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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

ILLUSTRATIONS

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”