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.