NOVELS
INTERIM. By Dorothy Richardson. Duckworth. 7s. net.
VALMOUTH. By Ronald Firbank. Grant Richards. 7s. net.
FULL CIRCLE. By Mary Agnes Hamilton. Collins. 7s. net.
INVISIBLE TIDES. By Beatrice Seymour. Chapman & Hall. 7s. net.
Miss Richardson's novel is her fifth volume in the same manner and about the same person; and a sixth volume is announced. She has apparently in effect only one novel to write and only one manner in which to do it. It is a manner distinctively her own, and yet not an isolated phenomenon. This kind of thinking and this kind of writing seem to be abroad at the moment. There are deep and genuine analogies between Miss Richardson's style and the style of Mr. James Joyce; there is a much more superficial resemblance between her work and the fumisterie of Mr. Ronald Firbank. She has influenced (but in this case it was a conscious discipleship) the method of Miss May Sinclair. It would not be difficult to find in her traits which she has in common with the more sincere exponents of Futurist poetry and with the theory an attempt to embody which was made in Futurist paintings. She is, in fact, an individual member of a school which is mostly posing and pretence, and which tends to discredit its very few genuine exponents. But that Miss Richardson is genuine, whether we like reading her books or not, is a question beyond dispute. She writes as she does because she must, because it is the way in which it has been given her to write.
It is her object to translate the memories of sensations into words directly and with as little change as possible. This is a specimen:
Miriam pulled up in front of a large oil-painting over the sofa; its distances—where a meadow stream that was wide in the foreground with a stone bridge and a mill-wheel and a cottage half hidden under huge trees, grew narrow and wound on and on through tiny distant fields until the scene melted in a soft-toned mist—held all her early visits to the Brooms in the Banbury Park days before they had discovered that she did not like sitting with her back to the fire. She listened eagerly to the busy sounds of the Brooms. Someone had bolted the hall-door and was scrooping a chair over the tiles to get up and put out the gas. Dust-sheets were still being flountered in the room behind her. Grace's arm came round her waist.—I'm so glad you've come, sweet, she said in her low, steady, shaken tones.—So am I, said Miriam.—Isn't that a jolly picture.—Yes. It's an awfully good one, you know. It was one of papa's.—What's O'Hara doing in the kitchen?—Taking Grace by the waist, Miriam drew into the passage, trying to prance with her down the hall. The little kitchen was obscured by an enormous clothes-horse draped with airing linen. She's left a miserable fire, said Mrs. Philps from behind the clothes-horse. She hasn't done the saucepans, aunt, scolded Florrie from the scullery.—Never mind, we can't have er down now. It's nearly midnight.
This is the reconstitution of a moment and, for what it is worth, Miss Richardson makes the moment live again. But minds which observe and record in her close, literal fashion are not normal minds; and therefore her impressions of life, coloured as they are by her acute introspectiveness, cannot correspond to life as normal persons see it. The normal person simplifies life, not merely when, if ever, he describes it, but also when he perceives it. The world is not to him the fragmentary incoherent whirl of feelings and events which it is to Miss Richardson. Nevertheless, it is obvious that this is how the world appears to her; and here, again for what it is worth, is her description of it. With such a book, a document rather than a novel, the ordinary attitude of the critic of fiction is naturally unsuitable and inapplicable. He cannot assume the conventional position of judgment from a definite and unalterable standard. He can, in fact, do no more than explain what is the book before him and leave it at that. We attempt to do no more. We do, however, think it worth while to establish the fact, if possible, that Miss Richardson's "novels" are the real expression of a real personality. On some readers they may have absolutely no effect; on some a small or a transitory effect; some, we know, appreciate them enormously. But they are genuine; they are not "stunts." When the series is finished, it may, of course, appear that Miss Richardson has given to the life of Miriam Henderson an artistic shape and moulding, instead of making it merely an endless film. But this does not at present suggest itself. What we have now is the record of a particular mind in various states, a mind which is not normal, but is not possessed to an abnormal degree of either beauty or power. That, we confess, is all we are able to say.
That Miss Richardson's method is native and genuine may be seen by a comparison of it with that of Mr. Ronald Firbank, whose Valmouth is worth noticing here in order to make the point. Here, again, a random specimen is necessary: