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.”