Revolving Lights

had been all carefully according to the love-stories of the sentimental books, would always be, for good kind people brought up on the old traditions. And a predictable future was there, another home life carrying the traditions forward. All the old family sayings applied. Many of them were quoted with a rueful recognition. But they were all proud of playing these recognisable parts. All of their faces had confessed, as they had come, one by one, betweenwhiles, to talk freely to her alone, their belief in the story that had lain, hidden and forgotten, in the depths of her heart; making her affection for them blaze up afresh from the roots of her being. She had seen the new theories disproved. Not that there was not some faint large outline of truth in them, but that it was so large and loose that it did not fit individuals. It did not correspond to any individual experience because it was obliged to ignore the underlying things of individuality.⁠ ⁠… Blair Leighton⁠ ⁠… Marcus Stone⁠ ⁠… Watts; Mendelssohn, corresponded to an actual individual truth.⁠ ⁠… The new people did not know it because they were odd, isolated people without upbringing and circumstances? They did not know because they were without backgrounds? Quick and clever, like Jews without a country? They would fasten in this story on the critical dismay of the parents, make comedy or tragedy out of the lack of sympathy between the two families, the persistence of unchanged character in each one, that would tell later on. But comedy and tragedy equally left everything unstated. No blind victimising force could account for the part of the story they left untold, something that justified the sentimental books they all jeered at; a light, that had come suddenly holding them all gentle and hushed behind even their busiest talk; bringing wide thoughts and sympathies; centring in the girl; breaking down barriers so completely that for a while they all seemed to exchange personalities. Blind force could not soften and illuminate.⁠ ⁠… There was something more than an allurement of “nature,” a veil of beauty disguising the “brutal physical facts.” Why brutal? Brutal is deliberate, a thing of the will. They meant brutish. But what was wrong with the brutes, except an absence of free will? Their famous “brutal frankness” was brutish frankness, showing them pitifully proud of their knowledge of facts that looked so large, and ignorant of the tiny enormous undying fact of free will. Perhaps women have more free will than men?

It is because these men write so well that it is a relief, from looking and enduring the clamour of the way things state themselves from several points of view simultaneously, to read their large superficial statements. Light seems to come, a large comfortable stretching of the mind, things falling into an orderly scheme, the flattering fascination of grasping and elaborating the scheme. But the after reflection is gloom⁠ ⁠… a poisoning gloom over everything.⁠ ⁠… “Good writing” leaves gloom. Dickens doesn’t.⁠ ⁠… But people say he’s not a good writer.⁠ ⁠… Youth⁠ ⁠… and Typhoon.⁠ ⁠… Oh “Stalked about gigantically in the darkness.”⁠ ⁠… Fancy forgetting that. And he is modern and a good writer. New. They all raved quietly about him. But it was not like reading a book at all.⁠ ⁠… Expecting good difficult “writing” some mannish way of looking at things, and then⁠ ⁠… complete forgetfulness of the worst time of the day on the most grilling day of the year in a crowded Lyons’ at lunchtime and afterwards joyful strength to face the disgrace of being an hour or more late for afternoon work.⁠ ⁠… They leave life so small that it seems worthless. He leaves everything big; and all he tells added to experience forever. It’s dreadful to think of people missing him; the forgetfulness and the new birth into life. Even God would enjoy reading Typhoon.⁠ ⁠… Then that is “great fiction?” “Creation?” Why these falsifying words, making writers look cutoff and mysterious? Imagination. What is imagination? It always seems insulting, belittling, both to the writer and to life.⁠ ⁠… He looked and listened with his whole self⁠—perhaps he is a small pale invalid⁠—and then came “stalked about gigantically”⁠ ⁠… not made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding⁠ ⁠… and working his salvation. That is what matters to him.⁠ ⁠… In the day of Judgment, though he is a writer, he will be absolved. Those he has redeemed will be there to shout for him. But he will still have to go to Purgatory; or be born again as a woman. Why come forward suddenly, in the midst of a story to say they live far from reality? A sudden smooth complacent male voice, making your attention rock between the live text and the picture of a supercilious lounging form, slippers, a pipe, other men sitting round, and then the phrase so smooth and good that it almost compels belief. Why cannot men exist without thinking themselves all there is?

She was in the open roadway, passing into the deeps of the central freedom of Piccadilly Circus, the crowded corner unknowingly left behind. Just ahead was the island, the dark outline of the fountain, the small surmounting figure almost invisible against the shadowy upper mass of a bright-porched building over the way. The grey trottoir, empty of the shawled flowerwomen and their great baskets, was a quiet haven. The surrounding high brilliancies beneath which people moved along the pavements from space to space of alternating harsh gold and shadowy grey, met softly upon its emptiness, drawing a circle of light round the shadow cast by the wide basin of the fountain. There was a solitary man’s figure standing near the curb, midway on her route across the island to take to the roadway opposite Shaftesbury Avenue; standing arrested; there was no traffic to prevent his crossing; a watchful habitué; she would pass him in a moment, the last fragment of the west-end⁠ ⁠… goodbye, and her thoughts towards gaining the wide homeward-going lane. A little stoutish dapper grey-suited⁠ ⁠… Tommy Babington! Standing at ease, turned