raw material. It bores me to look at things unless there is
also the idea of doing something with them. I should find a holiday,
doing nothing amidst beautiful scenery, not a holiday, but a torture.
The contemplative ecstacy of the saints would be hell to me. In the--I
forget exactly how many--books I have written, it is always about life
being altered I write, or about people developing schemes for altering
life. And I have never once "presented" life. My apparently most
objective books are criticisms and incitements to change. Such a writer
as Mr. Swinnerton, on the contrary, sees life and renders it with a
steadiness and detachment and patience quite foreign to my disposition.
He has no underlying motive. He sees and tells. His aim is the
attainment of that beauty which comes with exquisite presentation. Seen
through his art, life is seen as one sees things through a crystal lens,
more intensely, more completed, and with less turbidity. There the
business begins and ends for him. He does not want you or any one to do
anything.

Mr. Swinnerton is not alone among recent writers in this clear, detached
objectivity. We have in England a writer, Miss Dorothy Richardson, who
has probably carried impressionism in fiction to its furthest limit. I
do not know whether she will ever make large captures of the general
reader, but she is certainly a very interesting figure for the critic
and the amateur of fiction. In _Pointed Roofs_ and _Honeycomb_, for
example, her story is a series of dabs of intense superficial
impression; her heroine is not a mentality, but a mirror. She goes about
over her facts like those insects that run over water sustained by
surface tension. Her percepts never become concepts. Writing as I do at
the extremest distance possible from such work, I confess I find it
altogether too much--or shall I say altogether too little?--for me. But
Mr. Swinnerton, like Mr. James Joyce, does not repudiate the depths for
the sake of the surface. His people are not splashes of appearance, but
living minds. Jenny and Emmy in this book are realities inside and out;
they are imaginative creatures so complete that one can think with ease
of Jenny ten years hence or of Emmy as a baby. The fickle Alf is one of
the most perfect Cockneys--a type so easy to caricature and so hard to
get true--in fiction. If there exists a better writing of vulgar
lovemaking, so base, so honest, so touchingly mean and so touchingly
full of the cra