agedy, farce. The things that happen to us are not our life. They
are imposed upon life, they come and go. But life is a secret process.
We only see the accretions.

The novel which I dreamed of writing has recently been done, or rather
begun, by Miss Dorothy Richardson. She betters the example of Jane
Austen by telling us much more about what seems to be infinitely less,
but is not so in reality. She dips into the well whereof Miss Austen
skims the surface. She has essayed to report the mental process of a
young woman's lifetime from moment to moment. In the course of four,
if not five, volumes nothing has happened yet but the death of a
mother and the marriage of a sister or so. She may write forty, and I
shall be ready for the forty-first. Mental process, the states of
the soul, emotional reaction--these as they are moved in us by other
people are Miss Richardson's subject-matter, and according as these
are handled is the interest we can devote to her novels. These
fleeting things are Miss Richardson's game, and they are the things
which interest us most in ourselves, and the things which we desire to
know most about in our neighbours.

But, of course, it won't do. Miss Richardson does not, and cannot,
tell us all. A novel is a piece of art which does not so much report
life as transmute it. She takes up what she needs for her purpose, and
that may not be our purpose. And so it is with poetry--we don't go to
that for the facts, but for the essence of fact. The poet who told us
all about himself at some particular pass would write a bad poem, for
it is his affair to transfigure rather than transmute, to move us by
beauty at least as much as by truth. What we look for so wistfully
in each other is the raw material of poetry. We can make the finished
article for ourselves, given enough matter; and indeed the poetry
which is imagined in contemplation is apt to be much finer than that
which has passed through the claws of prosody and syntax. The fact,
to be short with it, is that literature has an eye upon the consumer.
Whether it is marketable or not, it is intended for the public. Now
no man will undress in public with design. It may be a pity, but so
it is. Undesignedly, I don't say. It would be possible, I think,
by analysis, to track the successive waves of mental process in _In
Memoriam_. Again, _The Angel in the House_ brought Patmore as near to
self-explication as a poet can go. Shakespeare's Sonnets offer a more