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Title: Pilgrimage: Foreword
Date of first publication: 1938
Author: Dorothy M. Richardson (1873-1957)
Date first posted: July 16, 2018
Date last updated: July 16, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20180780

This eBook was produced by: Jens Sadowski
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




                                FOREWORD


Although the translation of the impulse behind his youthful plan for a
tremendous essay on _Les Forces humaines_ makes for the population of
his great cluster of novels with types rather than with individuals, the
power of a sympathetic imagination, uniting him with each character in
turn, gives to every portrait the quality of a faithful self-portrait,
and his treatment of backgrounds, contemplated with an equally
passionate interest and themselves, indeed, individual and unique, would
alone qualify Balzac to be called the father of realism.

Less deeply concerned with the interplay of human forces, his first
English follower portrays with complete fidelity the lives and
adventures of inconspicuous people, and for a while, when in the English
literary world it began its career as a useful label, realism was
synonymous with Arnold Bennett.

But whereas both Balzac and Bennett, while representing, the one in
regard to a relatively concrete and coherent social system, the other in
regard to a society already showing signs of disintegration, the turning
of the human spirit upon itself, may be called realists by nature and
unawares, their immediate successors possess an articulate creed. They
believe themselves to be substituting, for the telescopes of the writers
of romance whose lenses they condemn as both rose-coloured and
distorting, mirrors of plain glass.

By 1911, though not yet quite a direct supply of documentary material
for the dossiers of the _cause célèbre_, Man versus conditions impeached
as the authors of his discontent, realist novels are largely explicit
satire and protest, and every form of conventionalized human association
is being arraigned by biographical and autobiographical novelists.

Since all these novelists happened to be men, the present writer,
proposing at this moment to write a novel and looking round for a
contemporary pattern, was faced with the choice between following one of
her regiments and attempting to produce a feminine equivalent of the
current masculine realism. Choosing the latter alternative, she
presently set aside, at the bidding of a dissatisfaction that revealed
its nature without supplying any suggestion as to the removal of its
cause, a considerable mass of manuscript. Aware, as she wrote, of the
gradual falling away of the preoccupations that for a while had dictated
the briskly moving script, and of the substitution, for these inspiring
preoccupations, of a stranger in the form of contemplated reality having
for the first time in her experience its own say, and apparently
justifying those who acclaim writing as the surest means of discovering
the truth about one's own thoughts and beliefs, she had been at the same
time increasingly tormented, not only by the failure, of this now so
independently assertive reality, adequately to appear within the text,
but by its revelation, whencesoever focused, of a hundred faces, any one
of which, the moment it was entrapped within the close mesh of direct
statement, summoned its fellows to disqualify it.

In 1913, the opening pages of the attempted chronicle became the first
chapter of 'Pilgrimage,' written to the accompaniment of a sense of
being upon a fresh pathway, an adventure so searching and, sometimes, so
joyous as to produce a longing for participation; not quite the some as
a longing for publication, whose possibility, indeed, as the book grew,
receded to vanishing point.

To a publisher, nevertheless, at the bidding of Mr J. D. Beresford, the
book was ultimately sent. By the time it returned, the second chapter
was partly written and the condemned volume, put away and forgotten,
would have remained in seclusion but for the persistence of the same
kind friend, who acquired and sent it to Edward Garnett, then reading
for Messrs Duckworth. In 1915, the covering title being at the moment in
use elsewhere, it was published as 'Pointed Roofs.'

The lonely track, meanwhile, had turned out to be a populous highway.
Amongst those who had simultaneously entered it, two figures stood out.
One a woman mounted upon a magnificently caparisoned charger, the other
a man walking, with eyes devoutly closed, weaving as he went a rich
garment of new words wherewith to clothe the antique dark material of
his engrossment.

News some from France of one Marcel Proust, said to be producing on
unprecedentedly profound and opulent reconstruction of experience
focused from within the mind of a single individual, and, since Proust's
first volume had been published and several others written by 1913, the
France of Balzac now appeared to have produced the earliest adventurer.

Finally, however, the role of pathfinder was declared to have been
played by a venerable gentleman, a charmed and charming high priest of
nearly all the orthodoxies, inhabiting a softly lit enclosure he
mistook, until 1914, for the universe, and celebrated by evolving, for
the accommodation of his vast tracts of urbane commentary, a prose style
demanding, upon the first reading, a perfection of sustained
concentration akin to that which brought it forth, and bestowing, again
upon the first reading, the recreative delights peculiar to this form of
spiritual exercise.

And while, indeed, it is possible to claim for Henry James, keeping the
reader incessantly watching the conflict of human forces through the eye
of a single observer, rather than taking him, before the drama begins,
upon a tour amongst the properties, or breaking in with descriptive
introductions of the players as one by one they enter his enclosed
resounding chamber where no plant grows and no mystery pours in from the
unheeded stars, a far from inconsiderable technical influence, it was
nevertheless not without a sense of relief that the present writer
recently discovered, in 'Wilhelm Meister,' the following manifesto:

   In the novel, reflections and incidents should be featured; in
   drama, character and action. The novel must proceed slowly,
   and the thought-processes of the principal figure must, by one
   device or another, hold up the development of the whole....
   The hero of the novel must be acted upon, or, at any rate, not
   himself the principal operator.... Grandison, Clarissa,
   Pamela, the Vicar of Wakefield, and Tom Jones himself, even
   where they are not acted upon, are still retarding personalities
   and all the incidents are, in a certain measure, modelled
   according to their thoughts.

Phrases began to appear, formulae devised to meet the exigencies of
literary criticism. 'The Stream of Consciousness' lyrically led the way,
to be gladly welcomed by all who could persuade themselves of the
possibility of comparing consciousness to a stream. Its transatlantic
successors, 'Interior Monologue' and 'Slow-motion Photography,' may each
be granted a certain technical applicability leaving them, to this
extent, unhampered by the defects of their qualities.

Lives in plenty have been devoted to the critic's exacting art and a
lifetime might be spent in engrossed contemplation of the movements of
its continuous ballet. When the dancers tread living boards, the boards
will sometimes be heard to groan. The present writer groans, gently and
resignedly, beneath the reiterated tap-tap accusing her of feminism, of
failure to perceive the value of the distinctively masculine
intelligence, of pre-War sentimentality, of post-War Freudianity. But
when her work is danced upon for being unpunctuated and therefore
unreadable, she is moved to cry aloud. For here is truth.

Feminine prose, as Charles Dickens and James Joyce have delightfully
shown themselves to be aware, should properly be unpunctuated, moving
from point to point without formal obstructions. And the author of
'Pilgrimage' must confess to an early habit of ignoring, while writing,
the lesser of the stereotyped system of signs, and, further, when
finally sprinkling in what appeared to be necessary, to a small
unconscious departure from current usage. While meeting approval, first
from the friend who discovered and pointed it out to her, then from an
editor who welcomed the article she wrote to elucidate and justify it,
and, recently, by the inclusion of this article in a text-book for
students of journalism and its translation into French, the small
innovation, in further complicating the already otherwise sufficiently
complicated task of the official reader, helped to produce the chaos for
which she is justly reproached.

For the opportunity, afforded by the present publishers, of eliminating
this source of a reputation for creating avoidable difficulties, and of
assembling the scattered chapters of 'Pilgrimage' in their proper
relationship, the author desires here to express her gratitude and,
further, to offer to all those readers who have persisted in spite of
every obstacle, a heart-felt apology.

                                                              D. M. R.

TREVONE, 1938.




                          Transcriber's Notes


This text is taken from: Dorothy M. Richardson, Pilgrimage I. Dent and
Cresset, London, 1938, p. 9-12.


[The end of _Pilgrimage: Foreword_ by Dorothy M. Richardson]