ABSTRACT
Much has been made in recent criticism of the bold modern plunge into subjective experience. In reading some of these eulogies of the new psychology one is almost persuaded that introspection is as modern as aviation and that reality was first discovered by Mr. James Joyce while he was looking over the shoulder of Mr. Leopold Bloom. But is the matter so simple as this? Compared with the mental involutions of Mr. Joyce or Mr. Lawrence, the great English novelists may appear a simple-minded assemblage, interested, not in pathological symptoms, but in this, too, too solid flesh and other tangible substances…. After all, no invention was ever bold enough to startle to-morrow. The sunflower of Oscar Wilde looks to us as faded and as brittle as a pressed leaf in a book; and the mud of Ulysses will harden probably into clay before the stream of consciousness has run dry in the novel….
