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.