It was as though the room were instantly flooded with water. After a moment’s hesitation, first one couple, then another, leapt into mid-stream, and went round and round in the eddies. The rhythmic swish of the dancers sounded like a swirling pool. By degrees the room grew perceptibly hotter. The smell of kid gloves mingled with the strong scent of flowers. The eddies seemed to circle faster and faster, until the music wrought itself into a crash, ceased, and the circles were smashed into little separate bits.
Without this shift of attitude, her material is composed of the characteristic English-novel accessories. Mr. Pepper is a vegetarian pedant who complains of his ailments; St John is the eunuch second-lead friend who worships the heroine awkwardly and always says the wrong thing, for which you love him; Mrs. Somebody is partially deaf, so that tragic news gains a hysterical relief by being shouted at her four times. Indeed, a great many of her characters are stock types which could be patched together from one season on Broadway.
Too often, the general mentality behind the books displays a hankering after the secrets of life, the sacred experience, the beautiful truths which are sensed—not realized in crude clarity—one more bow, in short, to the inarticulate muqueuses. The more important—and therefore sensitive characters—spend a large portion of their time living as in a dream, frequently floating in so disturbingly indefinite a thing as a cloud of thought. Indeed, Mrs. Woolf’s vocabulary for fixing brain states does not depart radically from that of Oliver Optic; we learn, for instance, that her hero’s “mind was scaling the highest pinnacles of its alps, where there was only starlight and the untrodden snow.” She also accepts with unquestioning seriousness what Benda would call the “aesthetic of love”: which is to say that the Bronte throb is restored with neither additions nor subtractions. (And while on this subject it might be well to add that Mrs. Woolf’s romantic men are more than a vengeance for our male authors’ romantic women.)
These tendencies, however, show to much less disadvantage in The Voyage Out, since in this book the technical manipulation has been so thorough. It is a splendid stroke, for instance, when the heroine is dead, to dismiss her and her lover entirely, return to the hotel and summon a raging storm. For a few pages this little colony of Britishers, who have come all the way to South America and transplanted every single feature of their life in England, chat nervously while the tropical storm rips by and Rachel is known to he dead. It passes; we see it lighting far out on the ocean; the Britishers go to their rooms. One gets the smell of fresh damp vegetation . . . and the death of the heroine has been magnificently orchestrated. In fact, The Voyage Out is full of such careful juxtaposition of elements; Mrs. Woolf reaches the highest points in her book by just this method.
If Night and Day had been followed by The Voyage Out, one could explain very glibly that the first book was a mere blind tentative. But as the books were written in the reverse order, it seems that Mrs. Woolf did not realize her own distinctions. The same calamity happened to Louis Wilkinson, who wrote The Buffoon, and then went scurrying back to the usual society novel of his countrymen. As a matter of fact, the ideal development of a writer would probably be in exactly the opposite direction. Before he had attained a complete consciousness of his intentions and a mediumistic equipment with which to embody those intentions, he would be much nearer the general level of writing than after he had gotten himself really in hand. To take the example of music, it is only in their earlier compositions that Scriabine and Debussy approach the Grade 3 A splendour of the Minute Waltz.
But for some reason or other, literature seems to fight shy of this Zug nach Innen. There is the case of Sherwood Anderson in America, for instance, who is evolving on the principle that the stages of a literary artist should be, first to express one’s self, then to express an Illinois butcher, and finally to express all the readwhile-runners in seven continents. (Those, that is, for whom a book is the moral equivalent of a newspaper or a box of chocolates. The work of art is received as a vague lump; the acme of critical acumen is attained in the characteristic “Have you read the latest book by—?” To become “great,” a book must naturally be composed of elements which do not go beyond this preponderant public.) In America, this process of vulgarization is caused by our neo-Whitmanite hoax, which strives to make art explode like a blunderbuss. In England, perhaps, it all derives from the deadly combination of literature and the drawing room.
The Editing of Oneself
The Mystic Warrior by James Oppenheim. Alfred A. Knopf
The Dial, August 1921, 232–235
With the advent of psychoanalysis the literature of confessions enters upon a new phase. Heretofore the confessor has been subject to emotion in such a way that his need to express himself was greater than his discretion; he maintained a wavering battlefront between pride and humility, although above and beyond it all the confessions continued. But now the confession has become an invention, made possible only by the discoveries of modern science and research. If the older confessions were written almost in spite of oneself, the newer confessions burble along like brooks. And when one has been properly “psyched,” he does not even suffer a pudency before his secretly suspected virtues.
As a consequence, it is becoming the custom, when one has reached a certain age, to lay out the stades and parasangs of one’s journey; and, having decided just where one is going, to tell exactly how one got there. Further, it seems there is no longer any essential difference between making a work of literary art and writing an essay on the causes of the Great War. Beginning with the result, one works back into a set of teleological connections, and then starting with the teleological connections, one works up to the result . . . a method which has produced a remarkably interesting volume in Mr. Oppenheim’s The Mystic Warrior.
The Mystic Warrior, working along these lines, is born to find that “the world was a dream of beauty, an ache of loveliness.” But, on the other hand, “everything spoke of death, everything whispered in my ears, ‘James, you will die.’” In the beginning, therefore, Mr. Oppenheim recalls the love of life and the fear of death. “Then, after breakfast, grammar.” He could not concentrate on his studies, however. “Phantasy possessed me . . . And everything was too beautiful . . . Too beautiful the blue of the sky, green of the earth, Too poignant the gleam of wonder in butterfly wings, Too aching lovely the summer fields, the glaze of the morning . . . My throat was clutched with tears . . .” Little James watches the sun go down with terror, since then he will think of death. By way of summing up here, the author passes two judgment s: “O, only one who has felt this terror knows what it is to live!” and later on: “And nobody bothered his head about it!”
With the death of his father—told with an honest homeliness of emotion which makes it one of the finest passages in the book—the boy is thrown into less general preoccupations. “But now I must take his place: I must hurry and be a man . . . Strange task for the dreamy little singer and artist!” Along with this, a period of yearning sets in:
. . . I wanted, not to be my father,
But to be the child encircled by my father’s love . . .
I wanted to go from the hard weary world, the torture of existence,
The clash and dust of my brain,
Into that cell of abnegation and quiet
Where the invisible Beloved hovers,
And I should give birth to the divine child,
My inspired song, my poem, born in love.
But instead:
Sold my love for power, converted religion into livelihood,
And gave the artist in me to be a semi-harlot of the press.
For the next years, life is a hodge-podge of Napoleon, Lincoln, Shakespeare, Wagner, Jesus, and jobs. Above it all was a mixed ambition to conquer or redeem the world, to throw off contemplation for action. However:
I essayed, and failed . . . song lured me again . . .
Again the storm-cloud, again the agony,
Again