Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/303

Rh beauty. In the stream of glittering similes, unfinished sentences, hectic catalogues, unanchored proper names, we seem to be going nowhere. Yet the goal comes, the method and the matter prove to have been one, and looking back from the pathos of the closing scene we see for a moment the airy drifting atoms piled into a colonnade. The break with Night and Day and even with The Voyage Out is complete. A new type of fiction has swum into view, and it is none the less new because it has had a few predecessors—laborious, well meaning, still-born books by up-to-date authors, which worked the gasp and the drone for all they were worth, and are unreadable.

Three years after Jacob's Room comes another novel in the same style, or slight modification of the style: Mrs. Dalloway. It is perhaps her masterpiece, but difficult, and I am not altogether sure about every detail, except when my fountain pen is in my hand. Here is London at all events—so much is certain, London chorussing with all its clocks and shops and sunlit parks, and writing texts with an aeroplane across God’s heaven. Here is Clarissa Dalloway, elderly, kind, graceful, rather hard and superficial, and a terrible snob. How she loves London! And there is Septimus Warren Smith—she never meets him—a case of shell shock—very sad—who hears behind the chorus the voices of the dead singing, and sees his own apotheosis or damnation in the sky. That dreadful war! Sir William Bradshaw of Harley Street, himself in perfect health, very properly arranges for Septimus Warren Smith to go to a lunatic asylum. Septimus is ungrateful and throws himself out of the window. ‘Coward’, cries the doctor, but is too late. News of which comes to Clarissa as she is giving an evening party. Does she likewise commit suicide? I thought she did the first time I read the book; not at my second reading, nor is the physical act important, for she is certainly left with the full knowledge—inside knowledge—of what