But The Things We Are, as I have said, starts out very plainly to supply the antidote to Still Life. Mr Boston, far from deluging us with self-analyses, is an unusually rigid and silenced man, a man in whom all impressions lie buried and unuttered. Then suddenly, about half-way through the book, Mr Boston begins to unbend; he acquires a virulent attack of normality, goes out among good wholesome people, picks up a couple of buns, falls in love with a girl, and analyses himself as expertly as though he had been at it all his life, or as though he had been carried over bodily from Mr Murry's earlier novel. Thus, there are simply two Mr Bostons: one is made to feel the potentialities of this first Boston, and to see the second Boston kinetically, but one does not feel that the potential energy of the first Boston is the kinetic energy of the second. The accepted methods of effecting a character's rejuvenation are (a) to have him meet a Salvation Army lass, or (b) to have him awakened by the war. Mr Murry's invention of simply having the character rejuvenated is more cautious, perhaps, but no more contenting.
On taking up these books of Mr Murry's one automatically returns to the question of Dostoevsky. Mr Murry, to be sure, has done a remarkably thorough job at making the Russian less uncouth and reducing his frenzy to the proportions proper to an English drawing-room; but the principle underlying both authors is the same. It calls, I think, for a distinction between the psychology of form and the psychology of subject-matter. Or between the psychologism of Dostoevsky and the psychologism of, say, a Greek vase. By the psychology of subject-matter I mean, I believe, what Mrs Padraic Colum has defined as information, or science. She might as well have called it journalism. Journalism, science, biographical gossip . . . this movement of almost pure information has had a tremendous effect on modern aesthetics. Thanks to it, far too much emphasis is laid upon the documentary value of the work of art, upon art as a revelational function. We find both Mr Matthew Josephson and Mr Burton Rascoe, for instance, objecting to Joyce because there are more psychoanalytic facts to be obtained from the reading of Kraft-Ebbing or Freud than from Ulysses. And I trust soon to hear these Messrs objecting to Cézanne because his paintings do not contain nearly so much data on trees as can be found in a bulletin of the Forestry Department.
