The December 1935 issue of the London Mercury devoted three full pages to R. A. Scott’s review — ostensibly of Clear Horizon but really a summary assessment of Pilgrimage and Dorothy Richardson’s approach. Scott begrudged Richardson any claim as an innovator in her technique, but held her to be the pre-eminent woman novelist as woman: “Miss Richardson not merely presents the feminine point of view; she is it.”
One had wondered what had become of Miriam in these years that have elapsed since she last appeared in Miss Richardson’s Pilgrimage cycle of novels. Had the final word been said, or were we again to listen to her thinking aloud as the stream of consciousness brought her into relationship with a world that, for us, has changed considerably since we first heard of her? It had seemed likely that the possibilities of Miriam—so far, that is, as she could be effectively used by the same novelist for the purposes of fiction—had been exhausted.
During the war—which was an incident among public affairs that had no noticeable effect whatever upon the mind of the author—Miriam had dawned freshly upon the world like a being from a sphere we had only recently acquired the faculties to be aware of. In The Tunnel, published in February 1919, she had become her brightest, most irrefutable, transcendent self, transforming the dingy atmosphere of Mornington Road and the Wimpole Street surgery into crystalline ether. In Interim (November 1919), she was still illuminating a dull and rather purposeless world by her manner of experiencing it. In Deadlock, in Revolving Lights and in subsequent books we had found her still living within herself—or rather her environment shifting from point to point within her mind—and had felt that her author at last was relying too little on art and too much on inspiration (which sometimes deserting her) in the attempt to make the common round of Miriam’s life interesting for us as readers. Miriam’s mind, perceiving persons so shrewdly, marking its memories of little things and of a few high ecstasies, was like a river, passing this memorable point and that on the bank, and, as it left each behind, moving on with the same rhythmic, rippling flow—towards no conceivable goal. Goals, of course, are among the things that Miss Richardson would leave severely to “men.”
And now, after an interval, after a period in which doubtless she has been re-surveyed, re-experienced, Miriam appears again. She is still in essence the same; not very much older, if one can judge of age at all in such a history ; still existing in a time when motor-cars and aeroplanes were only just beginning to be familiar ; and, what is more important, so far as mere happenings have any importance for the spiritual life, in a time when the militant suffrage movement was going on, and providing a suitable opportunity for the exit of Amabel, incomparable Amabel, from Miriam’s life. But Miss Richardson in this interval has changed more than Miriam, not, indeed, in what is essential to her point of view, but in her art. She has become, strangely enough, a literary person such as we could never think of her being before— in the sense, say, that Mrs. Virginia Woolf is a literary person—composing her sentences with much elaboration, arranging her pattern, advancing with less appearance of spontaneity but more certainty to her end. The thoughts and impressions that used to fly over the pages in short exclamatory sentences now move slowly, analysed minutely and guardedly, almost in the manner of Henry James; as thus:
She remained aware, as she seized and fled away with this last, incredible sample of the treatment she had escaped, of his voice beginning again, keeping going, in the way of voices all over the world, the semblance of interchange beneath which the real communications of the evening had flowed, silently and irretrievably to and fro ; of its rather excessively cordial and interested tone, at once betraying and disposing of the satisfaction he had experienced in describing her to herself as reduced to her proper status, set aside to become an increasingly uncomfortable and finally agonized biological contrivance whose functioning, in his view, was the sole justification for her continued existence.
Never before, surely, has Miss Richardson written like that. In summing up all the impressions that have gone to the making of Miriam as she is now, in minutely exposing the mature subtleties of apprehension with which she takes in each situation, her record has acquired an intellectual character; Miriam is no longer merely perceiving; she is seen severely reflecting upon perception. It is perhaps natural that at this stage her mind should be filled with memories; and memories, for her, evoke criticism of past thought. In the whole book there are only five or six external happenings. Miriam introduces Michael (whom she rejected in Revolving Lights) to Amabel; with Amabel again she endures the conversation of Hypo; she goes to a Concert; she visits Amabel in prison; is in Wimpole Street; at her sister’s nursing home; and we leave her on the verge of “going away, right away.” That is all, in the external world, except that Amabel, as seen through Miriam’s eyes, is irresistibly, rapturously alive.
It has often been said of Miss Richardson that she was a pioneer, or at any rate one of two or three pioneers, in creating a new technique for the modern novel. Certainly she carried further than any previous novelist the method of eliminating the author and presenting a world simply as experienced by a fictitious individual—namely, Miriam. As Miss May Sinclair wrote of her:
She (the narrator) must be Miriam-Henderson. She must not know or divine anything that Miriam does not know or diving. . . Of the persons who move through Miriam’s you know nothing but what Miriam knows…. In identifying herself with this life which is Miriam s stream of consciousness, Miss Richardson produces her effect of being the first of getting closer to reality than any of our novelists who are trying so desperately to get close.
But it is not enough to point out that a novelist has invented a new technique-if indeed she could be said to have invented a method which was being simultaneously used by Proust, James Joyce and others; towards which Henry James and Conrad had travelled far; which, moreover, was an almost inevitable development of the method of Flaubert. No technique in any case justifies itself unless it produces results, and cannot be enough to confer high distinction unless the matter within the framework has high value. In the case of Miss Dorothy Richardson there is a quality more fundamental which constitutes her unique claim to distinction.
That quality lies in her femininity. She is perhaps the most perfect incarnation that has ever existed of one of the warring elements in the eternal sex war. Hers is — or perhaps I had better say appears to be — the authentic voice of essential woman using the distinctively feminine faculties to express the world. No doubt it was not by chance that she was first trying her had at writing at the moment when the militant suffragette movement was at its height. Not that the suffragette way was her way. It was not by attempting to do what men do, or by “assimilating masculine culture” that women (according to Miriam) acted in their own true part. Miriam’s part was to act, think, feel and experience life with the sentience that belongs to the feminine side of human nature and to do so in full consciousness of what she was doing. Jane Austen in her way was just as feminine in her outlook as Miss Richardson but she had no consciousness of opposition—she merely failed to make men real whenever she liked them. Charlotte Bronte was just as feminine, but, protesting, she succumbed to femininity. Mrs. Virginia Woolf has immense power of presenting the feminine point of view, but she is not herself controlled by it, as Miss Richardson is. Miss Richardson not merely presents the feminine point of view; she is it. She is conscious of the fact, glories in it, and wages (through Miriam) relentless war on the amusing monstrosity of the male intelligence.
This is evident in all her books. It is a governing element from first to last. “Men” generalize, make statements, argue, and evade life by rationalizing it. We hear of the “clever superficially true things men said.” Miriam in The Tunnel found that it was only by pretending to be interested in “statements” (which were not things) and taking sides about them that she could have conversation with men. To cultivate the trick of thinking in such terms might be a fine talent in women; but it would mean hiding so much letting so much go; all the real things. The things men never seemed to know about at all.” In Revolving Lights, Miriam rejected Michael because to marry would be to go into complete solitude, marked for life as a segregated female whose whole range of activities was known; in the only way men have of knowing them. And similarly in Clear Horizon Hypo is introduced mainly to be guyed as a nice clever man using his “clumsy masculine machinery of observation,” meeting realities with formulae, enclosed and enmeshed, as men are, in opinions and in their illusion of freedom.
This is not the place to discuss whether Miss Richardson has or has not missed something of possible value in the distinctively masculine intelligence. But it must be insisted that she is not primarily destructive. On the contrary, she is all the time the feminine mind in operation, with all its virtue. If one asks what that is, the answer must be, read her books. It resides in the actuality of experience, the individual experience — that is only knowable here and now, in the moment of perception, and in the next moment, and the next moment, and such fusion of all the moments as you may get in the rarer acts of divination. Even Miriam with all her feminine power is often conscious of being defeated. In listening to music at a concert she was aware of “passing along the surface of its moments as one by one they were measured off in sound that no longer held for her any time-expanding depth,” tormented by knowing that her “authentic being” was far away in her consciousness, till suddenly “a single flute-phrase, emerging unaccompanied … spread coolness within her, refreshing as sipped water from a spring.” Paths of new adventure in the search for personality open before us.
One may, of course, suppose that there is something of the woman in every man, and something of the man in every woman—and even individuals who combine the excellences of both. It is evident — that the distinctive excellence for which Miss Richardson stands made it desirable for her to have just such a vehicle as she has chosen; her technique exactly serves her purpose. It lends itself—one might add— to artistic laziness—possibly a feminine defect?—to following the least line of resistance in recording the unordered flow of impressions as they pass through the mind.
Miss Richardson in some of her books is not guiltless of artistic laziness. But — with diminished inspiration—she has come nearer to conquering it in this book than in any other; also in this book more than in any other the synthetic method of the male mind, it is worth observing, is not wholly lacking. But the defects of Miss Richardson’s method almost become virtues since with them she has made that half of human nature whose capacities transcend articulation as nearly articulate as possible, and so has accomplished something unique.