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Title: The doctor looks at literature
Psychological studies of life and letters

Author: Joseph Collins

Release date: January 28, 2025 [eBook #75230]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: G.H. Doran, 1923

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DOCTOR
LOOKS AT LITERATURE ***

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
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hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. For the
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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.

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
61
Psychologist
IV Dorothy Richardson and Her Censor 96
V Marcel Proust: Master Psychologist and Pilot of
116
the “Vraie Vie”

VI Two Literary Ladies of London: Katherine Mansfield
and 151
Rebecca West
VII Two Lesser Literary Ladies of London: Stella Benson
181
and Virginia Woolf

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
256
about D. H. Lawrence

XII The Joy of Living and Writing about It: John St.
289
Loe Strachey
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 127
method
of revision

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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 Govt and
Compa 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.