sentimentalist, as it is no doubt there are some people who would accuse her of being one.
Jacob's Room and Ulysses! Turn from one to the other and compare them, for both are new departures in literary method. Both could only have been written in the last few years, but they are utterly different.
M Valéry Larbaud has told us that Ulysses is written exactly on the pattern of the Odyssey, and that Mr Joyce wrote it in different coloured chalks in order to make quite clear to what part each sentence belonged. But in spite of the coloured chalks it is impossible to find out why one part leads to the next. It is an agglomeration, not a unity. But the real failure of Ulysses is not that it lacks unity, but that the author has a different set of values from the rest of us. It is the things from which mankind instinctively turns away that Mr Joyce delights to write about.
In the art of painting subject is probably of no importance: but the aesthetic of writing is different. Not only must a poem or story have some sort of subject, but, even though they cannot be graded like apples, some subjects are more important than others. And the failure of Ulysses is that it is full of subjects of practically no aesthetic value, not that it is full of obscene words. This is all very relevant to Jacob's Room, for Mrs Woolf is incapable of Mr Joyce's offence. She can touch only what will move us aesthetically. She is the kind of butterfly that stoops only at the flowers, Mr Joyce "a painted lady or peacock that feasts upon bloody entrails dropped by a hawk," or even on less interesting droppings.
And Jacob's Room has form. Tangled and twisted as is the story, discursive, full of alleys (but not blind alleys) yet the whole has unity.
"Oh yes, human life is very tolerable on the top of an omnibus in Holborn, when the policeman holds up his arm and the sun beats on your back, and if there is such a thing as a shell secreted by man to fit man himself here we find it, on the banks of the Thames, where the great streets join and St. Paul's Cathedral, like the volute upon the top of the snail shell, finishes it off."
Yes, the same thing can be said of Jacob's Room, though it has more form than London has. But the book would be better if not
