The essays of virginia w.., p.15
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5, page 15
It is strange how vividly all this is brought before us, considering that the diary is made up of brief notes, such as any quiet woman might make of her garden’s changes and her brother’s moods.
It is only gradually that the difference between this rough notebook and others discloses itself; only by degrees that the brief notes unfurl in the mind, and each terse description proves to be made of such sound material that we can rest our weight on it, and so direct that if we look exactly and closely along the line that she points we shall see precisely what she saw. ‘The moonlight lay upon the hills like snow.’fn12 ‘The air was become still, the lake was of a bright slate colour, the hills darkening. The b[a]ys shot into the low fading shores. Sheep resting. All things quiet.’fn13 ‘There was no one waterfall above another – it was a sound of waters in the air – the voice of the air.[’]fn14 Even in these brief notes one feels the suggestive power which is the gift of the poet rather than of the naturalist, the power that gives the flat statement its light and shadow, its completeness and coherency as a picture. Her first concern is to be truthful – grace and eloquence are subordinate to that.
But truth is sought because to falsify the look of the stir of the breeze on the lake is to tamper with the spirit which inspires appearances. And that truth is not mere truth of observation; it is something that lies further and is sunk deeper, so that when the phrase is found it has something of the intensity of an artistic triumph. The phrase was only to be found if all her faculties were on the stretch; and the landscape, with its vastness and its littleness, its sameness and its mutability, kept her faculties forever on the stretch. A sight or a sound would not let her be till she had traced her perception along its course and fixed it, in words however bald, in an image, however stark and angular. The exact prosaic detail must be rendered as well as the vast and visionary outline.
Indeed, she seemed scarcely to shut her eyes. They looked and they looked, urged on by the most indefatigable curiosity and reverence, as if some secret of the utmost importance lay beneath the surface. Her pen sometimes stammers with the intensity of the emotion that she controlled as De Quincey said that her tongue stammered with the conflict between her ardour and her shyness when she spoke. For controlled she was. Fiery and impulsive by nature, her eyes, ‘wild and starting,’fn15 tormented by feelings which she knew not how to order, she must control, she must repress or she would fail in her task – she would cease to see. But if one subdued one’s self and submitted one’s private agitations completely to nature, then as if in reward nature would bestow an exquisite satisfaction. ‘Rydale was very beautiful, with spear-shaped streaks of polished steel…. It calls home the heart to quietness. I had been very melancholy,’fn16 she wrote. She had been melancholy, for did not Coleridge walk over the hills and tap on the door late at night; did she not carry a letter from Coleridge safe hidden in her bosom?
Thus giving to nature and thus receiving back again from nature it seemed, as the arduous and ascetic days went by, that nature and Dorothy had grown together in perfect sympathy – a sympathy not cold or vegetable or inhuman because at the core of it burnt that other love for ‘my beloved,’ her brother, who was indeed its heart and inspiration. William and nature and Dorothy herself, were they not one being? Did they not compose a trinity, self-contained and self-sufficient and independent, whether indoors or out? They sit indoors. It was ‘about 10 o’clock[,] a quiet night. The fire flickers and the watch ticks. I hear nothing but the breathing of my beloved as he now and then pushes his book forward, and turns over a leaf.’fn17 And now it is an April day and they take the old cloak and lie in John’s grove out of doors together. ‘William heard me breathing, and rustling now and then, but we both lay still and unseen by one another. He thought that it would be sweet thus to lie in the grave, to hear the peaceful sounds of the earth, and just to know that our dear friends were near. The lake was still; there was a boat out.’fn18
This love, in which nature played so great a part, was a strange love, profound, almost dumb, as if brother and sister had grown together and shared not the speech but the mood so that they hardly knew which felt, or which spoke, which saw the daffodils or the sleeping city; only Dorothy stored the mood in prose and later William came and bathed in it again and made it into poetry. But one could not act without the other. They must feel, they must think together. So now when they had lain out on the hillside they would rise and go home and make tea, and Dorothy would write to Coleridge, and they would sow the scarlet beans together, and William would work at the ‘Leech Gatherer’fn19 and Dorothy would copy the lines for him. Rapt but controlled, free yet strictly ordered, the homely narrative moves naturally from ecstasy on the hills to baking and ironing and fetching William his supper in the cottage.
For Dove Cottage, though its garden ran on to the fells, was on the highroad.fn20 Through her cottage window Dorothy looked out and saw whoever might be passing – a tall beggar woman, perhaps, with her baby on her back; an old soldier, a coroneted landau with touring ladies prying inquisitively inside. The rich, the great she would let pass – they were sophisticated, they were no friends of hers – but she could never meet a beggar on the highroad without getting into talk with him and questioning him closely. Where had he been? What had he done? How old was he? She searched into the histories of the poor as if they held in them the same secret that the hills concealed. She made them come into the cottage. A beggar eating cold bacon over the kitchen fire might have been a starry night, so closely she observed how his old coat was patched ‘with three bell-shaped patches of darker blue behind, where the buttons had been,’fn21 how his beard of a fortnight’s growth was like ‘grey plush,’fn22 and as they rambled on with their tales of seafaring and the press gang she never failed to capture the one phrase that sounds on in the mind long after the story is forgotten. ‘What, you are stepping westward?’fn23 ‘To be sure there is great promise for virgins in Heaven.’fn24 ‘She could trip lightly by the graves of those who died when they were young.’fn25 The poor had their poetry, as the hills had, crowned by the stars.
But it was out of doors, on the road or the hillside, that she was most at her ease. Her finest work was done tramping beside a jibbing horse on a wet Scotch moor without certainty of bed or supper. All she knew was that there was some sight ahead, some grove of trees to be noted, some waterfall to be inquired into. On they tramped hour after hour, in silence for the most part, though Coleridge, who was of the party, mused within himself, and sometimes debated aloud the different meanings of the words majestic, sublime and grand. They had to walk, because the horse had thrown the cart over a bank and the harness was mended with string and pocket handkerchiefs. And they were hungry, because Wordsworth had dropped the chicken and the bread into the lake and they were soaked through. They were uncertain of the way and did not know if they would find lodging; all they knew was that there was a sight of some kind ahead. At last Coleridge could stand it no longer…. He had rheumatism in the joints; the Irish jaunting car provided no shelter from the weather. The couple were silent and absorbed. He left them. But the Wordsworths tramped on. They looked like tramps themselves, for Dorothy’s cheeks were as brown as an Egyptian’s and her clothes were shabby and her gait was rapid and ungainly. But still her eye never failed; still she noticed everything. At last they came to the waterfall, to the grove of trees.
Then all Dorothy’s powers of observation fell upon the sight, searching out its character, noting its resemblances and its differences and taking it to her heart with all the ardour of a discoverer, with all the rapture of a lover. She had seen it at last – she had laid it up in her mind for ever. It had become one of those ‘inner visions’ which she could call to mind at any time in their distinctness and in their particularity. It would come back to her long years afterward when she was old and her mind had failed her; it would come back stilled and heightened and mixed with all the happiest memories of her past – with Racedown and Alfoxden and Coleridge reading Christabelfn26 and her beloved, her brother William. It would bring with it what no human being could give, consolation and peace. If then the passionate cry of Mary Wollstonecraft had reached her ears – ‘Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable – and life is more than a dream,’ she would have no doubt whatever as to her answer. She would have said, quite simply, ‘We looked about us, and we felt that we were happy.’fn27
Women and Leisurefn1
I must thank Miss Irvine for her very intelligent and generous article on my book, A Room of One’s Own. But perhaps you will allow me to dispute one or two of her contentions. ‘The poorest community of men,’ she says, ‘would never sit down week in, week out, to such a diet’ (i.e., a diet of prunes and custard). And she infers that men are therefore endowed with some desirable power that women lack. But, after all, the majority of Englishmen are sitting down at this moment to such a diet. The working-class man does not possess either £500 a year or a room of his own. And if the majority of men, without the burden of child-bearing and with the professions open to them, yet find it impossible to earn a wage that admits of leisure and the production of works of art, it would seem to prove that both sexes, men as well as women, are forced to eat prunes and custard not because they like them, or are patient or can imagine nothing better, but because that is all that they can get. It is the middle-class man to whom we owe our art; but whether he would have enjoyed his very valuable degree of comfort and prosperity had the duty of childbirth been laid upon him in the flower of his youth, and had all the professions been closed to him by his sex, seems to me disputable.
Then again, Miss Irvine contends that if the Brontë sisters had lived now they would have become schoolmistresses, and would have travelled abroad under the auspices of Thomas Cook and Son;fn2 but they would have lost their leisure, she says, and we should have lost Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.fn3 What kind of ‘leisure’ the women of the nineteenth century enjoyed is, I think, made very plain by Florence Nightingale in Cassandra. ‘Women never have half an hour in all their lives (excepting before or after anybody is up in the house) that they can call their own, without fear of offending or of hurting someone.’fn4 I submit that Charlotte Brontë would have enjoyed more true leisure as a schoolmistress now than she did as the daughter at home in close attendance upon a beloved, but it would seem somewhat exacting, parent in a vicarage in a graveyard. Nor can I stifle my suspicion that if Emily had travelled in the summer holidays even under the guidance of Mr Cook she might not have died of consumption at the age of twenty-nine. But, of course, in no circumstances could the Brontë sisters have been either typical schoolmistresses or typical globe-trotters. They remain rare and remarkable women. And my argument was that if we wish to increase the supply of rare and remarkable women like the Brontës we should give the Joneses and the Smiths rooms of their own and five hundred a year. One cannot grow fine flowers in a thin soil. And hitherto the soil – I mean no disrespect to Miss Smith and Miss Jones – has been very starved and very stony.
An Excerpt from A Room of One’s Ownfn1
As I leant against the wall the University indeed seemed a sanctuary in which are preserved rare types which would soon be obsolete if left to fight for existence on the pavement of the Strand. Old stories of old deans and old dons came back to my mind,fna but before I had summoned up courage to whistle – it used to be said that at the sound of a whistle old Professor —— instantly broke into a gallopfn2 – the venerable congregation had gone inside. The outside of the chapel remained. As you know, its high domes and pinnacles can be seen, like a sailing-ship always voyaging never arriving, lit up at night and visible for miles, far away across the hills.fn3 Once, presumably, this quadrangle with its smooth lawns, its massive buildings and the chapel itself, was marsh too, where the grasses waved and the swine rootled. Teams of horses and oxen, I thought, must have hauled the stone in wagons from far counties, and then with infinite labour the grey blocks in whose shade I was now standing were poised in order one on top of another, and then the painters brought their glass for the windows, and the masons were busy for centuries up on that roof with putty and cement, spade and trowel. Every Saturday somebody must have poured gold and silver out of a leathern purse into their ancient fists, for they had their beer and skittles presumably of an evening. An unending stream of gold and silver, I thought, must have flowed into this court perpetually to keep the stones coming and the masons working; to level, to ditch, to dig and to drain. But it was then the age of faith, and money was poured liberally to set these stones on a deep foundation, and when the stones were raised, still more money was poured in from the coffers of kings and queens and great nobles to ensure that hymns should be sung here and scholars taught. Lands were granted; tithes were paid. And when the age of faith was over and the age of reason had come, still the same flow of gold and silver went on; fellowships were founded; lectureships endowed; only the gold and silver flowed now, not from the coffers of the king, but from the chests of merchants and manufacturers, from the purses of men who had made, say, a fortune from industry, and returned, in their wills, a bounteous share of it to endow more chairs, more lectureships, more fellowships in the university where they had learnt their craft. Hence the libraries and laboratories; the observatories; the splendid equipment of costly and delicate instruments which now stands on glass shelves, where centuries ago the grasses waved and the swine rootled. Certainly, as I strolled round the court, the foundationsfnb of gold and silver seemed deep enough; the pavement laid solidly over the wild grasses. Men with trays on their heads went busily from staircase to staircase. Gaudy blossoms flowered in window-boxes. The strains of the gramophone blared out from the rooms within. It was impossible not to reflect – the reflection whatever it may have be[e]n was cut short. The clock struck. It was time to find one’s way to luncheon.
It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine. Here, however, I shall take the liberty to defy that convention and to tell you that the lunch on this occasionfn4 began with soles, sunk in a deep dish over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe. After that came the partridges, but if this suggests a couple of bald, brown birds on a plate you are mistaken. The partridges, many and various, came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent. And no sooner had the roast and its retinue been done with than the silent serving-man, the Beadle himself perhaps in a milder manifestation, set before us, wreathed in napkins, a confection which rose all sugar from the waves. To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult. Meanwhile the wine-glasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, half-way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the companyfn5 – in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one’s kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat.
If by good luck there had been an ash-tray handy, if one had not knocked the ash out of the window in default, if things had been a little different from what they were, one would not have seen, presumably, a cat without a tail. The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal padding softly across the quadrangle changed by some fluke of the sub-conscious intelligence the emotional light for me. It was as if someone had let fall a shade. Perhaps the excellent hock was relinquishing its hold. Certainly, as I watched the Manx cat pause in the middle of the lawn as if it too questioned the universe, something seemed lacking, something seemed different.fn6 But what was lacking, what was different, I asked myself, listening to the talk? And to answer that question I had to think myself out of the room, back into the past, before the war indeed, and to set before my eyes the model of another luncheon party held in rooms not very distantfnc from these; but different. Everything was different. Meanwhile the talk went on among the guests, who were many and young, some of this sex, some of that; it went on swimmingly, it went on agreeably, freely, amusingly. And as it went on I set it against the background of that other talk, and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was the descendant, the legitimate heir of the other. Nothing was changed; nothing was different save only – here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current behind it. Yes, that was it – the change was there. Before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they would have sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves. Could one set that humming noise to words? Perhaps with the help of the poets one could. A book lay beside me and, opening it, I turned casually enough to Tennyson. And here I found Tennyson was singing:
