Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/110

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JACOB'S ROOM

quite so many pictures were called up; with all its beauty it is a little bit too much like fire, or like a very amusing person's memories of life. Here and there in it one finds something a little haphazard. In a work of Art as in St Paul's Cathedral: "if a boot creaks it's awful; then the order; the discipline. The verger with his rod has life ironed out beneath him." So should the artist. One thing calls up another, it is endless, and the images are introduced again and again, we never forget the surroundings, the setting.

No book so completely gives the feeling of London since Henry James wrote, but it is the London of to-day. "A homeless people, circling beneath the sky, whose blue or white is held off by a ceiling cloth of steel filings and horsedung shredded to dust."

In Jacob's Room Mrs Woolf has broken the conventional mould of the novel into which she poured The Voyage Out and Night And Day. For four or five years she wrote a number of short sketches, experiments to enable her to find the style which suits her. These sketches were published together under the title Monday or Tuesday, and it is by using the style she developed in them, that she was able to write Jacob's Room. She is now free to do anything she likes.