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he has depicted for this purpose, but in the poetic
envelope with which he has surrounded them. Each psychological
change has become a change in the writer’s mood,
inextricably bound up with his exquisite form of expression.
Like M. Géraldy, he has mastered the art of shifting
an emotional focus in order to include a segment (often
a humorous one) that has remained in shadow. It is an
extremely delicate art and one follows Mr. Bullett’s sensitive
technique with admiration.
Leaving Mr. Bullett’s world of illusion behind, one
mounts into another and more highly evolved world where
symbolical outlines have transcended the real ones, “and
into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of
life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself like a beak
of brass, barren and bare.” This is the theme of “To the
Lighthouse” developed by Virginia Woolf into a Meredithian
novel in three parts—“The Window,” “Time
Passes,” and “The Lighthouse.” It is Meredithian because
of the esthétique of the two writers rather than because of
a similarity of rhythm or fecundity of style. The chosen
quotation might have served for “Diana of the Crossways”
as well as for Mrs. Woolf’s novel, simply in that the proportions
and purposes of her world are interchangeable
with Meredith’s.
Mrs. Woolf has not tried to create a new Diana, aged
fifty, the mother of eight children. Instead, she has composed
a picture of life fruitful in its essence and various
in its attributes: life that reaches its perfection in a woman
seen as “a rosy-flowered fruit-tree, laid with leaves and
dancing boughs, into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar”
of the egotistical man, plunges and smites, demanding
sympathy when his own creative rhythm has ebbed
away; a world which trembles between dissolution and continuity
and is finally recreated by new relationships demanding
new forms.
Of the tiny particles that compose Mrs. Woolf’s world,