breaking into light just in front of you, flowers and light stretching out. Then you shut it down, letting it go through you with a leap that carries you to the moon-the sun, and makes you bump with life like the little boy bursting out of his too-small clothes, and go on choking with song to do the next thing deftly. . . . I can't be easy till I've said it in my mind, and I'm sad till I've said it somehow. . . and sadder when I have said it. But nothing gets done. I must stop thinking from now and be fearfully efficient."

But she doesn't she thinks aloud all through the book. Some people, most, I fear, will be put off by countless pages like that which I have quoted. But it is not for the story, but for the impression which life makes on the mind of a young girl that one reads this book. To put her novel down and go out into the street or on to the common is necessary very frequently in order to keep in touch with that life which most of us value very highly because we have compromised at an early age and allowed ourselves to descend into that arena to fight, but it is equally refreshing to return to the rarefied atmosphere of The Tunnel and watch Miriam's fugitive and cloistered virtue remaining aloof from the dust and heat. For one thing, by so doing she has kept her virgin soul intact and is able to say things about music, painting, and literature which we recognise to be true and fine and totally beyond our power of expression.

"Somebody had said that all good art, all great art, had a sensuous element . . . it was dreadful, but probably true. Mr Hancock was 'put off' by sensuousness, by anybody taking a delight in the sun on rice-fields and the gay colours of Japan perhaps one ought to be 'put off by Hearn.

ous.

Or this about reading: "There ought to be clear enunciation. Not expression-that was like commenting as you read; getting at the person you were reading to . . . reading with expression really hadn't any expression." Or this about Zola: "Wandering back to her room she repeated the phrases in her mind in French: they seemed to clear up and take shelter-somehow they were terse and acceptable, and they were secret and secure-but English people ought not to read them in English. It was outrageEnglishmen, . . . the Frenchman had written them simply French logic ... Englishmen were shy and suggestive about these things either that or breezy 'filth,' which was almost worse." Or this about Eden Phillpotts: "There was something about the name: soft and numb, with a slight chatter and hiss at the end, a rainstorm, the atmosphere of Devonshire and the mill-wheel." Even her friends comment on Miriam's "extraordinarily sharp sense of right and wrong.' Everybody else seems to be blunting her senses all the time by "going in amongst the crowd" (a Hendersonism for "married "), or mixing “naturally " with others. I say "her " advisedly. Men's senses in Miriam's eyes are already blunted beyond all hope of repair. Miss Richardson seems to me to be most paradoxical: she calls our existence (yours, mine), the sheltered life: her idea of complete emancipation is to be able "to turn up on Sunday morning in your knickers with your hair down" far from sheltered women and men. Miss Richardson

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complacent abominable

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has got a bee in her bonnet about us as a sex. She can't use the word "man" without losing her temper. She is more reasonable on the things of the mind.

"You ought not to think in words-I mean-you can think in your brain by imagining yourself going on and on through it, endless space."

"You can't grasp space with your mind."

"You don't GRASP it, you go through it. . There is no such thing as eternal punishment. It makes God a failure and a fool. It's a man's idea. Sitting on a throne judging everybody and passing sentence is a thing a man would do."

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Again, on the eternal subject of “ Man "

6

"Old men seemed to have some sort of understanding of things. If only they would talk with the same conviction about other things as there was in their tone when they said those personal things (my beauty, my sweet, you sweet girl, etc.). But the things they said were worldly: generalisations, like the things one read in books that tired you out with trying to find the answer, and made books so awful-things that might look true about everybody at some time or other, and were not really true about anybodywhen you knew them. All the things the old men said about life and themselves and other people were sad: Make the best of your youth, my dear, before it flies.' If it all ended in sadness and envy of youth, life was simply a silly trick. Life could not be a silly trick. That is the simple truth . . . a certainty. Whatever happens, whatever things look like, life is not a trick." Life is not a trick to Miriam simply because she is always ecstatically happy. To toss all the joys and happiness away and know that you are happy and free without anything." Why do lovely things and people go on happening? Harking back to the subject of words: "Whether you agree or not, language is the only way of expressing anything, and it dims everything. So the Bible is

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F

not true it is a culture. word-dogmas out of it. Christianity, which calls false. It clings to words which get more and more wrong. Then there's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be quite sure of rejoicing about. The Christians are irritating and frightened. The man with side-whiskers [Huxley, a special object of Miriam's hatred] understands something. But."

Religion is wrong in making Christ was something. But Him divine and so on, is

Her defence of women talking shamelessly at concerts and chattering on a mountain-top in the presence of a magnificent panorama would have rejoiced the heart of Rupert Brooke : "Then men mustn't treat them as works of art: it was perfectly reasonable that the women who got that sort of admiration from men should assert themselves in the presence of other works of art." One of the frightening things about Miss Richardson's genius is the way that she sends her thoughts out in all sorts of queer directions. "Miriam figured them in a flash coming down the road to the house: their young men's talk and arguments, their certainty of rightness and completeness." Or this of music: "The player's air of superiority to other music was insufferable: her way of playing out bar by bar of the rain on the roof, as if she were giving a lesson, was a piece of intellectual snobbery. Alma's horrible holding back of the third note for emphasis where there was no emphasis it was like . . . finding a wart at the end of a fine tendril. Why are the English so awful about music? They are poets. English people ought never to play, only to listen to music. They are not innocent enough to play. They cannot forget themselves." Or this on Shakespeare :

...

"Women always despise men under the influence

of passion or fatigue: did a man ever speak in a natural voice-neither blushing, nor displaying his cleverness, nor being simply a lustful slave? To pretend one did not see through a man's voice would be treachery. Harshness must go-perhaps that was what Christ meant. . . . The knowledge of woman is larger, bigger, deeper, less wordy and clever than that of men. Men have no real knowledge, but of things; a sort of superiority they get by being free to be out in the world amongst things; they do not understand people, ‘ a civilisation can never rise above the level of its women.' Perhaps if women became lawyers they would change things. Women do not respect law. Portia ? She had been invented by a man. There was no reality in any of Shakespeare's women. They please men because they show women as men see them. Shakespeare's plays are universal' because they are about the things that everybody knows and hands about, and they do not trouble anybody. They make every one feel wise."

To revert to men for the nth time: "In speech with a man a woman is at a disadvantage, because they speak different languages. She may understand his. Hers he will never speak nor understand. In pity, or from other motives, she must therefore, stammeringly, speak his. That's the truth about life. Men and women never meet. Inside the life-relationship you can see them being strangers and hostile: one or the other, or both, completely alone." A sentiment immediately followed by her usual song and caper of well-being. "I am frantically, frantically happy," presumably because there are no males at hand to bother. But this mood doesn't last in the next chapter she is at it again, hell-for-leather, attacking the man-made world.