cal work; Dudley, a young artist, lover of Julia; Julia, the wife of Lawrence, beautiful and idle. But I have spoken of Mrs Scott's greater complexity; let us examine just how it affects her treatment of this vexing problem. First going back to The Narrow House.
The Narrow House was part of that astonishing post-war movement of anti-chauvinism among the intellectuals, a movement which attained its greatest expression in the sales of Main Street and the departure of Mr Harold Stearns for Europe. The Narrow House, then, was what might be termed "professionally depressing." Like most of 1921's record, it dipped back into Zola, being somewhat more circumspect and infinitely less powerful. It showed dull, broken lives, American lives which were so weary, so hateful, that even the American sun was discovered to shine with fatigue upon them.
In her second work Mrs Scott has cut away a great deal of this misery praeter necessitatem. The house is distinctly less narrow. The professional depression is for the most part lightened. Despite her public's approval of the patent gesture in The Narrow House, Mrs Scott seems to have developed a distrust of it. But unfortunately, the resultant virtue is only a negative one; the author has gone through the excesses of The Narrow House to attain the neutralization of Narcissus.
At the same time she has attempted to graft upon her style elements of James Joyce and Waldo Frank. There is no objection to them as influences. There is no particular reason why writers should begin over again, when philosophers hand their apparatus from one to the other throughout the ages. Thus, my objection is neither to influences in general nor to these particular influences; but I do question the propriety of the influences as they appear in Narcissus.
For they produce a work which is peculiarly lacking in correlation. One feels this especially in the case of Waldo Frank, since his method is so specifically adapted to his own kind of writing. Narcissus is, as we have said, more or less of a society drama, wherein characters are presented for their objective reality, for their identity as people you see or shake hands with. But Waldo Frank's characters are meant to be like pebbles dropped into a pool: he tries to draw ever-widening circles around them. His plots are conceived in the same non-temporal, non-spatial tone. It is not to the point to attempt any judgements on this method at present. But it is to the
