creator and against
+what to her is the indignity of being a woman. This is epitomised
+splendidly in “The Tunnel,” when she is fretting her
+mind through the wearying summer days to keep pace with
+the illness that is creeping upon her. Entries in the dentists'
+index under the word “Woman” start the train of thought:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“inferior; mentally, morally, intellectually and physically ...
+her development arrested in the interest of her special functions<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</span>
+... reverting later towards the male type ... old
+women with deep voices and hair on their faces ... leaving
+off where boys of eighteen began.... Woman is undeveloped
+man ... if one could die of the loathsome visions.... Sacred
+functions ... highest possibilities ... sacred for what?
+The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world? The future
+of the race? What world? What race? Men.... Nothing
+but men; forever.... It will go on as long as women are
+stupid enough to go on bringing men into the world ... even
+if civilised women stop the colonials and primitive races would
+go on. It was a nightmare. They despise women and they
+want to go on living—to reproduce—themselves. None of
+their achievements, no 'civilisation,' no art, no science can
+redeem that. There is no possible pardon for men. The only
+answer to them is suicide; all women ought to agree to commit
+suicide.... All the achievements of men were poisoned at
+the root. The beauty of nature was tricky femininity. The
+animal world was cruelty. Jests and amusements were tragic
+distractions from tragedy.... The woman in black works.
+It's only in the evenings she can roam about seeing nothing.
+But the people she works for know nothing about her. She
+knows. She is sweeter than he. She is sweet. I like her.
+But he is more me.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Earlier, but less consciously, she expresses it when, watching
+the men guests at the Corrie's,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Miriam's stricken eyes sought their foreheads for relief.
+Smooth brows and neatly brushed hair above; but the smooth
+motionless brows were ramparts of hate; pure murderous hate.
+That's men, she said, with a sudden flash of certainty, that's
+men as they are, when they are opposed, when they are real.
+All the rest is pretence. Her thoughts flashed forward to a
+final clear issue of opposition, with a husband. Just a cold
+blank hating forehead and neatly brushed hair above it. If a
+man doesn't understand or doesn't agree he's just a blank bony
+conceited thinking, absolutely condemning forehead, a face
+below, going on eating—and going off somewhere. Men are all
+hard angry bones; always thinking something, only one thing
+at a time and unless that is agreed to, they murder. My husband
+shan't kill me.... I'll shatter his conceited brow—<em>make</em><span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</span>
+him see ... two sides to every question ... a million
+sides ... no questions, only sides ... always changing.
+Men argue, think they prove things; their foreheads recover—cool
+and calm. Damn them all—all men.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Few writers could have sketched Miriam Henderson without
+condemning her and without inviting the condemnation of the
+reader. Miss Richardson has done it. She has given us
+Miriam as she knows herself, without explanation, plea, or
+sentence, and left us to judge for ourselves. She does not label
+her. And this is probably the reason Miss Richardson's work
+has found so small an audience. People demand labels. They
+want to be “told.” And she does not “tell” them. She invites
+them to think, and original thinking is an unpopular process.</p>
+
+<p>If ten people were to read these books and write their impressions
+of them, the results would be as different as were the
+thoughts of the ten people. Because each result would add
+what the author has left out: a judgment, or an estimate
+of Miriam. And this judgment would be rendered upon the
+evidence, but according to the mind of the judge.</p>
+
+<p>The question which everyone must decide for himself is:
+when such revelations of the conscious and the unconscious
+are spread before him in words and sentences, does the result
+constitute gibberish or genius; is it slush or sanity; is it the
+sort of thing one would try to experience; or should one struggle
+and pray to be spared? It may be the highroad to dementia—this
+concentrating of all one's thoughts upon oneself,
+and oneself upon a single instinct. And Miriam might well
+have been headed for it when she failed to differentiate between
+ideas based upon objective evidence and ideas created
+solely out of her instinctive craving, which is an approach
+toward the belief of the insane person in his own delusions.</p>
+
+<p>We identify ourselves, motives, and conduct with the characters
+of fiction who cut a good figure; we identify with the
+ones who do not, those we dislike, disdain, or condemn. Has<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</span>
+anyone identified himself with Miriam Henderson and added
+to his or her stature?</p>
+
+<p>The strongest impression made upon an admirer of Miss
+Richardson's craftsmanship is a wish that it might be applied
+to the study of a different, a more normal, type of personality.
+But the wish that such a study might be given us is burdened
+with a strong doubt whether its fulfillment would be humanly
+possible. Could anyone but an extreme type of egocentric
+person make such a study of himself? Could anyone whose
+libido was normally divided in various channels follow its
+course so graphically? And would not such division destroy
+the unity essential to even so much of the novel form as Miss
+Richardson preserves?</p>
+
+<p>Here is a deadlock for the reader: Miss Richardson's art
+and Miriam as she is; or a Miriam with whom one could
+identify oneself as a heroine of fiction.</p>
+
+<p>The novel, according to Miss Richardson, may be compared
+to a picture-puzzle in a box. Properly handled, the pieces may
+be made to constitute an entity, a harmonious whole, a thing
+of beauty, a portrait or a pergola, a windmill or a waterfall.
+The purpose of the novel is to reveal the novelist, her intellectual
+possessions, emotional reactions, her ideals, aspirations,
+and fulfilments, and to describe the roads and short-cuts over
+which she has travelled while accomplishing them. People
+and things encountered on the way do not count for much,
+especially people. They are made up largely of women, whom
+she dislikes, and men, whom she despises. It should be no
+part of its purpose to picture situations, to describe places, to
+narrate occurrences other than as media of author-revelation.
+Undoubtedly it is one of the most delightful things in the world—this
+talking about oneself. I have known many persons who
+pay others, physicians for instance, to listen. But unless the
+narration is ladened with adventure, or interlarded with
+humour, or spiced with raciness, it is often boring; and reluctantly
+it must be admitted that when we have ceased to admire<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</span>
+Miss Richardson's show of art, when we no longer thrill at
+her mastery of method, when we are tired of rising to the fly
+of what Miss Sinclair calls her “punctilious perfection” of
+literary form, she becomes tiresome. Egocentrics should have
+a sense of humour. Samuel Butler thus endowed might have
+been assured of immortality. Lacking that, they should have
+extensive contact with the world. That is what enlivens the
+psychological jungle of Marcel Proust. If Henri Amiel had
+had a tithe of Jean Jacques Rousseau's worldly and amatory
+experiences his writings might have had great influence and
+a large sale.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Dorothy M. Richardson has revealed herself a finished
+technician. She may be compared to a person who is ambitious
+to play the Chopin Studies. She practices scales steadily for a
+year and then gives a year to the Studies themselves. But
+when she essays to play for the public she fails because, although
+she has mastered the mechanical difficulties, she has
+not grasped the meaning. She reveals life without drama
+and without comedy, and that such life does not exist everybody
+knows.</p>
+
+<p>She may have had compensation for her effort from two
+sources: her imitators and her benefactors. The former are
+too numerous to mention, but Mr. J. D. Beresford and Miss
+May Sinclair would undoubtedly admit their indebtedness.</p>
+
+<p>It is vicarious compensation, also, to be praised by one's
+peers and superiors. If Dorothy M. Richardson hasn't yet
+had it, in the writer's judgment she may look forward to it with
+confidence.</p>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" >CHAPTER V<br>
+<small>MARCEL PROUST: MASTER PSYCHOLOGIST<br>
+AND PILOT OF THE “VRAIE VIE”</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Marcel Proust may justly be hailed as the greatest
+psychological novelist of his time. He was to normal
+psychology what Dostoievsky was to abnormal psychology:
+an unsurpassed observer, interpreter, and recorder of men's
+thoughts and conduct.</p>
+
+<p>It would be hazardous to attempt to estimate the place
+he will eventually have in literature until the remaining volumes
+of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” and “Le Temps
+Retrouvé” are published. But the volumes of the former
+that have appeared: “Du Côté de Chez Swann,” “Á l'Ombre
+des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs,” “Le Côté de Guermantes,” and
+“Sodome et Gomorrhe” justify the statement that with the
+death of their author in November, 1922, France lost a writer
+whose fame will rank with that of Balzac. It is not likely
+that he will ever have a popularity comparable to Balzac
+or even to Bourget, Barbusse, or several other contemporaries,
+for M. Proust is an author for writers. He will never
+be read by the large class of novel readers who create the
+market demand for novels of action and plot; nor will he
+appeal to that hardly less numerous class—chiefly women—who
+find the emotional novel palatable food. However, those
+who, like the writer, cannot punish themselves by struggling
+through a detective story and by whom the most skillfully
+contrived plot can be endured only if the harassment which
+it causes is counterbalanced by the charm of its literary style
+or its interpretation of the personality of the author reacting<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</span>
+to conditions more or less common to all mankind, may find in
+M. Proust a novelist whom they can ill afford to ignore. And
+no writer of fact or fiction today would be just to himself were
+he to proceed with his art without making the acquaintance of
+this master artificer and psychologist. Proust will be remembered
+as a pioneer who explored the jungle of the unconscious
+memory, and a marvellous interpreter of the laws governing
+associated memories. I doubt not his name will be as
+inseparably connected with the novel of the future as that of
+de Maupassant or Poe has been with the short story of the last
+few decades, even while his wares will still find scant sale, save
+to writers, dilettantes, professional students of letters, of
+form, and of psychology.</p>
+
+<p>The measure of success that was vouchsafed him came late
+in life. He was fifty when the Goncourt Prize was awarded
+“A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs” in 1919. Until that
+time his writings were known to readers of “La Nouvelle
+Revue Française,” to friends, and to a limited circle whose
+members have an urge for the unusual, and a flair for the
+picturesque in literature. Then readers began to nibble at
+“Du Côté de Chez Swann,” and the more they nibbled, that
+is the oftener they read it, or attempted to read it—for it is
+difficult even for a cultured Frenchman—the more keenly
+aware did they become that they had encountered a new force,
+a new sensibility in literature, and, like appetite that comes
+with eating, the greater was their desire to develop an intimacy
+with him. “Le Côté de Guermantes” showed that he walked
+and talked, dined and wined, registered the thoughts and interpreted
+the dreams of the aristocracy with the same security,
+understanding, perspicacity, and clairvoyancy that he had
+brought to bear on the bourgeoisie in “Du Côté de Chez
+Swann.” In “Sodome et Gomorrhe” he did the impossible. He
+talked with frankness and with a tone of authority of an
+enigmatic, inexplicable aberration of nature, inversion of the
+genesic instinct, which antedates possibly by millions of years
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</span>
+the differentiation of man from anthropoid stock; which has
+always been with us, now the patent of good form, the badge of
+intellectual superiority, the hallmark of æsthetic refinement, as
+in the days of Hellenic supremacy; now the stigma of sin,
+the scarlet letter of infamy, the key of the bottomless pit, as
+today; and which unquestionably will always continue to be
+with us. He divested it of pruriency; he rescued it from
+pornography; he delivered it from pathology; and at the same
+time he made the penologist pause and “normal” man
+thoughtful.</p>
+
+<p>Whether this freakishness of nature is as common as M.
+Proust says, whether it bulks so large in the conduct of daily
+life as he intimates, is a matter for the individual to estimate.
+No statistics are available, but experienced psychiatrists and
+discerning pedagogues know that a considerable proportion
+of mankind is so constituted. To deny it is equivalent to
+acknowledging that one is immune to evidence; to consider
+it a vice is to flaunt an allegation of falsehood in the face of
+biology. One can imagine the shock the world would have
+today if everyone told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
+but the truth about his genesic instinct. If, then, it was
+decided to segregate and deprive of liberty the inverted, what
+a strange medley it would be of general and soldier, of prince
+and pauper, of priest and parishioner, of genius and moron, of
+ambassador and attaché, of poet, artist, and savant. It will
+mark an epoch in modern civilisation when this strange variation
+from the normal shall be subject to study by such investigators
+as Mendel, de Vries, Tschermak, and the host of
+biologists who are slowly solving the mysteries of heredity.
+Meanwhile the preparation for such work is the formation of
+public opinion, and probably there is no better way to accomplish
+it than that adopted by M. Proust.</p>
+
+<p>So far the only one of M. Proust's books that has appeared
+in English is “Du Côté de Chez Swann,” (Swann's Way), by
+C. K. Scott Moncrieff. The translation itself is a work of art,
+and the reading public is under profound obligation to this
+master stylist.</p>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe25" id="ilo_fp121">
+  <img class="w100 p2" src="images/ilo_fp121.jpg" alt="ilop119" title="p119ilo">
+  <figcaption class="caption p2b"><span class="allsmcap">MARCEL PROUST IN 1890</span></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The narrator is M. Proust himself, but the reader who
+would understand Proust must keep in mind that he has
+distributed his own personality between two characters, the
+narrator of the story, and Swann. Those who see Proust
+only in the first, or only in Swann, see but half of him.</p>
+
+<p>In the overture he recalls the memories of a precocious,
+sentimental, sickly childhood spent in his aunt's house in
+Combray, with an indulgent mother, a sensible matter-of-fact
+father, an archaic paternal grandmother, and two silly sentimental
+grandaunts. He succeeds in introducing in the most
+incidental way M. Swann, the son of a stockbroker, “a converted
+Jew and his parents and grandparents before him,”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</span>
+who has successfully unlocked the door of smart and savant
+society; his former mistress Odette de Crecy whom he has now
+married, to the disgust of his neighbours; his daughter with
+whom the narrator is to fall in love; M. Vinteuil whose sonata
+contains the solvent of Swann's amatory resistance, and his
+daughter, a Gomorrite; M. de Villeparisis; and M. de Charlus,
+who we shall see in “Sodome et Gomorrhe” is not like other
+men.</p>
+
+<p>The setting is in Brittany.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we
+used to see it from the railway when we arrived there every
+year in Holy Week, was no more than a church epitomising the
+town, representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon,
+and as one drew near, gathering close about its long, dark
+cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as a shepherd
+gathers his sheep, the woolly grey backs of its flocking
+houses, which a fragment of its mediæval ramparts enclosed,
+here and there, in an outline as scrupulously circular as that of
+a little town in a primitive painting.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>He who invokes his memories is a boy of ten or thereabouts,
+lying in bed and awaiting dinner to end and M. Swann<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</span>
+to depart that his mother may kiss him goodnight. Memory
+of it was like a luminous panel, sharply defined against a
+vague and shading background.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“The little parlour, the dining-room, the alluring shadows
+of the path along which would come M. Swann, the unconscious
+author of my sufferings, the hall through which I would journey
+to the first step of that staircase, so hard to climb, which
+constituted, all by itself, the tapering 'elevation' of an irregular
+pyramid; and, at the summit, my bedroom, with the little
+passage through whose glazed door Mamma would enter; in a
+word, seen always at the same evening hour, isolated from all
+its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its
+shadowy background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary
+(like the setting one sees printed at the head of an old play,
+for its performance in the provinces); to the drama of my
+undressing, as though all Combray had consisted of but two
+floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though there had
+been no time there but seven o'clock at night.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The power not only of reproducing scenes and events, but
+also of revivifying states of consciousness long past through
+invoking associated memories, is utilised with an effect rarely
+parallelled in literature. It is invoked through any of the
+special senses, but chiefly through taste and hearing. The
+little cake soaked in tea which, taken many years after the
+trivial events of his childhood at Combray had been all but
+forgotten, unlocks, as if by magic, the chamber stored with
+memories.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it,
+touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body,
+and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that
+were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my
+senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its
+origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent
+to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this
+new sensation having had on me the effect which love
+has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</span>
+was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel
+mediocre, accidental, mortal.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>He then tries to analyse the state, and</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out
+every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my ears and
+inhibit all attention to the sounds which come from the next
+room.... Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the
+depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory
+which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my
+conscious mind.... Will it ultimately reach the clear surface
+of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment
+which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled
+so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very
+depths of my being?”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It does reach the surface of consciousness, for</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“once I had recognised the taste of the crumb of madeleine
+soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to
+give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone
+the discovery of why this memory made me so happy)
+immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her
+room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself
+to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden.... And just
+as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl
+with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which
+until then are without character or form, but, the moment they
+become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and
+distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent
+and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our
+garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the
+Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings
+and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of
+its surroundings, taking their proper shape and growing solid,
+sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of
+tea.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>M. Proust's description of the first effect upon him of the
+little “madeleine” dipped in tea, when, “weary after a dull<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</span>
+day, with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my
+lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of
+the cake” is almost a paraphrase of the words of Locke in his
+“Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” </p>
+
+<p>Music, more than anything else, has the power of invoking
+Swann's associated memories. A little phrase of old Vinteuil's
+Sonata runs like a fine thread all through the tangle of Swann's
+love for Odette de Crecy, although the memory of the phrase
+goes back prior to his meeting Odette—to the night of the
+party at which he had heard it, after going home from which</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“he was like a man into whose life a woman, whom he has
+seen for a moment passing by, has brought a new form of
+beauty, which strengthens and enlarges his own power of perception,
+without his knowing even whether he is ever to see
+her again whom he loves already, although he knows nothing
+of her, not even her name.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Swann had tried in vain to identify the fugitive phrase which
+had awakened in him a passion for music that seemed to be
+bringing into his life the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Like a confirmed invalid whom all of a sudden, a change
+of air and surroundings, or a new course of treatment, or, as
+sometimes happens, an organic change in himself, spontaneous
+and unaccountable, seems to have so far removed from his
+malady that he begins to envisage the possibility, hitherto beyond
+all hope, of starting to lead—and better late than never—a
+wholly different life, Swann found in himself, in the memory
+of the phrase that he had heard, in certain other sonatas which
+he had made people play over to him, to see whether he might
+not, perhaps, discover his phrase among them, the presence
+of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to
+believe, but to which, as though the music had had upon the
+moral barrenness from which he was suffering a sort of
+recreative influence, he was conscious once again of a desire,
+almost, indeed, of the power to consecrate his life.” </p>
+
+<p>“It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture our own past;
+all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</span>
+hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect,
+in some material object (in the sensation which that
+material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as
+for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon
+it or not before we ourselves must die.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Associative memory depends upon the fact that though the
+grouping of the stimuli is novel, the elementary components
+are individually similar to previous stimuli, and Proust avails
+himself of this established fact. These elementary stimuli
+leave retention traces in the central nervous system. When
+the same stimuli recur in a new grouping the pathways and
+centres that bear such traces are brought into connection
+and are combined in new ways. This modifies the form of
+the response. As the separate retention traces were due to
+conditions resembling the present, the new response will tend
+to be adaptive. This associative memory is known in psychology
+as mnemonic combination.</p>
+
+<p>Although no attempt is made to describe the development
+of the personality of the sensitive, sentimental, impressionable,
+precocious child who narrates the story, one gets an extraordinarily
+vivid picture of him. He has the hallmarks and
+habituations of neuropathy, and amongst them phantasying
+and substitution.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“In those days, when I read to myself, I used often, while
+I turned the pages, to dream of something quite different. And
+to the gaps which this habit made in my knowledge of the
+story more were added by the fact that when it was Mamma
+who was reading to me aloud she left all the love-scenes out.
+And so all the odd changes which take place in the relations
+between the miller's wife and the boy, changes which only
+the birth and growth of love can explain, seemed to me plunged
+and steeped in a mystery, the key to which (as I could readily
+believe) lay in that strange and pleasant-sounding name of
+<em>Champi</em>, which draped the boy who bore it, I knew not why,
+in its own bright colour, purpurate and charming.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</span></p>
+
+<p>That his neuropathic constitution was a direct inheritance
+is obvious. He got it through his Aunt Leonie</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“who since her husband's death, had gradually declined to
+leave, first Combray, then her house in Combray, then her
+bedroom, and finally her bed; and who now never 'came
+down,' but lay perpetually in an indefinite condition of grief,
+physical exhaustion, illness, obsessions, and religious observances....
+My aunt's life now was practically confined to
+two adjoining rooms, in one of which she would rest in the
+afternoon while they aired the other.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Despite these apparent restrictions of life's activities she
+knows more of the happenings of the village than the town
+crier, and in a way she conditions the conduct of her neighbours
+whose first question is “What effect will it have on
+Aunt Leonie?” Her contact with people is limited to Françoise,
+a perfect servant, to Eulalie, a limping, energetic, deaf
+spinster, and to the reverend Curé.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“My aunt had by degrees erased every other visitor's name
+from her list, because they all committed the fatal error, in
+her eyes, of falling into one or other of the two categories of
+people she most detested. One group, the worse of the two,
+and the one of which she rid herself first, consisted of those
+who advised her not to take so much care of herself, and
+preached (even if only negatively and with no outward signs
+beyond an occasional disapproving silence or doubting smile)
+the subversive doctrine that a sharp walk in the sun and a good
+red beefsteak would do her more good (her, who had had
+two dreadful sips of Vichy water on her stomach for fourteen
+hours) than all her medicine bottles and her bed. The other
+category was composed of people who appeared to believe that
+she was more seriously ill than she thought, in fact that
+she was as seriously ill as she said. And so none of those whom
+she had allowed upstairs to her room, after considerable hesitation
+and at Françoise's urgent request, and who in the
+course of their visit had shown how unworthy they were of
+the honour which had been done them by venturing a timid:
+'Don't you think that if you were just to stir out a little on
+really fine days...?' or who, on the other hand, when she
+said to them: 'I am very low, very low; nearing the end, dear
+friends!' had replied: 'Ah, yes, when one has no strength left!
+Still, you may last a while yet'; each party alike might be
+certain that her doors would never open to them again.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<figure class="figcenter illowe22" id="ilo_fp129">
+  <img class="w100 p2" src="images/ilo_fp129.jpg" alt="ilop127p127ilo">
+  <figcaption class="caption p2b"><span class="allsmcap">A PAGE OF CORRECTED PROOF SHOWING</span><br>
+<small>MARCEL PROUST'S METHOD OF REVISION</small></figcaption>
+</figure>
+</div>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>With all his literary art, and mastery of the mysterious
+powers that suggestion has to heighten awareness and deepen
+information, M. Proust does not succeed in enlightening us
+as to how the boy at Combray comes to possess so much information
+of people and such knowledge of the world. Part of it
+is intuitive, but understanding of Vinteuil's daughter, who
+“after a certain year we never saw alone, but always accompanied
+by a friend, a girl older than herself, with an evil reputation
+in the neighbourhood, who in the end installed herself
+permanently at Montjouvain,” thus leading M. Vinteuil broken-hearted
+to the grave because of the shame and scandal of
+her sadism, is beyond possibility even for a boy of his precocity
+and prehensibility.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“For a man of M. Vinteuil's sensibility it must have been
+far more painful than for a hardened man of the world to
+have to resign himself to one of those situations which are
+wrongly supposed to occur in Bohemian circles only; for they
+are produced whenever there needs to establish itself in the
+security necessary to its development a vice which Nature herself
+has planted in the soul of a child, perhaps by no more than
+blending the virtues of its father and mother, as she might
+blend the colours of their eyes. And yet however much M.
+Vinteuil may have known of his daughter's conduct it did not
+follow that his adoration of her grew any less. The facts of
+life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are
+cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so
+they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual
+blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening
+them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one
+after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family,
+will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or
+the capacity of its physician.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</span></p>
+
+<p>Thus does he introduce most casually a subject which bulks
+large in “Sodome et Gomorrhe,” and which M. Proust understands
+like a composite priest, physician, and biologist.</p>
+
+<p>Most of the grist of the boy's mill comes over the road that
+skirts Swann's park, but some comes the Guermantes Way.
+In “Le Côté de Guermantes,” which followed “A l'Ombre
+des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs,” he makes us as intimately acquainted
+with the Duchesse de Guermantes, Mme. de Villeparisis,
+and other notables of the <em>société élegante</em>, as he does
+in “Swann's Way” with the Verdurins and their “little nucleus”
+which furnishes a background to Odette, and furnishes M.
+Proust with canvas upon which to paint the portrait of an
+Æsculapian bounder, Dr. Cottard, who, it has been said, is
+still of the quick. M. Proust was the son and the brother of a
+physician and had abundant opportunity not only to get first-hand
+information but to have his natural insight quickened.
+In the same way one discovers his Jewish strain (his mother
+was a Jewess) in his mystic trends and in his characters such
+as Bloch and Swann. “Whenever I formed a strong attachment
+to any one of my friends and brought him home with
+me that friend was invariably a Jew.” Moreover his lack of
+a sense of humour is an Hebraic trait. With the exception
+of the reaction provoked in his grandfather by the advent of
+one of these friends, “Swann's Way,” and indeed all M.
+Proust's writings, are humourless.</p>
+
+<p>The genesis of Swann's love and the dissolution of Odette's
+take up one volume. If it is not a perfect description of the
+divine passion in a mature man surfeited by conquest and
+satiated by indulgence, it is an approximation to it.</p>
+
+<p>He was introduced one day at the theatre to Odette de
+Crocy by an old friend of his, who had spoken of her to
+him as a ravishing creature with whom he might very possibly
+come to an understanding. She made no appeal to
+Swann; indeed she not only left him indifferent, aroused in
+him no desire, but gave him a sort of physical repulsion. But<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</span>
+Odette knew the <em>ars amandi</em> as did Circe or Sappho, and ere
+long she had entangled him in the meshes of Eros' net. When
+the net was drawn to her craft and the haul examined, it didn't
+interest her, though she kept it, for it contributed to her material
+welfare. Then M. Proust did a psychological stunt
+which reveals an important aspect of his mastery of the
+science. Swann identified Odette with Zipporah, Jethro's
+daughter, whose picture is to be seen in one of the Sixtine
+frescoes by Botticelli. Her similarity to it enhanced her
+beauty and rendered her more precious in his sight. Moreover
+it enabled him to introduce the image of Odette into a world
+of dreams and fancies where she assumed a new and nobler
+form. And whereas the mere sight of her in the flesh, by
+perpetually reviving his misgivings as to the quality of her
+face, her figure, the whole of her beauty, used to cool the
+ardour of his love, those misgivings were swept away and that
+love confirmed now that he could re-erect his estimate of her
+on the sure foundations of his æsthetic principles. Instead of
+placing a photograph of Odette on his study table, he placed
+one of Jethro's daughter, and on it he lavished his admiration
+and concentrated his intensity in all the abandon of substitution.</p>
+
+<p>The author utilises the potency of suspense to bring Swann's
+ardour to the boiling point. One evening when Odette had
+avoided him he searched the restaurants of the Boulevards in
+a state of increasing panic.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Among all the methods by which love is brought into being,
+among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane,
+there are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which,
+now and then, sweeps over the human spirit. For then the
+creature in whose company we are seeking amusement at
+the moment, her lot is cast, her fate and ours decided, that is
+the creature whom we shall henceforward love. It is not necessary
+that she should have pleased us up till then, any more, or
+even as much as others. All that is necessary is that our taste
+for her should become exclusive.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</span></p>
+
+<p>He proceeded to cultivate his love in an emotional medium
+and to inoculate himself with the culture which rendered him
+immune to love of another. The culture medium was furnished
+by Vinteuil, the old composer, who had died of a broken
+heart. “He would make Odette play him the phrase from the
+sonata again ten, twenty times on end, insisting that, while she
+played, she must never cease to kiss him.” </p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Watching Swann's face while he listened to the phrase,
+one would have said that he was inhaling an anæsthetic which
+allowed him to breathe more deeply.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The effect that it had was deep repose, mysterious refreshment.
+He felt himself transformed into a “creature foreign
+to humanity, blinded, deprived of his logical faculty,
+almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimera-like creature conscious of
+the world through his two ears alone.” </p>
+
+<p>Swann's discovery of the spiritual and bodily inconstancies
+of his mistress, the perfidies and betrayals of the Verdurins,
+his jealousy, planned resentments, and resurrection are related
+in a way that convinces us that Proust saw life steadily and
+saw it whole.</p>
+
+<p>To appease his anguish, to thwart his obsession, to supplant
+his preoccupation he decided to frequent again the aristocratic
+circles he had forsaken. The description of the reception at
+Mme. de Saint Euverte's, showing the details of fashionable
+life, is of itself a noteworthy piece of writing. Not only is it
+replete with accurate knowledge of such society, but it gives M.
+Proust the opportunity to display understanding of motives
+and frailties and to record impressions of contact with the
+world abroad. Speaking of one of the guests he says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“She belonged to that one of the two divisions of the human
+race in which the untiring curiosity which the other half feels
+about people whom it does not know is replaced by an unfailing
+interest in the people whom it does.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</span></p>
+
+<p>The peculiar tendency which Swann always had to look
+for analogies between living people and the portraits in galleries
+reasserted itself here in a more positive and more general
+form. One of the footmen was not unlike the headsman in
+certain Renaissance pictures which represent executions, tortures,
+and the like. Another reminded him of the decorative
+warriors one sees in the most tumultuous of Mantegna's paintings.
+“He seemed as determined to remain as unconcerned
+as if he had been present at the massacre of the innocents or
+the martyrdom of St. James.” As he entered the salon one
+reminded him of Giotto's models, another of Albert Dürer's,
+another of that Greek sculpture which the Mantuan painter
+never ceased to study, while a servant with a pallid countenance
+and a small pig-tail clubbed at the back of his head
+seemed like one of Goya's sacristans.</p>
+
+<p>It was this soirée that conditioned irrevocably Swann's
+future life, and the little phrase from Vinteuil's Sonata did it
+for him. To have heard it “in this place to which Odette would
+never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence,
+from which she was entirely absent” made him suffer
+insupportably. While listening to it</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“suddenly it was as though she had entered, and this apparition
+tore him with such anguish that his hand rose impulsively
+to his heart.... All his memories of the days when Odette
+had been in love with him, which he had succeeded, up till that
+evening, in keeping invisible in the depths of his being, deceived
+by this sudden reflection of a season of love, whose sun, they
+supposed, had dawned again, had awakened from their slumber,
+had taken wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his
+ears, without pity for his present desolation, the forgotten
+strains of happiness.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It raised the flood-gate of the dam in which he had stored
+the memories of Odette when she loved him and before he
+loved her. Not only did it liberate the memories of her, but
+the memories that were associated with them: all the net-work<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</span>
+of mental habits, of seasonable impressions, of sensory reactions,
+through which it extended over a series of groups its uniform
+meshes, by which his body now found itself inextricably
+held.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“When, after that first evening at the Verdurins', he had had
+the little phrase played over to him again, and had sought to
+disentangle from his confused impressions how it was that,
+like a perfume or a caress, it swept over and enveloped him,
+he had observed that it was to the closeness of the intervals
+between the five notes which composed it and to the constant
+repetition of two of them that was due that impression of a
+frigid, a contracted sweetness; but in reality he knew that he
+was basing this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but
+merely upon certain equivalents, substituted (for his mind's
+convenience) for the mysterious entity of which he had become
+aware, before ever he knew the Verdurins, at that earlier party,
+when for the first time he had heard the sonata played....</p>
+
+<p>“In his little phrase, albeit it presented to the mind's eye a
+clouded surface, there was contained, one felt, a matter so
+consistent, so explicit, to which the phrase gave so new, so
+original a force, that those who had once heard it preserved
+the memory of it in the treasure-chamber of their minds.
+Swann would repair to it as to a conception of love and happiness....</p>
+
+<p>“Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it
+existed, latent, in his mind, in the same way as certain other
+conceptions without material equivalent, such as our notions
+of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the rich
+possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and
+adorned. Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will
+be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so
+long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a
+state in which we shall not have known them than we can
+with regard to any material object, than we can, for example,
+doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in
+view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from
+which has vanished even the memory of the darkness....</p>
+
+<p>“So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of
+the sonata did, really, exist. Human as it was from this point
+of view, it belonged, none the less, to an order of supernatural<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</span>
+creatures whom we have never seen, but whom, in spite of
+that, we recognise and acclaim with rapture when some explorer
+of the unseen contrives to coax one forth, to bring it
+down from that divine world to which he has access to shine
+for a brief moment in the firmament of ours.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>From that evening Swann understood that the feeling which
+Odette had once had for him would never revive. He had
+made his bed, and he resolved to share it in holy matrimony
+with Odette, though this discomforted his friends and made
+him a species of Pariah.</p>
+
+<p>Mme. Swann in Combray was a solitary, but not in Paris.
+There she queened it, as many lovely ladies had done before
+her. The account of that, and of the narrator's love for
+Gilberte, Swann's daughter, who, when he had encountered her
+casually at Combray, had made a stirring and deep impression
+on him; and the advent of Albertine, a potential Gomorrite,
+make up the contents of the succeeding instalment, entitled
+“A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs.” Gilberte, Swann's
+daughter, and the narrator now approaching puberty, came to
+play together in the Champs Elysées, frolicking like children,
+innocently, though another feeling began soon to bud in him, a
+feeling which he did not yet understand. In this volume the
+narrator relates the experiences he had when a youth, and
+therefore there is more precision in the description of the
+persons with whom he came in contact. The volume also
+throws much light indirectly on Proust's personality. From a
+certain incident which he tells regarding the way he was
+brought up, one sees that his father was a rigourous aristocrat,
+stiff in his demeanour, and very particular in the choice of his
+connections. He, the narrator, was brought up in a way the
+Germans would call “schablonenmässig”: everything was discussed
+at a family council, as though he were an inanimate
+plaything. His naïvete, the result of such training, is very
+characteristic.</p>
+
+<p>For some time he had been longing to see “Phèdre” played<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</span>
+by the famous Mme. La Berma (evidently Sarah Bernhardt,
+for at that time she was the only one who played “Phèdre”).
+After long deliberation because of his illness, it was decided
+he should go chaperoned by his grandmother, to see his ideal
+actress. The scene opened with two men who rushed on in
+the throes of heated argument. He did not know that this was
+part of the play and that the men were actors; he thought they
+were some ruffians who had forced their way into the theatre
+and who would surely be ejected by the officials. He wondered,
+though, that the spectators not only did not protest, but
+listened to them with the greatest attention. Only when the
+theatre re-echoed with applause did he understand that the two
+men were actors. Afterwards, when two ladies came upon the
+stage, both of portly bearing, he could not decide which one
+was La Berma; a little later he learned that neither of them
+was the great actress. To reconcile such unsophistication with
+the account of the peeping Tom episode when he laid bare Mlle.
+Vinteuil's deforming habituation is very difficult.</p>
+
+<p>Swann, now ill, and repentant, was consumed with ambition
+to introduce his wife, Odette, into high society, in which he
+succeeded to a great extent. Though he did not like M.
+Buntemps because of his reactionary opinions, he, “the director
+of the minister's office,” was an important personage and
+his wife, Mme. Buntemps, was a steady visitor in Odette's
+salon. But once in a while he was malicious enough to exasperate
+Mme. Buntemps. He told her once he would invite the
+Cottards and the Duchesse de Vendome to dinner. Mme. Buntemps
+protested, saying it was not seemly that the Cottards
+should be at the same table with the Duchesse. In reality she
+was jealous of the Cottards who were going to share the
+honour with her. The Prince d'Agrigente was invited, because
+it was altogether “private”! Odette is described as a woman
+of low intelligence, without education, speaking faulty French,
+but shrewd, dominating her husband. One of her guests was
+Mme. Cottard, the wife of Dr. Cottard, the medical bounder<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</span>
+who had now become Professor, a woman who did not belong
+to her present circle. But she had to invite a person who could
+tell her former friends of her high connections, so as to raise
+their envy.</p>
+
+<p>The Marquis de Norpais, a former ambassador, is admirably
+drawn. He was naturally considered by the narrator's
+father as the cream of society. Just think of it! a man with
+two titles: Monsieur l'Ambassadeur, and Son Excellence Monsieur
+le Marquis! It is true that he was an ambassador under
+a republican government. But because of this he was interesting,
+for despite his antecedents he was entrusted with several
+extraordinary missions by very radical ministers. When a
+monarchist would not accept that honour, the republican government
+having had no fear that he might betray it, M. de
+Norpais himself willingly accepted the charge. Being in his
+blood a diplomat, he could not help exercising the functions of a
+diplomat, though in his heart he detested the republican spirit
+of government.</p>
+
+<p>The narrator's mother did not admire his intelligence, but
+for the father every word of M. l'Ambassadeur de Norpais
+was an oracle. He had always wished that his son should become
+a diplomat, while the son wished to take up literature
+so as not to be separated from Gilberte. M. de Norpais, who
+did not much like the new style diplomats, told the narrator's
+father that a writer could gain as much consideration and
+more independence than a diplomat. His father changed his
+mind.</p>
+
+<p>It is quite impossible, within the space of an essay, to give
+even an outline of the remaining volumes that have already
+appeared of this amazing and epochal novel.</p>
+
+<p>Without doubt M. Proust had a definite idea in mind, a determination
+to make a contribution: to prove that the dominant
+force in mental life is association, the chief resource of
+mentality reminiscence. Thus the primitive instincts of mankind
+and their efforts to obtain convention's approbation furnish<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</span>
+the material with which he has built. It is extraordinary
+how large association bulks: individuals remind him of famous
+paintings, not merely the general characters of the people
+whom he encounters in his daily life, but rather what seem
+least susceptible of generalisation, the individual features of
+men and women whom he knows. For instance, a bust of the
+Doge Loredan by Antonio Rizzo, is suggested by the prominent
+cheekbones, the slanting eyebrows, in short a speaking likeness
+to his own coachman Rami; the colouring of a Ghirlandajo, by
+the nose of M. de Palancy; a portrait by Tintoretto, by the
+invasion of the plumpness of the cheek by an outcrop of
+whisker, the broken nose, the penetrating stare, the swollen
+eyelids of Dr. du Bolbon.</p>
+
+<p>If, on descending the stairs after one of the Doncières
+evenings, suddenly on arriving in the street, the misty night
+and the lights shining through suggest a time when he arrived
+at Combray, at once there is thrown on the screen of his consciousness
+a picture of incidents there and experiences elsewhere
+that are as vivid and as distinct as if he were looking at
+them on a moving-picture screen. Then suddenly there appears
+a legend “the useless years which slipped by before my
+invisible vocation declared itself, that invisible vocation of
+which this work is the history.” Like the monk who seeks God
+in solitude, like Nietzsche who sought Him in reason, M.
+Proust has sought to reveal his soul, his personality, the sum
+total of all his various forms of consciousness by getting
+memory to disgorge her contents, the key to the chamber being
+association.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“We try to discover in things, endeared to us on that account,
+the spiritual glamour which we ourselves have cast upon
+them; we are disillusioned, and learn that they are in themselves
+barren and devoid of the charm which they owed, in
+our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we
+mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array so as to
+influence and subjugate other human beings who, as we very<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</span>
+well know, are situated outside ourselves, where we can never
+reach them.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There are so many features of M. Proust's work that excite
+admiration that it is possible to enumerate only a few. Despite
+a studied style of confusion and interminable sentences, suspended,
+hyphenated, alembicated, and syncopated, that must
+forever make him the despair of anyone whose knowledge of
+French is not both fundamental and colloquial, he makes telling,
+life-like pen pictures of things and persons. Such is one
+of Françoise, the maid at Combray,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“who looked as smart at five o'clock in the morning in her
+kitchen, under a cap whose stiff and dazzling frills seemed
+to be made of porcelain, as when dressed for church-going;
+who did everything in the right way, who toiled like a
+horse, whether she was well or ill, but without noise, without
+the appearance of doing anything; the only one of my aunt's
+maids who when Mamma asked for hot water or black coffee
+would bring them actually boiling; she was one of those servants
+who in a household seem least satisfactory, at first, to a
+stranger, doubtless because they take no pains to make a conquest
+of him and show him no special attention, knowing
+very well that they have no real need of him, that he will cease
+to be invited to the house sooner than they will be dismissed
+from it; who, on the other hand, cling with most fidelity to
+those masters and mistresses who have tested and proved their
+real capacity, and do not look for that superficial responsiveness,
+that slavish affability, which may impress a stranger
+favourably, but often conceals an utter barrenness of spirit in
+which no amount of training can produce the least trace of
+individuality.</p>
+
+<p>“The daughter of Françoise, on the contrary, spoke, thinking
+herself a woman of today and freed from all customs, the
+Parisian argot and did not miss one of the jokes belonging to
+it. Françoise having told her that I had come from a Princess:
+'Ah, doubtless a Princess of the cocoanut.' Seeing that I was
+expecting a visitor, she pretended to think that I was called
+Charles. I answered 'No,' naïvely, which permitted her to
+exclaim 'Ah, I thought so! And I was saying to myself Charles<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</span>
+waits (charlatan).' It wasn't very good taste, but I was less
+indifferent when as a consolation for the tardiness of Albertine,
+she said, 'I think you can wait for her in perpetuity. She will
+not come any more.' Ah, our gigolettes of today!</p>
+
+<p>“Thus her conversation differed from that of her mother but
+what is more curious the manner of speaking of her mother
+was not the same as that of her grandmother, a native of
+Bailleau-le-Pin which was near the country of Françoise.
+However the patois were slightly different, like the two country
+places. The country of the mother of Françoise was made up
+of hills descending into a ravine full of willows. And, very far
+from there, on the contrary, there was in France a little region
+where one spoke almost exactly the same patois as at Meseglise.
+I made the discovery at the same time that I was bored by it.
+In fact, I once found Françoise talking fluently with a chambermaid
+of the house who came from the country and spoke
+its patois. They understood each other mostly. I did not
+understand them at all. They knew this but did not stop on
+this account, excused, so they thought, by the joy of being
+compatriots, although born so far apart, for continuing to
+speak before me this foreign language as if they did not wish
+to be understood. This picturesque study of linguistic geography
+and comradeship was followed each week in the kitchen
+without my taking any pleasure in it.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Time, M. Proust was convinced, was made for slaves. It
+takes longer to read his account of a soirée at the Prince de
+Guermantes' than it would to attend it. It requires half a
+volume to narrate it. The account is masterly, and the reader
+is filled with the feelings that actual experience might produce.
+Those who have had contact with aristocracy, and whose lucidity
+of mind has not been impaired by it, also find such an
+account interesting. Here one meets aristocrats of every complexion,
+heirs of the oldest and proudest names in Gotha's
+Almanach, and those whose pedigree is not so ancient, upon
+whom the former look condescendingly. As in a Zoo, one
+sees a great variety of the aristocrat genus, and if one has
+believed that the nobility is formed of people different and
+better than the common herd the delusion is dissipated. Here<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</span>
+is a light that fairly dazzles those who are susceptible to the
+appeal of clothes, wealth, and jewels. If one's yearnings are
+for things more substantial in human nature he will not be
+satisfied as a guest of the Prince de Guermantes. Diogenes
+there would have used his lantern in vain.</p>
+
+<p>One becomes intimately acquainted with the <em>haut monde</em>,
+their colossal pride, and overweening conceit, concealed from
+the eyes of those below them in the hierarchy by thin veils
+of conventional and shallow amiability which they make more
+and more transparent as the people they deal with are further
+removed from the blue zone of the <em>nobilior spectrum</em>. One
+discovers also another characteristic: the capacity for putting
+up with such pride and conceit from above, and for making
+the best of it for the sake of securing the lustre which comes
+with the good will of those higher up, and contact with them.</p>
+
+<p>In the society of the Guermantes one becomes acquainted
+with such specimens of human meanness and hatefulness, such
+hypocrisy, such paucity of the sentiments that ennoble life,
+that he finds himself wondering why better flowers do not
+grow in the enchanted gardens. Those which seemed so
+beautiful at a distance turn out to be not only without fragrance,
+but with a bad odour. The <em>grand monde</em>, in truth,
+seems to be nothing but a small world of gossiping and shallow
+talk, a world aware of no other nobility than that of
+inherited titles, and scorning the idea that real nobility is a
+refinement of the soul, produced by education, to which rich
+and poor, high and low, may all aspire. The feeling of a man
+not recognised as an aristocrat who, for some special reason,
+gains admission to this circle, is made vivid in the experience
+of a talented physician who has saved the life of the Prince
+de Guermantes and who owes his invitation to the reception
+to the Prince's gratitude. The experience of a Bavarian
+musician is also interesting. It shows how great can be the
+insolence of aristocracy swollen with vanity. At the soirée
+we meet nobles who never possessed ideals which acted as<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</span>
+armour against pollution, nobles with imaginations easily inflamed
+by the attractions of women servants, whose lust for a
+chambermaid is sufficient to dim all consciousness of their
+pedigrees. And we meet others who are even lower, noblemen
+and ladies who keep up the traditions of Sodom and Gomorrah
+in modern society.</p>
+
+<p>It may be beside the question to inquire the intention of
+the author in painting this picture of high society and then
+dwelling on aspects of it that can only cause disgust. His
+words at times seem to reveal a sarcastic intention. His
+descriptions are so full of minute details and so rich in incidents
+of extreme naturalness that it is impossible to believe that
+even a lively imagination could fabricate them. One easily
+sees that they are fragments of real life. This keeps the
+interest alive, despite the involved style. His periods are so
+twisted and turgid with associated thoughts, so bristling with
+parenthetical clauses that often profound effort is required
+to interpret them. There is none of the plain, clear, sane,
+sunny style of a Daudet, or of Paul Bourget. This causes a
+sensation of discomfort at times, especially when the author
+indulges in introspection that reveals a morbid imagination
+and pathological sensitiveness; as, for instance, in the distinction
+between abiding sorrows and fugitive sorrows; on
+how our beloved departed ones live in us, act on us, transform
+us even more than the living ones; and how those who are
+dead grow to be more real to us who love them than when
+they were alive.</p>
+
+<p>We feel an unhealthiness under it all. We have to stop
+and analyse, to unravel the main idea from the tangled skein
+in which it is hidden. But it is a work that brings its own
+reward. It brings real jewels of <em>finesse de pensée et d'observation</em>,
+such as those on the reminiscence of departed sensations
+and feelings; on the different selves which we have been in the
+past and which coexist in our present individuality; on the
+eclipses to which the latter is subject when one of its components<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</span>
+suddenly steps from the dark recesses into the vivid
+light of consciousness; on the elements of beauty apparent in
+different individuals who are partial incarnations of one great
+beauty without; on reminiscence of Plato; on the anxiety of
+expectation while awaiting a person; on the effect which consciousness
+of his own sinfulness has on the sinner; on the
+interchange of moral qualities and idiosyncrasies of persons
+bound by mutual sympathy; on the permanence of our passions—in
+mathematical jargon, a function of the time during
+which they have acted on our spirit. It also discloses treasures
+of delicate feeling, such as are awakened in a person by the
+image of a beloved one that flashes vivid in his memory.</p>
+
+<p>But to discover such treasures one has often to wade through
+a series of long and indigestible sentences of thirty or forty
+lines.</p>
+
+<p>I recall reading in an English magazine, a number of years
+ago, an article entitled “A Law in Literary Expression.” 
+Stated in its plainest terms, the law is this: that the length
+of the phrase—not the sentence, but its shortest fraction, the
+phrase—must be measured by the breath pause. M. Proust
+breaks this law oftener than any citizen of this country breaks
+the prohibition law, no matter how imperious may be his thirst.</p>
+
+<p>Finally the frank and scientific way in which he has discussed
+a subject that has always been tabooed in secular literature
+calls for remark. Of the posterity of Sodom he says it forms
+a colony spread all over the world, and that one can count it
+as one can count the dust of the earth. He studies all the
+types and varieties of sodomists. Their manners and ways,
+their sentiments, their aberrations of the senses, their shame
+are passed in review. It is a sort of scientific, poetical
+treatise. The actions in which the sodomistic instinct finds
+its outlet are often compared to the seemingly conscious actions
+by which flowers attract the insects that are the instruments
+of their fecundation. Botany and sexuality are mixed together.
+Sometimes the scientific spirit, gaining the upper hand, leads<span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</span>
+him to look upon these phenomena of genesic inversion as
+manifestations of a natural law, and therefore marvellous,
+like all the workings of nature. He is nearly carried away,
+and finds excuses for what is considered a vice, and seems to
+be on the verge almost of expressing his admiration.</p>
+
+<p>Some of his observations on sodomistic psychology are
+highly interesting, although expressed in long periods.</p>
+
+<p>I append a few pages of literal translation from the opening
+chapter of “Sodome et Gomorrhe”; first, that the reader may
+have a sample of M. Proust's style; second, that he may gain
+an insight of the grasp the writer has of one of nature's most
+unsolvable riddles; and finally, that he may have the description
+of an individual who plays an important part in the novel.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“At the beginning of this scene, before my unsealed eyes, a
+revolution had taken place in M. de Charlus, as complete, as
+immediate as if he had been touched by a magic wand. Until
+then, not understanding, I had not seen. The vice (so-called
+for convenience), the vice of each individual, accompanies him
+after the manner of those genii who are invisible to those
+who ignore their presence. Goodness, deceit, a good name,
+social relations do not allow themselves to be discovered,
+they exist hidden. Ulysses himself did not at first recognise
+Athene. But gods are immediately perceptible to gods, the
+like to the like, so M. de Charlus was to Julien. Until now, in
+the presence of M. de Charlus, I was like an absent-minded
+man in company with a pregnant woman, whose heavy figure
+he had not remarked and of whom, in spite of her smiling
+reiteration 'Yes, I am a bit tired just now,' he persists in asking
+indiscreetly, 'What is the matter with you then?' But, let
+some one say to him, 'She is pregnant,' he immediately is conscious
+of her abdomen and hereafter sees nothing but that.
+Enlightenment opens the eyes; an error dissipated gives an
+added sense.</p>
+
+<p>“Those persons who do not like to believe themselves examples
+of this law in others—towards the Messieurs de Charlus
+of their acquaintance whom they did not suspect even until
+there appears on the smooth surface of a character, apparently
+in every respect like others, traced in an ink until then<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</span>
+invisible, a word dear to the ancient Greeks, have only to recall,
+in order to satisfy themselves, how at first the surrounding
+world appeared naked, devoid of those ornamentations which
+it offers to the more sophisticated, and also, of the many times
+in their lives that they had been on the point of making a
+break. For instance, nothing upon the characterless face of
+some man could make them suppose that he was the brother,
+the fiancé or the lover of some woman of whom they are on
+the point of making an uncomplimentary remark, as, for example,
+to compare her to a camel. At that moment, fortunately,
+however, some word whispered to him by a neighbour
+freezes the fatal term on his lips. Then immediately appears,
+like a <em>Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin</em>, these words, 'This is
+the fiancé, or the brother, or the lover of the woman, therefore
+it would be impossible to call her a camel before him,' and,
+this new notion alone causes the retreat or advance of the
+fraction of those notions, heretofore completed, that he had
+had concerning the rest of the family.</p>
+
+<p>“The real reason that M. de Charlus was different from other
+men was because another being had been engrafted upon him,
+like the horse upon the centaur, that his being was incorporated
+with that of the Baron. I had not hitherto perceived.
+The abstract had not become materialised, the being, finally
+understood had lost its power of remaining invisible, and the
+transmutation of M. de Charlus into a new person was so
+complete that not only the contrasts of his face, of his voice, but
+retrospectively the heights and depths of his relations with me,
+everything, in fact, which had until then appeared incoherent,
+became intelligible, disclosed itself, like a phrase which, without
+meaning so long as the letters composing it are scattered
+becomes, if the characters be placed in their proper order, a
+thought impossible to forget.</p>
+
+<p>“Moreover I now understood why, a short time ago, when I
+saw M. de Charlus coming out from Mme. de Villeparisis' I
+thought he looked like a woman. It was because he was one!
+He belonged to that race of beings whose ideal is virile because
+their temperament is feminine, and who are, in appearance
+only, like other men. The silhouette cast in the facet of
+their eyes, through which they see everything in the universe,
+is not that of a nymph but of a beautiful young man.
+One of a race upon whom rests a curse, who is forced to live<span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</span>
+in an atmosphere of falsehood and perjury because he knows
+that his desire, that which gives to all creatures the greatest
+satisfaction in life, must be unavowed, being considered punishable
+and shameful, who must even deny God himself, since
+when even as a Christian he appears as an accused at the bar
+of the tribunal he must before Christ and in his name defend
+himself as if from a calumny from that which is his very life;
+son without a mother, forced to lie to her all her life, even to
+the moment when he is closing her eyes, friend without friendships,
+in spite of all those who are attracted by his charm, fully
+recognised, and whose hearts would lead them to be kind—for
+can those relations, which bloom only by favour of a lie,
+be called friendship, when the first burst of confidence he might
+be tempted to express, would cause him to be rejected with
+disgust? Should he, by chance, have to do with an impartial
+mind, that is to say a sympathetic one, even then diverted
+from him by a psychology of convention, would permit to flow
+from the confessed vice even the affection which is the most
+foreign to him—as certain judges extenuate and excuse more
+easily assassination amongst inverts and treason amongst Jews
+from reasons drawn from original sin and fatality of race.</p>
+
+<p>“Finally, lovers (at least according to the first theory advanced
+which one will see modified by the continuation and
+which would have angered them above everything had not this
+contradiction been wiped out from before their eyes by the
+same illusion that made them see and live) to whom the possibility
+of this love (the hope of which gives them the force to
+bear so many risks, so much solitude) is nearly closed since
+they are naturally attracted to a man who does not resemble
+in any way a woman, a man who is not an invert and who
+therefore cannot love them; consequently their desire would
+remain forever unappeased if money did not deliver to them
+real men or if the imagination did not cause them to take for
+real men the inverts to whom they are prostituted. Whose
+only honour is precarious; whose only liberty provisory,
+up to the discovery of the crime; whose only situation is
+unstable like the poet, who, fêted at night in all the salons,
+applauded in all the theatres of London is chased from his
+lodgings in the morning and can find no place to lay his head.
+Turning the treadmill like Sampson and saying like him, 'The
+two sexes will die each on his own side.' Excluded even (except<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</span>
+during the days of great misfortune when the greatest
+number rallies around the victim like the Jews around Dreyfus—from
+the sympathy—sometimes of society) excluded
+even from their kind who see with disgust, reflected as in a
+mirror which no longer flatters, all those blemishes which they
+have not been willing to see in themselves and which make
+them understand that that which they call their love (and to
+which, playing upon the word, they have annexed everything
+that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism can add to
+love) comes not from an ideal of beauty which they have
+chosen, but from an incurable malady. Like the Jews again
+(save a few who only care to consort with their own race and
+have always on the lips ritualistic words and consecrated
+pleasantries); they fly from each other, seeking those who are
+most unlike them, who will have nothing to do with them, pardoning
+their rebuffs, intoxicating themselves with their condescensions;
+but also reassembled with their kind by the very
+ostracism which strikes them, the opprobrium into which they
+have fallen, and finally taking on (as a result of a persecution
+similar to that of Israel) the physical and moral characteristics
+of a race, sometimes beautiful, often frightful, finding (in spite
+of all the mockeries that those more homogeneous, better
+assimilated to the other race, in appearance less of an invert
+heap upon him who is apparently more of one) finding even a
+kind of expansion in frequenting with their kind, even an aid
+from their existence so that while denying that they belong to
+that race (whose very name is the greatest of injuries) those
+who have succeeded in hiding the truth, that they also are of
+that despised race, unmask those others, less to injure them, not
+detesting them, than to excuse themselves, as a physician seeks
+the appendicitis inversion in history, they find pleasure in recalling
+that Socrates was one of them and that the same thing
+was said of Jesus by the Israelites, without remembering
+that then when homo-sexuality was normal there was no abnormality,
+as there were no anti-Christians before Christ, also
+that opprobrium alone makes it crime, since it has been only
+allowed to exist as crime because it is refractory to all predication,
+all example, to all punishment by virtue of special
+innate disposition which repulses men more (although it may
+accompany high moral qualities) than certain vices which contradict
+high moral qualities, such as theft, cruelty, bad faith,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</span>
+better understood, therefore more easily excused by men in
+general.</p>
+
+<p>“Forming a free-masonry, much more extended, more efficacious
+and less suspected than that of the lodges, because it
+rests upon an identity of tastes, of needs, of habits, of dangers,
+of apprenticeships, of knowledge, of traffic and of language.
+Whose members avoid one another and yet immediately recognise
+each other by natural or conventional signs, involuntary
+or studied, which disclose to the mendicant one of his kind in
+the lord whose carriage door he opens, to the father in the
+fiancé of his daughter, to him who had wished to be cured, to
+confess, in the physician, the priest or the lawyer whom he
+had gone to consult; all obliged to protect their secret, but,
+at the same time, sharing the secret of the others, which was
+not suspected by the others and which makes the most improbable
+romances of adventure seem true to them, for, in their
+romantic life, anachronically, the ambassador is the friend of
+the criminal, the prince who, with a certain freedom of manner,
+(which an aristocratic education gives and which would be
+impossible with a little trembling bourgeois) leaves the house
+of the duchess to seek the Apache. Rejected part of the human
+collectivity but all the same an important part, suspected
+where it does not exist, vaunting itself, insolently with impunity
+where it is not divined; counting its adherents everywhere,
+amongst the people, in the army, in the temple, in the prison,
+upon the throne; finally living, at least a great number of them,
+in a caressing and dangerous intimacy with men of the other
+race, provoking them, enticing them to speak of this vice as
+if it were not theirs, a game which is made easy by the blindness
+or the falseness of the others, a game which may be prolonged
+for years—until the day of Scandal, when these conquerors
+are devoured. Until this time obliged to hide their
+true life, to turn away their regards from where they would
+wish to fix them, to fix them upon that from which they would
+naturally turn away—to change the meaning of many adjectives
+in their vocabulary, a social constraint merely, slight compared
+to that interior constraint which their vice, or that which
+is improperly called so, imposes upon them, less with regard
+to others than to themselves and in a manner which makes it
+seem not to be a vice—to themselves. But certain ones, more
+practical, more hurried, who have not time to bargain and to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</span>
+renounce the simplification of life and the gain of time that
+might result from cooperation, have made two societies, of
+which the second is exclusively composed of beings like themselves.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>M. Proust's work is the first definite reply in the affirmative
+to the question whether fiction can subsist without the seductive
+power due to a certain illusory essence of thought. Whether
+in this respect he will have many, if any, successful followers
+is to be seen. But his own volumes stand as an astonishing
+example of an organic and living fiction obtained solely by
+the effort to portray truth.</p>
+
+<p>Because of the unique qualities of his novels and the fact
+that they are developed on a definite psychological plan, more
+than the usual interest in a favourite writer is attached to the
+personality of M. Proust. During his lifetime inaccessible
+both because of aristocratic taste and of partial invalidism, his
+figure is likely to become more familiar to the reading world—even
+to those who never read his books—than the figures of
+great authors who walked with the crowd and kept the common
+touch.</p>
+
+<p>Neither Proust the man nor Proust the author can be
+considered apart from his invalidism. It shows all through his
+writings, although what the malady was which rendered him, if
+not a <em>de facto</em> invalid, certainly a potential invalid, is not
+known. Some of his friends accused asthma, others a disease
+of the heart, while still others attributed it to “nerves.” In
+reality his conduct and his writings were consistent with
+neuropathy and his heredity. And if the hero of “A la Recherche
+du Temps Perdu” is to be identified with himself, as
+is popularly supposed, he was from early childhood delicate,
+sensitive, precocious, and asthmatic, that is profoundly
+neuropathic.</p>
+
+<p>He was fastidious in his tastes; he liked the best styles,
+the most elegant ladies, aristocratic salons, and fashionable
+gatherings. He was noted for the generosity of his tips. His<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</span>
+life reminds one of the hero of Huysman's famous novel. In
+his early days, M. Proust was a great swell, and there is no
+doubt that many of his descriptions of incidents and persons
+are elaborations of notes that he made after attending a reception
+given by the Duchesse de Rohan, or other notables of the
+Faubourg St. Germain, in whose houses he was an habitué.</p>
+
+<p>His social activity may have been deliberate preparation
+for his work, as his fifteen-year apprenticeship to Ruskin was
+preparation. Or it may have been a pose, much the same as his
+mannerisms, habits, customs, and possibly some features of his
+invalidism, were a pose. Surely he enjoyed the reputation of
+being “different.” </p>
+
+<p>He ruminated on Rousseau and studied Saint-Simon. When
+he arrived at the stage where he could scoff at one and spurn
+the other, he learned Henry James by heart. Then he wrote;
+he had prepared himself. The deficit which art and endeavour
+failed to wipe out was compensated by his maternal inheritance.</p>
+
+<p>One may infer whither he is going by reading Proust once,
+but to accompany him he must be read a second time. Those
+who would get instruction and enlightenment must read him
+as Ruskin, his master, said all worth while books must be
+read: “You must get into the habit of looking intensely at
+words and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by
+syllable.” </p>
+
+<p>The discerning reader must look intensely at M. Proust's
+words. If he looks long enough they seem to take on the
+appearance of <em>Mene, Tekel, Phares</em>.</p>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" >CHAPTER VI<br>
+<small>TWO LITERARY LADIES OF LONDON: KATHERINE MANSFIELD<br>
+AND REBECCA WEST</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Many persons are so constituted that they accept any
+positive statement as fact unless they know it to be
+false. Few more positive statements are made in print than
+“So and So is England's or America's or France's leading or
+most popular writer of fiction or verse.” Publicity agents have
+found apparently that such claim sells books and needs no
+substantiation. The reading public rarely protests. It denies
+in a more effective way, but before the denial gets disseminated
+many credulous seekers of diversion and culture are misled.</p>
+
+<p>There are several young women writing fiction in England
+today of whom it can be said truthfully that they ornament
+the profession of letters. Women have long justified their reputation
+for being intuitive by their fictional writing. It is likely
+that they may proceed to establish an equal reputation for
+accurate observation, logical inference, and temperate narrative.
+Had not the waves of death recently encompassed
+Katherine Mansfield in her early maturity she would have
+remained at the top of the list, the place where now, varying
+with individual taste and judgment, stand the names of Dorothy
+Richardson, Rebecca West, Stella Benson, Virginia Woolf,
+Sheila Kaye-Smith, Mary Webb, Rose Macaulay, to mention
+no others. For the first time in history women prose writers
+preponderate, and it is a good augury for a country which has
+been so quickly and successfully purged of anti-feminism.</p>
+
+<p>Katherine Mansfield's output has been small, but quality
+has made up for quantity. Her reputation is founded on two<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</span>
+volumes of short stories. To say that they reveal capacity to
+create life, to recognise the temperament, intellectuality, and
+morality of the ordinary human beings that one encounters,
+and to display their behaviour; as well as a power to analyse
+personality and to depict individuality that equals de Maupassant,
+is to make a truthful statement, and a temperate one.
+Indeed, she seemed to her contemporaries to be possessed of
+some unsanctified and secret wisdom.</p>
+
+<p>Her history is brief. She was Kathleen Beauchamp, third
+daughter of a man of affairs, recently knighted, and was born
+in Wellington, New Zealand. She was 23 years old when she
+married, just before the war, J. Middleton Murry, the British
+critic and novelist. Her first book “In a German Pension,” 
+published when she was 21, gave no promise of great talent.
+Her first mature work was a series of book reviews in <em>The
+Nation and Athenæum</em>, about 1919. She was quickly recognised
+to be a subtle and brilliant critic. In 1920 the publication
+of “Bliss and Other Stories” revealed her metal and temper.
+Development and maturity marked her second and last
+collection, “The Garden-Party and Other Stories,” which followed
+in 1922. Hardly had the promise of her early work been
+recognised before it was overshadowed by progressive pulmonary
+disease, and after long months of illness, during which
+she was obliged to spend most of her time away from England,
+she died in France on January 9, 1923.</p>
+
+<p>Katherine Mansfield had a technique which may be compared
+to that of a great stage manager. When the play is put
+on, the scenes and the characters, the atmosphere and the environment,
+the sentiment and the significance are satisfying,
+intelligent and convincing. The world seen through her eyes,
+and the conduct of its most highly organised product, is the
+world that may be seen by anyone who has normal, keen vision.
+The conduct of the people who encumber it is that which an
+observer without inherited bias or acquired bigotry knows intuitively,
+and has learned from experience, is the conduct that
+reflects our present development, our attitudes, our interests,
+our desires, and most of all our dispositions.</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe25" id="ilo_fp155">
+  <img class="w100 p2" src="images/ilo_fp155.jpg" alt="ilop155" title="p155ilo">
+  <figcaption class="caption p2b"><span class="allsmcap">KATHERINE MANSFIELD</span></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>She prepared the stage and then her characters came on.
+She didn't bore with narrative of their birth, weary with incidents
+of their development, or disgust with details of their
+vegetative existence. They reacted to their immediate desires
+and environment in the way that people act in real life. She
+had a comprehensive understanding of human motives, and
+she realised how firmly engrained in man is the organic lust to
+live and to experience pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>To find the balance in fiction midway between the “joy
+stuff” which for the last decade has been threatening to reduce
+American literature to a spineless pulp, and morbid realism
+which, in both England and this country, has been reflecting
+the influence of so-called psychoanalysis, is an accomplishment
+deserving of the thanks of all admirers of sanity in art. Miss
+Mansfield has succeeded in doing this, with the result that a
+large measure of the charm of her art lies in its sanity, its
+extraordinary freedom from obsessions, from delusions, and
+from excessive egocentricity. To borrow a term from music,
+she may be said to have possessed an unerring sense of pitch.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</span></p>
+
+<p>The easiest way of estimating any unknown element is to
+compare it to something already known, and Katherine Mansfield
+has been called the Chekhov of English fiction. Such a
+comparison may be useful as an approach to her work. In
+truth, however, while her position in English fiction may be
+compared with that of the illustrious Russian, she is in no
+sense an imitator, a disciple of him or of any one else. Her
+art is her own.</p>
+
+<p>It can best be estimated from study of her last published
+story. If Katherine Mansfield, feeling herself already drawn
+into the shadow of approaching death, had tried to leave the
+world one final sample of her art which would epitomise her
+message and her method, “The Fly,” published in <em>The Nation
+and Athenæum</em> of March 18, 1922, is a lasting triumph of her
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</span>
+success. In a story of twenty-five hundred words she has said
+more than most authors say in a one-hundred-thousand word
+novel, or, indeed, in many novels. Not only is every word
+pregnant with meaning, but for those who can read between the
+lines there is an indictment of the life she is picturing too poignant
+for any but strong souls who can look upon the wine of
+life when it is red; who can even drain the cup to the bitter
+dregs in their sincere desire to learn its truth, without suffering
+the draft to send its poison into their souls. It is not that Katherine
+Mansfield was poisoned with the bitterness of life, or
+weakened with the taint of pessimism. On the contrary, she
+was as immune to bitterness, to poison, to weakness, as a disembodied
+spirit would be to disease. She was like pure white
+glass, reflecting fearlessly the part of life that was held before
+her, but never colouring it with her own personality. Her
+reflection was impartial.</p>
+
+<p>In “The Fly” the <em>dramatis personæ</em> are old Mr. Woodifield,
+the boss, and the fly. Old Mr. Woodifield is not described,
+but the reader sees him, small of body and of soul, shrivelled,
+shaky, wheezy, as he lingers in the big, blatantly new office
+chair on one of the Tuesdays when, since the “stroke” and
+retirement from his clerkship, he has escaped from the solicitude
+of the wife and the girls back into his old life in the city—“we
+cling to our last pleasures as the tree clings to its last
+leaves”—and revelled in the sense of being a guest in the
+boss's office. The boss is more graphic because he remains
+nameless. “Stout, rosy, five years older than Mr. Woodifield
+and still going strong, still at the helm” is what we are told
+he is, but this is what we see: A brutal, thick man, purring
+at the admiration of the old clerk for his prosperity revealed
+in the newly “done-up” office; self-satisfied, selfish, and supercilious,
+offering a glass of whiskey as a panacea for the old
+man's tottering pitifulness, and then listening, insolently tolerant,
+to the rambling outpourings of the old soul, harmless,
+disciplined to long poverty of purse, of life, of thought, about<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</span>
+the “Girls” visit to the soldier's grave in Belgium and the price
+they paid for a pot of jam. Then the picture changes. The
+shuffling footsteps of the old man have died out, the door is
+closed for half-an-hour, the photograph of a “grave-looking boy
+in uniform standing in one of those spectral photographers'
+parks with photographers' storm-clouds behind him,” looks
+out at the boss who has “arranged to weep.” But the floodgates
+which have opened at the tap of the one sentiment of
+which the boss was capable are now suffering from the rust
+of six years. Tears refuse to come.</p>
+
+<p>A fly drops into the pot of ink, and the boss, absent-mindedly
+noticing its struggles for freedom, picks it out with a pen and
+shakes it on to the blotting paper, where the little animal makes
+a heroic effort to clean off the ink and get ready for life again.
+But the boss has an idea. In spite of himself, his admiration
+is aroused by the fly's struggle, his pluck—“that was the way
+to tackle things, that was the right spirit. Never say die; it
+was only a question of.... But the fly has again finished its
+laborious task and the boss has just time to refill his pen, to
+shake fair and square on the newly cleaned body yet another
+dark drop. What about it this time?” And yet another.
+“He plunged his pen back into the ink, leaned his thick wrist
+on the blotting paper, and as the fly tried its wings, down
+came a great heavy blot. What would it make of that?...
+Then the boss decided that this time should be the last, as
+he dipped the pen deep in the inkpot. It was. The last blot
+fell on the soaked blotting-paper and the bedraggled fly lay in
+it and did not stir.” And as he rings for some new blotting-paper,
+a feeling of unaccountable wretchedness seizes him and
+he falls to wondering what it was he had been thinking about
+before the fly had attracted his attention. “For the life of
+him, he could not remember.” And that is the end of the
+story.</p>
+
+<p>Katherine Mansfield's art resembles that of the great Russian
+physician-novelist in that she preaches no sermon, points<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</span>
+no moral, expounds no philosophy. Although there is no available
+exposition of her theories, her work is evidence that her
+conception of art was to depict the problematic as it was
+presented to her, and leave the interpretation to the reader's
+own philosophy. She made Raoul Duquette say, in “Je ne
+parle pas Française,” one of the most psychologically remarkable
+of her stories: “People are like portmanteaux, packed
+with certain things, started going, thrown about, tossed away,
+dumped down, lost and found, half emptied suddenly or
+squeezed fatter than ever until finally the Ultimate Porter
+swings them on to the Ultimate Train, and away they rattle.” 
+That may have been her own belief.</p>
+
+<p>While it may be true in a certain sense that the artist sees
+only himself in his art, there is an essential difference between
+seeing himself reflected in life and in seeing life as in himself.
+Katherine Mansfield habitually did the latter. And it is this
+fact that enabled her to use as models, or accessories, or background
+any of the chance travellers she may have encountered
+with almost equal success. If she ever reflected herself in her
+art, it was a normal and objective self, a self which was interested
+in the drama being enacted about her, not merely the
+drama of her own soul; and in the fine points of this drama as
+well as in its leading actors and more obvious aspects.</p>
+
+<p>Her world from which she has gathered the material for her
+two books of stories has been richly variegated, and her readers
+are given the full benefit of a versatile experience. She was <em>La
+Gioconda</em> of English fiction writers. “Je ne parle pas Française”
+shows that she knew the soul maladies and, like Walter
+Pater's conception of Leonardo's masterpiece, she knew some
+of the secrets of the grave: though she had not “been a diver in
+deep seas,” nor “trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants.” 
+She did not <em>finish</em> an individual. She narrated an
+episode which revealed his or her character; she didn't lead
+up to some epochal event like marriage, a dramatic reconciliation,
+a studied folly, or a crime. She depicted an episode,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</span>
+and left you to put such interpretation upon it, or to continue
+it, as your experience, imagination, or desire might suggest.
+She was a picture maker, not pigment by pigment, cell by cell,
+but with great sweeps of the brush.</p>
+
+<p>She usually depicted sentimental <em>men</em>, whose long suits were
+fidelity and constancy, or men whose fundamental urges were
+not harmonised to convention. Her women were, in the main,
+fickle, designing, inconstant, shallow, truckling, vain. “Marriage
+à la Mode,” is a specimen. William keeps his romantic
+and sentimental view of life after prosperity and progeny come.
+Isabel doesn't. She is all for progress and evolution—new
+house, new environment, new friends, new valuation of life's
+possessions. He goes home for week-ends chockful of love
+and sentimentality. She meets him at the station with her
+new friends—sybarites and hedonists in search of sensation.
+He soon finds he isn't in the game at all as Isabel now plays
+it. So he decides to abbreviate his visit. On the way back to
+town he concocts a long letter full of protestations of unselfish
+love, and willingness to stand aside if his presence is a drag
+on her happiness. She reads it aloud to her guests who receive
+it with sneers and jeers. Isabel has a moment of self-respect,
+and withdraws to her room and experiences the vulgarity
+and loathesomeness of her conduct. She will write to
+William at once and dispel his fears and reassure him, but
+while she is holding her character up to her eyes disparagingly
+she hears her guests calling her and decides “I'll go with them
+and write to William later—some other time. Not now. But
+I shall <em>certainly</em> write.” Procrastination, not hesitation, condition
+her downfall.</p>
+
+<p>In “Je ne parle pas Française” she handled a subject—the
+implantation of the genesic instinct—in such a way that the
+reader may get little or much from it, depending upon his
+knowledge and experience. But in the lines and between the
+lines there is exposition of practically all that is known of
+the strange deviations of the libido. Raoul Duquette and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</span>
+Dick, his English friend, who cannot kill his mother, cannot
+give her the final blow of letting her know that he has fallen
+in love with Mouse, are as truly drawn to life as Paul Verlaine
+and Arthur Rimbaud, or as Encolpius and Giton of the
+Satyricon.</p>
+
+<p>It is a far cry from the depths glimpsed—but with such terrible
+sureness—in this story, to the budding soul of a young
+girl from the country as pictured in Leila in “Her First Ball”;
+or to the very spirit of healthy youth, both frivolous, superficial
+youth, and sensitive idealising youth, which exudes from
+the pages of “The Garden-Party.” </p>
+
+<p>She depicted transformation of mental states, the result
+of suggestion or impulse, much as a prestidigitator handles
+his Aaron's rod. This is particularly well seen in Leila. The
+reader shares her joyous mental state, full of vistas of hope
+and love and joy. Then a fat man who has been going to
+parties for thirty years dances with her and pictures her future
+follies, strifes, struggles, and selfishness at forty. At once
+she realises her doll is stuffed with sawdust, and cries and wants
+to go home, but a young man comes along, dances with her
+again, and behold the filling isn't sawdust, but radium!</p>
+
+<p>Katherine Mansfield's art may be studied in such a story as
+“At the Bay.” The <em>dramatis personæ</em> are: Beryl, a temperamental
+young lady looking for romance, seeking fulfilment of
+destiny, thwarted by a Narcissus inhibition; Linda, her sister,
+without temperament, to whom fulfilment is repellant; Mrs.
+Harry Kember, unmoral and immoral, a vampire with a past
+and keen for a future; Harry Kember, her husband of whom
+many things are said, but none adequate to describe him;
+Stanley Burnell, a conventional good man—mollycoddle; Jonathan
+Trout, a poet compelled by fate to be a drone; Alice, a
+servant in transformation from chrysalis to butterfly; Mrs.
+Stubbs, a vegetative hedonist; and several delightful children
+and a devoted “Granma.” </p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</span></p>
+
+<p>They spend a holiday at the seashore and Beryl looks for
+romance. Here is the picture:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the
+whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist.
+The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You
+could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows
+began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and
+bungalows the other side of it; there were no white dunes
+covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing
+to mark which was beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew
+had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops hung on the
+bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp
+on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and the pinks in the
+bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with wetness.
+Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew lay on
+the flat nasturtium leaves. It looked as though the sea had
+beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave
+had come tippling, rippling—how far? Perhaps if you had
+waked up in the middle of the night you might have seen a
+big fish flicking in at the window and gone again....” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>You feel the wetness of it. Then come the first signs of
+waking up in the place: the shepherd with his dog and flock
+making for the Downs, the cat waiting on the gatepost for
+the milk-girl—harbingers of the day's activities.</p>
+
+<p>Then the picture is animated.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“A few minutes later the back door of one of the bungalows
+opened, and a figure in a broad-striped bathing suit flung down
+the paddock, cleared the stile, rushed through the tussock
+grass into the hollow, staggered up the sandy hillock, and
+raced for dear life over the big porous stones, over the cold,
+wet pebbles, on to the hard sand that gleamed like oil. Splish-splosh!
+Splish-splosh! The water bubbled round his legs as
+Stanley Burnell waded out exulting. First man in as usual!
+He'd beaten them all again. And he swooped down to souse his
+head and neck.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is a complete revelation of his character—smug, righteous,
+selfish, the centre of a world in which every tomorrow<span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</span>
+shall be like today, and today is without romance. He feels
+cheated when Jonathan Trout tries to talk to him.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“But curse the fellow! He'd ruined Stanley's bathe. What
+an unpractical idiot the man was! Stanley struck out to sea
+again, and then as quickly swam in again, and away he
+rushed up the beach.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is something pathetic in his determination to make
+a task of everything, even the entailments of matrimony.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“You couldn't help feeling he'd be caught out one day, and
+then what an almighty cropper he'd come! At that moment
+an immense wave lifted Jonathan, rode past him, and broke
+along the beach with a joyful sound. What a beauty! And
+now there was another. That was the way to live—carelessly,
+recklessly, spending oneself. He got on to his feet and began
+to wade towards the shore, pressing his toes into the firm,
+wrinkled sand. To take things easy, not to fight against the
+ebb and flow of life, but to give way to it—that was what was
+needed. It was this tension that was all wrong. To live—to
+live!”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The whole world of his home moves round Stanley. When
+he returns for breakfast he has every member of the family
+working for him. When Beryl does not help him at once, its
+mechanism must be dislocated. But Linda he can't draw into
+the net. “Linda's vagueness on these occasions could not be
+real, Stanley decided.” </p>
+
+<p>The bathing hour on the beach for the women and children
+is as vivid as if taken by a camera.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“The firm, compact little girls were not half so brave as the
+tender, delicate-looking little boys. Pip and Rags, shivering,
+crouching down, slapping the water, never hesitated. But
+Isabel, who could swim twelve strokes, and Kezia, who could
+nearly swim eight, only followed on the strict understanding
+they were not to be splashed. As for Lottie, she didn't follow
+at all. She liked to be left to go in her own way, please. And
+that way was to sit down at the edge of the water, her legs<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</span>
+straight, her knees pressed together, and to make vague motions
+with her arms as if she expected to be wafted out to sea.
+But when a bigger wave than usual, an old whiskery one, came
+lolloping along in her direction, she scrambled to her feet with
+a face of horror and flew up the beach again.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mrs. Harry Kember and Beryl give an exhibition of the
+vampire and the novice, while Linda dreams the morning away
+in revery and retrospect. Beryl's dream of romance when
+she is alone in the garden after everybody else in the household
+has gone to bed receives a rude jolt from Harry Kember.</p>
+
+<p>The story is illustrative of Miss Mansfield's art in leaving
+her characters without killing or marrying them or bringing
+great adventure into their lives. It leaves one with a keen
+interest in what is next for Beryl, although she is not the most
+attractive of the figures in the story, but there is no indication
+that we shall meet her again. “Granma” and the children are
+the features of this story, and appear as real as life. The
+author's faculty in making the reader interested in characters
+who do not play heroic or leading rôles is distinctive. Even the
+sheep-dog's encounter with the cat on the gatepost is delightful,
+also the glimpse of Mrs. Stubbs' cottage with its array
+of bathing suits and shoes and the lady's reception of Alice are
+art: “With her broad smile and the long bacon knife in her
+hand, she looked like a friendly brigand.” </p>
+
+<p>“Prelude,” the introductory story of “Bliss and Other
+Stories,” is a further revelation of Beryl, with side lights on
+her sister Linda and Linda's husband, Stanley, and her quite
+wonderful mother. The Narcissus in Beryl has bloomed.
+Forced to accept bed and board from her brother-in-law, she
+bewails her fate while chanting the praises of her physical
+charms and mental possessions. Linda, by this time, has given
+herself all the air of confirmed invalidism. Linda gets her
+emotional appeasement from what might have been; Beryl,
+from what is going to be—both foundationed in introspection.
+When Linda first met Stanley out in Australia she<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</span>
+scorned him, but previous to or after their marriage she fell
+in love with him. But her antipathy to childbearing and her
+fear of it are so profound that they colour all her thoughts
+and emotions. This is best seen when she relates her dream
+about birds.</p>
+
+<p>“Prelude” is not a story of Linda, but of Beryl and her
+hypocrisy. It should be dovetailed into “At the Bay.” The
+overtures and the temptation which were made to her by Mr.
+and Mrs. Harry Kember have not borne fruit. She is in love
+with herself and it may be that that is what the author meant
+to convey. The description of herself and her comment
+on her own appearance: “Yes, my dear, there is no doubt about
+it, you really are a lovely little thing” is very illuminating.
+She persuades herself that she is a potential Nina Declos and
+that if opportunity had not been denied her she could rival
+Messalina. Hypocrisy is bearing in on her and it is not
+quite evident, at the close of “Prelude,” where it is going to
+lead her.</p>
+
+<p>The burden of the story is to intensify interest in Beryl,
+and her influences and surroundings, and to heighten the suspense
+of the reader. On finishing “At the Bay” one has a
+picture of the romantic girl; at the close of “Prelude” one
+feels that something is going to happen to her before the
+author finishes with her. The reader gets no clue, however,
+to what it might be, except that it would be the working
+out of her temperament—admiration for self and longing for
+romance through which to express this self. Her longing at
+first seemed to be for expression of self biologically and intellectually;
+now it seems to be to find a setting in which to
+frame becomingly this adorable self—an essential difference
+in character and the difference that is the axis upon which
+the story might be expected to turn. If people are their temperaments,
+it is such subtle differences of temperament which
+determine destiny, or what they shall work out for themselves
+from given circumstances.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</span></p>
+
+<p>Beryl is more cold-blooded, more calculating than she at
+first appeared to be, and never again will she be in danger of
+capitulating to a Kember. What she wants is to shine, and
+she is going to use her valued attractions designedly as
+currency to accomplish this. Beryl and Linda are studies in
+selfishness and introspection. The latter is phlegmatic and
+lazy, mentally and emotionally as well as physically.</p>
+
+<p>“Granma” and the children are still the most attractive
+figures in the family. How such a woman as “Granma” could
+have had daughters like Beryl and Linda is truer to life than to
+fiction. Had we known their father they might not have been
+so enigmatic.</p>
+
+<p>Katherine Mansfield had a genius for catching the exact
+meaning of the little touches in life, the little ironies and comedies
+as well as the single little wild flower in a rank growth of
+weeds. She was delightfully objective. She had a quality rare
+in women writers, especially, of not putting all her treasures in
+one basket, of not concentrating upon one character and that
+character more or less the expression of herself; and of being
+interested in the whole drama as it passed. She could enter
+into the soul of a charwoman or a cat and take a snap-shot
+of it which made the reader love the charwoman or the cat,
+as well as she could paint a picture that gives the very atmosphere
+of children at play or of dawn at the seashore or night
+in a quiet house—even better than she could make an X-ray
+study of the soul of a selfish woman or a stupid self-righteous
+man.</p>
+
+<p>The “high light” of “The Garden-Party” is the contrast
+between a typical happy prosperous family and an equally
+unhappy poor one; a garden-party for the young girls of the
+first family, the accidental death of the man and the wage-earner
+of the second. One lives on the hill in the sunlight;
+the other in the damp forbidding hollow below. They are near
+neighbours in point of space; strangers in all other respects.
+One makes an art of the graces and pleasures of life; the other<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</span>
+is familiar with the gloom typified by poverty and death.
+Both accept their existences unquestioningly, in worlds as
+different psychologically as they are physically.</p>
+
+<p>The author does not preach; there is no straining for effect.
+Laura, one of three sisters, is more sensitive than the other
+members of the family. She alone feels contrasts. She is
+revelling in the preparations for the garden-party when she
+hears from the workmen of the man's sudden death, and her
+joy is clouded. But her mother and sisters make light of it,
+and the party proceeds—a picture of average wholesome young
+joyousness. Then the mother sends Laura, with a basket of
+cakes, to the man's family. The dramatic contrast is in Laura's
+impressions when she goes, in her party clothes, with the
+frivolous-looking basket, down into the hollow at dusk. That
+is all. There is no antagonism, no questioning of fate, no
+sociology—just a picture. Only the ability not to use an extra
+word, the taste and the humour which kept out any mawkishness
+saved the story from being “sob stuff.” </p>
+
+<p>When Katherine Mansfield read virtues into her female characters
+she usually made them humble, lowly, or plain, such
+as Ma Parker, Miss Brill, and Beryl's mother. She could introduce
+Ma Parker who cleaned the flat of the literary gentleman
+every Tuesday, and in eleven pages, without a single approach
+to sentimentality, make you in love with the old scrubwoman,
+with her hard life and heroic unselfish soul, when you left
+her standing in the cold street wondering whether there was
+any place in the world where she could have a cry at last. The
+motive of this story is much the same as that of “The Garden-Party,” 
+the sharp contrast between two extreme types of life
+which circumstances bring close together.</p>
+
+<p>In “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” the author walked
+with a sure step on thin ice from the first sentence to the last,
+never taking a false step or undignified slide. Humour alone
+preserved the balance where the ice was not too thin, and kept
+her from slipping over the invisible line of safety in the direction<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</span>
+of bathos on the one side, or of the coarsely comic on the
+other. To make two old ladies who had spent their lives
+“looking after father, and at the same time keeping out of
+father's way” and who at father's death find themselves among
+those whom life had passed by, interesting and intriguing, is
+a severe test for a writer. Not only are they dead emotionally,
+but their habit of thought has become too set to be readjusted
+to their new freedom. Miss Mansfield made them as funny
+as they naturally would have been, without “making fun” of
+them. Their funniness is lovable. For instance:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“At the cemetery while the coffin was lowered, to think that
+she and Constantia had done this thing without asking his
+permission. What would father say when he found out?
+For he was bound to find out sooner or later. He always did.
+'Buried. You two girls had me buried.' She could hear his
+stick thumping.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Or when the organ-grinding and the spot of sunshine on their
+mother's picture start in both silent reminiscence as to whether
+life might have been different if she had lived.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Might they have married? But there had been nobody for
+them to marry. There had been father's Anglo-Indian
+friends before he quarrelled with them. But after that she and
+Constantia never met a single man except clergymen. How
+did one meet men? Or even if they'd met them, how could
+one have got to know men well enough to be more than
+strangers? One read of people having adventures, being followed,
+and so on. But nobody had ever followed Constantia
+and her.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Miss Brill” is a sketch with a whimsical pathos. A little
+old maiden lady who dresses up every Sunday and goes to the
+<em>Jardin Publiques</em> in Paris and sits on a bench, getting her romance
+out of watching people and feeling that she is a part
+of the passing life, goes one Sunday as usual. The feature in
+the sketch is the little fur piece around her neck.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Miss Brill put up her hand and touched her fur. Dear little
+thing! It was nice to feel it again. She had taken it out of its
+box that afternoon, shaken out the mothpowder, given it a
+good brush, and rubbed the life back into the dim little eyes.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is to her like a pet animal or even a child. At first she
+finds the park less interesting than usual, but finally, as she
+senses romance in a pair of park lovers who sit down on her
+bench, she hears the boy say, “that stupid old thing at the
+end there. Why does she come here at all—who wants her?
+Why doesn't she keep her silly old mug at home?” And the
+girl, giggling, replies, “It's her fu-fur which is so funny....
+It's exactly like a fried whiting.” Suddenly the romance and
+the joy have all gone out of the old lady, and when she lays
+away her little fur piece in its box sadly and puts on the lid
+she thinks she hears something crying.</p>
+
+<p>Ability to depict the hidden speck of beauty under an uncompromising
+exterior not only inspired some of Katherine
+Mansfield's finest touches, but is especially refreshing after
+acquaintance with many writers who seem bent solely upon
+discovering some inmost rottenness and turning upon it the
+X-rays. There are many old ladies in this book, and the loving
+skill with which she has reproduced for the reader the charm
+she was able to see in them is indicative not only of her art,
+but also of her essential wholesomeness.</p>
+
+<p>“The Man Without a Temperament” is an objective study
+of an unpopular man. One knows him from the few outward
+glimpses given of him as well as if the author had made an
+intensive psychological study of him. That is, one knows him
+as one knows other people, not as he knows himself. The
+sketch is pregnant with irony and pathos. Without a temperament—unfeeling—is
+the world's verdict of him. In reality,
+he has more feeling than his critics. What he lacks is not
+feeling, but expression. He is like a person with a pocketful
+of “paper” who has to walk because he hasn't change to pay
+his carfare, or to go hungry because he can't pay for a meal.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</span>
+People who know him trust him, even if they do not fancy
+him or feel quite at ease with him; but with strangers he has
+no chance. A life study of such a character would make him
+interesting. A photograph shows him as one of the people
+who “never take good pictures.” </p>
+
+<p>In “Bliss and Other Stories,” the author went into deeper
+water than in the other collection. She was less concerned
+with the little ironies and with the fine points of her characters,
+and more with great passions.</p>
+
+<p>“Bliss,” the story, shows the same method as do many of her
+other stories, but reversed. It is as if her reel were being run
+before the reader backwards. Instead of hunting out the one
+flower in a patch of weeds, she painted a young married
+woman's Garden of Eden and then hunted down the snake.
+From the first note of Bertha Young's unexplainable bliss one
+knows that the snake motive is coming, but does not know how
+or where. The feeling of it runs through Bertha's psychical
+sense of secret understanding—the “something in common”
+between herself and Pearl Fulton, who, by a subtle uncanniness,
+is made to suggest a glorified “vamp.” The leading
+motive of the story is the psychic sympathy between the
+women, who are antitheses. Commonly such a sense of understanding
+would take the form of antipathy. That it is attraction—harking
+back in all likelihood to something in Bertha
+remote and unrecognised—constitutes the distinctiveness of
+the motive. The art is revealed in a clear-cut picture—nothing
+more. Katherine Mansfield knew so marvellously where to
+stop. She had a good eye, a deft hand, an understanding
+mind, a sense of humour, and she loved her fellow-beings.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Until “The Judge” was published Miss Rebecca West, in the
+opinion of many amateur and professional critics, was the most
+promising young woman to enter the field of literature in the
+reign of King George. Her advent to the literary world was
+impressive, and in a little book on Henry James in the “Writers<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</span>
+of the Day” series she revealed a capacity of interpretation
+and facility of expression which made her elders envious and
+her contemporaries jealous. It was obvious to the casual
+reader of this book, and of her journalistic contributions, that
+not only had she the artistic temperament, but that she was
+familiar with its display in others, and that she had read
+widely, discriminatingly, and understandingly. Moreover, she
+was a thoroughly emancipated young woman and bore no
+marks of the cage that had restrained her sex. Her cleverness,
+her erudition, her resourcefulness were admitted. It was
+rated to be an asset, also, that she did not hesitate to call a
+spade a spade or to use the birch unsparingly when she felt it
+was for the benefit of the reading public, misled and deluded as
+it so often is by false prophets, erring evangelists, and self-seeking
+promoters. In other words, though she had sentiment
+and sympathy, she knew how to use them judiciously. In
+“Notes on Novels” she constantly reminds herself that there
+is a draught that we must drink or not be fully human. One
+must know the truth. When one is adult one must raise to
+one's lips the wine of truth, heedless that it is not sweet like
+milk but draws the mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion
+with reality, or else walk forever queer and small like
+a dwarf. Miss West does not intend that her countrymen shall
+display these deformities.</p>
+
+<p>Her first novel, “The Return of the Soldier,” a fictional
+exposition of the Freudian wish, was acclaimed by critics
+as the first fulfilment of the promise she had given. The teachings
+of the Austrian mystic were not much known then in
+England, the country that now seems to have swallowed them,
+bait, line, and sinker, not only in the fields of fiction but in
+pedagogy and in medicine; so Miss West's little book was
+more widely read and discussed than it might be today when
+Miss May Sinclair, Mr. J. D. Beresford, Mr. D. H. Lawrence,
+and many other popular novelists have made his theories look
+like facts to the uninitiated.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</span></p>
+
+<p>The story is of Christopher, the ideal type of young
+Englishman who knows how to fight and to love.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“He possessed in a great measure the loveliness of young men,
+which is like the loveliness of the spring, foal or the sapling,
+but in him it was vexed with a serious and moving beauty by
+the inhabiting soul. To see him was to desire intimacy with
+him so that one might intervene between this body which was
+formed for happiness and the soul which cherished so deep a
+faith in tragedy.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is narrated by his cousin who has loved him platonically
+since youth. Chris had a romantic and ardent love affair with
+an inn-keeper's daughter in his youth, but he married Kitty,
+a beautiful little conventional non-temperamental young
+woman with a charming and cultivated soprano voice, of the
+class of women who</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“are obscurely aware it is their civilising mission to flash the
+jewel of their beauty before all men so that they shall desire
+and work to get the wealth to buy it, and thus be seduced
+by a present appetite to a tilling of the earth that serves the
+future.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>He goes to the war, gets concussion of the brain which
+causes amnesia, or forgetfulness of certain epochal events in
+his life, particularly his marriage to Kitty. “Who the devil
+is Kitty?” he replies when he is told she might have something
+to say on hearing of his plan to marry Margaret Allingham.
+Though some of the events of his life from twenty-one, when
+he fell in love with Margaret, to thirty-six, when he got
+injured, can be revived in his memory by Jenny, a resourceful
+understanding person, the sort of cousin every man should
+have, no argumentation can reconcile him to Kitty, and “he
+said that his body and soul were consumed with desire for
+Margaret and that he would never rest until he once more
+held her in his arms.” </p>
+
+<p>After exhausting every means that love and science can
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</span>
+suggest to jog his memory or wipe out the amnesia, it is decided
+to bring him and Margaret together. No one who had
+known her as the “Venus of Monkey Island,” a composite of
+charity and love, would recognise her now, seamed and scarred
+and ravaged by squalid circumstance, including dreary matrimony
+to a man with a weak chest that needed constant
+attention. Moreover, “all her life long Margaret had partaken
+of the inalienable dignity of a requited love, and lived with
+men who wore carpet slippers in the house.” Such experience
+had left deforming scars. However, Chris sees her with the
+eyes of youth, and her presence resurrects juvenile emotions.
+Under their influence Margaret undergoes transformation.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“She had a little smile in her eyes as though she were listening
+to a familiar air played far away, her awkwardness
+seemed indecision as to whether she would walk or dance to
+that distant music, her shabbiness was no more repulsive than
+the untidiness of a child who had been so eager to get to the
+party that it has not let its nurse fasten its frock.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>However, their interviews do not get them anywhere from
+Kitty's standpoint, and she decides to send for Dr. Gilbert
+Anderson.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Heaven knows she had no reason for faith in any doctor,
+for during the past week so many of them sleek as seals with
+their neatly brushed hair and their frockcoats, had stood
+around Chris and looked at him with the consequential deliberation
+of a plumber.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But Dr. Anderson was different.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“He was a little man with winking blue eyes, a flushed and
+crumpled forehead, a little grey moustache that gave him the
+profile of an amiable cat and a lively taste in spotted ties, and
+he lacked that appetiteless look which is affected by distinguished
+practitioners.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe25" id="ilo_fp175">
+  <img class="w100 p2" src="images/ilo_fp175.jpg" alt="ilop173" title="p173ilo">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="allsmcap">REBECCA WEST</span></figcaption>
+</figure>
+<p class="center p2b">Photograph by <em>Yevonde, London.</em></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Dr. Anderson explains to the family that Christopher's
+amnesia is the manifestation of a suppressed wish and that his
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</span>unconscious self is refusing to let him resume his relations with
+his normal life. He forgot his life with his wife because he
+was discontented, and there was no justification for it for
+“Kitty was the falsest thing on earth, in tune with every kind
+of falsity.” The doctor proposes psychoanalysis, but Margaret
+says she knows a memory so strong that it will recall
+everything else, in spite of his discontent, the memory of the
+boy, his only child who had died five years before. Dr.
+Anderson urges her to take Christopher something the boy
+had worn, some toy they used to play with. So she takes a
+jersey and ball and meets Chris in the garden where there is
+only a column of birds swimming across the lake of green light
+that lays before the sunset, and as Chris gazes at Margaret
+mothering them in her arms the scales fall from his eyes and
+he makes obeisance to convention and bids his creative libido
+<em>au revoir</em>.</p>
+
+<p>Jenny is witness of the transformation and when Kitty asks
+“How does he look?” she answers, though her tongue cleaves
+to the roof of her mouth, “Every inch a soldier.” </p>
+
+<p>When Miss West next essayed fiction in “The Judge” it was
+the diagnosis of the creative urge that was her theme. It is one
+of Freud's contentions that the male child, before it hears the
+voice of conscience and the admonition of convention, has
+carnal yearnings for the mother, the female child for the
+father. With the advent of sense, with the development of
+individuality, with the recognition of obligation to others, and
+particularly with the acquisition of the sense of morality,
+these are replaced with what are called normal desires. In
+some instances the transformation does not take place. The
+original trend remains, and it is spoken of as an infantile fixation.
+Its juvenile and adult display is called sin ethically and
+crime socially.</p>
+
+<p>The wages of sin still is death, according to Miss West's
+portrayal, but it is not called sin. It is merely behaviourism
+interpreted in the light of the New Psychology.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the
+sins of the father” is her thesis. As a work of art “The
+Judge” has elicited much praise. As a human document, a
+mirror held up to actual life, a statement of the accepted facts
+of heredity and of behaviour, and of the dominancy and display
+of passion, lust, jealousy, anger, revenge, I doubt that it
+merits unqualified approbation.</p>
+
+<p>Marion Yaverland, daughter of a Kentish father and a
+French mother, had yielded without compunction to the wooing
+of the local squire and had borne a child, Richard, around
+whose development, personality, and loving the story is built.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Vitality itself had been kneaded into his flesh by his
+parents' passion. He had been begotten when beauty, like a
+strong goddess, pressed together the bodies of his father and
+mother, hence beauty would disclose more of her works to
+him than to other sons of men with whose begetting she was
+not concerned.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But the goddess did not give him straight genesic endowment,
+so he was not able to keep filial love and carnal love in
+their proper channels. And from this flowed all the tragedy.
+His mother realised his infirmity, though she didn't look upon
+it as an infirmity, from the earliest days; and, unfortunately,
+she did not attempt to eradicate it—if it is ever eradicable.</p>
+
+<p>Squire Harry behaved badly to Marion, save financially,
+and public opinion backed up by a stoning in the streets (a
+real Old Testament touch) by a moron and his more youthful
+companions, made her accept an offer of marriage from the
+squire's butler, a loathsome creature called Peacey. In proposing
+marriage and promising immunity to its obligations he
+said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Marion, I hope you understand what I'm asking you to do.
+I'm asking you to marry me. But not to be my wife. I
+never would bother you for that. I'm getting on in life, you
+see, so that I can make the promise with some chance of keeping
+it.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</span></p>
+
+<p>But Peacey deceived no one save Marion. Miss West's description
+of the one visit of violence which he made to his
+wife, and which was followed in due time by Roger, whom
+Richard hated from birth, is a bit of realism that in verisimilitude
+has rarely been excelled. Roger was a pasty, snivelling,
+rhachitic child who developed into a high-grade imbecile of
+the hobo type, and finally managed to filter through the Salvation
+Army owing to some filter paper furnished by his
+mother that bore the legend “For the Gov<sup>t</sup> and Comp<sup>a</sup> of the
+Bank of England.” </p>
+
+<p>From earliest childhood Richard and his mother both realised
+that their intimacy was unnatural and unpromising for
+happiness. When he was two years old</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“He used to point his fingers at her great lustrous eyes as he
+did at flowers, and he would roll his face against the smooth
+skin of her neck and shoulders; and when he was naked after
+his bath he liked her to let down her hair so that it hung round
+him like a dark, scented tent.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Poor little monster, how unfortunate that he could not then
+have been given a hormone that would extrovert his budding
+perversion!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“She always changed her dress for tea, and arranged her
+hair loosely like a woman in a picture, and went out into the
+garden to gather burning leaves and put them in vases about
+the room, and when it fell dark she set lighted candles on the
+table because they were kinder than the lamp to her pain-flawed
+handsomeness and because they kept corners of dusk
+in which these leaves glowed like fire with the kind of beauty
+that she and Richard liked. She would arrange all this long
+before Richard came in, and sit waiting in a browse of happiness,
+thinking that really she had lost nothing by being cut off
+from the love of man for this was very much better than anything
+she could have had from Harry.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Somewhat like the way the daughter of Senator Metellus
+Celere, called by some Claudia and by others Lesbia, arranged
+the visits of Catullus.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</span></p>
+
+<p>When Richard was sixteen he forced life's hand and leapt
+straight from boyhood into manhood by leaving school where
+he had shown great promise in science, and becoming a sailor
+so that he should be admirable to his mother. His wanderings
+took him to South America where he had great success in affairs
+of the heart and of the purse. It is with disposition of the latter
+that the book opens in the office of a lubricitous old Scotch
+solicitor where sits a young red-haired temperamental suffragette
+whimpering for the moon.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen Melville is a lovable Celt of seventeen, and her creator
+displays a comprehensive insight into her mind and emotions.
+She is what Rebecca West once was and wished to be. It is
+sad that the pathway of her life leads so early to the <em>Via Dura</em>
+and that Richard Yaverland had not tarried in Vienna or
+Zurich to be psychoanalysed.</p>
+
+<p>Richard falls in love with her at first sight. He woos her
+ardently, though simply, and she responds like a “nice” girl,
+like a girl who feels that for the endowment of that most wondrous
+thing in the world, the cerebral cortex, it is vouchsafed
+her to exercise restraints and make inhibitions which insects
+and animals cannot. In the highest sense she is rational and
+instinctive.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen goes south to visit her future mother-in-law and a few
+days later Richard joins them. Roger meanwhile has “found
+Jesus,” and Poppy, a Salvation Army lassie, one stage removed
+from “Sin.” While knocking at Marion's door to gain entry
+that they may announce their intention to marry, their gaze
+floats upward and they see Ellen being kissed by the man to
+whom she will be married in three months. Roger, who is
+instinctive but not rational, puts a wrong interpretation upon
+it, and from that mal-interpretation the final tragedy flows. A
+few days later Marion realises there is no happiness for
+Richard and Ellen so long as she lives. She walks out into
+the marshes. Roger accuses Richard of driving his mother to
+it “because she saw that there was something wrong between<span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</span>
+you two.” He elaborates the accusation, and Richard drives
+a bread-knife into Roger's heart.</p>
+
+<p>Richard knows his doom is sealed. So he invites Ellen to
+share a cattlemen's hut with him on the farther side of the
+creek where his mother had drowned herself, until the people
+come to take him—and to share it comprehensively.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Her love had not been able to reach Richard across the
+dark waters of his mother's love and how like a doom that love
+had lain on him. Since life was like this she would not do what
+Richard asked.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But she does.</p>
+
+<p>The mode in which “The Judge” is cast is noteworthy because
+of its novelty and of the success attending it. Here is
+no sequential narrative, no time-table of events in the order in
+which they happened. The contact of Richard and Ellen is
+set forth in a straightforward way, but the main thesis of the
+book, the Laocoon grip of mother-love on Richard is conveyed
+indirectly, surreptitiously, atmospherically rather than verbally.
+Ellen, though she is quite normal, senses it at once
+when she meets Marion, and the writer approximates perfection
+of her art most closely in narrations of the first interviews
+of these two women, who are as unlike as the Colonel's lady
+and Judy O'Grady.</p>
+
+<p>While this mode may not prove an obstacle to an easy grasp
+of the novel upon first reading by writers or critics, it is doubtful
+whether the casual reader for diversion will comprehend
+its significance without special effort and perhaps several attempts
+at mastering the intricacies in the development of the
+story. The plan which the author has adopted of beginning,
+in direct narrative form, with the mature life of Richard and
+his love for Ellen, and then revealing through retrospect and
+suggestion the events of his early life and that of his mother,
+is a tax upon the technique of any novelist. The form has been
+used with notable success by Miss Elizabeth Robins in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</span>
+“Camilla.” But Miss West has not entirely mastered its difficulties,
+and her failure to do so seriously mars the story.</p>
+
+<p>Miss West's reputation for brilliancy has not suffered by
+“The Judge,” but if one were to sentence her after reading it,
+he would be compelled to say she is no novelist. If it is an
+index of her imaginative capacity, of her conception of life,
+of her insight into conduct, of her knowledge of behaviour,
+we must content ourselves with her contributions as critic and
+guide.</p>
+
+<p>The subject of her two novels is behaviourism of sexual
+motivation. It is an index of the change that has taken place
+in Great Britain within the past ten years, a change that should
+be acclaimed by everyone desirous of the complete emancipation
+of women.</p>
+
+<p>Rebecca West has leaned her ear in many a secret place
+where rivulets dance their wayward round, and beauty born of
+murmuring sound has passed into her soul, to paraphrase the
+words of one who, were he in the flesh, would likely not meet
+Miss West's entire approbation.</p>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" >CHAPTER VII<br>
+<small>TWO LESSER LITERARY LADIES OF LONDON:<br>
+STELLA BENSON AND VIRGINIA WOOLF</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Miss Stella Benson and Mrs. Virginia Woolf are
+young women who have come to the fore very rapidly.
+The former, who lived in this country for two years after the
+war, published in 1915, when she was barely out of her teens,
+a novel called “I Pose” which revealed an unusual personality
+with an uncommon outlook on life, and an enviable capacity
+to describe what she saw, felt, and fabricated. Until the appearance
+of her last novel it might be said that she created
+types which symbolised her ideas and attitudes and gave expression
+to them through conveniently devised situations,
+rather than attempting to paint models from life and placing
+them in a realistic environment.</p>
+
+<p>“I Pose” is a story of allegorical cast lightened with flashes
+of whimsical sprightliness. A pensive Gardener who likes to
+pose as “original,” a Suffragette who disguises romance under
+a mask of militancy, a practical girl, Courtesy, and a number
+of others take an ocean voyage and have many adventures, at
+the end of which the Suffragette and the Gardener find themselves
+in love, just as any other young people who had
+been dancing and playing tennis, instead of posing as individuals
+with convictions.</p>
+
+<p>For the setting of her two succeeding books, “This is the
+End,” and “Living Alone,” Miss Benson created a world of
+her own, and in a foreword to the latter book she says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“This is not a real book. It does not deal with real people,
+nor should it be read by real people. But there are in the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</span>
+world so many real books already written for the benefit of
+real people, and there are still so many to be written, that I
+cannot believe that a little alien book such as this, written for
+the magically-inclined minority, can be considered too assertive
+a trespasser.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Her world is not the traditional fairyland of the nursery,
+nor are the supernatural endowments of some of the characters
+the classic equipment of witches and fairies, although her
+<em>dramatis personæ</em> include both who function under the law of
+Magic. Rather is her dramatic machinery in these books a
+vehicle in the form of a sort of delicate symbolism for getting
+over a very sane attitude toward certain social foibles and
+trends of today. Incidentally it gives her opportunity of
+expressing this attitude in frequent witticisms and epigrammatic
+sayings for which she has a gift. In “Living Alone”
+social service and organised charity are the targets for her
+irony. She says,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Perception goes out of committees. The more committees
+you belong to, the less of ordinary life you will understand.
+When your daily round becomes nothing more than a round
+of committees you might as well be dead ... organizing work
+consists of sitting in 'busses bound for remote quarters of London,
+and ringing the bells of people who are almost always
+found to be away for a fortnight.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>So after Sarah Brown, whose work consists of</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“sitting every morning in a small office, collecting evidence
+from charitable spies about the Naughty Poor, and, after wrapping
+the evidence in mysterious ciphers, writing it down very
+beautifully upon little cards, so that the next spy might have
+the benefit of all his forerunners' experience,” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>eats the magic sandwiches which the witch has given her for
+her lunch, the scales fall from her eyes. “I am sentimental,” 
+she says to herself.</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</span></p>
+
+</div>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe25" id="ilo_fp185">
+  <img class="w100 p2" src="images/ilo_fp185.jpg" alt="ilop183" title="p183ilo">
+  <figcaption class="caption p2b"><span class="allsmcap">STELLA BENSON</span></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</span></p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“It is sentimental to feel personal affection for a Case, or to
+give a child of the Naughty Poor a penny without full enquiry,
+or to say 'a-goo' to a grey pensive baby eating dirt on the
+pavement ... or in fact to confuse in any way the ideas of
+charity and love.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>She resigns her “job” and her place on the committees and
+goes to live in the House of Living Alone.</p>
+
+<p>In other words, Miss Benson gives the artist in her what is
+called “rope.” She doesn't ask herself, “Will people think I
+am mad, or infantile?” She doesn't care what “people think.” 
+And that is an encouraging sign. Women writers will come to
+their estates more quickly and securely the more wholeheartedly
+they abandon themselves to portraying instincts as
+they experience them, behaviour as they observe it, motives
+and conduct as they sense and encounter them, accomplishments
+and aspirations as they idealise them, the ideals being
+founded, like the chances of race horses, on past performances.</p>
+
+<p>In her last novel, “The Poor Man,” Miss Benson's art shows
+tremendous development. This story is characterisation in the
+finest sense. Edward, the poor man, as a psychological study,
+is living, vivid, almost tragically real in the reactions which
+betray his inherent defects—a poor devil who never gets a
+chance. Miss Benson preaches no sermon, points no moral,
+makes no plea. She gives us a slice of life—and gives it relentlessly,
+but justly. It is the Old Testament justice which
+visits the iniquity of the father upon the third and fourth
+generations, and leaves the reader with the congenial task of
+finishing the sentence by supplying the mercy without which
+this old world could hardly totter under the weight of this
+Commandment. The story, however, makes no reference
+either to eugenics or to religion. The application is for the
+reader to supply—if he is so inclined. The author is not concerned
+with “science,” but with art. She does not bore us
+with a history of Edward's heredity or of his early life. She
+introduces him to us sitting in Rhoda Romero's room in San<span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</span>
+Francisco—an unwelcome guest—without throwing light upon
+his previous existence, except that he had been “shell-shocked”
+and had experienced three air raids in London.</p>
+
+<p>From his introduction we know Edward as we know an
+acquaintance, not as we know ourselves. His tragedy is his
+feeble mentality and still feebler temperament, and the heart
+of the tragedy is the contrast between his intentions and his
+acts. Edward always means well. He is not vicious; not lazy.
+But he is stupid. He wants to be decent; wants to be liked;
+even wants to work. He is weak, sickly, drinks too much, and
+there is nothing he knows how to do well. It is as a victim,
+rather than as an aggressive wrong-doer, that we see him
+secretly currying favour with school-boys he is supposed to be
+teaching, and ignoring their insults, selling what belongs to
+others, and at last robbing a boy of thirteen who has been left
+alone by his father in a hotel in Pekin, whence Edward has
+gone in headlong and blind pursuit of Emily, with whom he has
+become infatuated without even knowing her name. But such
+is the art of his delineator that one finds oneself almost pitying
+him when his infatuation climaxes in the declaration from
+Emily: “Can't you leave me alone? I can't bear you. I
+couldn't bear to touch you—you poor sickly thing.” It is on
+this note that the drama ends.</p>
+
+<p>If one were obliged to confine himself to backing one entry
+in the Fiction Sweepstakes now being run in England (entries
+limited to women above ten and under forty), he would do
+well to consider carefully the Stella Benson entry. Many
+would back Sheila Kaye-Smith, but the expert and seasoned
+bettor would be likely to find so many characteristics of the
+plough-horse that he would not waste his money.</p>
+
+<p>Had Rose Macaulay not succumbed to smartness and become
+enslaved by epigram, her chances would have been excellent.
+As it is, she attempts to carry too much weight. The
+committee, the literary critics, have done what they could
+to lighten it, but “Mystery at Geneva” is her answer.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</span></p>
+
+<p>E. M. Delafield, Clemence Dane, and even G. B. Stern
+would be selected by many, no doubt. But judged from their
+record, not on form, they cannot be picked as winners.</p>
+
+<p>The entry that is most likely to get place, if it doesn't win,
+is the youngest daughter of the late Sir Leslie Stephen, Mrs.
+Virginia Woolf.</p>
+
+<p>“Mark on the Wall,” her most important story, deals with
+the flood of thought, conscious and unconscious, when so-called
+abstraction is facilitated by intent gazing. The hypnotist
+anæsthetises the consciousness by having the subject gaze
+at some bright object, she by gazing at a snail. The illusion
+facilitates thought of the place and of the lives that have been
+lived there. The richness of the thought stream thus induced
+gives full play for her facility of expression and capacity for
+pen pictures.</p>
+
+<p>There is in Mrs. Woolf a note of mysticism, of spirituality
+which reveals itself in a conscious or unconscious prayer for
+the elusive truth. This note of itself sets her apart from the
+realistic woman writers of today. Although often vividly
+realistic in her form, there is in her work an essence which
+escapes the bounds of realism. This is most strongly acknowledged
+in “Monday or Tuesday,” a volume of short stories and
+sketches. The book takes its name from a little sketch of
+three hundred and fifty words, for which the only accurate
+label is “prose poem.” It is a direct illustration of the author's
+meaning when she makes her hero say, in “The Voyage Out”:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“You ought to write music.... Music goes straight for
+things. It says all there is to say at once. In writing it seems
+to me there's so much scratching on the match-box.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>For prose writing “Monday or Tuesday” is a triumph in the
+elimination of “scratching on the match-box.” One recognises
+in it the longing, more or less vaguely felt by all people, but
+inexpressible by most of them who are not poets, musicians,
+or artists in form or colour, for some supreme good which she<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</span>
+calls truth. The New Psychology would attribute it to the
+unconscious and call it an ugly name. But Mrs. Woolf does
+not name it; she merely gives voice to the aspiration welling
+up from somewhere in people's deeper selves and hovering
+hauntingly, just out of range but near enough to colour
+the quality of their thoughts, even when they are occupied
+with the most trivial and commonplace business of life.
+They can never elude it, any more than they can long elude
+the “Hound of Heaven,” but unlike the latter it is not a relentless
+pursuer, but a lovely, tantalising wraith—always present
+but never attainable or definable.</p>
+
+<p>In “An Unwritten Novel,” in the same collection, Mrs.
+Woolf again reveals a power of discernment, as well as the
+irony which is a part of her large human sympathy, in the
+conclusion of the story, which opens with:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to
+make one's eyes slide over the paper's edge to the poor woman's
+face—insignificant without that look, almost a symbol of
+human destiny with it.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>During a railway journey the writer makes up a novel to fit
+the face of the old woman opposite her—a story of an old maid
+whom life had cheated, thwarted, and denied all expression
+of sex, and left her embittered, resentful, envious, and
+starved.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“They would say she kept her sorrow, suppressed her
+secret—her sex, they'd say—the scientific people. But what
+flummery to saddle her with sex!”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>When she reaches her destination the old woman is met by
+her son—and the “story” remains unwritten.</p>
+
+<p>In “A Society,” Mrs. Woolf shies a few brick-bats—and
+well-aimed ones—at modern feminism. Her gesture is, however,
+more one of the irresistible impulse of the humourist to
+enjoy herself than any intention to do serious violence.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</span></p>
+
+<p>The members of the Society, who are a number of young
+girls bent upon self-education and believing that the object
+of life is to produce good people and good books, find themselves
+as a result of their investigations forced to acknowledge
+that if they hadn't learned to read they might still have been
+bearing children in ignorance, and that was the happiest life
+after all. By their learning they have sacrificed both their
+happiness and their ability to produce good people, and they
+are confronted, moreover, with the awful thought that if men
+continue to acquire knowledge they will lose their ability to
+produce good books.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Unless we provide them with some innocent occupation we
+shall get neither good people nor good books; we shall perish
+beneath the fruits of their unbridled activity; and not a human
+being will survive to know that there once was Shakespeare.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Society disbands with the conclusion that when a little
+girl has learned how to read “there's only one thing you can
+teach her to believe in—and that is in herself.” </p>
+
+<p>“Kew Gardens” is as vivid a picture as if it had been painted
+in colour, of the public gardens on a hot summer day, with
+their procession of varied humanity, old, young, and in the flush
+of life, each flashing for a moment with all of its own intense
+personality, like a figure in a cinema, before the reader, and
+then passing into the shadow as vague as the breath of the
+flowers, the buzzing of the dragon-fly, or the memories which
+for a moment the garden had invoked.</p>
+
+<p>The two novels, “The Voyage Out,” published in 1915, and
+“Night and Day,” in 1919, are love stories in which, through
+the efforts of the lovers to find and express themselves, the
+author reveals her own ideas of life. Her machinery is largely
+that of dialogue between the lovers, and her chief actors are
+normal young men and women, wholesome in their outlook, as
+well as frank in their expression of their problems, which revolve
+largely around matrimony. The result is that while the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</span>
+novels are introspective in a way, as well as daring in their
+analysis of the author's psychology, they are free from the
+morbidness of many of the introspective books of today.
+“The Voyage Out” is the expression of healthy, normal youth
+reverently but straightforwardly seeking in marriage the
+deeper values that underlie its superficialities and justify the
+quality of its idealism.</p>
+
+<p>In no more striking and creditable way have the women of
+Britain demonstrated the legitimacy of “Rights” than by their
+fiction of the past few years.</p>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" >CHAPTER VIII<br>
+<small>THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DIARIST: W. N. P. BARBELLION</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“The life of the soul is different. There is nothing
+more changing, more varied, more restless ... to describe
+the incidents of one hour would require eternity.” —<em>Journal
+of Eugénie de Guérin.</em></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Bruce Frederick Cummings, an English entomologist
+and assistant at the Natural History Museum,
+South Kensington, developed in early life an infectious disease
+of the central nervous system called disseminated sclerosis,
+which riddles the brain and spinal cord with little islets of
+tissue resembling scars, and died of it October 22, 1919, in the
+thirtieth year of his age. Six months before his death he published
+a book entitled “The Journal of a Disappointed Man,” 
+under the pen name of W. N. P. Barbellion. It is not destined
+to live as long as Pepys' “Diary” or Amiel's “Journal,” but it
+may outlive “The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff”—the three
+great diaries of the past century. “The Journal of a Disappointed
+Man,” in conjunction with another called “A Last
+Diary,” published after his death, may be looked upon as the
+revelation of a conscious mind, as complete as the conscious
+mind can make it. These books afford us opportunity to study
+the psychology of one variety of self-revelation, just as the
+books of James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson permit study
+of the subconscious mind, and more specifically undirected or
+wishful thinking, technically called autistic.</p>
+
+<p>While absolute classification of people is always inaccurate
+and misleading, still for the convenience of this study, in order
+to bring into high relief the features which distinguish
+Barbellion's diaries from the other three great self-revelations<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</span>
+of the conscious mind, the authors mentioned may be said to
+typify four distinct classes of diarists. The immortal Pepys
+may be dismissed with the words: pedant, philosopher, humourist.
+Amiel may be considered the mystic poet, with emphasis
+upon the spiritual side of his nature; Marie Bashkirtseff,
+the emotional artist whose talent was interpretive rather
+than creative; and Barbellion, the man of science, direct,
+forceful, effective on his objective side, but subjectively morbid
+and egocentric, unable to estimate correctly his own limitations
+or to direct his emotions into channels which would
+have made for happy living or sane thinking.</p>
+
+<p>Cummings began to keep a diary when he was thirteen
+years old, and after seventeen years he had accumulated
+twenty post-quarto volumes of manuscript. Two years before
+his death he made an entry “Am busy rewriting, editing and
+bowdlerising my Journal for publication against the time when
+I shall have gone the way of all flesh. Reading it through
+again, I see what a remarkable book I have written.” In it
+and in another small volume published posthumously, called
+“The Joy of Life,” he said,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“You will find much of Bruce Frederick Cummings as he
+appears to his Maker. It is a study in the nude, with no appeal
+to pemmicanised intellects, but there is meaty stuff in it,
+raw, red or underdone.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The noteworthy features of his life may be stated briefly.
+He was the youngest child of a journalist known in the little
+town of Barnstable, in Devon, as a shrewd and facile man,
+and of a timid, pious mother of the lower middle class. A puny
+child, backward in development mentally and physically, solitary,
+sensitive, shy, secretive, and self-conscious, he displayed
+an uncommon interest in nature, birds, fishes, insects, and all
+wild creatures. When he was fourteen he determined to become
+a naturalist, but his father's illness obliged him to contribute
+to the family maintenance. At sixteen he wrote,</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Signed my death warrant, i.e. my articles apprenticing me
+to journalism for five years. By Jove, I shall work frantically
+during these years so as to be ready at the end of them to take
+up a natural history appointment.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And work he did, for in little more than a year he was offered
+a small appointment at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory,
+which he had to refuse because of his father's complete
+incapacity. But after another year of newspaper work and
+intensive study at night and at odd moments, he won an
+appointment in competitive examination to the staff of the
+Natural History Museum at South Kensington. There he
+remained six years, until July, 1917, when he was compelled
+to resign owing to the progress of his disease. In September,
+1915, he married, after he had been declared unfit for military
+duty and after the secret of his obscure and baffling disease,
+and its outcome, had been revealed to some of his family and
+to his fiancée.</p>
+
+<p>Two months after he married, despite his infirm state, he
+offered his services to his King and Country, having previously
+obtained from his own physician a letter addressed to the
+Medical Officer Examining Recruits. The recruiting officer
+promptly rejected him, so the letter was not presented. On his
+way home Barbellion opened it and read his death sentence.
+“On the whole, I am amazed at the calm way in which I take
+this news.” At first he thought he would read up his disease
+in some System of Medicine, but the next day he wrote,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I have decided never to find out what it is. I shall find out
+in good time by the course of events. A few years ago the
+news would have scared me. But not so now. It only interests
+me. I have been happy, merry, quite high spirited
+today.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But this was soon followed by depression and despair, as the
+progress of the disease was attested by the occurrence of
+rapidly increasing incapacity to get about, to use his arm, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</span>
+to see. At that time he was ignorant of the fact that his wife
+had been informed of the nature and outcome of his disease
+previous to their marriage, and he was very much concerned
+lest she should find out. Within a year he discovered that she
+had known from the beginning and he was “overwhelmed with
+feelings of shame and self-contempt and sorrow for her.” </p>
+
+<p>The last months of his life were made as comfortable as
+possible by funds subscribed by a few literary men who had
+become interested in him from the publication of some chapters
+of the book in the London <em>Mercury</em>, and by the royalties
+from the publishers of the “Journal” in book form.</p>
+
+<p>Barbellion's appearance, as described by his brother A. J.,
+in the Preface to “The Last Diary,” was striking. He was
+more than six feet tall, thin as a rake, and looked like a typical
+consumptive. His head was large and crowned with thick
+brown hair which fell carelessly about his brow; his face pale
+and sharply pointed; eyes deepset, lustrous and wide apart;
+nose slightly irregular; mouth large and firm; and chin like a
+rock. “Few people, except my barber, know how amourous
+I am. He has to shave my sinuous lips.” He had an indescribable
+vividness of expression, great play of features, and a
+musical voice. His hands were strong and sensitive and he
+had a characteristic habit of beating the air with them in
+emphasising an argument. He moved and walked languidly,
+like a tired man, and stooped slightly, which gave him an attitude
+of studiousness.</p>
+
+<p>Barbellion's fame depends entirely upon “The Journal of a
+Disappointed Man.” “Enjoying Life and Other Literary
+Remains” is commonplace and might have been done by any
+one of countless writers whose years transcend their reputations.
+“The Last Diary,” on the other hand, has a note of
+superficiality which is prejudicial to permanence. It suggests
+that it was done for effect and displays studious effort to be
+wise and philosophical. Although the book contains many
+beautiful specimens of sentiment and shows that Barbellion had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</span>
+enhanced his literary skill and added to his capacity for expression
+and sequential statement, it also shows that the
+processes of dissolution, physical and mental, were going on
+apace.</p>
+
+<p>So much for the outward facts of his life. The value of the
+record lies entirely in the sincerity and completeness of the
+“portrait in the nude” which the author has painted of himself
+and which furnishes the basis for a psychological study of the
+original.</p>
+
+<p>Three characteristics make the shape and colour of this
+portrait. Whether seen in one comprehensive glance as a composite
+picture, or subjected to a searching analysis of its separate
+parts, these three facts must be reckoned with in any
+estimate of his life or of his personality as a whole; or of the
+smallest act, thought, or emotion which entered into it. The
+features or leading motives which shaped the human study
+that Barbellion has given us in his diaries are what he calls
+ambition to achieve fame, a passion for the study of zoology,
+and a struggle against disease.</p>
+
+<p>Every life which raises its possessor above the level of the
+clod may be called a battleground. The battle, in Barbellion's
+case a hard-fought one, was between ambition which inspired
+and actuated him and disease which seriously handicapped him
+during most of his life and finally caused his death—not, however,
+until after the victory had been won, since the odds were
+between fame and sickness, not between life and death.
+Judged, therefore, solely by the strength of the forces involved
+in the conflict and not at all by the value of the stakes,
+Barbellion's struggle and early death may claim a little of the
+glory suggested in the lines “Oft near the sunset are great
+battles won.” </p>
+
+<p>That the second motive mentioned, the love of zoology, entered
+into the conflict only as an ally, and not even an essential
+one, of the desire to become famous, has a special psychological
+interest. Unquestionable and persistent as was this passion<span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</span>
+for the science, it did not seem to form the basis for his ambition
+nor even to be inextricably bound up with it, as is usually
+the case with persons possessed of one strongly marked talent
+or taste combined with a dominant ambition. When nature
+has favoured an individual with a gift in the way of desire
+and ability to do one thing particularly well he usually concentrates
+on it. In fact the desire to achieve success through
+the talent, and the impulse for self-expression along the line
+of the talent, are so closely related that it is impossible to disentangle
+them and to say where the impulse for self-expression
+ends and the ambition to succeed begins. Barbellion's diaries,
+however, present no such difficulty. Conscious from early
+childhood of a great attraction to zoology for the sheer love
+of the science, his early life-plan naturally took the form of a
+career as a zoologist. Thwarted by circumstances, he still held
+to the plan with an admirable persistence and a measure of
+success which, considering his handicaps in the way of illness
+and lack of opportunities for study and training, would have
+been satisfactory to a less ambitious man. Such success would
+not, however, have given him the fame which it was the ruling
+motive of his life to achieve. Whether or not it was the recognition
+of this that determined the direction of his ambition
+it is impossible to say. The fact that stands out with great
+clearness, after reading his diaries, is that the consuming passion
+of his life was the desire for fame for its own sake, to be
+known of men, and to stand out from the mass of humanity as a
+man of distinction, a successful man. This seemed to be the
+full measure of Barbellion's ambition, and in this he succeeded,
+since the diaries have made him famous as the author
+of a record which shows him to the world as the winner of a
+losing game with life, though not as a scientist or as a writer
+of distinction.</p>
+
+<p>A closer analysis of the particular qualities of Barbellion's
+ambition is the first step in an estimate of his personality.</p>
+
+<p>The urge to keep a journal may come from within or from<span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</span>
+without the individual. Barbellion does not tell us which it
+was with him. In late childhood he began making frequent
+records of his doings, which were those of a lonely romantic
+child interested in natural history. During the first three years
+there is no record of thought, but beginning with his sixteenth
+year it makes its appearance, and there is ample evidence that
+he was not only mature beyond his years, but ambitious as
+well. He says of himself,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I was ambitious before I was breeched. I can remember
+wondering as a child if I were a young Macaulay or Ruskin
+and secretly deciding that I was. My infant mind even was
+bitter with those who insisted on regarding me as a normal
+child and not as a prodigy. Since then I have struggled with
+this canker for many a day, and as success fails to arrive it
+becomes more gnawing.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>That the “canker” was eating its way into his soul as life
+progressed and success seemed no nearer from day to day is
+evidenced by the statements:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I owe neither a knee nor a bare grammercy to any man. All
+that I did I did by my own initiative, save one exception.
+R. taught me to love music.” </p>
+
+<p>“I am daily facing the fact that my ambitions have overtaxed
+my abilities and health. For years my whole existence
+has rested on a false estimate of my own value, and my life
+has been revolving around a foolish self-deception. And I
+know myself as I am at last and I am not at all enamoured.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>As the “Journal” progresses it becomes evident that the author's
+hopes for the realisation of his ambition rested entirely
+on its publication, and it is in the expressions concerning his
+hopes and fears in connection with the book that the struggle
+of the soul in its death grip with advancing disease and threatening
+failure is most poignantly expressed. Three years before
+he died he said,</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“It is the torture of Tantalus to be so uncertain. I should be
+relieved to know even the worst. I would almost gladly burn
+my MSS. in the pleasure of having my curiosity satisfied. I go
+from the nadir of disappointment to the zenith of hope and
+back several times a week, and all the time I am additionally
+harassed by the perfect consciousness that it is all petty and
+pusillanimous to desire to be known and appreciated, that my
+ambition is a morbid diathesis of the mind. I am not such a
+fool either as not to see that there is but little satisfaction in
+posthumous fame, and I am not such a fool as not to realise
+that all fame is fleeting, and that the whole world itself is passing
+away.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A few months later, after a reference to his infant daughter,
+he said,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“If only I could rest assured that after I am dead these
+Journals will be as tenderly cared for—as tenderly as this
+blessed infant! It would be cruel if even after I have paid the
+last penalty, my efforts and sufferings should continue to remain
+unknown or disregarded. What would I give to know the
+effect I shall produce when published! I am tortured by two
+doubts—whether these MSS. (the labour and hope of many
+years) will survive accidental loss and whether they really
+are of value. I have no faith in either.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Again he wrote:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“My Journal keeps open house to every kind of happening in
+my soul. Provided it is a veritable autochthon—I don't care
+how much of a taterdemalion or how ugly or repulsive—I take
+him in and—I fear sponge him down with excuses to make
+him more creditable in other's eyes. You may say why
+trouble whether you do or whether you don't tell us all the
+beastly little subterranean atrocities that go on in your mind.
+Any eminently 'right-minded' <em>Times</em> or <em>Spectator</em> reader will
+ask: 'Who in Faith's name is interested in your retrospective
+muck-rakings—in fact, who the Devil are you?' To myself,
+a person of vast importance and vast interest, I reply—as are
+other men if I could but understand them as well. And in the
+firm belief that whatever is inexorably true however unpleasant
+and discreditable (in fact true things can never lack a certain
+dignity), I would have you know Mr. <em>Times-</em> and Mr.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</span>
+<em>Spectator-</em> reader that actual crimes have many a time been
+enacted in the secrecy of my own heart and the only difference
+between me and an habitual criminal is that the habitual
+criminal has the courage and the nerve and I have not....” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is more than probable that the hope of getting the
+“Journal” published was suggested by acquaintance with “The
+Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff” when Barbellion was twenty-four
+years old. On encountering a quotation from her in a
+book on Strindberg at that time, he noted,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“It would be difficult in all the world's history to discover
+any two persons with temperaments so alike. She is the very
+spit of me. We are identical. Oh, Marie Bashkirtseff, how we
+should have hated one another! She feels as I feel. We are
+of the same self-absorption, the same vanity and corroding
+ambition. She is impressionable, volatile, passionate—ill, so
+am I. Her Journal is my Journal. She has written down all
+my thoughts and forestalled me. Is there anything in the
+transmigration of souls? She died in 1886. I was born in
+1889.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Barbellion's own estimate of what he calls his ambition is
+well summed up in the following words:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“My life appears to have been a titanic struggle between consuming
+ambition and adverse fortune. Behold a penniless
+youth thirsting for knowledge introduced into the world out
+of sheer devilment, with a towering ambition, but cursed with
+ill health and a two-fold nature, pleasure loving as well as
+labour loving.” </p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>It would be interesting to find out in what way he was
+pleasure loving. As far as I can see from reading the “Journal,” 
+the only pleasure that he sought was the occasional pleasure of
+contemplating nature, which was really a part of his work, and
+from hearing music.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“You can search all history and fiction for an ambition more
+powerful than mine and not find it. No, not Napoleon, nor
+Wilhelm II, nor Keats. No, I am not proud of it, not at all.
+The wonder is that I remain sane, the possessed of such a
+demon.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</span></p>
+
+<p>In the same way it is difficult to find evidence of this colossal
+ambition, save his statement of it. In reality he was ambitious
+for one thing: call it favour, applause, publicity, notoriety, or
+what not. He wanted to do something in literature which
+would focus the vision of the world upon him, and to accomplish
+this he devoted an incredible energy and labour to the
+production of a diary which was the record of aggressive,
+directed, logical thinking. He may have had capacity for
+creative literature, or he may have developed such capacity,
+but he did not display it. His career can be compared with
+no other because of the immeasurable handicap of his illness.
+But if it were not for this illness, it would be interesting to
+compare him with Huysmans, who, working as a clerk in a
+Governmental office in Paris, produced a series of books which
+gave him a commanding and perhaps a permanent place in
+French literature.</p>
+
+<p>Unquestionably some resemblance exists between the passion
+for fame, or whatever it may be called, that Barbellion
+and Marie Bashkirtseff had in common, although in the case
+of the latter its relation to a definite talent was more evident.
+But that in either of the two cases it partook in any great
+measure of the nature of what is generally understood as ambition—the
+ambition, for instance, of Napoleon, Wilhelm II, or
+Keats to whom Barbellion compares himself—is not proved by
+either of their self-revelations. There is a quality well known
+to psychologists that may be described as the passion to attract
+attention, which is a distinguishing attribute of the neurotic
+temperament. It sometimes acts as an urge to the expression
+of a talent in case the possessor of the temperament is also the
+possessor of a talent—which is by no means infrequent and
+which was undoubtedly true in the case of Marie Bashkirtseff.
+It, however, exists in innumerable other cases where the neurotic
+has been gifted by nature with no special talent or ability
+for expression of any kind. The mere reiteration, therefore, of
+a passion to focus the attention of the world upon himself,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</span>
+while it would invite questions as to his balance or the lack of
+it, affords no proof of mental qualities upon which the hope
+of achieving such distinction might reasonably be placed.</p>
+
+<p>The next question which arises in relation to Barbellion's
+ambition or desire for distinction is: What were his intellectual
+possessions? And the first step in answering this question is
+the examination of his interests. By a man's admirations, as
+by his friends, you may know him. He identified himself, in a
+measure, with Keats; he had great admiration for Sir Thomas
+Browne; James Joyce was a writer after his own heart; and
+he admired Dostoievsky and Francis Thompson.</p>
+
+<p>Barbellion's objective intellect stands out rather clearly in
+his record, particularly as the evidence is written more forcibly
+between the lines than in his statements. Deduction, induction,
+and analysis are rather high. In fact, he possessed wisdom,
+ingenuity, caution, and perception; that is, the elements
+of objective thought. He showed no great ability to estimate
+the nature and bearing of his surroundings or to devise ways
+of dealing with them so as to turn them to his advantage, but
+had it not been for illness he might have done so. As to the
+actual results of his intellectual efforts, naturalists say he made
+some important contributions to their science; and, although
+these were trifling, they were in the right direction. His working
+life really ended at twenty-five, an age at which the working
+life of most men of science has scarcely begun.</p>
+
+<p>It is almost entirely upon his subjective thought, that is upon
+his estimate of himself, that the value of his record rests.
+Everyone in his progress through life and his intercourse with
+his fellows measures himself more or less deliberately against,
+and estimates his own capacity relatively to, theirs, not only
+with respect to wisdom, cleverness, or caution, but with respect
+to special accomplishments. Besides this relative estimate, he
+learns to form an absolute estimate of his intellectual powers.
+He knows what he can understand at once, what he has to study
+hard before he can understand, and what is wholly beyond his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</span>
+comprehension. Some people habitually underestimate their
+ability; others, the majority, overestimate it. It is very difficult
+to say, from the literary remains of Barbellion, whether he
+was of the latter class or not. He had literary taste, a prodigious
+appetite, and he displayed considerable capacity for
+assimilation. It is quite possible that, as the result of these,
+he might have revealed constructive imagination; but his life
+was very brief, it was riddled with illness, and he matured
+slowly.</p>
+
+<p>Barbellion's estimate of himself may be fairly judged by the
+epitome of his whole life which he made in an entry of August
+1, 1917, in connection with his retirement from the staff of the
+British Museum:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I was the ablest junior on the staff and one of the ablest
+zoologists in the place, but my ability was always muffled by
+the inferior work given me to do. My last memoir was the best
+of its kind in treatment, method and technique—not the most
+important—that ever was issued from the institution. It was
+trivial because the work given me was always trivial, the idea
+being that as I had enjoyed no academic career I was unsuited
+to fill other posts then vacant—two requiring laboratory training—which
+were afterwards filled by men of less powers than
+my own. There was also poor equipment for work and I had
+to struggle for success against great odds. In time I should
+have revolutionised the study of Systematic Zoology, and the
+anonymous paper I wrote in conjunction with R. in the
+<em>American Naturalist</em> was a rare <em>jeu d'esprit</em>, and my most
+important scientific work. In the literary world I fared no
+better. I first published an article at fifteen, over my father's
+name. My next story was unexpectedly printed in the
+<em>Academy</em> at the age of nineteen. The American <em>Forum</em> published
+an article, but for years I received back rejected manuscript
+from every conceivable kind of publication from <em>Punch</em>
+to the <em>Hibbert Journal</em>. Recently, there has been evidence of a
+more benevolent attitude towards me on the part of London
+editors. A certain magnificent quarterly has published one or
+two of my essays.... I fear, however, the flood-tide has
+come too late.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</span></p>
+
+<p>In regard to one of the essays, he noted that it called forth
+flattering comment in <em>Public Opinion</em>, but that it did not impress
+anybody else, even E., his wife, who did not read the
+critique, although she read twice a pleasant paragraph in the
+press noticing some drawings of a friend.</p>
+
+<p>It was one of Barbellion's persecutory ideas that he was not
+appreciated at his full value.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Ever since I came into the world I have felt an alien in this
+life, a refugee by reason of some prenatal extradiction. I
+always felt alien to my father and mother. I was different
+from them. I knew and was conscious of the detachment. I
+admired my father's courage and happiness of soul, but we
+were very far from one another. I loved my mother, but we
+had little in common.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>When his mother warned him that he was in danger of being
+friendless all his life because of his preference for acerbities to
+amenities he replied, “I don't want people to like me. I
+shan't like them. Theirs will be the greater loss.” </p>
+
+<p>His family feeling seems to have been concentrated largely
+on his brother, A. J., who prefixed a brief account of his life
+and character to “The Last Diary.” </p>
+
+<p>Of him Barbellion said,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“He is a most delightful creature and I love him more than
+anyone else in the wide world. There is an almost feminine
+tenderness in my love.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There were times when, despite his habitual self-appreciation,
+Barbellion sold his stock fairly low, and especially after
+he had been in London for two or three years and realised
+what little progress he was making in the world and how small
+the orbit of his activity remained.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I have more than a suspicion that I am one of those who
+grow sometimes out of a brilliant boy into a very commonplace
+man.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</span></p>
+
+<p>In speaking of his personal appearance he said, “I am not
+handsome, but I look interesting, I hope distinguished”; and
+at another time,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“If sometimes you saw me in my room by myself, you would
+say that I was a ridiculous coxcomb. For I walk about, look
+out of the window, then at the mirror—turning my head sideways
+perhaps so as to see it in profile. Or I gaze down into
+my eyes—my eyes always impress me—and wonder what effect
+I produce upon others. This, I believe, is not so much vanity
+as curiosity.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Naturally Barbellion's estimate of himself and of his potentialities
+varied from time to time, but he never rated his
+abilities lower than the sum total of his accomplishments would
+seem to justify, save in hours of extreme depression and discouragement.
+When twenty-one years of age he wrote,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the
+mystery and tears of things so that the commonest object, the
+most familiar face—even my own—becomes ghostly, unreal,
+enigmatic. I get into an attitude of almost total scepticism,
+nescience, solipsism even, in a world of dumb, sphinx-like
+things that cannot explain themselves. The discovery of how
+I am situated—a sentient being on a globe in space overshadows
+me. I wish I were just nothing.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A more hopeful note, and one that is of interest in that it
+foreshadows the plan of publication of the diary, is sounded
+after he had been working in the museum for less than a year.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“My own life as it unrolls itself day by day is a source of
+constant amazement, delight and pain. I can think of no more
+interesting volume than a distilled, intimate, psychological
+history of my own life. I want a perfect comprehension at
+least of myself. We are all such egoists that a sorrow or
+hardship—provided it is great enough—flatters our self-importance.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>At the age of twenty-five Barbellion had reached the depth
+of depression and discouragement.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I have peered into every aspect of my life and achievement
+and everything I have seen nauseates me. My life seems to
+have been a wilderness of futile endeavour. I started wrong
+from the very beginning. I came into the world in the wrong
+place and under the wrong conditions. As a boy I was preternaturally
+absorbed in myself and preternaturally discontented.
+I harassed myself with merciless cross examinations.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A year later he checked up on such moods and said,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“My sympathy with myself is so unfailing that I don't deserve
+anybody else's. In many respects, however, this Journal
+I believe gives the impression that I behave myself in the
+public gaze much worse than I actually do.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Man is invariably judged finally by his conduct. Opinion
+is often formed of him from what he says, but the last analysis
+is a review and estimate of the several activities which together
+constitute conduct. Conduct is the pursuit of ends. The conduct
+that is conditioned by taking thought does not by any
+means embrace all one's activities. The biological discoveries
+of the latter half of the Nineteenth Century showed conclusively
+that the ultimate end to which all life is directed and
+toward which every living being strives is the continuation of
+the race to which the individual belongs. Life becomes, therefore,
+a trust, not a gift, and the only way in which the obligation
+it entails can be discharged is by transmitting life to a new
+generation. Barbellion had bodily characteristics which permit
+the biologist to say that his gonadal redex was dominant,
+and throughout the diary there are frequent entries showing
+that, despite his shyness, self-consciousness, and lack of
+“Facility” (using the word in its Scottish sense), the opposite
+sex made profound appeal to him. His conduct from early
+youth would seem to indicate that he held with the Divine
+Poet—</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+<p>“—In alte dolcezze<br>
+Non si puo gioir, se non amando.”</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>But his love was evanescent and he was continually asking
+himself if it was real or but the figment of desire.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“To me woman is <em>the</em> wonderful fact of existence. If
+there be any next world and it be as I hope it is, a jolly gossiping
+place with people standing around the mantelpiece and
+discussing their earthly experiences, I shall thump my fist on
+the table as my friends turn to me on entering and exclaim in
+a loud voice, 'Woman!'”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here and there in the “Journal” there are entries which
+would indicate that his conduct with women transgressed conventions,
+though perhaps in harmony with custom. When he
+was twenty-five he went to see the “Irish Play Boy,” and sitting
+in front of him was a charming little Irish girl, accompanied by
+a man whose appearance and manner were repulsive. He
+flirted with her successfully. Later, haunted with the desire
+to meet her, he sent a personal advertisement to a newspaper
+hoping that her eye would encounter it. The advertisement
+and the money were returned, as it was suspected that he was
+a white slave trafficker. His admiration of the Don Juan type
+of man is evidenced by an entry in which he referred to his
+friendship with a bachelor of sixty, a devotee of love and
+strong drink.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“This man is my devoted friend and truth to tell I get on
+with him better than I do with most people. I like his gamey
+flavour, his utter absence of self-consciousness and his doggy
+loyalty to myself. He may be depraved in his habits, coarse
+in his language, boorish in his manners, ludicrous in the wrongness
+of his views, but I like him just because he is so hopeless.
+If he only dabbled in vice, if he had pale, watery ideas about
+current literature, if he were genteel, I should quarrel.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The entries that show Barbellion's attitude toward what
+may be called the minor activities of social life are illuminating.
+These are the latest activities to be acquired and, in a way,
+testify to or set forth the individual's development or limitations.</p>
+
+<p>Companionship with one's fellows is necessary to the mental
+health of man, and it is of prime necessity that he should secure<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</span>
+their good opinion. The loss of esteem and the knowledge
+that he is reprobated and held in contempt and aversion causes
+a stress that invariably has its baneful effect, particularly upon
+a sensitive, self-conscious youth.</p>
+
+<p>Barbellion was the type of individual who sits in ready judgment
+on his fellows, and oftentimes his judgment was violently
+prejudiced. He had little community feeling. As a youngster
+he was ostracised by his school fellows because he was different,
+and he felt alien. He never played games with them,
+but went off on long solitary rambles after school hours. Nor
+did he form intimacies with his masters.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I presented such an invertebrate, sloppy, characterless exterior
+that no one felt curious enough to probe further into my
+ways of life. It was the same in London. I was alien to my
+colleagues. Among them only R. has ventured to approach
+my life and seek a communion with me. My wife and child
+seem at a remote distance from me.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In another connection he says,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“A day spent among my fellows goads me to a frenzy
+by the evening. I am no longer fit for human companionship.
+People string me up to concert pitch. I develop suspicions of
+one that he is prying, or of another that he patronises. Others
+make me horribly anxious to stand well in their eyes and
+horribly curious to know what they think of me. Others I hate
+and loathe for no particular reason. There is a man I am
+acquainted with concerning whom I know nothing at all. I
+should like to smash his face in. I don't know why.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Barbellion retained many infantile traits in his adult years
+and these were displayed in his attitude and conduct toward
+people.</p>
+
+<p>At twenty-six he said,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I have grown so ridiculously hypercritical and fastidious
+that I will refuse a man's invitation to dinner because he has
+watery blue eyes, or hate him for a mannerism or an impediment<span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</span>
+or affectation in his speech. Some poor devil who has
+not heard of Turner or Debussy or Dostoievsky I gird at with
+the arrogance of a knowledgeable youth of seventeen.... I
+suffer from such a savage <em>amour propre</em> that I fear to enter the
+lists with a man I dislike on account of the mental anguish I
+should suffer if he worsted me. I am therefore bottled up so
+tight—both my hates and loves ... if only I had the moral
+courage to play my part in life—to take the stage and be
+myself, to enjoy the delightful sensation of making my presence
+felt, instead of this vapourish mumming. To me self-expression
+is a necessity of life, and what cannot be expressed
+one way must be expressed in another. When colossal egotism
+is driven underground, whether by a steely surface environment
+or an unworkable temperament or, as in my case,
+by both, you get a truly remarkable pain—the pain one might
+say of continuously unsuccessful attempts at parturition.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This may seem adorned and artificial, but to me it is the most
+illuminating entry in the “Journal” and reveals many of his
+limitations.</p>
+
+<p>At twenty-eight he made the entry,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“The men I meet accept me as an entomologist and <em>ipso
+facto</em>, an enthusiast in the science. That is all they know of
+me, and all they want to know of me, or of any man. Surely no
+man's existence was ever quite such a duplicity as mine. I
+smile bitterly to myself ten times a day, as I engage in all the
+dreary technical jargon of professional talk with them. How
+they would gossip over the facts of my life if they knew! How
+scandalised they would be over my inner life's activities, how
+resentful of enthusiasm other than entomological!”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It would have contributed to his peace of mind had he
+studied more closely the writings of the immortal physician of
+Norwich, from whom he believed he had spiritual descent:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“No man can justly censure or condemn another; because
+indeed no man truly knows another. This I perceive in myself;
+for I am in the dark to all the world; and my nearest
+friends behold me but in a cloud. Those that know me superficially<span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</span>
+think less of me than I do of myself; those of my near
+acquaintance think more; God who truly knows me knows
+that I am nothing. Further no man can judge another, because
+no man knows himself; for we censure others but as they
+disagree from that humour which we fancy laudable in ourselves,
+and commend others but for that wherein they seem
+to quadrate and consent with us. So that in conclusion, all
+is but that we all condemn, self-love.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Self-love, or over-appreciation of self, was Barbellion's most
+serious stumbling-block. He never got himself in the right
+perspective with the world, and it is unlikely, even though his
+brief life had been less tragic, that he would have succeeded in
+doing so. He was temperamentally unfit.</p>
+
+<p>Barbellion's friends say that he was courteous and soft
+mannered, but his own estimate of capacity for display of the
+amenities is so at variance with this that we are forced to
+believe the manner they saw was veneer.</p>
+
+<p>The following description of Lermontov by Maurice was,
+he averred, an exact picture of himself:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“He had, except for a few intimate friends, an impossible
+temperament; he was proud; overbearing, exasperated and exasperating,
+filled with a savage <em>amour-propre</em>, and he took a
+childish delight in annoying; he cultivated 'le plaisir aristocratique
+de deplair.'... He could not bear not to make himself
+felt and if he was unsuccessful in this by fair means he resorted
+to unpleasant ones.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Two years later he expressed much the same opinion of his
+social characteristics when he described himself as something
+between a monkey, a chameleon, and a jellyfish and made himself
+out an intellectual bully. He was honest enough not to
+omit an invariable trait of the bully—cowardice. He says,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“The humiliating thing is that almost any strong character
+hypnotises me into complacency, especially if he is a stranger....
+But by Jove, I wreak vengeance on my familiars, and on
+those brethren even weaker than myself. They get my concentrated<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</span>
+gall, my sulphurous fulminations, and would wonder
+to read this confession.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In order that any community may exist and thrive each individual
+must do things for the common welfare. He must regulate
+his activity so as not to impair or jeopardise the property
+and self-respect of his neighbours. He must contribute to its
+existence and development by an active execution of deeds that
+draw more closely the bonds of fellowship and knit more securely
+the fabric of society. He must exercise self-restraint
+in those countless ways by which the conduct of a person in
+the presence of others is shorn of indulgences which he allows
+himself when alone, and he must perform those ceremonies and
+benevolences which constitute politeness and courtesy. The
+unwritten law which compels these in order that he may have
+a reputation for “normalcy” is even more inexorable than the
+written law which compels him to pay taxes and serve on
+juries and does not permit him to beat carpets or rugs in the
+open. Although Barbellion seemed to be very keen in participating
+in the defence of the country against external foes,
+his diary does not reveal that he had any desire to undertake
+municipal, political, or social duties. Illness may explain this,
+but illness did not keep him from recording the desire to do
+so or the regret that he was prevented from participation in
+the full life.</p>
+
+<p>Every estimate of Barbellion must take his illness into consideration.
+Readily might he subscribe to Sir Thomas
+Browne's statement, “For the world, I count it not as an inn,
+but an hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.” In the
+first entries of the diary he speaks of being ill, and although
+the disease of which he died is not habitually associated with
+mental or emotional symptoms, it is nevertheless so horribly
+incapacitating and is accompanied by such distressing evidences
+of disturbed bodily functions that it invariably tinges<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</span>
+the victim's thoughts with despondency and tinctures his emotional
+activities with despair.</p>
+
+<p>Barbellion capitalised his infirmity to an extraordinary degree.
+He says we are all such egotists that a sorrow or
+hardship, provided it is great enough, flatters our self-importance.
+We feel that a calamity by overtaking us has distinguished
+us above our fellows. Were it not for his illness his
+book would never have found a publisher, for it is not a psychological
+history of his own life—which he believed would
+make such an interesting volume—but a Pepysian record of his
+doings, which, taken <em>in toto</em>, is fairly drab. It was the display
+of equanimity, resignation, and courage when confronted with
+the inevitable, and the record of his thoughts during that time
+that give the book its value and vogue. He was constantly
+fighting disease and cognisant of his waning strength.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I do not fear ill health in itself, but I do fear its possible
+effect on my mind and character. Already my sympathy with
+myself is maudlin. As long as I have spirit and buoyancy I
+don't care what happens, for I know that so long I cannot be
+counted a failure.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is one of the keynotes of his character—that he shall
+not be counted a failure. The other—and it is the same—keynote,
+is that he shall be a success; that he will make a noise in
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>The entries after he had got a two-months' sick leave are
+pathetic. He was on the point of proposing marriage; he had
+been to see a well-known nerve specialist who said that a positive
+diagnosis could not be made; he had set out for his holiday
+at the seaside and had a most depressing time. When he returned
+to London he was no better; in fact he was much worse,
+and had thoughts of suicide. After he had found out the
+nature of his disease he expressed himself with great fortitude,
+saying,</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“My life has become entirely posthumous. I live now in the
+grave and am busy furnishing it with posthumous joys. I accept
+my fate with great content, my one-time restless ambition
+lies asleep now, my one-time furious self-assertiveness is
+anæsthetised by this great war; the war and the discovery
+about my health together have plucked out of me that canker
+of self-obsession ... for I am almost resigned to the issue
+in the knowledge that some day, someone will know, perhaps
+somebody will understand and—immortal powers!—even sympathise,
+'the quick heart quickening from the heart that's
+still.'”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Barbellion's account of his experience with physicians engenders
+sadness. He went from general practitioner to chest
+specialists, digestion specialists, ophthalmologists, neurologists,
+without ever getting the smallest intimation of the nature of
+his illness, until it had progressed to an advanced stage. For
+a long time, indeed, it seemed to baffle all the physicians who
+were consulted. One of the distresses of the diary is that it
+testifies that doctors are far from omniscient. Nearly always
+he was advised to go and live on the prairies; and, like all
+sufferers from incurable diseases, the quacks finally got him.</p>
+
+<p>With the spectre of disease always lurking in the background,
+when not taking an evident part in the drama of
+Barbellion's life, it is inevitable that his attitude toward death
+should colour his thoughts to a very marked degree. As early
+as 1912, when he was twenty-three years old, he wrote, “As an
+egoist I hate death because I should cease to be I”; and the
+next year,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“What embitters me is the humiliation of having to die,
+to have to be pouring out the precious juices of my life
+into the dull earth, to be no longer conscious of what goes on,
+no longer moving abroad upon the earth creating attractions
+and repulsions, pouring out one's ego in a stream. To think
+that the women I have loved will be marrying and forget, and
+that the men I have hated will continue on their way and forget
+I ever hated them—the ignominy of being dead!”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</span></p>
+
+<p>If this latter entry had been written a few years later, one
+might suspect the influence of Rupert Brooke. As the date
+stands, one can only infer that Barbellion, in spite of his much
+vaunted morbidness, possessed a little of the zest of life which
+so richly flavoured the genius of that young poet.</p>
+
+<p>The entries in the “Journal” after the nature of his disease
+had been made known to him express a marked difference in
+his attitude toward death. In 1917 he said,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I ask myself; what are my views on death, the next world,
+God? I look into my mind and discover I am too much of a
+mannikin to have any. As for death, I am a little bit of
+trembling jelly of anticipation. I am prepared for anything,
+but I am the complete agnostic; I simply don't know. To
+have views, faith, beliefs, one needs a backbone. This great
+bully of a universe overwhelms me. The stars make me
+cower. I am intimidated by the immensity surrounding my
+own littleness. It is futile and presumptuous for me to opine
+anything about the next world. But I <em>hope</em> for something
+much freer and more satisfying after death, for emancipation
+of the spirit and, above all, for the obliteration of this puny
+self, this little, skulking, sharp-witted ferret.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This, one might almost say, shows Barbellion at his best.</p>
+
+<p>A power of fancy which is displayed in few other connections
+throughout the book made him say, during the same
+year,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“What a delightful thing the state of death would be if the
+dead passed their time haunting the places they loved in life
+and living over again the dear delightful past—if death were
+one long indulgence in the pleasures of memory! If the disembodied
+spirit forgot all the pains of its previous existence
+and remembered only the happiness! Think of me flitting
+about the orchards and farmyards in——birdnesting, walking
+along the coast among the seabirds, climbing Exmoor, bathing
+in streams and in the sea, haunting all my old loves and
+passions, cutting open with devouring curiosity Rabbits,
+Pigeons, Frogs, Dogfish, Amphioxus; think of me, too, at length
+unwillingly deflected from these cherished pursuits in the raptures<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</span>
+of first love, cutting her initials on trees and fences instead
+of watching birds, day-dreaming over <em>Parker and
+Haswell</em> and then bitterly reproaching myself later for much
+loss of precious time. How happy I shall be if Death is like
+this; to be living over again and again all my ecstasies, over
+first times.... My hope is that I may haunt these times
+again, that I may haunt the places, the books, the bathes, the
+walks, the desires, the hopes, the first (and last) loves of my
+life all transfigured and beatified by sovereign Memory.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Nothing in the diaries illustrates more strikingly Barbellion's
+zest for living than these allusions to death. In the first
+decade of life, the average person gives no thought as to
+whether he will live or die; in the second decade he rarely
+becomes concerned with thoughts of death unless they are
+forced upon him by painful or persistent illness. In the third
+decade, when the fear of death is very common, Barbellion
+knew that he must soon die. This flair for life, which he must
+have possessed to a marked degree, is evidenced in his love of
+nature and in his appreciation of beauty and of literature to an
+immensely greater extent than in contact with his fellows. His
+pleasure in æsthetics was real and profound, and included an
+appreciation of sound, colour, and form, both in nature and in
+art. His capacity for the appreciation of beauty of sound
+was greater than for the beauty of colour or form. Although
+apparently he had never studied music, he said of
+Beethoven's Fifth Symphony that it “always worked me up
+into an ecstasy”; and after listening to music by Tschaikovsky,
+Debussy, and others that, “I am chock-full of all this
+precious stuff and scarcely know what to write.” </p>
+
+<p>Whether or not his suspicion that “my growing appreciation
+of the plastic art is with me only distilled sensuality” was true,
+the appreciation was unquestionably genuine, as shown by his
+comment on Rodin's “The Prodigal Son” that it was “Beethoven's
+Fifth Symphony done in stone. It was only on my
+second visit that I noticed the small pebble in each hand—a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</span>
+superb touch—what a frenzy of remorse!,” and on “The Fallen
+Angel” that “The legs of the woman droop lifelessly backwards
+in an intoxicating curve. The eye caresses it—down
+the thighs and over the calves to the tips of the toes—like the
+hind legs of some beautiful dead gazelle.” </p>
+
+<p>Above his appreciation of æsthetic beauty, however, Barbellion
+realised, theoretically at least, that the topmost levels of
+pleasure and pain are constituted of qualities dependent upon
+achievements of the moral order—of duty well done, of happiness
+conferred, of services rendered, of benefits bestowed; or
+of the antithesis, of remorse for abstention and neglect of these
+or for active misdeeds. He says in “The Last Diary,” </p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Under the lens of scientific analysis natural beauty disappears.
+The emotion of beauty and the spirit of analysis and
+dissection cannot exist contemporaneously. But just as man's
+scientific analysis destroys beauty, so his synthetic art creates
+it. And man creates beauty, nature supplying the raw materials.
+Because there is beauty in man's own heart, he
+naïvely assumes its possession by others and so projects it into
+nature. But he sees in her only the truth and goodness that
+are in himself. Natural beauty is everyone's mirror.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Barbellion's strong sense of moral values was always coloured
+by his passion—which was almost a mania for receiving
+appreciation and applause. Although he denied wanting to be
+liked, respected, and admired, yet he clamoured for it. He displayed
+pain upon receiving the marks of disapprobation, and
+reproof he disliked and despised.</p>
+
+<p>He was singularly free from spontaneous disorder of will;
+that is, of delay, vacillation, and precipitation. The only evidence
+he gave of vacillation was about his marriage, and that
+showed his good judgment. He was much more inclined to
+precipitation than to vacillation, and for a neurotic individual
+he was strangely without obsession—that is the morbid desire
+to do some act which the would-be performer discountenances
+and struggles not to do.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</span></p>
+
+<p>With all his sensitiveness, Barbellion seemed to have been
+not without an element of cruelty. This was of the refined,
+indirect sort and was chiefly noticeable in references to his
+wife. While he was contemplating a proposal of marriage he
+made an entry in his diary,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I tried my best, I have sought every loophole of escape, but
+I am quite unable to avoid the melancholy fact that her thumbs
+are lamentable. Poor dear, how I love her! That is why I
+am so concerned about her thumbs.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In speaking of his fiancée's letters, he once wrote,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“These letters chilled me. In reply I wrote with cold steel
+short, lifeless, formal notes, for I felt genuinely aggrieved that
+she should care so little how she wrote to me or how she expressed
+her love. I became ironical with myself over the prospect
+of marrying a girl who appeared so little to appreciate
+my education and mental habits.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Two years later he added to this entry “What a popinjay!”
+But then two years later he was a confirmed invalid and she
+was making great sacrifice to take care of him.</p>
+
+<p>In another place he taunted her, after admitting her letters
+disappointed him with their coldness, and added, “Write as
+you would speak. You know I am not one to carp about a
+spelling mistake”; and at another time he recorded,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“My life here has quite changed its orientation. I am no
+longer an intellectual snob. If I were E. and I would have
+parted ere now. I never like to take her to the British
+Museum because there all the values are intellectual.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Of his wife the diaries give a very vague picture. Once he
+exclaimed, “To think that she of all women, with a past such
+as hers, should be swept into my vicious orbit!” but no information
+is given regarding this past. The idea of marriage was
+in his thoughts for several years, but his attitude was one of
+doubt and vacillation. In 1914 he wrote:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I wish I loved more steadily. I am always sidetracking myself.
+The title of 'husband' scares me.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>When he finally recorded his marriage as having taken place
+at the Registry Office he added,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“It is impossible to set down here all the labyrinthine
+ambages of my will and feelings in regard to this event. Such
+incredible vacillations, doubts and fears.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>“The function of the private journal is one of observation,
+experiment, analysis, contemplation; the function of the essay
+is to provoke reflection,” wrote Amiel. Barbellion's observation
+was of himself and of nature; his experiment how to adjust
+himself to the world; his analysis almost exclusively of his
+ego; and his contemplation the mystery of life and death.
+A “sport” in the biological sense, that is, differing markedly
+from his immediate ancestors, he fell afoul of infection early
+in life. From the beginning it scarred and debilitated him.</p>
+
+<p>He was an egotist and proud of it. He did not realise that
+the ego is a wall which limits the view rising higher with every
+emotional or intellectual growth. There is a certain degree of
+greatness from which, when a man reaches it, he can always
+look over the top of the wall of his egotism. Barbellion never
+reached it. He was a man above the ordinary, capable of
+originality and of learning from experience, clever at his profession,
+apt at forming general ideas, sometimes refined and
+sometimes gross; a solitary, full of contradictions, ironic or
+ingenuous by fits, tormented by sexual images and sentimental
+ideas, and possessed by the desire to become famous, but
+haunted by the fear that he would not live to see his desire
+accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>He had the misfortune to be without faith or ability to acquire
+it, but in compensation he was given to an envious degree
+immunity to fear, and he endured disease and faced death
+with courage and resignation. If we contrast his thought and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</span>
+conduct with that of another egotist, Robert Louis Stevenson,
+after he came to know the number of days that remained for
+him, as thought and conduct are recorded in the “Vailima Letters,” 
+Barbellion suffers from the comparison, for Stevenson
+was devoid of vanity and selfishness. But the comparison would
+not be a just one, for euphoria is a feature of the disease with
+which Stevenson contended, and despair of Barbellion's. Moreover,
+Stevenson was a Celt and had a sense of humour.
+Everyone likes to think that his distinguishing characteristic
+is a sense of humour. Barbellion believed he possessed it tremendously.
+He may have, but his books do not reveal it.</p>
+
+<p>He forced himself without academic training upon a most
+conservative institution, a close corporation, archaically conventionalised,
+and he gave earnest that he could mount the
+ladder of preferment quickly and gracefully.</p>
+
+<p>He saw himself with the lucidity of genius, but his admirers
+will not admit that he was the man he said he was. One
+admirer does.</p>
+
+<p>Would that he had added to his litany: <em>Defenda me, Dios,
+de me!</em>—The Lord deliver me from myself. Had he done so,
+he would have accomplished to a greater degree the object of
+life: to be happy and to make others happy.</p>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" >CHAPTER IX<br>
+<small>THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DIARIST: HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“True serenity does not consist in indifference to the
+phenomena of life amongst which we live. It consists
+of judging in an elevated way men and facts. True
+serenity does not reign apart from life. It is in the land
+of the hurricane that it is a grand virtue to know how
+to remain calm. Possibly he who can accomplish this
+will succeed in avoiding its perils, or surmounting its
+consequences. Perhaps it is better to lose one's foothold
+in the waves than it is to prosper in a solitude without
+echo. Only solitude that has been wrought from the
+tumult is precious.” —<span class="smcap">Georges Duhamel.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>No brief statement ever made applies more fittingly to
+Henri-Frédéric Amiel—more widely known now, one
+hundred years after his birth, than during his lifetime—than
+these words of one of the most promising young men of letters
+of France.</p>
+
+<p>Amiel says in his “Journal Intime”:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“There remains the question whether the greatest problems
+which have ever been guessed on earth had not better have
+remained buried in the brain which found the key to them,
+and whether the deepest thinkers—those whose hand has been
+boldest in drawing aside the veil, and their eye keenest in
+fathoming the mystery beyond it—had not better, like the
+prophet of Iliom, have kept for Heaven, and for Heaven alone,
+secrets and mysteries which human language cannot truly
+express nor human intelligence conceive.” </p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>“To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed,
+pardoned, and sustained by a supreme power, to feel himself
+in the right road, at the point where God would have him be—in
+order with God and the universe. This faith gives
+strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is, seems to me
+arbitrary and fortuitous. It may as well not be, as be. Nothing
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</span>
+in my own circumstances seems to me providential. All
+appears to me left to my own responsibility, and it is this
+thought which disgusts me with the government of my own
+life. I longed to give myself up wholly to some great love,
+some noble end; I would willingly have lived and died for the
+ideal—that is to say, for a holy cause. But once the impossibility
+of this made clear to me, I have never since taken a
+serious interest in anything, and have, as it were, but amused
+myself with a destiny of which I was no longer the dupe.” </p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>“There is a great affinity in me with the Hindoo genius—that
+mind, vast, imaginative, loving, dreamy, and speculative,
+but destitute of ambition, personality, and will. Pantheistic
+disinterestedness, the effacement of the self in the great whole,
+womanish gentleness, a horror of slaughter, antipathy to action—these
+are all present in my nature, in the nature at least
+which has been developed by years and circumstances. Still
+the West has also had its part in me. What I have found
+difficult is to keep up a prejudice in favour of any form, nationality,
+or individuality whatever. Hence my indifference
+to my own person, my own usefulness, interest, or opinions of
+the moment. What does it all matter? <em>Omnis determinatio
+est negatio.</em> Grief localises us, love particularises us, but
+thought delivers us from personality.... To be a man is a
+poor thing, to be a man is well; to be <em>the</em> man—man in essence
+and in principle—that alone is to be desired.” (Written at the
+age of fifty-four.)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The “Journal Intime,” upon which alone Amiel's fame rests,
+is studded with such expressions, all of which go to prove that
+he was handicapped with an inability to participate in life.
+One may call it aboulia, or lack of will power; but it was not
+lack of will power. That the intellect which could produce
+such work was not directed into some practical channel during
+a long and healthy life naturally arouses a question; and this
+question has been answered by Amiel's admirers and his
+critics in various ways. The only conclusion, however, to
+which an unbiassed examination of his life and of his book
+can lead is the simple one that Amiel was born that way, just
+as some people are born Albinos, or, to put it in other words,
+that he was temperamentally unfit for practical life.</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe25" id="ilo_fp223">
+  <img class="w100 p2" src="images/ilo_fp223.jpg" alt="ilop221" title="p221ilo">
+  <figcaption class="caption p2b"><span class="allsmcap">HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL</span></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Henri-Frédéric Amiel was born in Geneva September 27,
+1821, and died there March 11, 1881. His ancestors were
+Huguenots who sought refuge in Switzerland after the revocation
+of the Edict of Nantes. There is no record that any of
+them achieved greatness or had greatness thrust upon them.
+Very little has been written of his parents, who died when
+he was twelve years old, or of his uncle and aunt, in whose
+house he was brought up apart from his two sisters. All
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</span>
+those who have written about Amiel himself are singularly
+silent about his boyhood, so that we know practically nothing
+of the formative years of his life save that he was a sensitive,
+impressionable boy, more delicate than robust, disposed to
+melancholy, and with a deep interest in religious problems. In
+school and college he was studious but not brilliant; he had
+no interest in games or sports and made few intimacies, and
+these with men older than himself. When he was nineteen he
+came under the influence of a Genevan philologist and man of
+letters, Adolphe Picquet, whose lectures answered many a
+positive question and satisfied many a vague aspiration of this
+youth already in the meshes of mysticism. They exercised
+a decisive influence over his thought, filled him with fresh
+intuitions, and brought near to him the horizons of his dreams.</p>
+
+<p>When he was twenty he went to Italy and stayed more than
+a year, and while there he wrote several articles on Christian
+Art, and a criticism of a book by M. Rio. The next four years
+he spent in Germany, where he studied philosophy, philology,
+mythology, and history. After this he travelled about the university
+cities of Central Europe for two years, principally
+Heidelberg, Munich, and Vienna; and in 1849, when he was
+twenty-eight years old, he returned to Geneva and secured the
+appointment of Professor of Moral Philosophy in the Academy
+there. The appointment was made by the Democratic Party,
+which had just then come into control of the Government.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</span>
+The Aristocratic Party, which had had things their own way
+since the days following the restoration of Geneva's independence
+in 1814, would have nothing to do with intellectual
+upstarts, puppets of the Radical Party, so Amiel, by nature
+and conviction a conservative, found himself in the right pew,
+but the wrong church; and many of his friends thought that
+the discouragement which was manifest in his writings and in
+his conduct may, in a measure at least, have been due to the
+conflict between his discomfiture and his duty.</p>
+
+<p>He had few friends, but these he impressed enormously by
+his learning and his knowledge. He made no particular reputation
+as a professor or as a poet, and had it not been for the
+“Journal,” he would never have been heard of save by his
+friends and pupils. It is now forty years since the first volume
+of the book was published at Geneva. It had been put together
+from the thousands of sheets of diary which had come into
+the hands of his literary heirs. The Preface to the volume
+announced that this “Journal” was made up of his psychological
+observations and impressions produced on him by books.
+It was the confidant of his private and intimate thoughts; a
+means whereby the thinker became conscious of his own inner
+life; a safe shelter wherein his questionings of fate and future,
+the voice of grief, of self-examination and confession, the
+soul's cry for inward peace might make themselves freely
+heard.</p>
+
+<p>It made a great noise in the world and the reverberations
+of it will not cease.</p>
+
+<p>Some consider that the “Journal Intime” occupies a unique
+place in literature, not because it is a diary of introspection,
+but because of the tragedy which attended its production.
+This is the height of absurdity. There was no tragedy about
+its production. Amiel lived an unhealthy life, thwarted nature's
+laws, and nature exacted the penalty. N. J. Symons, in
+an article in the <em>Queen's Quarterly</em>, says, “To be gifted with
+the qualities of genius, yet to be condemned by some obscure<span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</span>
+psychosis to perpetual sterility and failure; to live and die in
+the despairing recognition of this fact; and finally to win posthumous
+fame by the analysis and confession of one's failure is
+one of the most puzzling and pathetic of life's anomalies.” It
+would be if it were true. But what were the qualities of genius
+that Amiel had? And how did he display the obscure psychosis?
+He discharged the duties of a professor from the time he was
+twenty-eight until he was sixty. He poetised pleasantly; he
+communed with nature and got much pleasure from it; and he
+had very definite social adaptability. His general level of
+behaviour was high. He was a diligent, methodical worker;
+he reacted in a normal way to conventional standards; he had
+few personal biases or peculiarities and none that drew particular
+attention to him; and he seemed to have adjusted
+himself without great difficulty to the incidences of life that he
+encountered.</p>
+
+<p>To say that such a man was the victim of some obscure
+psychosis is either to speak beyond the facts or to speak from
+the possession of some knowledge that is denied one familiar
+with his writings and what has been written about him.</p>
+
+<p>Unique the “Journal Intime” unquestionably is, in that it is
+the sincere confession of failure, both as a man and as a
+writer, of a man whose intellectual qualities justified his
+friends in expecting from him a large measure of success as
+both. Both admirers and critics agree that Amiel's failure
+was his refusal or his inability to act. This refusal to act was
+not the expression of some obscure psychosis, but was entirely
+consistent with his philosophy of life, which was arrived at
+through a logical process of thought. “Men's thoughts are
+made according to their nature,” says Bacon. It is to Amiel's
+nature, or temperament, or personality, that we must look for
+the answer to the question: To what can his confessed failure
+be charged?</p>
+
+<p>Any estimate of personality must weigh not only the capacity
+for dealing with thoughts, but the capacity for dealing<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</span>
+with men and with things as well. Intellectual qualities are
+of value only in relation to the dynamic quality of the mind;
+emotional qualities must be measured by the reactions to the
+environment; and the individual, in the last analysis, must
+take his standing among his fellows upon his acts, not upon
+his thoughts. In a balanced personality act harmonises with
+thought, is conditioned and controlled by it. Purely impulsive
+action carried to the extreme means insanity, and in
+milder degrees it exhibits itself in all grades and forms of
+what is known as lack of self-control. Such action is too familiar
+to call for comment. But there is the opposite type of
+individual whose impulses are not impelling enough to lead
+to expression in outward form of either thoughts or emotions.
+Such thoughts and emotions are turned back upon themselves
+and, like a dammed-up stream, whirl endlessly around the
+spring, the ego, until the individual becomes predominantly
+introspective and egocentric.</p>
+
+<p>Amiel possessed the power of clear logical thought to a
+high degree, but he limited its expression largely to the introspective
+musings of the diary. Aside from his daily life, which
+was narrow but normal and conventional, it is to Amiel's deepest
+interests and admirations as revealed by his diary that one
+must look for light upon his emotional make-up. The things
+with which he occupied himself were extremely few: introspective
+literature, philosophy and religion, and contemplation
+of God and the hereafter. The diary covers the years of his
+life from twenty-seven to sixty, the entire fruitful span of most
+men's lives. During all of this time his interests showed little
+or no variation. Nowhere throughout the record do we find any
+evidence of interest in the developments which were shaping
+the course of the world's history. Still less do we find any indication
+of a desire or a conscience to participate in such history.
+Amiel evidently felt no urge to be an actor in the drama.
+He was not even a critic or an interested on-looker. Rather<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</span>
+did he prefer to withdraw to a sheltered distance and forget
+the reverberations of the struggle in contemplation of abstractions.</p>
+
+<p>He lived in an era in which the world was revolutionised.
+The most deforming institution which civilisation has ever
+tolerated, slavery, was razed and dismantled; yet he never
+said a word about it. He was a witness of one of the
+greatest transformations that has ever been wrought, the
+making of things by machinery rather than by hand; and
+he never commented on it. His life was contemporaneous
+with the beginning of discovery in science, such as the origin
+of species and the general evolutionary doctrine associated
+with Darwin's name; and it seems only to have excited his
+scorn.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“The growing triumph of Darwinism—that is to say of materialism,
+or of force—threatens the conception of justice.
+But justice will have its turn. The higher human law cannot
+be the offspring of animality. Justice is the right to the maximum
+of individual independence compatible with the same
+liberty for others;—in other words, it is respect for man, for
+the immature, the small, the feeble; it is the guarantee of those
+human collectivities, associations, states, nationalities—those
+voluntary or involuntary unions—the object of which is to
+increase the sum of happiness, and to satisfy the aspiration
+of the individual. That some should make use of others for
+their own purposes is an injury to justice. The right of the
+stronger is not a right, but a simple fact, which obtains only
+so long as there is neither protest nor resistance. It is like
+cold, darkness, weight, which tyrannise over man until he has
+invented artificial warmth, artificial light, and machinery.
+Human industry is throughout an emancipation from brute
+nature, and the advances made by justice are in the same
+way a series of rebuffs inflicted upon the tyranny of the
+stronger. As the medical art consists in the conquest of disease,
+so goodness consists in the conquest of the blind ferocities
+and untamed appetites of the human animal. I see the
+same law throughout:—increasing emancipation of the individual,
+a continuous ascent of being towards life, happiness,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</span>
+justice, and wisdom. Greed and gluttony are the starting-point,
+intelligence and generosity the goal.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Nor is there anything in the “Journal Intime” to indicate
+that he had ever heard of Pasteur, or Morton, or Simpson, who
+laid the foundation of a diseaseless world and a painless world.
+His diary is a record of his own thoughts, to be sure, but one's
+thoughts are engendered, in a measure at least, by what is
+going on in the world. An inhabitant of any other world
+whose knowledge of this could be obtained only from Amiel's
+book, would be left with an abysmal ignorance of the subject.
+He would learn something of the German philosophers
+and of French littérateurs and of Amiel's ideas of God and of
+infinity.</p>
+
+<p>Schopenhauer says that</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“It is not by the unification of the intellect and the will that
+man attains to higher truth, but by their dissociation. When
+the intellect casts off the yoke of the will it rises above the
+illusion of finite life and attains a vision of transcendent truth.
+When one can contemplate without will, beyond, when he can
+dissolve the life instinct in pure thought, then he possesses the
+field of higher truth, then he is on the avenue that leads to
+Nirvana.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Higher truth is possible only through the annihilation of the
+will, and if this annihilation is done after taking thought, that
+is after planning to do it and determining to do it, the price
+that one has to pay, or the penalty that is exacted, is an incapacity
+or diminished capacity for practical life. Amiel was a
+real mystic, not by choice, perhaps, but by birth. He was
+proud of it in his youth and early maturity; he questioned it in
+his late maturity; and regretted it in his senescence. When he
+was fifty years old he wrote,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“The man who gives himself to contemplation looks on at
+rather than directs his life, is a spectator rather than an actor,
+seeks rather to understand than to achieve. Is this mode of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</span>
+existence illegitimate, immoral? Is one bound to act? Is such
+detachment an idiosyncrasy to be respected or a sin to be
+fought against? I have always hesitated on this point, and
+I have wasted years in futile self-reproach and useless fits of
+activity. My western conscience, penetrated as it is with
+Christian morality, has always persecuted my Oriental quietism
+and Buddhist tendencies. I have not dared to approve
+myself, I have not known how to correct myself.... Having
+early caught a glimpse of the absolute, I have never had the
+indiscreet effrontery of individualism. What right have I to
+make a merit of a defect? I have never been able to see any
+necessity for imposing myself upon others, nor for succeeding.
+I have seen nothing clearly except my own deficiencies and the
+superiority of others.... With varied aptitudes and a fair
+intelligence, I had no dominant tendency, no imperious faculty,
+so that while by virtue of capacity I felt myself free, yet when
+free I could not discover what was best. Equilibrium produced
+indecision and indecision has rendered all my faculties
+barren.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If Amiel had been a real Christian, that is, if he had taken
+his orientation and orders from Christ, he would have had no
+doubt whether such a mode of existence was illegitimate and
+immoral or not. He could have found specific instruction telling
+him he was bound to act. He was a nominal Christian,
+but a <em>de facto</em> Buddhist.</p>
+
+<p>Next to the output of a man's activity as shown by his work,
+his selection of recreational outlets for his emotional life is
+illuminating. What were Amiel's amusements? So far as the
+diary shows, day dreaming, poetising, fancy, and a contemplation
+of nature furnished the only outlets for his more organised
+emotional nature. For play in any form he apparently
+felt no need.</p>
+
+<p>There is a type of individual whose failure to bring his performance
+up to the standard which his intelligence would seem
+to warrant takes the form of inability to face concrete situations.
+Unable to adjust himself to his environment when realities
+present difficulties that call for solution, such an individual<span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</span>
+becomes burdened with a sense of his own inadequacy; and
+from this he is inclined to seek escape in impersonal abstractions,
+usually described by him as ideals. Mystic philosophy
+in some form is the frequent refuge of such tender souls from
+their own sense of inability to cope with life and its concrete
+problems.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the record divergence between ideals and acts
+stands out. Idealism is everywhere pled as the basis of the
+hesitation to act. The conscious and foredoomed disparity
+between conception and realisation is made the excuse for the
+absence of effort.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Practical life makes me afraid. And yet, at the same time,
+it attracts me; I have need of it. Family life, especially, in all
+its delightfulness, in all its moral depth, appeals to me like a
+duty. Sometimes I cannot escape from the ideal of it. A
+companion of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my
+hopes; within, a common worship, towards the world outside,
+kindness and beneficence; educations to undertake, the thousand
+and one moral relations which develop round the first—all
+these ideas intoxicate me sometimes. But I put them aside,
+because every hope is, as it were, an egg whence a serpent may
+issue instead of a dove, because every joy missed is a stab,
+because every seed confided to destiny contains an ear of grief
+which the future may develop.” </p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>“I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any
+presentiment of glory or happiness. I have never seen myself
+in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father,
+an influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this
+absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs.
+What dreams I have are vague and indefinite; I ought not to
+live, for I am now scarcely capable of living.—Recognise your
+place; let the living live; and you, gather together your
+thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you
+will be more useful so. Renounce yourself, accept the cup
+given you, with its honey and its gall, as it comes. Bring God
+down into your heart. Embalm your soul in him now, make
+within you a temple for the Holy Spirit; be diligent in good<span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</span>
+works, make others happier and better. Put personal ambition
+away from you, and then you will find consolation in
+living or in dying, whatever may happen to you.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Complaining of a restless feeling which was not the need
+for change, he said,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“It is rather the fear of what I love, the mistrust of what
+charms me, the unrest of happiness.... And is there not
+another reason for all this restlessness, in a certain sense of
+void—of incessant pursuit of something wanting?—of longing
+for a truer peace and a more entire satisfaction? Neighbours,
+friends, relations—I love them all; and so long as these affections
+are active, they leave in me no room for a sense of want.
+But yet they do not <em>fill</em> my heart; and that is why they have
+no power to fix it. I am always waiting for the woman and
+the work which shall be capable of taking entire possession of
+my soul, and of becoming my end and aim.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Amiel's life was a constant negation. His ideals were all
+concerned with concepts of perfection, with the absolute, and
+being sane enough to realise the impossibility of attaining such
+perfection, he refused compromises. He would not play the
+game for its own sake, nor for the fine points. If he could
+not win all the points—and being sane he knew beforehand
+that he could not—he preferred not to play at all. But he
+made a virtue of his weakness and called it idealism. Had he
+possessed the courage to hitch his wagon to a star—and let
+the star carry him where it would; had he heeded the warning,</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+<p>“And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost<br>
+Is—the unlit lamp and the ungird loin”;</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>or gone the way of thousands of practical idealists who have
+made their idealism an incentive to action and thereby left the
+world richer for having passed through it, he would have
+needed no excuse for his failure to attain perfection. On the
+contrary, he would have learned with the sureness of a
+hard-learned lesson that idealism is worth our loyalty only<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</span>
+when it becomes an inspiration to living, and that it is worse
+than futile when it serves merely as a standard for thought
+or an excuse for failure.</p>
+
+<p>Amiel coddled his sensibilities for fear of rebuff; he hid
+his intellectuality in the diary lest he should suffer from the
+clear light of publicity; he denied life out of apprehension that
+life might bruise his ego. He told himself that he was protecting
+his idealism. In reality he was protecting his egoism.
+If he had been the victim of a psychosis he would not have
+recognised his limitations nor stated them so clearly. It was
+sanity that enabled him to see the impossibility of attaining
+the perfection of which he dreamed and wrote. It was cowardice,
+not a psychosis, which made him refuse to act in the face
+of this knowledge. Had he been a Roman Catholic, he
+might have rested upon the conception of absolute perfection
+offered in the authority of the Church and the life of the
+cloister. But being a Protestant, both by inheritance and by
+conscience, he had to think things out for himself; and the
+more he thought the wider became the breach between his
+conception of perfection and his hope of realising it. He was
+tortured by a conscience goading him to action and a temperament
+paralysing him with the fear that the end would fall short
+of anticipation. He lacked the moral courage to put his power
+to the test and be disappointed. He was without the stamina
+of the man who fights and runs away. He was too much of an
+egoist to risk a losing game, and in consequence he never
+tasted the sweet flavour of work well done—even though the
+end was apparent failure.</p>
+
+<p>The growing sense of inadequacy between the conscience to
+act and the temperament to deny action is written plainly in
+these random quotations from the “Journal” during the record
+of many years. At thirty he wrote,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“He who is silent is forgotten; he who abstains is taken at
+his word; he who does not advance, falls back; he who stops is
+overwhelmed, distanced, crushed; he who ceases to grow<span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</span>
+greater becomes smaller; he who leaves off gives up; the
+stationary condition is the beginning of the end—it is the
+terrible symptom which precedes death. To live, is to achieve
+a perpetual triumph; it is to assert oneself against destruction,
+against sickness, against the annulling and dispersion of one's
+physical and moral being. It is to will without ceasing, or
+rather to refresh one's will day by day.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Ten years later when the conflict was closing in upon him he
+wrote,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“In me an intellect which would fain forget itself in things,
+is contradicted by a heart which yearns to live in human beings.
+The uniting link of the two contradictions is the tendency
+towards self-abandonment, towards ceasing to will and
+exist for oneself, towards laying down one's own personality,
+and losing—dissolving—oneself in love and anticipation. What
+I lack above all things is character, will, individuality. But,
+as always happens, the appearance is exactly the contrary of
+the reality, and my outward life the reverse of my true and
+deepest aspiration. I whose whole being—heart and intellect—thirsts
+to absorb itself in reality, in its neighbour man,
+in Nature and in God—I, whom solitude devours and destroys—I
+shut myself up in solitude and seem to delight only
+in myself and to be sufficient for myself.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>At forty-seven, when most men's work is at the high tide
+of realisation, he said,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I have no more strength left, I wish for nothing; but that is
+not what is wanted. I must wish what God wishes; I must
+pass from indifference to sacrifice, and from sacrifice to self-devotion.
+The cup I would fain put away from me is the
+misery of living, the shame of existing and suffering as a
+common creature who has missed his vocation; it is the bitter
+and increasing humiliation of declining power, of growing old
+under the weight of one's own disapproval, and the disappointment
+of one's friends.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>At fifty-four,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“What use have I made of my gifts, of my special circumstances,
+of my half century of existence? What have I paid<span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</span>
+back to my country?... Are all the documents I have produced
+... anything better than withered leaves?... When
+all is added up—nothing! And worst of all, it has not been a
+life used up in the service of some adored object, or sacrificed
+to any future hope.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Psychology teaches that too much emphasis cannot be laid
+in education upon the reconciliation of ideals and performance,
+nor too much effort devoted to the formation of habits of
+facing concrete situations squarely, reaching definite decisions,
+and thereby making efforts, however ineffective and crude, to
+link ideals to action. It has been proved that if natural dispositions
+are ignored or denied by the repression of normal
+primary instincts, disassociation of personality is likely to be
+the result. Amiel's ineffectiveness, his lack of dynamic
+quality, while in no sense a psychosis, may be considered as a
+personality defect. How far this defect may have been conditioned
+by his denial of the basic springs of human action
+cannot be stated. Neither can it, in any impartial estimate of
+his life and personality, be ignored. Next to the instinct of
+self-preservation, the instinct for the preservation of the race
+to which one belongs is the dominant impulse of the individual.
+No system of thought, no plan of life can ignore it
+and not pay the penalty. Amiel's diary is full of such denials,
+and they frequently carry with them the consciousness that he
+realised the death sentence to aspiration and realisation which
+he was reading to himself between the lines.</p>
+
+<p>Amiel was a shy, sensitive, solitary child. We know very
+little about his adolescent struggles and transition to heterosexual
+fixation. Indeed we do not know whether it ever
+came about, and that is where the chief hiatus in our
+knowledge of Amiel lies. As a youth he became intoxicated
+with philosophic idealism, and Hegel was for him the fountainhead
+of all philosophic thought.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing in the diary to indicate that the normal
+love-making of healthy youth had any part in his thoughts<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</span>
+or his life. Later, his sex consciousness colours the record to
+a great extent—indeed it might be said to give the colour
+to the book—but always in the guise of repressions, fears,
+hesitations, and longings for unattainable perfection, and
+finally of half-hearted regrets for his own denials.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I am capable of all the passions, for I bear them all within
+me. Like a tamer of wild beasts, I keep them caged and lassoed,
+but I sometimes hear them growling. I have stifled more
+than one nascent love. Why? Because with that prophetic
+certainty which belongs to moral intuition, I felt it lacking in
+true life, and less durable than myself. I choked it down in
+the name of the supreme affection to come. The loves of
+sense, of imagination, of sentiment—I have seen through and
+rejected them all; I sought the love which springs from the
+central profundities of being. And I still believe in it. I will
+have none of those passions of straw which dazzle, burn up,
+and wither; I invoke, I await, and I hope for the love which
+is great, pure, and earnest, which lives and works in all the
+fibres and through all the powers of the soul. And even if I
+go lonely to the end, I would rather my hope and my dream
+died with me, than that my soul should content itself with any
+meaner union.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is the basis of monasticism in the Catholic Church,
+and it is, in my judgment, the most violent offence to God that
+can be given. Goethe says that he never wrote a new poem
+without having a new love affair. Amiel was intrigued by
+Goethe secondly only to Hegel. If he had copied Goethe
+more nearly in living, he might have said with him,</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+<p>“Wonach soll man am Ende trachten?<br>
+Die Welt zu Kennen und nicht zu Verachten.”</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>There have been books made up of beautiful quotations
+from Amiel's “Journal Intime,” which are supposed to help
+people live, to mitigate pain, to disperse apprehension, and to
+assuage misery. They are not a patch on the Bible or on the
+writings of Socrates.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</span></p>
+
+<p>“The oracle of today drops from his tripod on the morrow,” 
+said John Morley. Will this apply to Amiel? Is he
+a passing fashion? And why has his popularity grown? The
+best answer to these questions is found in the nature of his
+audience. To what kind of people does Amiel appeal? To
+the contemporary purveyors of cloudy stuff; to mystics; to
+the tender-minded; to those who prefer the contemplation of
+far horizons to travelling the road just ahead. He does not
+appeal to anyone with fighting blood, whether he be facing the
+conflict with the glorious self-confidence of healthy untried
+youth, the magnetism of past success, the tried measure of his
+own limitations and powers, the scars of honest defeat, or the
+pluck of the one who fights a losing fight with more courage
+and idealism than he would have mustered for a winning one.</p>
+
+<p>Amiel's tragedy was that he outraged nature's unique law and
+nature exacted the penalty. If the world had a few thousand
+Amiels and they got the whip hand, it might cease to exist.</p>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" >CHAPTER X<br>
+<small>GEORGES DUHAMEL: POET, PACIFIST, AND PHYSICIAN</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>The world is thronged with people who are busying themselves
+with world ordering. They may be divided into
+two great groups: those who believe that it is to be brought
+about by revolution; and those who are convinced that it is
+to be accomplished by following the instructions given by the
+Master to the lawyer who asked the question: “Which is <em>the</em>
+great commandment in the law?” The former are called
+Bolshevists; the latter Pacifists; and both terms are habitually
+used derisively. Amongst the latter there are few more conspicuous
+in France than Georges Duhamel, a physician by
+profession, a littérateur by choice, who at thirty-eight years of
+age finds himself in a commanding position in French letters.</p>
+
+<p>I have recently had the opportunity of an interview with
+this brilliant young man, and it occurs to me to present a
+summary of his aspirations and an estimate of his accomplishments.</p>
+
+<p>His history is brief. Early success, like a happy country,
+does not furnish history. He was born in Paris in 1884, the
+son of a physician and the grandson of a farmer. This evolution
+from farmer to littérateur in three generations Duhamel
+says is common in France, indeed in all Central Europe. His
+tastes seem to have been largely influenced, if not formed, by
+the setting and atmosphere with which his father's profession
+surrounded his early life. Until he was mobilised in 1914
+Duhamel had not practised medicine. Even as a youth he had
+experienced the literary urge and felt that he would eventually
+succumb to it. He, however, devoted himself to the sciences
+and to medicine in the firm belief that such study provides
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</span>
+the best preparation for the vocation of literature. In
+this M. Duhamel is in full accord with another famous theoretical
+world orderer, Mr. H. G. Wells, but in disagreement
+with a practical one, Mr. Charles E. Hughes.</p>
+
+<p>“One does not learn life from letters, but from life, through
+seeing suffering and death,” said he when asked to speak of
+the factors that influenced him to abandon medicine for
+letters.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of his studies as a youth he had what he now
+calls rather a strange adventure.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I spent much time in the society of friends: writers, painters
+and sculptors. All of us were seized with a strong desire to
+shrink from society as it was constituted. Although we were
+not all Fourierites, we decided to form a phalanstery in which
+we could live a community life, each one taking part in the
+work and in the joy of living in an atmosphere adapted to our
+tastes and our professions. We agreed to make our living by
+means of manual work, and to abolish the relation of master
+and servant. We decided to adopt the trade of typography,
+which would permit us to advance our art. Through mutual
+economies we bought a printing press and our first books were
+published by 'L'Abbaye de Creteil,' as our little publishing
+house was called. The phalanstery was disbanded for financial
+reasons, but we had a taste of an agreeable life, independent,
+oftentimes difficult, but in many respects quite ideal.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>When asked about his earliest literary productions and why
+he essayed poetry rather than prose, he replied,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Generally speaking, all writers begin with poetry and gradually
+forsake metre. Our little group wanted to initiate a great
+literary epoch and we believed that this could be done only by
+creating an atmosphere favourable to intellectual work.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>He might have borrowed Socrates' reply when Cebes asked
+the same question: “For I reflect that a man who means to be a
+poet has to use fiction and not facts for his poems.” M.
+Duhamel's training had been in facts, and his greatest success
+in letters has been in the recording of facts. His smallest
+success has been in establishing postulates based upon them.</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe25" id="ilo_fp241">
+  <img class="w100 p2" src="images/ilo_fp241.jpg" alt="ilop239" title="p239ilo">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="allsmcap">GEORGES DUHAMEL</span></figcaption>
+</figure>
+<p class="center p2b">From a drawing by <em>Ivan Opffer</em> in <em>THE BOOKMAN.</em></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In 1909 M. Duhamel received his degree in medicine and
+shortly after appeared the four plays which, with his poetry,
+“Des Légendes, des Batailles,” a collection of verse published
+by “L'Abbaye” in 1907; “L'Homme en Tête,” in 1909;
+“Selon ma Loi,” in 1910; and “Compagnons,” in 1912, gave
+him a definite place in the literary hierarchy. These plays
+were “La Lumière,” which appeared in 1911; “Dans l'Ombre
+des Statues,” in 1912; “Le Combat,” a symbolic drama in <em>vers
+libres</em>, in 1912; and “L'Œuvre des Athlètes” in 1920. All of
+these were produced on the Paris stage and all save the last
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</span>
+have appeared in translations by Sasha Best in <em>Poet Lore</em>,
+Boston, in 1914 and 1915.</p>
+
+<p>These dramas, as well as his early poetry, show the influence
+of Walt Whitman. His message is conveyed through the
+medium of symbolism, his method being to create types rather
+than individual studies, and his purpose to bring art closer to
+the masses. The result, as might have been expected, is drama
+of no great popularity.</p>
+
+<p>Almost simultaneously with his work as poet and dramatist
+M. Duhamel achieved prominence as a critic. For some years
+he was critic of poetry for <em>Le Mercure de France</em>, and his
+articles contributed to that publication were collected in book
+form in 1914 under the title of “Les Poètes et la Poésie.” His
+earliest critical work, however, was a collaboration with M.
+Charles Vildrac, called “Mots sur la Technique Poétique.” 
+“Propos Critique,” published in 1912, is largely devoted to
+comments on the efforts of the younger and, at that time, comparatively
+unknown writers, and it is of special interest that
+many of these writers are now famous.</p>
+
+<p>“Paul Claudel: le philosophe—le poète—l'ecrivain—le dramaturge,” 
+published in 1913, is considered by some of Duhamel's
+admirers as the best of his critical works, marked as it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</span>
+is by the same gifts of analysis and charm of style which distinguished
+his briefer critical writings.</p>
+
+<p>It is, however, chiefly of his work since the beginning of
+the war, and the direction which his ideas and aims have taken
+under the influence of the war, that this article is concerned.</p>
+
+<p>When the war broke out it found Georges Duhamel—then
+about thirty years of age—intent upon his literary work:
+poetry, criticism, interpretation, which had put him in the first
+rank of littérateurs of his country. Mobilised in the Medical
+Corps he first went to Verdun and found himself in the thick
+of the carnage; but he was soon transferred to the Marne where
+in the comparative quiet of a hospital he was able to make the
+observations and write the reflections which have carried his
+name throughout the civilised world. During the four years of
+the war he produced four remarkable volumes: “Vie des Martyrs”
+(The New Book of Martyrs), “Civilisation,” “Possession
+du Monde” (The Heart's Domain), and “Entretiens dans le
+Tumulte” (Interviews in the Tumult), four of the most noteworthy
+and important books inspired by the war.</p>
+
+<p>Plunged at once into the great war hopper whose purpose
+was to reduce all human material to a homogeneous mass that
+would furnish energy for the war machine, Duhamel preserved
+his perspective and his individual outlook both upon the war
+and upon life. Nothing illustrates this so strikingly as some
+of his stories in “Civilisation,” gathered from scenes with
+which he came into contact after he had become a seasoned
+soldier.</p>
+
+<p>No stronger proof is needed of the essential wholesomeness
+and strength of Duhamel's make-up than the fact that while
+these stories, and those of “Vie des Martyrs,” were inspired
+by the horrors of the war, they do not depict horrors, nor do
+they create an atmosphere of horror. It is not the picture of
+healthy men in the flower of youth, in the vigour of virility
+fed to the war machine and left lacerated and broken, that
+Duhamel impresses upon the imaginations of his readers. It<span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</span>
+was thus that he had seen them in the first days of the siege
+of Verdun, in an improvised ambulance where from minute to
+minute new torments developed to increase their previous torments,
+while the fragile roof over their heads became a great
+resounding board for the projectiles of the siegers and the assieged.
+He had, however, the vision to see them in another
+light, and he was filled with pity and admiration for the French
+poilu. It is these two emotions, rather than horror, which
+make the atmosphere and colour of the two books of war
+stories. He sensed the significance of pain and saw the reactions
+of strong men to suffering. He saw man in his agony
+give the lie to the most misleading of all statements: that man
+is born equal. For neither in living nor in dying is there equality.
+Men are equal, we trust, before God, and they are alleged
+to be equal before the law, but after that equality of man does
+not exist.</p>
+
+<p>It is this book particularly that makes Duhamel the interpreter
+of the poor, the obscure, the stupid, the inarticulate.
+With an unerring intuition he reaches the soul. His
+sympathies are so large, his understanding so comprehensive,
+and his reflection of them so complete, that his readers suffer
+with the suffering. It seems impossible to depict the sufferings
+of these poor martyrs, sent like droves of cattle to be struck
+down for what purpose they knew not, more accurately and
+convincingly than he does. With the reader's sympathy
+thus awakened, one wonders that the individual can be deprived
+of his own right to judge whether the cause is great
+enough for him to lay down his all; to be crushed by the
+chariots of the god of war.</p>
+
+<p>M. Duhamel, in “Vie des Martyrs,” has succeeded in making
+his martyrs immortal. To him has been given in a superlative
+degree that seeing eye, that understanding heart, that
+power of vision which, perhaps more than any other gift,
+enriches life, since it enables the fortunate possessor to rid<span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</span>
+himself of the trammels of his own narrow existence and live
+the lives of many.</p>
+
+<p>He has made a contribution to behaviouristic psychology
+in these little stories, or better said sketches from life, that will
+endure. He has been able to convey to unenlightened man
+the difference between the <em>bon</em> and the <em>mauvais blessé</em> and to
+show that it is soul difference as well as bodily difference. He
+has portrayed in simple colours the desire to live, and the determination
+to live, factors which physicians know are most
+important in forecasting the chances of recovery of every sick
+man. And with it all there is tenderness, which the author has
+had the power to convey through delicacy of style that makes
+prose poetry of much of his narrative of the thoughts, aspirations,
+sentiments, and plans of individual men who, from their
+appearance and position, are the most commonplace of the commonplace.
+There is no anger, violence, hatred, or despair
+in any of his pictures. There is sometimes irony, but it is of
+so gentle a nature that it strengthens the impression of sympathy
+with his characters, rather than suggesting judgment of
+them.</p>
+
+<p>“A human being suffers always in his flesh alone, and that
+is why war is possible,” says M. Duhamel in “Civilisation.” 
+This is one of those marvellous epitomes of human conduct,
+of which he has framed many. It is vouchsafed to but few
+to understand and suffer another's pain. To the majority of
+mankind it is denied. Were it not so, the fellow-feeling that
+makes us wondrous kind would displace greed.</p>
+
+<p>There are so many remarkable features of M. Duhamel's
+war books, such, for instance, as what may be called the thesis
+of “Vie des Martyrs”: that men suffer after their own image
+and in their own loneliness; or of “Civilisation”: that consciousness
+has outrun life; that it has created for itself reactions
+and inhibitions so intricate and profound that they cannot
+be tolerated by life, that I was keen to learn how these attitudes
+had developed. When questioned, this is what he said:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I am forced to divide things in the way practiced in the
+sciences; that is to say, not to confuse the study of facts with
+conclusions drawn from them. In these two books I showed
+as faithfully as I could the life and sufferings of soldiers during
+the war. In the latter two (“The Heart's Domain” and “Interviews
+in the Tumult”) I drew conclusions from the facts established
+in the first two. This procedure seemed to me the best
+way to handle anti-war propaganda. The weakness of most
+books results from the fact that the idea or subject is confused
+with other, regrettably often sentimental, considerations. The
+procedure employed in the sciences seems to be more orderly,
+and therefore more convincing for the exposition of my ideas.
+These books awoke a great echo, because they corresponded
+closely to the state of mind of sensible men who are bent on
+doing everything to make war impossible. Because of this I
+was looked upon as a Pacifist, and I regard this as an honour.
+I have never been politically active nor do I belong to any
+political group. However I am a Pacifist and an Internationalist.
+I believe that it is only the individual that can be an
+Internationalist. A nation will never be Internationalist for the
+reason that Pacifism and Internationalism are indissolubly
+bound up with individualism.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>M. Duhamel's work cannot, therefore, be considered solely
+in the light of its literary qualities. By his own admission he
+is a writer with a purpose, and this purpose is the suppression
+of war. In the interview he stated that this purpose fills all
+of his work and “will be, I believe, the axis of my work all
+my life.” </p>
+
+<p>Regarding the four war books in this light, a sincere critic
+can hardly escape the conviction that the author has accomplished
+the first part of his task with immeasurably greater
+success than the latter part. Of the convincing appeal of the
+two books which aim only to present vivid and truthful pictures
+of the sufferings of the soldiers during the war there
+can be no question. But of the author's power as a propagandist
+against war, as expressed in the two latter books, it is
+by no means easy to form so satisfactory an estimate.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</span></p>
+
+<p>Duhamel does not believe that the war developed a <em>modus
+vivendi</em> for the world. He thinks it left us where it found us,
+only exhausted. Unless something is devised while this exhaustion
+is being overcome, the conflict will be taken up again.
+He believes that a revolution is necessary, but not a revolution
+in the sense of the term that applies to the affairs of Russia
+or Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>When Duhamel is read in the light of history, especially of
+the last one hundred and twenty-five years, one is less hopeful
+than if he were ignorant of history. If any <em>ex cathedra</em> statement
+is justifiable it would seem to be this: the world war
+flowed more or less directly from the revolutionary movement
+which began with the dissemination of the doctrine of the
+French philosophers, especially Rousseau, toward the end of
+the Eighteenth Century. His discourse “On the Origin of Inequality
+Amongst Men” is the fountainhead of modern socialism
+and the source from which the ferment that brought about
+the world revolution emanated. Rousseau's thesis was that
+civilisation had proven itself to be the curse of humanity and
+that man in his primitive state was free and happy.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“The first time he knew unhappiness was when convention
+stepped in and said 'you must not do this and you must not
+do that,' and the State stepped in and said 'this is private property.'
+The first man who bethought himself of saying 'this
+is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him was
+the real founder of civil society. What crimes, what wars,
+what murders, what miseries and horrors would he have spared
+the human race who, snatching away the spade and filling in
+the ditches, had cried out to his fellows: 'beware of listening
+to this impostor; you are lost if you forget that the fruits of
+the earth belong to all and the earth to no one.'”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It was the dissemination of this doctrine and the writings of
+Voltaire which led to the “Feast of Reason,” and the publication
+of the “Encyclopédie” that led to the world volcanic
+eruption of 1789, which had its repetition in 1914.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</span></p>
+
+<p>It seems that most of these ideas were to be found in the
+writings of Adam Weishaupt, an apostate Catholic, who
+founded the secret society known as the “Illiminati” in 1776.
+It is interesting to compare some of his statements with Duhamel's
+aspirations.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“When men united themselves into nations, national love
+took the place of universal love. With the division of the globe
+into countries benevolence restricted itself behind boundaries
+that it was never again to transgress. It became a virtue to
+spread out at the expense of those who did not happen to
+be under our dominion. In order to attain this goal it became
+permissible to despise foreigners and to deceive and offend
+them. This virtue was called patriotism. Patriotism gave birth
+to localism, to the family spirit, and finally to egoism. Thus
+the origin of states or governments of civil society was the
+seed of discord and patriotism found its punishment in itself.
+Do away with this love of country, and men will once more
+learn to know and love each other as men; there will be no
+more partiality; the ties between hearts will unroll and
+extend.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Duhamel wants to develop this relationship between men,
+but he wants to do it in a very different way.</p>
+
+<p>This moral revolution will be accomplished when men love
+one another, and when they reward good for evil. Even though
+this had not been shouted from the housetops and whispered
+through the lattice, in every tongue and in every clime for
+the past twenty centuries, we should still feel that M. Duhamel
+is in error, for these precepts are at variance with the teachings
+of biology, the science for which M. Duhamel has so much
+respect. You might just as well ask a man who is drowning
+not to struggle as to ask a man to return good for evil—that is
+unless he is doing it as a stunt, an artefact, or in redemption
+of the promise to be saved. It is against nature. First teach
+him to put a new valuation on life and to get new standards of
+what makes life worth living. Then M. Duhamel will have a
+foundation to build upon.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</span></p>
+
+<p>That M. Duhamel is no less earnest than sincere in his purpose
+is proved by his lectures through Europe during the last
+few years, as protagonist for the suppression of war; and also
+by the fact that he was one of the co-founders of “Clarté,” so
+named for the book by Barbusse, which is a group of men who
+preach anti-militarism, the intellectual solidarity of nations,
+and the social equality of all citizens.</p>
+
+<p>“Possession du Monde” is by virtue of its title a frank
+avowal of its aim to set forth the author's idea of finding some
+satisfactory substitute for the world possession for which the
+war was fought. It is the effort of a wholesome, buoyant, sympathetic
+man, after having been brought into contact with the
+horrors of the war, to find a substitute for orthodox religion;
+the expression of an emotionally religious man without a creed.
+M. Duhamel, who was brought up a Catholic, lost all religion,
+he said, when he was fifteen years old.</p>
+
+<p>The panacea which Duhamel offers in this book for human
+suffering and world ills is the conscious striving for happiness
+by means of a sort of “culture of the soul.” He puts a personal
+construction upon happiness and holds that it is and
+should be the object of all humanity and of the whole world
+of living things. He quotes Maeterlinck to the effect that “As
+man is created for health, so was man created for happiness.” 
+This soul culture is rather an attitude of feeling toward things
+than an attitude of thought. There is no attempt to think out
+any of the problems which have puzzled men for ages. Neither
+is there any denying of them. He simply says substantially:
+I am a practical man. Of course I take things as they are—or
+as they seem to be—but I take the best that is in them. I take
+the sunshine, the flowers, the wisdom of the ages, the art that
+has come down to us, the science, human love, the fine qualities
+of friendship, work, play, my sorrows and adversities, even
+religion—but I take only what is good out of them all; and
+I take that temperately, sanely, according to the limitations<span class="pagenum" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</span>
+which nature and circumstances have imposed. And I am
+happy. You can do likewise and you can be happy.</p>
+
+<p>But can I take poverty and want, and particularly can I
+take them with equanimity while my neighbour or brother is
+swaggering with riches, some of which he has robbed me
+because he is stronger or cleverer than I? Duhamel's formula
+for achieving happiness, as well as his conception of what constitutes
+happiness, only fits the average man, and it has been
+proven countless thousands of times that there is no such
+person. It is sufficient, perhaps, for people who feel normally
+and do not think for themselves. So it may be sufficient for
+the present for a mass of people who want to be led—if they
+are pious and healthy.</p>
+
+<p>But how about the people who are different, or who are
+not healthy, or who think they are safer custodians of wealth
+and power than their so-called brothers? It brings no help to
+the people who are tortured by an insistent need to think things
+out for themselves, or else to find something which will answer
+their questions as to the why. Nor does it tell those who are
+handicapped, physically, mentally, or even temperamentally,
+how they can overcome their handicaps so as to, as it were,
+extract the honey from the flowers. The world is full of people
+with all degrees of unusualness and abnormality. One may
+ignore them, but no scheme of things can deny them. Duhamel
+uses them by preference as a basis for his fiction.</p>
+
+<p>In his conception of happiness Duhamel reads himself and
+his own emotions into all things. He avers that the algæ
+growing in a tank of water with nothing but a few grains of
+dust and sunlight are happy because they subsist and work
+out their humble joy. Has any sentient soul told him he was
+happy under parallel circumstances? That is the question.
+He reads his own philosophy into the algæ. To him to be
+living as nature intended one to live is to be happy. But who
+can say? Just here I am reminded of a quotation from Anatole
+France of which Duhamel makes use in this book: “Men<span class="pagenum" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</span>
+have cut each others' throats over the meaning of a word.” 
+People might argue forever over the meaning of the word
+“happiness” and never get anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>Duhamel says that happiness is the ultimate end of life and
+that religion is the search for happiness in a life to come after
+this. Everybody wants to be happy in this life and some
+people expect to be happy in a life after this—of these two
+assertions there can be no doubt. But Duhamel says there
+is no life after this, and that the sole object of life is to be
+happy in this world. He does, however, speak of “saving the
+soul,” and he implies his belief in God. He says substantially
+that the plants are happy because they are fulfilling their
+destiny, or doing what God meant them to do; and implies that
+man will be happy if he does the same. Very likely. But
+shall he strive to fulfill his destiny—to do what God meant
+him to do—merely in order to be happy? Or shall he strive to
+fulfill his destiny—and happiness will follow incidentally?
+Which should be his conscious end, happiness or the fulfilment
+of his destiny? Most religious people would say the latter.
+Duhamel says the former. But, for working purposes they
+are about the same, except that, for people who are at all
+temperamental or who meet with many discouragements,
+it is frequently difficult to strive for a happiness which seems
+elusive. Whereas, such people, if they are spiritually minded,
+can always find a stimulus in trying to do what they were
+intended to do. And if they believe in God the stimulus becomes
+greater. And if they can believe that the soul grows
+through every honest effort—that nothing is ever lost, whether
+the result appears to be success or failure—and that the limits
+of its growth are not bounded by what their senses can tell
+them in this life, their capacity for striving becomes sometimes
+amazing. How else account for the man who expends
+ten times the effort in playing a losing game that he would
+have spent in one that promised an easy success?</p>
+
+<p>That the soul will find its greatest happiness in the contemplation<span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</span>
+of itself, is Duhamel's belief. “He is the happiest
+man who best understands his happiness; for he is of all men
+most fully aware that it is only the lofty idea, the untiring
+courageous human idea, that separates gladness from sorrow,” 
+he quotes from Maeterlinck. A man should think about his
+soul at least once every day. But it would be safe to say that
+for one man who finds happiness in a life of contemplation ten
+find it in a life of action. The wholesome, sane, average, happy
+men—of whom Duhamel is an excellent example—are mostly
+men of action. The very existence of this book is a contradiction
+of his happiness of contemplation theory as applied to
+himself. It may well be questioned whether Duhamel would
+have written “Possession du Monde” if he had not been the
+kind of man who finds happiness in giving expression to every
+emotion. Besides self-study is safe only for strong natures.
+Self-analysis was the undoing of the man in one of Duhamel's
+best books, “Confession de Minuit.” </p>
+
+<p>Finally, what is “happiness”? Is it merely a feeling? Gladness?
+If that were all, and the ultimate end of life, would not
+the logical conclusion be that the happiest—and therefore the
+most successful—man would be the joyful maniac?</p>
+
+<p>The publication of M. Duhamel which has the greatest
+popularity is the one that his admirers would wish he had
+not written: “Possession du Monde.” It is a protest against
+the evaluation of life commercially, and a plea for a moral or
+spiritual standard. This is a topic for an epoch maker, and one
+who has not a vision or a plan should not essay it. M. Duhamel
+may have both, but he does not reveal them. He displays
+only the wish that the world should be better. In the
+jargon of the Freudian, it is a wish-fulfilment that does not
+realise. It is neither well done nor convincing, and it has been
+well and convincingly done by many writers, and still we have
+not profited by it. Amiel did it; Maeterlinck did it; Karr did
+it; and “others too numerous to mention.” They may have
+had some effect upon individuals, but the history of the past<span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</span>
+eight years shows that they had no effect upon the world at
+large, its evolution, or devolution. Moreover, there is a note
+of unction and self-satisfaction running through the book that
+is displeasing, if not offensive. It is quite true, or likely to be
+true, that “to think about the soul, to think about it at least
+once in the confusion of every crowded day, is indeed the beginning
+of salvation,” but there is a book in which this is said
+in a more convincing way than M. Duhamel can ever hope
+to say it.</p>
+
+<p>Viewed from a literary standpoint alone, the book is in
+keeping with, if not quite up to, the standard of his other
+works. His prose is always musical, and he often creates an
+atmosphere rather than an edifice. He is never emphatic,
+mandatory, severe, superlative. He is soft, gentle, often
+ironical, but always human.</p>
+
+<p>Two remarkable pieces of fiction constitute Duhamel's output
+since the four war books: “Les Hommes Abandonnés”
+(Abandoned Men) and “Confession de Minuit” (Midnight
+Confession). The first contains eight histories which try to
+prove that when men are gathered together in a crowd they are
+abandoned by the individual soul. It is an illustration on the
+reverse side in favour of individualism.</p>
+
+<p>“Confession de Minuit” is particularly significant as being
+named by the author in the interview as his favourite work.
+“As a human research I believe that it is the one with the most
+meaning,” he said of this novel; and it is, therefore, a matter
+of self-congratulation on the part of the writer that he found
+this book to be the one which interpreted to him the author's
+particular genius in the most convincing and interesting light
+The story has its bearing upon the author's theories because
+it illustrates more clearly than any of his other works a statement
+made by him in the interview:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“People often reproach me with being interested only in my
+stories with sick people or with children. Healthy men do not<span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</span>
+register the motives which govern them. When one studies
+a sick person one is able to see the relations between moral
+characteristics which in the healthy man exist, but are hidden.” 
+However, I hold that the average man, healthy, typical,
+scarcely exists in literature, and that the most interesting creations
+from the human point of view had for their subjects men
+who were unbalanced—from Hamlet to Leopold Bloom; from
+Raskolnikov to Dorian Gray.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Confession de Minuit” is the self-revelation of a man who
+was decidedly unbalanced. As a bit of art work the book is
+unique and remarkable. Almost the unity of a short-story is
+preserved without recourse to any of the usual machinery of
+the ordinary novel, such as plot, action, or conversation, except
+a very little of the most casual nature. To a person who
+reads fiction for character delineation this absence of trappings
+is a distinct gain.</p>
+
+<p>“Confession de Minuit” is the story of a man than whom
+a more uninteresting person could hardly be found in life;
+and yet as told by the man himself, Duhamel sustains the
+interest of the reader in the recital of pitiful weakness from the
+first page to the last without one lapse into dryness or loss
+of sympathy for the character, with whom, in the flesh, it
+would have been hard to feel any sentiment besides pity.
+It opens with the incident which causes the man to lose
+his position as a small clerk in an office through an utterly
+senseless—although perfectly harmless—performance: yielding
+to a sudden impulse to touch the ear of his employer just
+to assure himself that the employer was really made of flesh
+and blood, as himself. As society, or in this case the employer,
+is more afraid of an insane person than of a criminal, the
+reader does not share the man's feeling of injustice because
+he is first confronted with a revolver and then thrown speedily
+and bodily out of the office where he had been a faithful
+worker for several years; although he is able to pity the victim.
+The story, as told by the man himself, traces his rapid deterioration<span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</span>
+through progressive stages of self-pity, self-absorption,
+and inability to get hold of himself, to make an effort to
+re-establish himself, or even to seek advice or sympathy, until
+the last night when he pours out his “confession” to a stranger,
+with the statement that, on account of his failure in every
+relation in life, he is never going home to his old mother who
+has supported him with her small income and her needlework—nor
+is he ever going anywhere else, so far as the reader can
+see. He does not commit suicide. In fact, the story leaves
+one with the impression that he is merely “going crazy.” 
+Whether or not he is insane when the recital begins with the
+commission of the insane act is a matter for neither the novelist
+nor the critic to state.</p>
+
+<p>The great art of the writer lies in his ability to sustain
+interest at a high level in a pure character study of what is
+frequently described as a “shut-in personality.” </p>
+
+<p>This novel seems to have been written without reference
+to the author's happiness or “cult of the soul” theory. It
+might almost be construed as a contradiction of it. One might
+put a fatalistic construction upon it, if one did not take a
+material point of view of health and disease. I do not see
+how anyone could get away from the conviction that the man
+who makes the “Midnight Confession” of his own pitiful
+failure in life is a victim of either his own mental limitations,
+or else of his particular environment, or of both. The only
+other way in which anyone might account for his utter inability
+to get hold of life or to stand up against his first discouragement
+is the refuge of the Radical Socialist—that society
+gave him no chance, the concrete illustration being the cruel
+way in which constituted authority, or his employer, treated
+his first downward step. But if the author had intended to
+condemn the employer and to excuse the man he would hardly
+have selected for this step an act which would so readily arouse
+a question as to the man's sanity, nor would he have followed
+the incident with a story in which the only development was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</span>
+rapidly increasing loss of touch with the outside world.
+No philosophy, or religion, or cult could have helped this man,
+who was handicapped with a nature so weak that it could not
+resist an impulse which would have been suppressed instantly
+by any well-balanced person; nor could it have given him
+the strength to withstand the simple discouragements that are
+the inevitable lot of all men. He simply was not able to cope
+with something—define it as one may.</p>
+
+<p>One moral the story teaches. And that is the nobility
+of sympathy with even the weakest, most despised, and least
+interesting of human beings.</p>
+
+<p>M. Duhamel consecrates his life to the prevention of war.
+It is a noble gesture. He is gifted, sane, articulate, and temperamentally
+adapted and adjusted to the task. Were he a
+platonist and not a neo-platonist, I am sure greater success
+would crown his efforts. Twenty-five hundred years ago a
+man who penetrated the mysteries of life and death more
+deeply than anyone before or since said to his pupils who had
+gathered to speed him to the Great Beyond, the ship having
+returned from Delos and the Eleven having decided to release
+Socrates from his fetters:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“The body fills us with passions and desires, and fears, and
+all manner of phantoms and much foolishness; and so, as the
+saying goes, in very truth we can never think at all for it. It
+alone and its desires, cause war and factions and battles for
+the origin of all wars is the pursuit of wealth.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Until that pursuit can be substituted, the labours of M. Duhamel
+and his co-founders of “Clarté” are likely to be in vain.</p>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" >CHAPTER XI<br>
+<small>EVEN YET IT CAN'T BE TOLD—THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT<br>
+D. H. LAWRENCE</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>About twenty years ago a brilliant, unbalanced, young
+Austrian Jew wrote a book, “Sex and Character,” whose
+purpose was to show that woman had played a greater rôle
+in the world than her possessions warranted, that she was
+inherently devoid of morality, and that men should cease to
+procreate. In the autumn of 1903 its author, Otto Weininger,
+then twenty-three years old, shot and killed himself in the
+house in Vienna in which Beethoven had died. The author's
+awful theme and his tragic end caused the book to be widely
+read and even more widely discussed. Amongst those impressed
+by it was a boy of humble but uncommon parents, bred
+in the coal-fields of mid-England where he had led a strenuous
+life struggling with the sex question, contending with the stream
+of consciousness as it became swollen with the tributaries of
+puberty—“Oh, stream of hell which undermined my adolescence.” 
+While still a youth he felt the influence of another
+Austrian mystic of the same faith, Sigmund Freud, who maintains
+that the unconscious is the real man, that its energiser
+and director is the libido, and that the conscious is the artificed,
+the engendered man whose tenant and executive is the ego.
+By day and by night this exceptionally gifted and burdened boy
+took his grist to these two mystic millers. To comfort himself,
+to keep up his courage in the dark on his journeys to
+the mill and from it, he read the Bible, the poetry of Walt
+Whitman and Robert Browning, and the prose of Thomas
+Hardy. From the Old Testament he got an unsurpassed
+capacity for narrative and metaphor, while the “grey poet”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</span>
+whetted his appetite for worship and exaltation of the human
+body. Well might he say of Whitman, as Dante said of Virgil:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+<p>“Tu sè'lo mio maestro e il mio autore<br>
+Tu sè'solo colui, da cui io tòlsi<br>
+Lo bèllo stile che m'à fatto onore.”</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Thus D. H. Lawrence, like Jeshurun, waxed fat and kicked,
+forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock
+of his Salvation. And he began to pour forth his protest in
+a series of books, each a little more lawless than its predecessor,
+culminating in “The Rainbow.” The book was suppressed
+by the Government of his own country, but the censors
+of our “free country,” who pronounced “Jurgen” a book
+prejudicial to public morals, allowed “The Rainbow” to be
+published here. Perhaps that is the reason “Jurgen” has been
+published in England without molest. After that, when Mr.
+Lawrence wished to circulate his contributions to world-purification
+and progress, which many call pornography, he resorted
+to the camouflage of “published privately for subscribers only.” </p>
+
+<p>My information is that Mr. Lawrence is not so widely read
+in the United States as are many of his contemporaries, Mr.
+Compton Mackenzie or Mr. Frank Swinnerton, for example.
+But there is a Lawrence cult here and it is growing, particularly
+amongst those who like to be called Greenwich Villagers, the
+breath of whose nostrils is antinomianism, especially sex antinomianism.
+Moreover, he has a way of interpolating between
+his salacious romances and erotic poetry books of imagination,
+observation, and experience, such as “Bay” and “Twilight in
+Italy,” that are couched in language whose swing and go few
+can withstand. These are replete with descriptions of sense-stirring
+scenery and analyses of sex-tortured souls, analyses
+which give lyric expression to the passions of the average man,
+who finds their lurid and ecstatic depiction diverting. Finally,
+Mr. Lawrence is striving to say something—something of sex
+and self which he believes the world should know; indeed,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</span>
+which is of paramount importance to it—and his manner of
+saying it has been so seductive that there are probably many
+who, like myself, have been clinging to him, as it were, buying
+his books and reading him with the hope that eventually he
+would succeed.</p>
+
+<p>The time limit given him by one of his admirers and well-wishers
+has expired. In taking leave of him I purpose to set
+down my reasons for severing the emotional and intellectual
+thread that has kept us—even though so very loosely, and to
+him, quite unawaredly—together.</p>
+
+<p>This renders unavoidable a line or two about criticism.
+I accept Matthew Arnold's estimate of the function of criticism,
+“to make known the best that is thought and known in the
+world,” providing that the critic also exposes the poor and
+meretricious which is being palmed off as “just as good,” or
+which is bidding for estimate, high or low. A guide should
+not only show the traveller upon whose eyes the scales still
+rest, or who has set out on a journey before the dawn, the right
+road, but he should also warn him of perilous roads and specify
+whether the peril is from bandits, broken bridges, or bellowing
+bulls. It is needless to say that the guide should have
+travelled the road and should know it and its environment
+well, and that his information should be recent.</p>
+
+<p>The road that Mr. D. H. Lawrence has been travelling for
+the past decade and more, and making the basis for descriptions
+of his trips, is well known to me. I have worked upon it,
+laughed upon it, cried upon it for more than a quarter of a
+century. My information of it is recent, for there, even now, I
+earn my daily bread. It is the road leading from Original Sin
+to the street called Straight. All must travel it. Some make
+the journey quickly; some laboriously. Some, those who have
+morbid sex-consciousness in one form or another, inadequate
+or deviate genetic endowment, are unable to finish the journey
+at all.</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe25" id="ilo_fp261">
+  <img class="w100 p2" src="images/ilo_fp261.jpg" alt="ilop259" title="p259ilo">
+  <figcaption class="caption p2b"><span class="allsmcap">D. H. LAWRENCE</span></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mr. Lawrence seems to have learned early that he could not
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</span>
+fulfill his own nature passionately, and he has been struggling
+all his life to find the way in which fulfilment lies. It is generally
+believed that “Sons and Lovers” is largely autobiographical
+and that the writer is to be identified with Paul. In that
+book he gave ample testimony that he could not fulfill himself
+because of the conflict between mother-love and uxorial
+love; for we may venture to catalogue Paul's consortional
+experiences under that heading, even though he had no marriage
+lines. He has never been able to define just how he
+expected to fulfill his nature, but one may legitimately conclude
+from some of his recent publications that he believes,
+if the strings of the lyre of sensuality can be made taut enough
+and twanged savagely enough, the tone produced will constitute
+not only fulfilment and happiness, but an eternity of
+ecstasy, a timeless extension of that indescribable exaltation
+that Dostoievsky was wont to experience in moments
+preceding his epileptic seizures, which is so vividly described
+by him and which made such an impression upon his thoughts
+and so influenced his imagery. Mr. Lawrence apparently believes
+that fulfilment will be meditated by one “who will touch
+him at last on the root and quicken his darkness and perish on
+him as he has perished on her.” When this happens,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>“We shall be free, freer than angels, ah, perfect”;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>and,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>“After that, there will only remain that all men detach themselves and become unique<br>
+Conditioned only by our pure single being, having no laws but the laws of our own being.”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Finally:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>“Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ideas and ideals are the machine plan and the machine
+principles of an automatonised Psyche which has been so prejudicial<span class="pagenum" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</span>
+to human progress and human welfare. We must get rid
+of them both.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In fact, it is a world without ideals for which Mr.
+Lawrence is clamouring and which he maintains he is in
+process of creating. It must be allowed that he is working
+industriously to do it, but most people, I fancy, will continue
+to believe that his world will not be a fit place to live in should
+he be able to finish his task. Meanwhile he is doing much
+to make the world less livable than it might otherwise be,
+particularly for those who are not competent to judge whether
+any of Mr. Lawrence's contentions are tenable or any of his
+statements in harmony with the evidence of science.</p>
+
+<p>“Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious” contains more misinformation
+in a small space than almost any recent book save
+the “Cruise of the Kawa.” It may reasonably be expected that
+anyone who writes upon psychoanalysis and the unconscious
+today and expects a hearing should know something about
+biology. But no biologist would accept such dogmatic statements
+as</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Life begins now, as always, in an individual living
+creature. In the beginning of the individual living creature
+is the beginning of life, every time and always. And life has
+no beginning apart from this.... There is no assignable and
+no logical reason for individuality.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>To give such sentences the semblance of truth there should
+have been added, “so far as I know.” It is misleading to follow
+up such statements by saying, “having established so much,” 
+etc. A poet may be permitted to say that “The young bull in
+the field has a wrinkled and sad face.” Indeed, he may
+abandon all morphology and animal behaviour and make the
+graceful serpent rest its head upon its shoulder! But the man
+who invades the field of science should, at least, practise some
+accuracy of expression, even though he give himself the latitude
+of poetic license.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</span></p>
+
+<p>“The White Peacock” was Mr. Lawrence's first novel. It
+was favourably received. Letty, the principal character, is
+the trial portrait of all his later heroines. Her creator, in his
+youth and inexperience, did not know how to make her “carry
+on,” but she is the <em>anlage</em> for all his female characters, their
+immoralities and bestialities. Her story is a simple one. Her
+mother, a lady of fine character, has been put to the acid test
+by the moral defalcation of her father, a drunkard and wastrel
+with charm. Leslie, a young man with money and social position,
+commonplace, emotionally shallow, spiritually inelastic,
+unimaginative, but intelligent and straightforward, wooes the
+temperamental, volatile, romantic Letty. The appeal which
+Leslie did not make to her is made by George, a young farmer
+“stoutly built, brown-eyed and fair-skinned,” whom Letty
+finds “ruddy, dark and with greatly thrilling eyes” and whom
+she calls her bull. Meanwhile George and Letty's brother form
+a friendship which is in dimmest outline the prototype of that
+extraordinary relationship existing between Gerald Crich and
+Rupert Birkin in “Women in Love.” </p>
+
+<p>The book shows the influence of Thomas Hardy, after whom
+Lawrence in his early youth sedulously patterned himself. In
+those days he was concerned with the photographic description
+of rustic scenes and particularly the lives of farmers and miners—which
+he knew from experience—and showed a sensitive
+appreciation of natural beauty. But the interest of the book
+is in the fact that it contains trial pictures of most of his
+later characters. George is Tom Brangwen of “The Rainbow”;
+Leslie, grown up and more arrogant, is Gerald in “Women in
+Love” and Gerald Barlow in “Touch and Go”; Cyril, more experienced
+and daring, is called Rupert Birkin when he is introduced
+again. In all of Lawrence's books the same characters
+appear. They vary only in having different standards and
+different degrees of immorality. The environment is always
+the same—a mining town; a countryside pitted with collieries;
+farms teeming with evidence of vegetable and animal life which<span class="pagenum" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</span>
+is described with such intensity that the reader feels he is
+witnessing a new era of creation; mean drab houses; and
+squalid pubs. Into these and the schoolhouses and churches
+he puts his sex-tortured men and hyper-sexed women and
+surges them with chaotic vehemence of invitation and embrace
+and with the aches, groans, and shrieks of amorous love.</p>
+
+<p>His second novel, “The Trespassers,” shows the author
+to have, in addition to a sensitive and impassioned apprehension
+of nature, great capacity for describing the feelings of
+commonplace people. Helena, headstrong, determined, emancipated,
+self-sufficient, falls in love with her music teacher,
+Sigmund, a man of forty who had married when seventeen a
+matter-of-fact young woman who gave him many children
+which he ill-supported while she slaved and became sour and
+slatternly. Helena notices that Sigmund is tired and suggests
+that they spend a few days together in the Isle of Wight. She
+makes the plans, finds a nice motherly person who will take
+them into her cottage more for company than money, and,
+though this seems to be her first adventure, she acts with the
+certainty which attends experience. The scenery and tools
+that Mr. Lawrence uses so skilfully are all here: moonlight
+and its effect to produce ecstasy; bathing and lying naked on
+the sand or the grass and gazing approvingly at the body;
+lovely flowers and plants; and above all, a knowledge of the
+effects of baffled eroticism, of collision between primitive simple
+passion and artificial fantasying aberrant passion. Like
+Hermione Roddice of “Women in Love,” Helena's genetic instincts
+are abnormal. She has her Louisa, ten years her senior,
+whom she treats with indifference, cruelty, or affection, as it
+pleases her. Early in the history of man the prototype of
+Helena and Hermione was known. Shuah's second son, it is
+alleged, was the first example. The Lord slew Onan as soon
+as he deliberately violated the first and most essential principle
+of nature, but this drastic measure did not eradicate the biologic
+aberration, for it has displayed itself in the human<span class="pagenum" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</span>
+species from that day to this, and even today gives more concern
+to parents and pedagogues than any other instinct deviation.
+Fortunately novelists, until the advent of Mr. Lawrence,
+have not featured this infirmity.</p>
+
+<p>Even in these juvenile days, Mr. Lawrence left very little
+to the imagination. Helena and Sigmund, lying on the cold
+wet beach in the twilight, enveloped in the Scotch mist (parenthetically
+it may be said that his heroes and heroines are
+wholly insensitive to bodily discomfort when they are in the
+throes of concupiscence) were practising the “Overture to
+Love,” </p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“and when Helena drew her lips away she was much exhausted.
+She belonged to that class of dreaming women with whom
+passion exhausts itself at the mouth. Her desire was accomplished
+in a real kiss. She then wanted to go to sleep. She
+sank away from his caresses, passively, subtly drew back from
+him.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The next morning Sigmund goes into the sea, and this
+gives the author opportunity to display the burning passion
+which the sight and contemplation of the male human body
+seems to cause in him.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“He glanced at his wholesome maturity, the firm plaiting
+of his breasts, the full thighs, creatures proud in themselves,
+and said 'She ought to be rejoiced at me, but she is not. She
+rejects me as if I were a baboon under my clothing.'”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>When Mr. Lawrence convinced himself that he could write
+a more panoplied description of erotic ecstasy than that with
+which he afflicted Helena, he wrote the description of Ursula's
+encounter with the moon in “The Rainbow.” Indeed the real
+motive of “The Trespassers” is a trial portrait of Ursula; and
+while making up his mind as to the size of the canvas and the
+colours that he would use in painting that modern Messalina,
+Mr. Lawrence gave the world “Sons and Lovers,” which more
+than any other of his books, gave him a reputation for an
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</span>
+understanding of the strange blood bonds that unite families
+and human beings, and for having an unusual, almost exquisite
+discrimination in the use of language.</p>
+
+<p>From boyhood Mr. Lawrence seems to have been possessed
+of a demon who whispered to him by day and shrieked to
+him by night, “Be articulate, say it with words,” and the
+agony of his impotence is heartrending, as frustration after
+frustration attends his efforts. He tries it in prose, then in
+verse. Gradually, from taking thought, from sex experience
+and from hasty perusal of scientific and mystic literature,
+there formulated in his mind a concrete thought, which in time
+engendered a conviction, finally an obsession. A brief exposition
+of the mental elaboration and the Laocoon grip that
+it took on him follows:</p>
+
+<p>The Greeks, fanning the embers of Egyptian civilisation and
+getting no fire for their torch, said,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Let there be an ideal to which all mankind shall bow the
+knee. Let consciousness and all its manifestations be expressed
+in terms of ideals and ideas or in conduct that expresses
+them, and finally let everything that tends to hinder such
+expression, such as the sensual and animal in man be subdued
+and repressed.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Christianity went a step further and said,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Not only shall ideals be exalted, but pure spirituality and
+perfection—man's goal—can only be obtained by the annihilation
+of what are called Animal Instincts.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe25" id="ilo_fp269">
+  <img class="w100 p2" src="images/ilo_fp269.jpg" alt="ilop267" title="p267ilo">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="allsmcap"><span class="allsmcap">D. H. LAWRENCE</span></span></figcaption>
+</figure>
+<p class="center p2b">From a drawing by <em>Jan Juta.</em></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Christianity's promoters and well-wishers realised, however,
+that the continuance of the race depended upon the
+gratification of these appetites, and so laws and conventions
+were made under whose operation they could be legitimately
+indulged, there being small hope that the wish expressed by
+Sir Thomas Browne, the author of “Religio Medici” and a flock
+of children, that man might procreate as do the trees, should
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</span>
+ever be gratified. In civilised lands the conquest of the lower
+self has been objective. Man has moved from a great impulse
+within himself, the unconscious. Once the conquest has been
+effected, the conscious mind turns, looks, and marvels:</p>
+
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+<p>“E come quei che con lena affannata<br>
+Uscito fuor del pelago alla riva,<br>
+Si volge all'acqua perigliosa, e guata.”</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>This self-conscious mental provoking of sensation and reaction
+in the great affective centres is called sentimentalism or
+sensationalism. The mind returns upon the affective centres
+and sets up in them a deliberate reaction. These are passions
+exploited by the mind. Or the passional motive may act
+directly, and not from the mental provocation, and these reactions
+may be reflected by a secondary process down into the
+body. This is the final and most fatal effect of idealism, because
+it reduces everything to self-consciousness into spuriousness,
+and it is the madness of the world today. It is this madness
+that Mr. Lawrence has sworn to cure. He is going to do
+it by conquering what he calls the lower centres, by submitting
+the lowest plane to the highest. When this is done there will
+be nothing more to conquer. Then all is one, all is love, even
+hate is love, even flesh is spirit. The great oneness, the experience
+of infirmity, the triumph of the living spirit, which at
+last includes everything, is then accomplished. Man becomes
+whole, his knowledge becomes complete, he is united with
+everything. Mr. Lawrence has mapped out a plan of the
+sympathetic nervous system and has manipulated what biologists
+call the tropisms in such a way as to convince himself
+that he has laid the scientific foundation for his work, but as
+there is scarcely a page or paragraph in his little book that
+does not contain statements which are at variance with scientific
+facts, it is unnecessary to say that his science will not
+assist him in his propaganda nearly so much as his fiction.
+Like Weininger, he finally eliminates women. As he puts it:<span class="pagenum" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</span>
+“Acting from the last and profoundest centres, man acts womanless.” 
+It is no longer a question of race continuance. It
+is a question of sheer ultimate being, the perfection of life
+nearest to death and yet furthest away from it. Acting from
+these centres man is an extreme being, the unthinkable warrior,
+creator, mover, and maker. “And the polarity is between
+man and man.” </p>
+
+<p>That sentence contains to him who can read it aright the
+whole truth of Mr. D. H. Lawrence. To some that brief
+statement has the luminousness and significance of the writing
+on the wall. Anyone who reads Mr. Lawrence's later books
+attentively—and I appreciate that it is some task to do it—will
+understand it; and those who, like myself, have devoted
+themselves to study of aberrations, genesic and mental,
+as they display themselves in geniuses, psychopaths, and
+neuropaths, as well as in ordinary men, will sense it correctly.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lawrence thinks there are three stages in the life of
+man: the stage of sexless relations between individuals, families,
+clans, and nations; the stage of sex relations with an all-embracing
+passional acceptance, culminating in the eternal
+orbit of marriage; and finally, the love between comrades, the
+manly love which only can create a new era of life. One state
+does not annul the other; it fulfills the other. Such, in brief,
+is the strange venture in psychopathy Mr. Lawrence is making,
+and contributions to it up to date are “Women in Love,” 
+“Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious,” and “Aaron's Rod.” 
+“The Prussian Officer,” “The Rainbow,” “The Lost Girl,” 
+“Look, We Have Come Through” were merely efforts to get
+his propaganda literature into shape.</p>
+
+<p>The Adam and Eve of Mr. Lawrence's new creation are
+Tom Brangwen and his wife; and to understand their descendants
+(and no one, not even Mr. Lawrence, can understand
+them fully) one must study the parents. Tom, the youngest
+of the Brangwen family, as a boy is rather heavy and stupid
+intellectually, sensitive to the atmosphere around him, brutal<span class="pagenum" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</span>
+perhaps, but at the same time delicate, very delicate. He does
+not get on in school, so he leaves precipitously when he is
+fifteen, after having laid open the master's head with a slate,
+but not before he has formed a masochistic friendship with
+a warm clever frail boy. Sex desire begins soon to torment
+him. His first experience causes his sensibilities to rebel,
+and the second is a failure because of his self-consciousness
+and the dominancy of a budding inferiority complex. He
+is on the way to anæsthetising desire by brandy drinking, to
+which he periodically gives himself, when one day he meets on
+the street a demure lady whose curious absorbed flitting
+motion arrests him and causes a joy of pain to run through him.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“She had felt Tom go by almost as if he had brushed
+her. She had tingled in body as she had gone up on the
+road. Her impulse was strong against him because he was
+not of her sort. But one blind instinct led her to take him,
+to have him, and then to relinquish herself to him. It would
+be safety. Also he was young and very fresh.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Her passional reactions are not from the mind. They are
+spontaneous and know no inhibition. After a second quite
+casual meeting, Tom goes to the vicarage where she, a Polish
+lady, is housekeeper since her husband, a doctor obliged to
+leave his country for political reasons, had died and left her
+and her baby daughter in dire want. “Good evening,” says
+Tom, “I'll just come in a minute”; and having entered, he
+continues, “I came up to ask if you'd marry me.” He arouses
+an intensity of passion in her that she cannot, or wishes not,
+to withstand. But Tom is conventional and so they are married.
+The description of his marital lust is lurid to the last
+degree, and finally after one great debauch “he felt that God
+had passed through the married pair and made Himself known
+to them.” Tom is largely brawn and brute, though he has a
+vein of sentiment, and finally he yields to drink and meets a
+violent death, leaving two sons, a namesake who is attracted<span class="pagenum" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</span>
+to his own sex, Fred who suffers the tortures of a mother-sapped
+spirit, and Anna, his stepdaughter.</p>
+
+<p>Anna hates people who come too near her until she meets
+Will Brangwen, the son of Tom's brother who had flagrantly
+offended matrimonial convention. She is fascinated by this
+æsthetic serious self-satisfied youth with a high-pitched voice,
+who sings tenor and who is interested in church architecture
+and ritualism. Anna hurls herself at Will's head and tells
+him in no uncertain tones of her all-consuming love before
+he makes any protests. She arranges the wheat shocks in the
+moonlight so that they will propitiate her purpose, but only
+passionate caresses and a proposal of marriage result. This
+disappoints her, but the men of the Brangwen family, though
+consumed with elemental passion, are sex-slackers compared
+with the women. Will goes into states of ecstasy sitting
+motionless and timeless, contemplating stained-glass windows
+and other religious symbols, and she hates him violently.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“In the gloom and mystery of the church his soul lived and
+ran free, like some strange, underground thing, abstract. In
+this spirit he seemed to escape and run free of her.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>They are happy only when in the throes of conjugality. She
+is profoundly fecund and has periods of ecstasy when she
+thinks God has chosen her to prove the miracle of creation.
+In her exaltation, big with child as she is, she dances naked
+in her bedroom, to the Creator to Whom she belongs.</p>
+
+<p>In order to develop the now widely disseminated Freudian
+ideas about the love of the eldest girl for the father, the antagonism
+between the mother and daughter, etc., Will falls in
+love with his oldest child, Ursula. “His heart grew red-hot
+with passionate feeling for the child” when she is about a
+year old. “Her father was the dawn wherein her consciousness
+woke up wide-eyed, unseeing, she was awakened too soon.” 
+The writer, master as he is of the mysteries of perversion, uses
+this sympathy and Will's extrauxorial vagaries and wanderings<span class="pagenum" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</span>
+to cause, vicariously, a welling-up of passion in Anna. After a
+revolting scene with a grisette, Will goes home to his wife who
+immediately detects that there is a change in him, that he has
+had a new experience. She is excited to wild lubricity, and
+“he got an inkling of the vastness of the unknown sensual
+store of delight she was.” But this is the book of Ursula.
+The spontaneous passions of the grandmother and mother are
+incidental.</p>
+
+<p>Ursula goes through with the son of the old Polish clergyman
+Baron the same sort of experience that her father went through
+with the flapper that he picked up at the movie, only not with
+such <em>slancio</em>. The purpose of this episode is to point out the
+intensity of love in the female and her clamour for the dominant
+male. When Ursula finds that Skrebensky is a slacker,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two
+breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like
+a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the
+moon. She wanted the moon to fill into her, she wanted more,
+more communion with the moon, consummation.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Since Ursula has not met the one-hundred-per-cent male,
+and as “her sexual life flamed into a kind of disease within
+her,” Mr. Lawrence now brings her into relations with a finely
+portrayed Lesbian, Winifred Inger. The description of their
+first real contact in the bungalow at night and their night bath
+is willfully and purposely erotic. Ursula, tired of Winifred,
+plans to marry her to her uncle, Tom. When they meet “he
+detected in her a kinship with his own dark corruption. Immediately
+he knew they were akin.” One might safely say that
+Mr. Lawrence had before him, or in his mind's eye, when he
+penned the description of Tom, the photograph of one of his
+fellow-poets of a generation ago whom the English public
+found necessary to put in the Reading Gaol.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“His manner was polite, almost foreign, and rather cold. He
+still laughed in his curious, animal fashion, suddenly wrinkling<span class="pagenum" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</span>
+up his wide nose, and showing his sharp teeth. The fine beauty
+of his skin and his complexion, some almost waxen quality,
+hid the strange, repellant grossness of him, the slight sense of
+putrescence, the commonness which revealed itself in his
+rather fat thighs and loins.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is in the chapter “The Bitterness of Ecstasy” that Mr.
+Lawrence takes off the brakes. In London, whither she has
+gone with Skrebensky, Ursula decides to solve the riddle of
+the Sphinx. She goes about it in the conventional Brangwen
+way by biting him, clawing him, and generally tearing him to
+pieces. It seems good to him and he likes her and wants to
+marry her. One day, after they have had some tall bouts of
+love at Richmond, she tells him that she won't marry him and
+he has a grand crisis of hysteria. She is sorry she has hurt
+him. She hails a cab and takes the sobbing wooer home, and
+the lecherous cabby is moved nearly to violence by the radiation
+of passion from Ursula. She senses danger and persuades
+Tony to walk. She knows then that he is but a simulacrum
+of man, and when she has gone home she decides that she will
+not marry. Finally, however, she gives in and the date is more
+or less arranged. Then comes the <em>grande finale</em> with the scene
+wonderfully set in the moonlight by the seashore. There she
+makes an onslaught on him that is tigress-like to the last degree,
+throws him on the sand, devours him, wrings him like a
+dirty rag, shows him that he is no good, and hurls him from
+her, a sucked lemon. He sneaks away and offers himself to
+his Colonel's daughter, is accepted, and is off to India, leaving
+“the need of a world of men for her.” </p>
+
+<p>Then comes “The Rainbow,” a parody of Freud's exposition
+of the dream of being trampled upon by horses. Ursula finds
+after a time that the customary result has followed her experiences,
+so she writes a letter to Skrebensky saying she'll be good
+and go out and marry him. She goes for a walk in the mist
+and the rain, into the wood where the trees are all phallic symbols
+“thrust like stanchions upright between the roaring overhead<span class="pagenum" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</span>
+and the sweeping of the circle underfoot.” She begins to
+hallucinate, to feel her subconsciousness take possession of her,
+and the sight of a group of horses fills her bestial soul with a
+hope that she might finally be possessed in such a way as
+would give her satisfaction, that she might get “some fantastic
+fulfilment in her life.” She goes into a state of delirium and
+several weeks later, when it has passed, she finds that she has
+miscarried. This is followed by a mild dementia; she thinks
+she is moral and will be good, but as she gets strong she sees
+the rainbow, which is Eros kindling the flames again.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“And she saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture,
+the old brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away,
+the world built up in a living fragment of Truth, fitting to the
+overarching heaven.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mr. Lawrence, exhausted with the perpetration of these
+sensual delights and disappointed with the distrusts of the
+flesh, turned for a short time to nature to refresh his spirit and
+bathe his soul. He sensed frustration despite the unleashment
+of passion; he realised that sublimation had eluded him, and so
+he turned to primitive life and primitive people, the peasants
+of Italy. Soon his torments began to creep up again in “Twilight
+in Italy.” The roused physical sensations will not subside.
+They penetrate pastoral scenes and emanate from sylvan
+scenery.</p>
+
+<p>After having refreshed himself, he gave the world “The Lost
+Girl,” whose genesic aberrations are comparatively mild, and
+whose antics with the half-gipsy, half-circus folk are rather
+amusing. Some of Mr. Lawrence's early admirers were encouraged
+to look for his reformation, especially after the appearance
+of a thin book of poems entitled “Bay.” Even in
+this, here and there, the inhibited and mother-sapped spirit
+crops out, as in the poem called “The Little Town in the Evening,” 
+but for the most part the verses are founded on sane
+ideas, even ideals, truths, and morality. Most of them are<span class="pagenum" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</span>
+poems of the war, wonderful pen pictures and silhouettes, such
+as “Town,” a London transformed by the war as no picture
+or prose description could render it, ending,</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+<p>“It is well,<br>
+That London, lair of sudden<br>
+Male and female darknesses<br>
+Has broken her spell.”</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>In previous volumes of poems, particularly in “Amores” and
+in “Look, We Have Come Through,” he had published verse
+which was highly appraised by competent critics, and hailed by
+a small group steeped in preciosity, as epoch-making. However,
+if most of his poems have any central or dominant idea,
+he is unable to express it. They are the verbal manifestations
+of moods expressed symbolically, allegorically; of sensuous desires,
+satisfactions, and satieties “seeking polarity,” to borrow
+his favourite expression. Nearly everything is passion with
+Mr. Lawrence, or suggestive of passion. The pure lily is a
+phallic symbol, the bee sucking honey from a flower is a ravisher
+of innocence, the earth itself bursts asunder periodically
+in the throes of secret sensuality. Only the sea is free from the
+trammels of lust, and it is</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+<p>“Sworn to a high and splendid purposelessness<br>
+Of brooding and delighting in the secret of life's going.”</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“New Poems,” published in this country in 1920, did not
+fame or defame him, although “Piano,” “Intime,” “Sickness,” 
+and “Twenty Years Ago” might well have done the former,
+and “Seven Seals” the latter.</p>
+
+<p>The lull did not last long, and it was only a lull before a
+storm, a hurricane, a tornado which spent its force and destruction
+upon the author and made him the outlaw, if not the
+outcast, of English literature. “Women in Love” is the adventure
+of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, the
+Brangwens whose frightful passions we have now known for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</span>
+three generations, and two men of breeding, wealth, and culture,
+Gerald Crich, a Sadist by inheritance and natural inclination,
+and Rupert Birkin, an intellectual, apparently male,
+but contradicted in this by his instinct and by his conduct,
+whose purpose and ambition is to fall into the long African
+process of purely sensual understanding.</p>
+
+<p>The portrait of Rupert Birkin is superb. No excerpt could
+convey Mr. Lawrence's capacity for characterisation as well as
+the paragraph which describes him:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“He was thin, pale and ill-looking. His figure was narrow
+but nicely made. He went with a slight trail of one foot, which
+came only from self-consciousness. His nature was clever and
+separate. He did not fit at all in the conventional occasion.
+He affected to be quite ordinary, perfectly and marvellously
+commonplace. And he did it so well, taking the tone of his
+surroundings, adjusting himself quickly to his interlocutor and
+his circumstance, that he achieved a verisimilitude of ordinary
+commonplaceness that usually propitiated his onlookers for a
+moment, disarmed them from attacking his singleness. He
+did not believe in any standards of behaviour though they are
+necessary for the common ruck. Anyone who is anything can
+be just himself and do as he likes. One should act spontaneously
+on one's impulses—it's the only gentlemanly thing to do,
+provided you are fit to do it.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Hermione Roddice, daughter of a Derbyshire baron, a tall
+slow reluctant woman, with a weight of fair hair and pale long
+face that she carries lifted up in the Rossetti fashion, and that
+seems almost drugged as if a strange mass of thoughts coil
+in the darkness within her allowing her no escape, is in love
+with him. “She needed conjunction with Rupert Birkin to
+make her whole and, she believed, happy. But the more she
+strove to bring him to her, the more he battled her back.” </p>
+
+<p>Gerald Crich, whose gleaming beauty and maleness is like
+a young good-natured smiling wolf, flashes upon Gudrun
+Brangwen and she succumbs at once, just as the Polish lady did
+when Gudrun's grandfather got sight of her from the tail of his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</span>
+eye. The first time Gerald and Rupert meet “There was a
+pause of strange enmity between the two men that was very
+near to love.” Going up in the train to London together, they
+have a talk about ideals, the object and aim of life. This gives
+Rupert time to formulate his thought that Humanity does not
+embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity
+is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment in a
+new way. Let humanity disappear as quickly as possible.
+They are introduced into bohemia; that is, the haunts of the
+semi-abandoned and the perverted. Birkin shares a flat with
+Halliday, a degenerate “with a moving beauty of his own,” and
+his friends. Just how far this group expresses Mr. Lawrence's
+own views of art and philosophy, in their discussion of wood
+carvings of the primitive negroes of West Africa, we need not
+attempt to estimate, but that need not deter us from saying
+that the description of a gathering around the fireplace in a
+state of complete nudity is indecent and disgusting, even
+though Mr. Lawrence thinks this kind of thing marks a milestone
+on the way to that which he calls “Allness.” </p>
+
+<p>A large portion of the book is, in my judgment, obscene, deliberately,
+studiously, incessantly obscene. Obscenity, like
+everything else, has its gradations, its intensities, its variations,
+and the author of this book knows how to ring the changes
+upon obscenity in a way that would make Aretino green with
+envy. For instance, the so-called wrestling scene between
+Rupert and Gerald is the most obscene narrative that I have
+encountered in the English language—obscene in the etymological
+sense, for it is ill-omened, hence repulsive; and
+in the legal sense, for it tends to corrupt the mind and to
+subvert respect for decency and morality. The major part of
+Hermione's conduct with Rupert is in the realm of perversion,
+and Rupert in his speech to her conveys by innuendo what
+Mr. Lawrence knows the laws of his country would not permit
+him to say directly. The Marquis de Sade was a mere novice
+in depicting the transports of lust that result from inflicting<span class="pagenum" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</span>
+injury or causing humiliation compared with Mr. Lawrence;
+and as for Sacher-Masoch, who worked on the other side of
+the shield, he merely staked out the claim for a young Britisher
+to cultivate.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione says that if we could only realise that in the spirit
+we are all one, all equal in spirit, all brothers there, the rest
+would not matter. There would then be no more struggle for
+power and prestige, the things which now destroy. This drives
+Rupert to violence. He denies it savagely. We are alike in
+everything <em>save</em> spirit. In the spirit he is as separate as one
+star from another; as different in quality and quantity.
+Establish a state on that. This destroys the last vestige of
+Hermione's restraint and facilitates the consummation of
+voluptuous ecstasy at last. With a beautiful ball of lapis
+lazuli, a paper weight, she smashes his skull while he is sitting
+in her boudoir.</p>
+
+<p>A second blow would have broken his neck had he not shied
+it with a volume of Thucydides (a deft touch to make the
+immortal Greek save the prototype of the Superman that Mr.
+Lawrence is introducing while he buries Greek idealism).</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“She must smash it, it must be smashed before her ecstasy
+was consummated, fulfilled forever. A thousand lives, a thousand
+deaths matters nothing now, only the fulfilment of this
+perfect ecstasy.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But he gets away from her.</p>
+
+<p>“Then she staggered to the couch, and lay down, and went
+heavily to sleep”; and he wanders into the wet hillside that
+is overgrown and obscure with bushes and flowers. Here
+Mr. Lawrence gives a classic description of masochistic lust.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“He took off his clothes and sat down naked among the
+primroses ... but they were too soft. He went through the
+long grass to a clump of young fir trees, that were no higher
+than a man. The soft-sharp boughs beat upon him, as he
+moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers<span class="pagenum" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</span>
+of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of
+soft-sharp needles. There was a thistle which pricked him
+vividly, but not too much, because all his movements were
+discriminate and soft. To lie down and roll in the sticky young
+hyacinths, to lie on one's belly and cover one's back with handfuls
+of fine wet grass, soft as a breath, softer and more delicate
+and more beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then
+to sting one's thighs against the living dark bristles of the
+fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one's
+shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch trunk
+against one's breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots
+and ridges—this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And this is the man who Mr. Lawrence would have us believe
+was Inspector of Schools in England in the beginning of
+the Twentieth Century! The idea that he wants a woman
+is now absurd. This is his idea of bliss. He knows where
+to plant himself, his seed: along with the trees in the folds of
+the delicious fresh-growing leaves. This is his place, his
+marriage place.</p>
+
+<p>It may interest Mr. Lawrence to know that this procreative
+idea of Birkin's is not original with him. Many years ago I
+encountered a man in the Kings Park State Hospital who was
+of the same belief and addicted to the same practice.</p>
+
+<p>It would not be convincing if only æsthetes, intelligentsia,
+artists, and the like had revolutionary ideas. Gerald, a man
+of business, an executive, a coal baron, aggressive, capable, also
+had them, inherited from his mother, acquired from Birkin and
+“made in Germany” where he had been sent to school. He
+makes love to Ursula by expounding his theories of life:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“If only man was swept off the face of the earth, creation
+would go on so marvellously, with a new start, non-human.
+Man is one of the mistakes of creation—like the ichthyosauri.
+If only we were gone again, think what lovely things would
+come out of the liberated days; things straight out of the fire.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>He wants her without contract, understood or stated:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“There is a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond
+responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I
+should want to meet you—not in the emotional, loving plane—but
+there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of
+agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two
+utterly strange creatures. I should want to approach you and
+you me.—And there could be no obligation, because there is no
+standard for action there, because no understanding has been
+reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman—so there can be
+no calling to book, in any form whatsoever—because one is outside
+the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies.
+One can only follow the impulse, take that which lies in front,
+and responsible for nothing, asked for nothing, giving nothing,
+only each taking according to the primal desire.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In other words, sheer savagery, and the worst African variety
+at that!</p>
+
+<p>One of Mr. Lawrence's obsessions is that he can distinguish
+between the sexual writhings of his characters, depending upon
+the environment in which they writhe and the immediate exciting
+cause. This justifies him in describing the same writhe
+over and over with a different setting. Of the five hundred
+pages, at least one hundred are devoted to descriptions of the
+sensations that precede and accompany ecstasy provoked and
+induced by some form of unhealthy sexual awareness.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to give even a brief synopsis of “Women in
+Love.” One chapter, however, must be mentioned, for in a
+way it is the crux of the book. For some time Birkin has been
+trying to state his case to Ursula and stave off her clamour
+for consummation. He wants sex to revert to the level of
+the other appetites, to be regarded as a functional process, not
+as fulfilment. He wants her to give him her spirit.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“He knew he did not want further sensual experience, he
+thought. His mind reverted to the African statues in Halliday's
+rooms. They displayed their thousand upon thousand
+of years of sensual knowledge, purely unspiritual. Thousands
+of years ago that which was imminent in himself must have
+taken place in these Africans. This is what was imminent in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</span>
+him; the goodness, the holiness, the desire for creation and
+productive happiness must have lapsed, leaving the single impulse
+for knowledge in one sort, mindless, progressive knowledge
+through the senses, knowledge arrested and ending in the
+senses, mystic knowledge in disintegration and dissolution. Is
+the day of our creative life finished or are we not ready for the
+sensual understanding, the knowledge in the mystery of dissolution?
+The man Ursula would take must be quaffed to the
+dregs by her, he must render himself up to her. She believed
+that love surpassed the individual. She believed in an absolute
+surrender to love. He didn't.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>They then have a violent verbal altercation in which Ursula
+tells him what she thinks of his obscenity and perverseness in
+words that admit of no misunderstanding. She then leaves him
+in a state of wrath and resentment after having thrown the
+topaz engagement ring, bought from a second-hand dealer, in
+his face. But her ardour conquers her righteousness and she
+goes back to him, saying, “See what a flower I found you.” 
+And then it is settled quietly and as if they were normal
+humans. They go to a hotel and there they have super-corporeal
+contact that beggars description. As far as can be
+made out, there is no consortion in the ordinary sense. It
+is neither love nor passion.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“She had established a rich new circuit, a new current of
+passional electric energy, between the two of them released
+from the darkest poles of the body and established in perfect
+circuit, and she had done this in some mysterious ways by
+tracing the back of his thighs with her sensitive fingertips, his
+mysterious loins and his thighs. Something more mystically-physically
+satisfying than anything she had imagined or known—though
+she had had some experience—was realised. She
+had thought that there was no source deeper than the phallic
+source, but now from the strange marvellous flanks and thighs
+came the flood of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>They laughed and went to the meal provided. And this is
+what they had:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“There was a venison pasty, of all things, a large broad-faced
+cut ham, eggs and cresses, and red beet root, and medlars
+and apple tart, and tea.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is a deep, dark significance in this meal, which the
+Freudian will understand perfectly, but which to the uninitiated
+will seem quite meaningless, even after Ursula says, “What
+<em>good</em> things. How noble it looks.” </p>
+
+<p>There is a lot more about the full mystic knowledge that she
+gets from his suave loins of darkness, the strange, magical
+current of force in his back and his loins, that fills with nausea.
+They finish by driving to Sherwood Forest, taking all their
+clothes off and beginning anew their effort for fulfilment.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“She was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence
+of mystic, palpable, real utterance.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>I have neither the strength nor the inclination to follow
+Gudrun in her search for her amatory <em>Glückeritter</em>, or to hear
+further exposition of the <em>credo</em> of the strange freak of nature
+that Mr. Lawrence strives to apotheosise. Suffice it to say that
+the precious quartette go off to the Tyrol, Ursula and Birkin
+having gone through the formality of marriage; Gudrun and
+Gerald dispensing with it. And there Gudrun begins writhings
+which are designed to put all the others in the shade. And in
+a way they do, because Gerald's violent death is required to
+facilitate her supreme moment. They introduce a super-degenerate
+Loerke, a sculptor, who represents the rock bottom
+of all life to Gudrun.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“There was the look of a little wastrel about him that intrigued
+her, and an old man's look, that interested her, and
+then, besides this, an uncanny singleness, that marked out an
+artist to her. He had come up from a street Arab. He was
+twenty-six, had thieved, sounded every depth. He saw in
+Gudrun his soul-mate. He knew her with a subconscious,
+sinister knowledge, devoid of illusions and hopes. The degradation
+of his early life also attracted her. He seemed to be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</span>
+the very stuff of the underworld of life. There was no
+going beyond him. Birkin understood why they should like
+him, the little obscene monster of the darkness that he is. He
+is a Jew who lives like a rat, in the river of corruption.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Birkin and Ursula come back for Gerald's funeral. Birkin
+does some soliloquising, the burden of which is “He should
+have loved me. I offered him.” He is sure Gerald would have
+been happy if he had accepted. When Ursula wants to know
+if she is not enough for him, he says,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“No, to make life complete, really complete, I wanted eternal
+union with a man too, another kind of love.” </p>
+
+<p>“It is a perversity,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Well——,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“You can't have two kinds of love. Why should you?” she
+said.</p>
+
+<p>“It seems as if I can't,” he said. “Yet I wanted it.” </p>
+
+<p>“You can't have it because it's wrong, impossible,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“I don't believe that,” he answered.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And that is the unvarying and final answer of the advocates
+of the enigmatic aberration whose doctrines Mr. Lawrence is
+trying to foist upon an unsuspecting English-reading public.</p>
+
+<p>In “Aaron's Rod” Mr. Lawrence returns to the theme of
+“The Rainbow” and “Women in Love.” His ardour, fortunately,
+has cooled somewhat, but his psychology is more at
+variance with facts and his philosophy more mystic than in
+either of these. Aaron Sisson, a miner's checkweighman, with
+a talent for music, marries when twenty, an over-sexed young
+woman of better social position than himself. Though he soon
+betrays her, they manage to live, with their three children, an
+average family life for twelve years. He then determines that
+he will not be the instrument and furnisher of any woman.
+He rebels against the sacrament by which we live today;
+namely, that man is the giver, woman the receiver. He can
+not and will not tolerate the life centrality of woman. Man's<span class="pagenum" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</span>
+contact with woman should be for procreational purposes, but
+man should blend his spirit with man: “Born in him was a
+spirit which could not worship woman, and would not.” </p>
+
+<p>So he sets up the Christmas tree for the children, goes out to
+buy candles for it, and never returns. Instead, he falls in with
+a family group of inverts which the little mining towns always
+seem to have—a man of perverted type; his fiancée, a Lesbian,
+the daughter of a promiscuous Hermione and her complaisant
+husband; and several others—and they proceed to have a mild
+orgy in the ugly midland mining town, “in which it is remarkable
+how many odd or extraordinary people there are to be
+found.” Aaron gets a position as flutist in an orchestra, and
+at the opera he meets Mr. Lilly, who, though married, is by
+nature of inverted genesic instinct. He is Aaron's downfall.</p>
+
+<p>It is to be noted that there is a deep symbolism in the names
+that Mr. Lawrence selects for his heroes and heroines. Aaron
+is sure that he never wanted to surrender himself to his wife,
+nor to his mother, nor to anybody. But he falls ill, and Lilly
+cares for him and nurses him like a mother, and then goes off
+to Italy—Aaron after him like a hound after the scent. We
+are introduced to a choice lot of males in Florence, all portraits
+of exiled Britishers who find it suits their tastes, which
+their country calls their infirmities, to live there, and easily
+recognisable by anyone who has lived in Florence. We are
+regaled with their philosophy and with Mr. Lawrence's reflections
+on art and Sixteenth Century music. Finally, to show
+Aaron's charm and concupiscense, the author throws a modern
+brooding Cleopatra—Anthony-less—across his path. She
+is an American woman from the Southern States whose father
+was once Ambassador to France. Aaron capitulates at the
+second interview and then despises himself. But again he falls
+a few days later, and then he realises that there is nothing left
+for him but flight, flight to Lilly and abandonment of the love
+idea and the love motive. Life submission is his duty now, and
+when he looks up into Lilly's face, at the moment resembling<span class="pagenum" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</span>
+a Byzantine Eikon, and asks, “And to whom shall I submit?”
+the reply comes, “Your soul will tell you.” </p>
+
+<p>And my soul tells me that he who submits himself to reading
+the doctrines promulgated by D. H. Lawrence deserves his
+punishment. Moreover, I maintain that, both from the artistic
+and the psychological standpoints, Mr. Lawrence's performances
+are those of a neophyte and a duffer. He can make
+words roar and sing and murmur, and by so doing he can make
+moral, poised, God-fearing, sentiment-valuing man creep and
+shudder, indeed, almost welcome the obscurity of the grave,
+so that he will not have to meet his fellow again in the flesh.
+He libels and he bears false witness against man. There are
+persons in the world such as Mr. Lawrence describes. So are
+there lepers and lunatics. We do not talk about them as if the
+whole world were made up of them; and we do not confidently
+look for world reformers or world orderers among them.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lawrence is a self-appointed crusader who is going to
+destroy European civilisation and at the same time revivify
+that of six thousand and more years ago. He is the most
+shining avatar of mysticism the Twentieth Century has yet
+produced, and the most daring champion of atavism in twenty
+centuries. He is using a medium to facilitate his manifestations
+and embodiments of which he is a consummate master,
+viz., fiction. But his statements, both when he uses the language
+of science, and when he uses that of fiction, are at variance
+with truth and fact; and he has not furnished, nor can he
+furnish, a particle of evidence to substantiate his thesis: enhancement
+of the awareness and potency “of that other basic
+mind, the deepest physical mind” by sensuous satisfaction or
+through sexual ecstasy. His “broodings and delightings in the
+secret of life's goings” are anathema.</p>
+
+<p>During the past decade biology has accumulated a convincing
+amount of evidence to show that sex intergrades, or
+imperfect sex separation and differentiation frequently exist,
+and furthermore it may be produced experimentally. These<span class="pagenum" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</span>
+facts justify the belief that individuals with the convictions
+and conduct of Birkin result from a definite developmental
+condition, which is the fundamental cause of the peculiar sex
+reactions. Such persons are actually different from fully expressed
+males or females, and their peculiar condition is permanent,
+present from childhood to old age, and uninfluenceable
+by any measures; pedagogy or punishment, mandate or
+medicine.</p>
+
+<p>My experience as a psychologist and alienist has taught me
+that pornographic literature is created by individuals whose
+genesic endowment is subnormal <em>ab initio</em>, or exhausted from
+one cause or another before nature intended that it should be,
+and that those who would aid God and nature in the ordering
+of creation are sterile, or approximately so. This is a dispensation
+for which we cannot be too grateful.</p>
+
+<p>There are two ways of contemplating Mr. Lawrence's effort.
+Has he a fairly clear idea of what he is trying to say, of what
+he is trying to put over; or is he a poetic mystic groping in
+abysmal darkness? I am one of those who is convinced that
+he knows just what he wants to accomplish, and that he could
+make a statement of it in language that anyone could understand,
+did the censor permit him. Public opinion is adequate
+to deal with the infractions of taste and ethics that he has
+perpetrated, and it is quite safe to leave him finally to that
+judiciary.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lawrence once wrote, “The Americans are not worthy
+of their Whitman. Miracle that they have not annihilated
+every word of him.” To which I would make rejoinder, “The
+Britishers have not deserved D. H. Lawrence. Pity it is that
+they do not annihilate every trace of him.” </p>
+
+<p>Ten years have gone since Henry James, walking up and
+down the charming garden of his picturesque villa in Rye, discussing
+the most promising successors of Hardy, Meredith, and
+Conrad, said to me, “The world is sure to hear from a young
+man, D. H. Lawrence.” It has heard from him. He has sown<span class="pagenum" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</span>
+in glory and raised in corruption. He has triumphed, and his
+triumph has stained English literature. He has debased an
+unusual talent and devoted his splendid endowment of artistry
+to spoking the wheel of evolutionary progress, even to spinning
+it in a reverse direction. He has arrived, and in arriving has
+brought with him a sweltering, suffocating South African atmosphere,
+difficult and dangerous for one of his former admirers
+to breathe, who as he withdraws from it ventures to call
+the attention of others to its noxiousness.</p>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" >CHAPTER XII<br>
+<small>THE JOY OF LIVING—AND WRITING ABOUT IT:<br>
+JOHN ST. LOE STRACHEY</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Twenty-five years ago, browsing among the second-hand
+book-shops of Shaftesbury Avenue, my attention
+was arrested by a sombre volume entitled “From Grave to
+Gay,” by J. St. Loe Strachey.</p>
+
+<p>Until then I had not heard of Mr. Strachey, and though I
+admit it with reluctance, I had not even heard of his famous
+cousin, Henry Strachey, who was private secretary to Lord
+Clive. But the subtitle of his book: “Concerned with Certain
+Subjects of Serious Interest, with the Puritans, with Literature
+and with the Humours of Life, Now for the First Time Collected
+and Arranged,” intrigued me. Those were the very subjects,
+I had convinced myself, with which I was concerned,
+for did they not give spice to life and make for surcease
+of its burdens? “Now for the First Time Collected
+and Arranged” I construed to be a belief on the part of
+the writer that from time to time he could substitute for
+the word “first” the other numerals in progressive order.
+Whether or not he has been able to do so, I have not determined,
+but every one knows that he became “editor and sole
+proprietor” of the London <em>Spectator</em> and has occupied a conspicuous
+place in journalism for the past quarter of a century.
+And now he recounts his life, or such parts of it as seem to
+him will permit others to understand how and why he has
+carried on, and he calls it “The Adventure of Living: A Subjective
+Autobiography,” stressing “the influences that have
+affected my life and for good or evil made me what I am.” 
+He emphasises that the interesting thing about a human being
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</span>
+is not what he is, but how he came to be what he is, which
+naturally includes what he does and why he does it.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Strachey came to be what he is from his heredity, aided
+and guided—after it had formulated itself in the organism to
+which, a few months later, the name John St. Loe was given—by
+Mrs. Salome Leaker, the family nurse. Once the reader
+gets her name out of the realm of risibility, he falls in love
+with her. A face radiant with a vivid intelligence, a nature
+eager and active, a fiery temper—reserved almost entirely for
+grown-ups—an appreciation for good literature and art, which,
+although she had been brought up in illiteracy, she had developed
+by self-education and “threw quotations from the
+English classics around her in a kind of hailstorm,” supplemented
+a genuine love of children and abounding common
+sense.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“There was no nonsense in her nursery as to over-exciting
+our minds or emotions, or that sort of thing. She was quite prepared
+to read us to sleep with the witches in 'Macbeth' or the
+death scene in 'Othello.' I can see her now, with her wrinkled,
+brown face, her cap with white streamers awry over her black
+hair beginning to turn grey. In front of her was a book,
+propped up against the rim of a tin candlestick shaped like a
+small basin. In it was a dip candle with a pair of snuffers.
+That was how nursery light was provided in the later 'sixties
+and even in the 'seventies. As she sat bent forward, declaiming
+the most soul-shaking things in Shakespeare between nine
+and ten at night, we lay in our beds with our chins on the
+counterpane, silent, scared, but intensely happy. We loved
+every word and slept quite well when the play was over.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The pen picture of Mrs. Salome Leaker, and the photograph,
+are of the book's best. It is not unlikely that Mr. Strachey
+owes his worldly success and pleasure quite as much to his
+nurse as to “the famous men, and our fathers who begat us,” 
+of whom his father, “though without a trace of anything approaching
+pride, was never tired of talking.” </p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe25" id="ilo_fp293">
+  <img class="w100 p2" src="images/ilo_fp293.jpg" alt="ilop291" title="p291ilo">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="allsmcap">J. ST. LOE STRACHEY</span></figcaption>
+</figure>
+<p class="center p2b">From a drawing by <em>W. Rothenstein.</em></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In his early childhood he was subject to occasional experiences—a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</span> 
+sense of spiritual isolation with poignancy amounting
+to awe. Although he devotes several pages to them he does
+not succeed in describing his sensations, but in characterising
+them. One day while standing in a passage he suddenly had a
+sensation of being alone, not merely in the house, but in the
+world, the universe. With this came a sense of exaltation and
+magnification of personality so ample that it was difficult to
+describe. He felt then, though he was only six, that his soul
+had become naked. The effect on him was intensely awe-inspiring,
+so much so as to be disturbing in a high degree.
+Though not terrified, he experienced a kind of rawness and
+sensitiveness of soul, such as when a supersensitive mucous
+membrane is touched roughly by a hand or instrument. In
+addition to this awe and sensitiveness, was a sudden realisation
+of the appalling greatness of the issues of living, not only of
+the imminence but of the ineffable greatness of the whole
+of which he was a part. He felt that what he was “in for”
+as a sentient human being was immeasurably great. It was
+thence that the sense of awe came, thence the extraordinary
+sensitiveness, thence the painful exhilaration, the spiritual
+sublimation. “As a human being I was not only immortal
+but <em>capax imperii</em>,—a creature worthy of a heritage so tremendous.” </p>
+
+<p>Mr. Strachey defines his state as one of <em>isolement</em>, and further
+defines it as ecstasy. The latter term has probably been
+borrowed from current psychoanalytic terminology. It is
+purely a subjective term, and as this is a subjective autobiography,
+satisfies his needs, though it puts us only a little
+way on the road to understanding.</p>
+
+<p>No objective description of this state has been worked out.
+A scheme for it would be elaborate and require more patience
+than the behaviourists have so far displayed. They know some
+things in an exact way about organic reactions to simplified
+laboratory situations. They have never followed out the life
+history of any of the reactions they describe, either exactly or<span class="pagenum" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</span>
+in tentative descriptive terms. Autobiographic writings furnish
+rich material for an objective psychologist. Mr. Strachey,
+for instance, has an unusual memory, has never suffered any
+serious breaks in his reaction system, and would seem not to be
+subject to any wealth of parallel reactions. The objective
+psychologists may, in the not distant future, work out a description
+of <em>isolement</em> in terms of organic reactions, and their
+life histories in terms of organic memory. I do not see how a
+highly organised intelligence in such a setting—reminiscent
+father, tradition-ladened background, cultivated and uncultivated
+mysticism of his nurse—could have failed to develop
+some such moments.</p>
+
+<p>It is quite likely that the main outlines of Mr. Strachey's
+intelligence as a working mechanism had been laid down, even
+at this early age. It was said of him that when a little more
+than two and a half years old, when his family was starting on a
+long journey to Pau, he insisted that his father should take
+with him Spenser's “Faerie Queene!” He must have had
+in late childhood a rich freight of memories. An elaborate
+and delicate set of reaction mechanism, spontaneously called
+forth these definite movements of detachment in the interests
+of further internal organisation. Moreover, it seems to me
+entirely a normal experience, in view of the fact that there was
+so much incentive to fantasy and so little progress beyond mere
+normal ecstasy.</p>
+
+<p>It is a fearsome thing to contemplate how little fruit the
+arrival of powers of abstraction bring with them. Immediately
+Mr. Strachey was plunged into the artificial region of letters
+and politics, he made no effective contacts with scientific and
+social thinking of his period. His whole mental career from
+this standpoint was a gradually elaborated detachment, significant
+mainly for its richness, brilliancy, and generally prevailing
+consistency.</p>
+
+<p>One other psychic experience he records, a dream during an
+afternoon nap: His wife came to him with a telegram in her<span class="pagenum" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</span>
+hand which related that his son had been killed in a hunting
+accident in France. The incident of this telepathic dream
+from the objective standpoint is not very significant. The
+dreamer had plenty of reasons for apprehension over the welfare
+of his son, who was in a country where hazards were of
+frequent enough occurrence to make some time identity between
+dream and occurrence possible. The form of the hazard
+in the dream could probably have been traced at the time to
+some recent event or hearsay, and was gratuitously attached
+to the state of apprehension which came to the surface in the
+dream state.</p>
+
+<p>The story of one who for a third of a century has been in
+British journalism while the world was being recast and remoulded
+must of necessity be rich in the raw material of
+“human interest,” as well as of history and politics. But it is
+not this material which the author of the subjective autobiography
+has chosen to present. It is with the adventure of his own
+life that he would interest the reader. He says,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Every life is an adventure, and if a sense of this adventure
+cannot become communicated to the reader, any one may feel
+sure that it is the fault of the writer, not of the facts.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>He quotes Sir Thomas Browne's advice to a son about to
+write an account of his travels in Hungary</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“not to trouble about methods of extracting iron and copper
+from the ores, or with a multitude of facts and statistics, but
+not to forget to give a full description of the 'Roman alabaster
+tomb in the barber's shop at Pesth.'”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The alabaster tomb in the barber's shop, rather than high
+politics or even high literature, is the goal which he has set before
+him in writing this book. The test by which he invites
+judgment of it is the power to enthrall the imagination of the
+reader with the sense of adventure.</p>
+
+<p>The “supreme good luck to be born the second son of a
+Somersetshire squire and to be brought up in a Somersetshire<span class="pagenum" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</span>
+country-house” was reinforced by the influence of parents to
+whose qualities he pays tribute in a chapter devoted to memories
+of his parents, and in another devoted to the stories told
+him as a child by his father. These stories serve to cloak the
+genealogical facts that always flavour so keenly, to the adventurer
+himself, the zest of his adventure. In this case they
+leave the reader free to trace, should he possess a relish for
+such a trail, through the rattling rust of ancient armour, the
+spell of great country houses and other symbols of authority.
+One may also trace Mr. Strachey's hereditary urge for literature,
+for there was a certain ancestor who “almost certainly
+knew Shakespeare” and “had a considerable amount of book-writing
+to his credit,” including “two or three pamphlets
+written by him and published as what we should now call 'Virginia
+Company propaganda.'” No light is thrown upon the
+heritage, guardian angel, or kind fate which was responsible
+for providing the adventurer at the outset of his journey with
+the most fortunate of all possessions, the temperament to “take
+the good the gods provide,” and for relieving him of all encumbrances
+in the way of “inferiority” and other complexes,
+which have become so fashionable a part of the modern adventurer's
+equipment.</p>
+
+<p>If, indeed, anything in the way of good fortune was wanting
+in the gifts of fate to the author of the autobiography, he was
+more than compensated by a disposition which made it easy
+for him to appreciate the good qualities of others, even of his
+mother-in-law—that usually most unappreciated of all human
+relations—and to live in unimpaired serenity in her family. Of
+her we are told that</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“she was an admirable talker and full of clear and interesting
+memories. I had no sooner entered the Simpson house and
+family than I found that there were a hundred points of
+sympathy between us. She had known everybody in London
+who was worth knowing ... and had visited most of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</span>
+political country houses in England on the Whig side, and
+most of the neutral strongholds.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Aside from the chapters on his parents and old nurse, only a
+few glimpses are given of a normal and happy childhood passed
+in the good old days when ladies still had time to cultivate the
+art of correspondence—of which he says, “I have no time to
+dwell on my mother's most intimate friendship with Lady
+Waldegrave and with their habit of writing daily letters to each
+other.” The salient point of his childhood seems to be that
+he was saturated with precocity and filial piety. He was not
+quite so strong as other boys and was not sent to public
+school, and “the irony of accident,” he says, “had designed
+my mental equipment to be of a kind perfectly useless for the
+purposes of the preliminary Oxford examinations.” Knowledge
+of literature, a power of writing, a not inconsiderable
+reading in modern history, and a commendable grasp of mathematics
+were of no use whatever for the purpose of matriculation.
+So the youthful Strachey turned to Latin and Greek
+and finally entered Balliol as an unattached student. The first
+discord in the harmony of his relations with life was sounded
+when he became a student at Balliol, where he did not get on
+well with the Dons.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I can say truthfully that I never received a word of encouragement,
+of kindly direction, or of sympathy of any sort or
+kind from any of them in regard to work or anything else.
+The reason, I now feel sure, was that they believed that to take
+notice of me would have only made me more uppish.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>His recollections of Jowett, the Master of Balliol, are tempered
+by the successes and the good fortune that have come
+to him in the intervening forty years, but he remains convinced
+that “the Master of Balliol evidently felt the Stracheyphobia
+very strongly, or perhaps I should say felt it his duty
+to express it very strongly.” The sarcasm that Jowett poured
+upon him on his return to Balliol after his first year as an<span class="pagenum" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</span>
+unattached student still rankles. But in those early days
+there must have been an atmosphere of self-sufficiency, complacency,
+possibly one might be justified in saying conceit,
+that dissolved the testy Master's inhibitions.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Strachey is never tired of emphasising the good fortune
+of his friendships.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I have no doubt I was considered odd by most of my
+contemporaries, but this oddness and also my inability to
+play football or cricket never seemed to create, as far as
+I could see, any prejudice. Indeed I think that my
+friends were quite discerning enough and quite free enough
+from convention to be amused and interested by a companion
+who was not built up in accordance with the sealed pattern.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Nothing better illustrates his mental endowment and his cultural
+equipment as estimated by himself than this statement:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“In my day we would talk about anything, from the Greek
+feeling about landscape to the principles the Romans would
+have taken as the basis of actuarial tables, if they had had
+them. We unsphered Plato, we speculated as to what Euripides
+would have thought of Henry James, or whether Sophocles
+would have enjoyed Miss ——'s acting, and felt that it was of
+vital import to decide these matters.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Good old days, indeed! We can imagine what the fate of
+the student at Harvard, let us say, would be today if he
+shaped his talk to indicate that “the most important thing
+in the world” was talk of this kind.</p>
+
+<p>At an early age Mr. Strachey yielded to the urge of poetry
+writing, and even had a book of verses printed by a local
+publisher, of which he says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“The thing that strikes me most, on looking back at my
+little volume of verse, is its uncanny competence, not merely
+from the point of view of prosody, but of phraseology and
+what I may almost term scholarship.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p><em>Omne ignotum pro magni-</em> (or <em>miri</em>) <em>fico</em>. In spite of this
+he felt no great desire to adopt poetry-making as his profession.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Possibly I thought the trade was a bad one for a second son
+who must support himself. It is more probable that I instinctively
+felt that although it was so great a source of joy
+to me, poetry was not my true vocation. Perhaps, also, I
+had already begun to note the voice of pessimism raised by
+the poets of the seventies, and to feel that they did not believe
+in themselves.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>“The pivot of my life has been <em>The Spectator</em>, and so <em>The
+Spectator</em> must be the pivot of my book.” His connection with
+it began when he was about twenty-six, after he had settled in
+London to study for the Bar. The book opens with an account
+of the spectacular success of his first adventure of
+writing for this journal. Armed with a formal introduction
+from his father, who had been a friend of the joint editors,
+Mr. Hutton and Mr. Townsend, and a frequent contributor to
+the paper, Mr. Strachey called at <em>The Spectator</em> office in
+Wellington Street and listened to the well-worn story—no less
+true thirty years ago than it is today—of “more outside reviewers
+than they could possibly find work for,” and received,
+out of friendship for his father alone, the choice of five volumes
+to notice. One of them was an edition of “Gulliver's
+Travels,” and it was destined to play a leading rôle in the
+adventure of John St. Loe Strachey. Nothing daunted by the
+indifferent encouragement, he promptly despatched the completed
+reviews, and in due time again presented himself at the
+office for the sole purpose of returning the books. Great was
+his amazement when, instead of a lukewarm reception, he was
+immediately asked to select anything he would like to review,
+from a new pile of books. When he protested that he had not
+come to ask for more books to review, he learned that the
+position of the editors had been entirely changed by the review
+of “Gulliver's Travels,” and “they hoped very much that
+I should be able to do regular work for <em>The Spectator</em>. I was
+actually hailed as 'a writer and critic of the first force.'” Even<span class="pagenum" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</span>
+a stronger head might have been turned by such praise from
+such a source.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, was only the first chapter of his successful
+adventure with <em>The Spectator</em>. Shortly afterwards, he received
+a letter from Mr. Hutton asking him to write a couple of
+leaders a week and some notes while Mr. Townsend was away
+for a holiday. His first leader brought a delighted response
+from Mr. Townsend, who requested him to remain as his assistant
+while Mr. Hutton was away, and soon afterward suggested,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“with a swift generosity that still warms my heart, that if
+I liked to give up the Bar, for which I was still supposing
+myself to be reading, I could have a permanent place at
+<em>The Spectator</em>, and even, if I remember rightly, hinted that I
+might look forward to succeeding the first of the two partners
+who died or retired, and so to becoming joint editor or joint
+proprietor.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>His second political leader, entitled the “Privy Council
+and the Colonies,” brought down even bigger game than
+the first. Fate, always the ally of Mr. Strachey, so arranged
+that Lord Granville, then Colonial Secretary, had been
+prevented by a fit of gout from preparing a speech which he
+was to deliver when he received the Agents-General of the
+self-governing Colonies, and he supplied the hiatus by beginning
+his speech with the words: “In a very remarkable article
+which appeared in this week's <em>Spectator</em>”—and then going on
+“to use the article as the foundation of his speech,” with the
+result that Mr. Hutton was “greatly delighted, and almost said
+in so many words that it wasn't every day that the editors of
+<em>The Spectator</em> could draw Cabinet Ministers to advertise their
+paper.” </p>
+
+<p>So the “first two leaders had done the trick.” Still, as the
+young adventurer was soon to learn, it was possible for an
+aspirant to success to get by both editors, and even a Cabinet
+Minister, and still fail of entire recognition from the most<span class="pagenum" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</span>
+critical member of <em>The Spectator</em> staff. Even this distinction,
+however, Mr. Strachey was destined promptly to achieve.
+“The last, the complete rite of initiation at <em>The Spectator</em>
+office,” occurred one day as he was talking over articles, when</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“a large, consequential, not to say stout black tom-cat slowly
+entered the room, walked around me, sniffed at my legs in a
+suspicious manner, and then, to my intense amazement and
+amusement, hurled himself from the floor with some difficulty
+and alighted upon my shoulder.... The sagacious beast had
+realised that there was a new element in the office, and had
+come to inspect it and see whether he could give it his approval.
+When that approval was given, it was conceded by
+all concerned that the appointment had received its consecration.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And so, having received the unqualified endorsement
+of the office cat, the future “editor and sole proprietor” of
+<em>The Spectator</em>, within a few weeks of his introduction to the
+office, had his career mapped out for him. That Mr. Strachey
+has been content with that career this subjective autobiography
+is likely to convince the most sceptical.</p>
+
+<p>Two chapters are devoted to an estimate of Meredith Townsend,
+who was successively his chief, his partner, and later—after
+Mr. Strachey became “sole proprietor and editor-in-chief”—merely
+leader-writer for <em>The Spectator</em>. The sketch of
+Mr. Townsend, which will undoubtedly appeal more to British
+than to American readers, is vivid and sympathetic, bringing
+into high relief the rather picturesque side of an altogether
+lovable and thoroughly practical personality—although any
+weak points which he may have displayed as leader-writer
+are not blurred over. His fairness, both toward his junior
+partner and toward those who differed with him, is emphasised,
+as well as his sound philosophy, his wit, his capacity for felicitous
+epigram, and his mental directness and forcefulness.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Strachey has the same pleasure in recalling his early<span class="pagenum" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</span>
+days with <em>The Spectator</em> that the aged courtesan is alleged to
+have in telling of her youthful <em>amours</em>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“When an occasion like this makes me turn back to my old
+articles, I am glad to say that my attitude, far from being one
+of shame, is more like that of the Duke of Wellington. When
+quite an old man, somebody brought him his Indian dispatches
+to look over. As he read, he is recorded to have muttered:
+'Damned good! I don't know how the devil I ever managed
+to write 'em.'”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>When Mr. Strachey became “proprietor, editor, general
+manager, leader-writer, and reviewer” of <em>The Spectator</em> he
+naturally asked himself: “What is the journalist's function in
+the State, and how am I to carry it out?” After reflection and
+deliberation he decided that the journalist must be the watch-dog
+of society, and this in full recognition of the fact that the
+watch-dog is generally disliked, often misunderstood, and
+burdened with a disagreeable job, even with its compensations.
+He defends the watch-dog for barking,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“in a loud and raucous way, even for biting occasionally. It is
+good for the dog and it is good for the one who is barked at
+or bitten, though the latter, like the boy who is being flogged
+for his good, neither sees it nor admits it.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mr. Strachey recites a specific instance of his watch-dog
+methods in dealing with Cecil Rhodes, whose methods of expanding
+the British Empire seemed to <em>The Spectator</em> dangerous
+and inconsistent with the sense of national honour and good
+faith. He therefore</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“warned the British public that Rhodes, if not watched, would
+secretly buy policies behind their backs and that the party
+machine, when in want of money, would with equal secrecy
+sell them. And I proved my point, incredible as it may seem.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mr. Strachey says that he could, of course, mention other
+examples of the way in which this particular watch-dog gave
+trouble and got himself heartily disliked, but recounting them<span class="pagenum" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</span>
+would touch living people. Mr. Strachey does not bow the
+knee to archaic conventions like “<em>De mortuis nil nisi bonum</em>.” </p>
+
+<p>Next to the watch-dog function of the journalist is that of
+publicity. Publicity is one of the pillars of society, and while
+this has long been recognised in America, Mr. Strachey says,
+it is only very recently that it has come to be thoroughly
+appreciated in his country. Publicity is as important a thing
+as the collection and preservation of evidence at a trial, but
+it is not the whole of journalism. Comment is an important
+part, and infinitely more important apparently in Britain than
+in this country. The journalism of comment may be divided
+into two parts: judicial, and the journalism of advocacy. It is
+the former that Mr. Strachey has practised or that he has
+meant to practise.</p>
+
+<p>On the ethics of newspaper proprietorship he thinks that
+it makes for soundness that newspaper proprietors should be
+pecuniarily independent. It is also most important that they
+should be men whose money is derived from their newspapers,
+and not from other sources. A great newspaper in the hands
+of a man who does not look to it for profit, but owns it for
+external reasons, is a source of danger. In view of this opinion,
+it is interesting to recall that the control of the greatest
+newspaper in the world has recently passed, in great part, into
+the hands of a man who possesses a considerable portion of
+one of America's greatest fortunes.</p>
+
+<p>The chapters of Mr. Strachey's book which should have
+been most interesting are those entitled “Five Great Men,” in
+which he discusses Lord Cromer, John Hay, Theodore
+Roosevelt, Cecil Rhodes, and Joseph Chamberlain. Many will
+find them the most disappointing, particularly those who knew
+in the flesh any of these great men. They would be less disappointing,
+perhaps, if they were not so palpably self-laudatory.
+Mr. Strachey had a profound admiration for Lord
+Cromer and he shared it with thousands of his countrymen<span class="pagenum" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</span>
+and Egyptian well-wishers the world over. Recalling a visit
+to Lord Cromer in Cairo, he says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Inexperienced as I then was in public affairs, it was a
+matter of no small pleasure and of no small amount of pride
+to find my own special opinions, views, and theories as to
+political action plainly endorsed by an authority so great.
+In not a single case was I disappointed or disillusioned either
+with what had been my own views or with what were Lord
+Cromer's.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This reminds strangely of Mr. Strachey's opinion of the
+Dons in his youthful days at Oxford. Future biographers
+of Lord Cromer will have to note the fact that “he was, with
+the single exception of my cousin, Lytton Strachey, the most
+competent reviewer I ever had,” and that “he wrote a review
+every week for <em>The Spectator</em> on some important book,” also
+that “he took an immense amount of trouble to realise and
+understand <em>The Spectator</em> view, and to commit me to nothing
+which he thought I might dislike.” </p>
+
+<p>In the same way, Mr. Strachey tells with great relish how he
+won the approval of Roosevelt with his tact and discretion
+when the President invited him to be present at one of his
+Cabinet meetings, and of Roosevelt's admiration when Mr.
+Strachey went with him in floods of rain for a ride on a dark
+November evening. In curious contrast to his statement that
+on this occasion he was mounted on a superb Kentucky horse
+procured from the cavalry barracks, “a creature whose
+strength and speed proved how well deserved is the reputation
+of that famous breed,” is the photograph of Mr. Strachey on
+his pony at the end of the chapter, from which one would not
+readily gather that he had been selected by Mr. Roosevelt to
+accompany him “on these afternoon winter rides” as a test
+of men.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Strachey says that the bed-rock of his political opinions
+is a whole-hearted belief in the principles of democracy, and
+he defines his conception of democracy as being</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“not devotion to certain abstract principles or views of communal
+life which have the label 'democratic' placed upon them,
+but a belief in the justice, convenience and necessity of ascertaining
+and abiding by the lawfully and constitutionally expressed
+Will of the Majority of the People.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>He states his belief in the referendum</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“in order to free us from the evils of log-rolling and
+other exigencies of the kind which Walt Whitman grouped
+under the general formula of 'the insolence of elected persons.'”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>He admits, however, that a whole-hearted belief in the
+democratic principles need not prevent one from having
+strong views on special points of policy, and one of his special
+points of policy is in regard to Ireland.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I objected to Home Rule as bad for the Empire, bad for
+the United Kingdom, and bad in an even extremer degree for
+Ireland herself. If, however, it should be determined that some
+measure of Home Rule must be passed, then the existence
+of the two Irelands must be recognised in any action which
+should be determined upon. When, therefore, the support
+which the Unionist party decided on giving to Mr. Lloyd
+George at the end of the war made some form of Home Rule
+seem almost inevitable, I strongly advocated the division of
+Ireland as the only way of avoiding a civil war in which the
+merits would be with Northern Ireland.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>One who comes to this delightful narrative as an admirer
+of the author may feel, on taking leave of it, that what Mr.
+Strachey has said of a famous fellow editor, William T. Stead,
+might also be said of him:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Stead, though a man of honest intent, and very great
+ability, was also a man of many failings, many ineptitudes,
+many prejudices and injustices. Further, there was an element
+of commonness in his mental attitude, as in his style.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Yet this would not be quite fair or accurate. Mr. Strachey
+is a man of honest intent and very great ability, but there<span class="pagenum" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</span>
+is no element of “commonness” in his mental attitude. His
+admirers would not admit that he is a man of many failings
+and many injustices. The word “some” should be substituted
+for “many,” in any case. But then there are his pronunciamentos
+on Ireland and his recollections of Cecil Rhodes.</p>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" >CHAPTER XIII<br>
+<small>THE KING OF GATH UNTO HIS SERVANT: MAGAZINE INSANITY</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>For one who has devoted a considerable portion of his
+life to a study of the human mind in dissolution there
+are few things more diverting than popular disquisitions on
+the subject of insanity. If popular comments and interpretations
+regarding other subjects—world politics, for instance—are
+as apropos and penetrating as are those on mental disorder,
+the less readers are guided by them the more instructed they
+may expect to be.</p>
+
+<p>I have recently read in an important magazine an article
+entitled “Up from Insanity” which has all the qualities that
+a contribution intended to be instructive and helpful should
+not have. It reeks with misinformation, not only misstatement
+of facts, but unwarranted inferences and unjustifiable
+and illogical conclusions.</p>
+
+<p>The Editor of that distinguished and dignified periodical
+says: “It is a revealing narrative, genuine down to the latest
+detail.” And so it is. It reveals the writer's incapacity to grasp
+the fundamental principles of psychology, established experimentally
+and empirically, and which have taken their place
+amongst the eternal truths of the world; and it reveals that the
+writer, whether because of his previous mental disorder, or
+willfully, is quite ignorant of what has been accomplished by
+countless students and innumerable workers in the field of
+psychiatry by way of throwing some light upon the mysteries
+of the normal mind.</p>
+
+<p>“I am almost a pioneer in the field of written experience of
+insanity,” he writes; and yet Mr. Clifford Beers' book, “A
+Mind that Found Itself,” and “The Autobiography of a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</span>
+Paranoic,” two comparatively recent works that are most
+illuminating and have had a great effect in concentrating the
+attention of the public on insanity as a social problem, must
+have been known to him.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“It is a privilege conferred upon few men in the world to
+return from the dark and weird adventure [meaning insanity]
+to live a normal life.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Considering that upward of one-third of all insane individuals
+recover, there is no other interpretation to be put upon
+this statement than that the writer of it does not know whereof
+he speaks.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“A friend of mine lost his mind from thinking too much
+about his income tax.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This may be an attempt at facetiousness on the part of the
+writer. No physician who has dealt with the insane has
+ever encountered an individual made insane by “thinking too
+much.” If so, he has been silent about it.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“I suppose, first of all, you would like to know how it
+feels to be insane. Well, it is indeed a melancholy situation.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is, indeed, a melancholy situation if you have melancholia,
+but if you have mania, and especially if you have certain
+forms in which your self-appreciation is enhanced and your
+belief in your potencies and possessions quickened to an
+immeasurable degree, it is far from being a melancholy sensation.
+It is a sensation of power and possession which renders
+its possessor incapable of believing that any such thing
+as depression exists in the world.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Lately a movement has arisen to change the name of
+insane asylums to 'mental hospitals.' We now recognise
+former madmen as merely sick people. We used to think of
+insane people as wild-eyed humans gnawing at prison bars
+or raving in a straight-jacket.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</span></p>
+
+<p>The casual reader might infer from this that “lately” means
+within the past few years, and yet three generations have come
+and gone since Conolly, Hack, Tuke and others initiated the
+movement which accomplished this.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“It was inconceivable to a well-known New York publisher
+that an insane man could play golf, go to Africa, or talk
+about his experiences.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The mental and emotional make-up of “well-known New
+York publishers” is enigmatic. There is general agreement on
+that point, but if there is one amongst them who believes that
+an insane man cannot play golf, he could readily divorce himself
+from the conviction by driving past any hospital for the
+insane. There he will see a golf course and some of the
+patients playing, though he will not be able to distinguish them
+from “regular” golfers. As for an insane man talking about
+his golf or his experiences in Africa, no New York publisher,
+well-known or otherwise, would need proof to convince him
+that an insane man can do that.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“On my way through New York I called on a celebrated
+specialist who told me that I had only six months to live and
+told me to go out and hunt, roam the world and make the best
+of the passing hours. Six months later that great physician
+died insane.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is to be assumed that the celebrated specialist was a
+specialist in diseases of the mind. If that is so, the
+writer is in error. No celebrated alienist of New York has
+died insane within the past quarter of a century. In the
+second place, there has never been a celebrated alienist in
+New York who would fit the description,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“forty, rich, famous, living in an elegant home amid exquisite
+surroundings on University Heights with his wife, one of the
+most beautiful women I ever looked upon, a statuesque blonde
+of astounding loveliness.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</span></p>
+
+<p>save in the last qualification. Each one of them has had a
+beautiful wife, but none “a statuesque blonde of astounding
+loveliness.” </p>
+
+<p>If the writer consulted a physician who made that statement
+to him, he had the misfortune not only to be insane
+himself but to seek the counsel of a physician who was also
+insane.</p>
+
+<p>The writer of the article says that he will attempt seriously
+to show that the centre of the will is distinct from the centre
+of the mind, and is a separately functioning organ; but in the
+stress of relating his experiences he forgot to do so. In fact,
+there would be no more satisfactory way of estimating his
+mental possessions and equilibrium than from an examination
+of this written document.</p>
+
+<p>Those who are experienced with the insane give great diagnostic
+weight to their writings, not only the orthography
+and the syntax, but the sequence of thought, the rhythm
+of expression, the continuity of narrative, the pertinency of
+reference, the credibility of citation or example, the discursiveness
+of the narrative, and the way in which the writer develops
+and finally presents the central thought or idea. All
+these and other features of the written document are evidences
+to which he gives great weight. “Up from Insanity” is neither
+sequential in thought nor in narrative. Nearly every paragraph
+furnishes evidence of the distractibility of the writer's
+mind, and the discursiveness of the entire article amounts
+almost to rambling. It is marked with journalese jargon
+which reminds me of the newspaper accounts of the kidnapping
+or spiriting from Cuba of Señorita Cisneros.</p>
+
+<p>The pith of the human document that we are discussing is
+that “every man's strength wells up from some centre deeper
+in him than the brain.” It does. A man's personality at any
+moment is the sum total of all the reactions of every cell or
+physiological unit in his body; but acceptance of this fact
+does not alter the universally accepted belief that the brain is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</span>
+the organ of mind. To have it said by a psychopathic individual
+that his restoration to a normal mental state came after
+he had observed “that a double nerve centre at the base of the
+spine had been aroused and the function of these centres
+brought balance and poise and strength, which was instantly
+reflected in every movement and thought, and that these basic
+nerve centres are the centre of the will,” neither proves that
+there is such a centre nor makes it at all probable that it
+exists.</p>
+
+<p>Why such humanistic and scientific puerilities as these
+should have been taken seriously is not easy to understand.</p>
+
+<p>Our knowledge concerning the human mind is not by any
+means complete or satisfactory, but there are certain things
+about it which we know. For instance, we know that there
+is a conscious mind and a subconscious mind. The discovery
+in 1866 of the “subliminal consciousness” of the psychologist
+(the “unconscious mind” of the psychoanalyst), was called
+by William James the greatest discovery in modern psychology.
+We know that the person the individual thinks he is
+is the equivalent of his conscious mind. The man that he
+really is is the man his unconscious mind makes him. The
+face that he sees when he looks in the glass is the face that
+goes with his conscious mind. The face that others see is the
+one that fits his unconscious mind. Anyone who would observe
+the revelations of that unconscious mind in literature
+can readily gratify his wish by reading the “Portrait of the
+Artist as a Young Man,” that remarkable presentation by
+James Joyce.</p>
+
+<p>Many believe today that a man's ego or individuality is the
+equivalent of this unconscious mind; that therein lies the
+power of genius, the source of vision, the springs of inspiration
+that gush forth in prophecy, in artistic creation, in invention.</p>
+
+<p>We are now engaged in investigating this subliminal consciousness,
+or unconscious mind, with every means at our<span class="pagenum" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</span>
+disposal, and year by year we are making headway. Our
+progress is not adequate, perhaps, to satisfy the impatient
+and the impulsive, but with each succeeding decade there is a
+distinct achievement. Nevertheless, in the half-century during
+which we have been working at the matter in a methodical—perhaps
+one might almost say a scientific—way, we have
+discovered things about the mind which are truly epoch-making.</p>
+
+<p>It is evident that the writer of the article, “Up from Insanity,” 
+has never been insane. He is a psychopathic individual
+who has had distressing episodes. At times these episodes
+have parallelled with considerable closeness the features
+of definite mental diseases such as manic depressive insanity,
+at other times they seem to have resembled the features of
+dementia præcox; but he never was the victim of either one.
+He inherited an unstable nervous system which displayed
+itself in youth as a shut-in, markedly sensitive, anti-social
+personality. Like the majority of individuals so burdened, he
+was subject to periods of excitation, at which times he did
+things at top speed. Neurologists call this a “hypo-manic
+state,” that is, a state that resembles mania in miniature. Such
+states would be followed by periods of inadequacy, of retardation
+of mental and physical activity, and of depression.</p>
+
+<p>After a severe attack which he suffered when he was
+twenty-one, he had what is called in polite circles a “nervous
+breakdown,” the chief symptoms being abortive delusions of
+reference. He thought that certain parts of his body had
+changed so materially that it was necessary to hide them from
+the gaze of onlookers. It made him sick to look at his own
+face. He had to wear coloured glasses in order that others
+might not read his secret from his eyes, and his sense of relationship
+with everything constituting the external world was
+disordered disagreeably. Accompanying this there were a
+series of symptoms which constitute “feeling badly,” and all
+the functions of the body that were concerned with nutrition<span class="pagenum" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</span>
+were disordered, so that he became weak and lost flesh.
+Oftentimes his depression of spirits was so great that he convinced
+himself he wanted to die, but he did not embrace
+a good opportunity to accomplish this end when it was offered
+to him. In fact, he struggled so valiantly with the run-away
+horse that he checked him and “slid from his back ingloriously,” 
+physically exhausted. It would be interesting to know
+why sliding off the back of a horse who has run away and
+whose frenzy has been subdued by the rider should be an
+inglorious dismounting. Of course it might be more glorious
+to tame him to such a degree that his master could stand upon
+his back and direct his capriciousness with a glance or a silken
+cord, but surely there is nothing inglorious about any kind of
+dismount from the back of a horse who has been transformed
+from a gentle to a wild animal.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, the experience was a beneficial one. When
+he reviewed his prowess he realised that he had imposed his
+will-power, mediated by muscle, upon the animal, and it occurred
+to him, a victim of aboulia like the majority of psychopathic
+individuals, that to impose a similar will-power
+upon himself would be a salutary procedure. With this discernment
+came other revelations. One was that he had always
+been lacking in concentration and was easily distracted—psychopathic
+hallmarks which can be effaced to a remarkable
+degree, in many instances, by training. The first fruit of
+his labour in this direction was the discovery that Dr. Cook
+had been understudying Ananias, Munchausen, <em>et al.</em></p>
+
+<p>In another part of his article he says, with consummate
+familiarity, “You are from Missouri when it comes to asking
+you to accept new thoughts.” He may be assured that one of
+his readers is not. New thoughts are as acceptable to this
+reader as breath to his nostrils; but he would claim citizenship
+in that State if asked to accept it as an indication of perspicacity
+to have discovered that Dr. Cook was a fake.</p>
+
+<p>Despite the fact that the writer of the article had “developed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</span>
+the sixth sense to a startling degree,” which assured him
+success as a journalist, he was chafing under his impotencies
+when he met a former medium who “had given up that life
+since her marriage.” Unlike the celebrated specialist's wife,
+who was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen up to the
+time he met his own wife, this one was “the most insignificant
+little woman I ever saw.” Whether it was her experience
+gained as a medium, or as the wife of a rich lumberman of the
+Middle West, that prompted her to shy the alleged lunatic,
+fearing he would bore her with a narrative of his troubles, or
+whether she did not want to rake up her past, cannot be
+gathered from the meagre narrative. However, he got from
+her this nugget of wisdom:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“To be really successful you must get in touch with the
+great reservoir of experience.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>From “one of the country's greatest physicians,” the like
+of which are his personal friends, he got a paraphrase of the
+Scripture:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Learn a lesson from the flowers of the field, be humble and
+modest, be natural and play a man's part.” </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It was then that calm repose settled upon him, and his
+nervous energy returned to the old channels and nourished
+him.</p>
+
+<p>If Mr. E. J. had only appended a few of his dreams to his
+human document, there would be very little difficulty in pointing
+out the emotional repression that was at the bottom of all
+his mental symptoms. That he conforms to a certain well-known
+type of psychic fixation there is very little doubt. He
+has always been bereft, because he has a feeling of being
+spiritually or mentally alone. He never learned to be independent
+in mind, but always looked for an uncritical, soothing,
+maternal sort of love from people who were not ready or willing
+to give it. He has not changed materially. Now that his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</span>
+so-called recovery has come, and being unable to find what
+he demands, he takes refuge in the next best thing, and plays
+at obtaining it vicariously; he convinces himself that he is
+going to devote himself to doing for others “all the little kindnesses
+that life offers.” </p>
+
+<p>The layman who would get some knowledge of insanity
+should avoid such confessions as that of E. J. If he would
+make acquaintance with the self-coddling of a neurotic individual
+who delights in self-analysis, self-pity, and exaggeration
+of his symptoms, and who is a fairly typical example of juvenile
+fixation, his purpose will be accomplished by reading this
+and similar articles. There is, however, a safer and more satisfactory
+way of securing such information, and that is by
+reading the writings of Pierre Janet. There he will find the
+obsessed, the hysteric, the aboulic, the neurasthenic individual
+discussed in masterly fashion, and he will find the presentation
+unmixed with mediæval mysticism and puerile platitudes, unflavoured
+with specious “uplift” sentiment and psychological
+balderdash.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, he may get real enlightenment from
+“The Jungle of the Mind,” published recently in the same
+magazine, providing he closes his eyes to the editorial comment
+and refuses to read the letter “of a physician of reputation”
+which sets forth that “according to all our text-book symptoms
+of dementia præcox she was surely that.” </p>
+
+<p>The purpose of such editorial comment must be either to suggest
+that the enigmatic dissolution of the mind to which Schule
+gave the name “precocious dementia” may eventuate in recovery,
+or to show that doctors make mistakes. If it is the
+former, it needs a lot of proof; if the latter, none whatsoever.
+Though students of mental pathology know little or nothing of
+the causes of the mental disorders of hereditarily predisposed
+individuals who get wrecked on the cliffs of puberty, or of the
+alterations and structure of the tissues that subserve the mind,
+they know, as they know the temperaments of their better<span class="pagenum" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</span>
+halves, the display, the types, the paradigms of the disease.
+And the lady who has recently contributed some notes on a
+disfranchisement from the state of <em>non compos mentis</em> to the
+<em>Atlantic Monthly</em> with such subtle display of proficiency in the
+literary art, may be assured that the doctors who averred she
+had dementia præcox added one more error to a list already
+countless. With the daring of one who hazards nothing by venturing
+an opinion, I suggest that she merely made a journey
+into a wild country from whose bourne nearly all travellers
+return. The country is called “Manic-Depressive Insanity.” </p>
+
+<p>A young woman of gentle birth develops, while earning her
+bread in uplift work, “nervous prostration,” that coverer of a
+multitude of ills. Her sister's home, to which she goes, brings
+neither coherence nor tranquillity. In fact, she gathers confusion
+rapidly there, and seeks to get surcease of it in oblivion.
+After three attempts at suicide, she is sent to a sanitarium.
+Six months of that exhausts her financial resources. This,
+with increasing incoherency and fading actuality, necessitate
+transfer to a state hospital, and there she remains three years,
+going through the stages of violence, indifference, tranquillity,
+resignation, and finally the test of work and recreation, culminating
+happily in probational discharge and resumption of
+previous work.</p>
+
+<p>This is the record of thousands in this country and in every
+civilised country. The variety of insanity which she had
+(and it is the commonest of all the insanities) nearly always
+terminates in recovery—that is, from the single attack. There
+is, of course, the likelihood of recurrence. How to avoid that is
+what we are keen to learn from mental hygienists and from
+those taught by experience. If this disenfranchised lady will
+tell us ten years hence what she has done to keep well and how
+her orientation has differed from that of the ten years following
+puberty, she will make a human document of value intellectually,
+not emotionally, as this one is. Meanwhile, should she
+be disposed to do something for future psychopaths, she may<span class="pagenum" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</span>
+record the experiences of her life from childhood to the period
+of full development, and particularly of the decade following
+her fifth year. If she will do this with the truthfulness of
+James Joyce, the chasteness of Dorothy M. Richardson, and
+the fullness of Marie Bashkirtseff, it may be said of her: “Out
+of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected
+praise.” </p>
+
+<p>It may be literature to describe one's fellow inmates of a
+psychopathic hospital, to portray their adult infantilisms, to
+delineate their schizophrenias, to recount their organised
+imageries, but it does not contribute an iota to our knowledge
+of insanity, how to prevent it, and how to cure it.</p>
+
+<p>We need intrepid souls who will bare their psychic breasts
+and will tell us, without fear or shame, of their conventionalised
+and primitive minds: how the edifice was constructed, the
+secrets of the architect, and of the builder. If Dostoievsky had
+been insane, not epileptic, the literature of psychiatry would
+today be vastly more comprehensive.</p>
+
+
+<p class="p2 center big2">THE END</p>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75230 ***</div>
+</body>
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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #75230 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75230)