The essays of virginia w.., p.32
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5, page 32
Something of the splendour of St Paul’s lies simply in its vast size, in its colourless serenity. Mind and body seem both to widen in this enclosure, to expand under this huge canopy where the light is neither daylight nor lamp-light, but an ambiguous element something between the two. One window shakes down a broad green shaft; another tinges the flagstones beneath a cool, pale purple. There is space for each broad band of light to fall smoothly. Very large, very square, hollow-sounding, echoing with a perpetual shuffling and booming, the Cathedral is august in the extreme; but not in the least mysterious. Tombs heaped like majestic beds lie between the pillars. Here is the dignified reposing room to which great statesmen and men of action retire, robed in all their splendour, to accept the thanks and applause of their fellow-citizens. They still wear their stars and garters, their emblems of civic pomp and military pride. Their tombs are clean and comely. No rust or stain has been allowed to spot them. Even Nelson looks a little smug. Even the contorted and agonised figure of John Donne, wrapped in the marble twists of his grave clothes, looks as if it had left the stonemason’s yard but yesterday.fn5 Yet it has stood here in its agony for three hundred years and has passed through the flames of the fire of London. But death and the corruption of death are forbidden to enter. Here civic virtue and civic greatness are ensconced securely. True, a heavy bossed door has above it the legend that through the gate of death we pass to our joyful resurrection;fn6 but somehow the massive portals suggest that they open not upon fields of amaranth and moly where harps sound and heavenly choirs sing, but upon flights of marble steps that lead on to solemn council chambers and splendid halls, loud with trumpets and hung with banners. Effort and agony and ecstasy have no place in this majestic building.
No contrast could be greater than that between St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. Far from being spacious and serene, the Abbey is narrow and pointed, worn, restless and animated. One feels as if one had stepped from the democratic helter skelter, the hubbub and humdrum of the street, into a brilliant assembly, a select society of men and women of the highest distinction. The company seems to be in full conclave. Gladstone starts forward and then Disraeli.fn7 From every corner, from every wall, somebody leans or listens or bends forward as if about to speak. The recumbent even seem to lie attentive, as if to rise next minute. Their hands nervously grasp their sceptres, their lips are compressed for a fleeting silence, their eyes lightly closed as if for a moment’s thought. These dead, if dead they are, have lived to the full. Their faces are worn, their noses high, their cheeks hollowed. Even the stone of the old columns seems rubbed and chafed by the intensity of the life that has been fretting it all these centuries. Voice and organ vibrate wirily among the chasings and intricacies of the roof. The fine fans of stone that spread themselves to make a ceiling seem like bare boughs withered of all their leaves and about to toss in the wintry gale. But their austerity is beautifully softened. Lights and shadows are changing and conflicting every moment. Blue, gold and violet pass, dappling, quickening, fading. The grey stone, ancient as it is, changes like a live thing under the incessant ripple of changing light.
Thus the Abbey is no place of death and rest; no reposing-room where the virtuous lie in state to receive the rewards of virtue. Is it, indeed, through their virtues that these dead have come here? Often they have been violent; they have been vicious. Often it is only the greatness of their birth that has exalted them. The Abbey is full of Kings and Queens, Dukes and Princes. The light falls upon gold coronets, and gold still lingers in the folds of ceremonial robes. Reds and yellows still blazon coats of arms and lions and unicorns. But it is full also of another and even more potent royalty. Here are the dead poets, still musing, still pondering, still questioning the meaning of existence. ‘Life is a jest and all things show it. I thought so once, and now I know it,’ Gay laughs. Chaucer, Spenser, Drydenfn8 and the rest still seem to listen with all their faculties on the alert as the clean-shaven clergyman in his spick-and-span red-and-white robes intones for the millionth time the commands of the Bible. His voice rings ripely, authoritatively through the building, and if it were not irreverent one might suppose that Gladstone and Disraeli were about to put the statement just propounded – that children should honour their parents – to the vote. Everybody in this brilliant assembly has a mind and a will of his own. The Abbey is shot with high-pitched voices; its peace is broken by emphatic gestures and characteristic attitudes. Not an inch of its walls but speaks and claims and illustrates. Kings and Queens, poets and statesmen still act their parts and are not suffered to turn quietly to dust. Still in animated debate they rise above the flood and waste of average human life, with their fists clenched and their lips parted, with an orb in one hand, a sceptre in another, as if we had forced them to rise on our behalf and testify that human nature can now and then exalt itself above the humdrum democratic disorder of the hurrying street. Arrested, transfixed, there they stand suffering a splendid crucifixion.
Where then can one go in London to find peace and the assurance that the dead sleep and are at rest? London, after all, is a city of tombs. But London nevertheless is a city in the full tide and race of human life. Even St Clement Danesfn9 – that venerable pile planted in the midstream of the Strand – has been docked of all those peaceful perquisites – the weeping trees, the waving grasses that the humblest village church enjoys by right. Omnibuses and vans have long since shorn it of these dues. It stands, like an island, with only the narrowest rim of pavement to separate it from the sea. And moreover, St Clement Danes has its duties to the living. As likely as not it is participating vociferously, stridently, with almost frantic joy, but hoarsely as if its tongue were rough with the rust of centuries, in the happiness of two living mortals. A wedding is in progress. All down the Strand St Clement Danes roars its welcome to the bridegroom in tail coat and grey trousers; to the bridesmaids virginal in white; and finally to the bride herself whose car draws up to the porch, and out she steps and passes undulating with a flash of white finery into the inner gloom to make her marriage vows to the roar of omnibuses, while outside the pigeons, alarmed, sweep in circles, and Gladstone’s statue is crowded, like a rock with gulls, with nodding, waving, enthusiastic sightseers.
The only peaceful places in the whole city are perhaps those old graveyards which have become gardens and playgrounds.fn10 The tombstones no longer serve to mark the graves, but line the walls with their white tablets. Here and there a finely sculptured tomb plays the part of garden ornament. Flowers light up the turf, and there are benches under the trees for mothers and nursemaids to sit on, while the children bowl hoops and play hopscotch in safety. Here one might sit and read Pamelafn11 from cover to cover. Here one might drowse away the first days of spring or the last days of autumn without feeling too keenly the stir of youth or the sadness of old age. For here the dead sleep in peace, proving nothing, testifying nothing, claiming nothing save that we shall enjoy the peace that their old bones provides for us. Unreluctantly they have given up their human rights to separate names or peculiar virtues. But they have no cause for grievance. When the gardener plants his bulbs or sows his grass they flower again and spread the ground with green and elastic turf. Here mothers and nursemaids gossip; children play; and the old beggar, after eating his dinner from a paper bag, scatters crumbs to the sparrows. These garden graveyards are the most peaceful of our London sanctuaries and their dead the quietest.
A Letter to a Young Poetfn1
My Dear John,
Did you ever meet, or was he before your day, that old gentleman – I forget his name – who used to enliven conversation, especially at breakfast when the post came in, by saying that the art of letter-writing is dead?fn2 The penny post, the old gentleman used to say, has killed the art of letter-writing. Nobody, he continued, examining an envelope through his eye-glasses, has the time even to cross their t’s. We rush, he went on, spreading his toast with marmalade, to the telephone. We commit our half-formed thoughts in ungrammatical phrases to the post card. Gray is dead, he continued; Horace Walpole is dead; Madame de Sévignéfn3 – she is dead too, I suppose he was about to add, but a fit of choking cut him short, and he had to leave the room before he had time to condemn all the arts, as his pleasure was, to the cemetery. But when the post came in this morning and I opened your letter stuffed with little blue sheets written all over in a cramped but not illegible hand – I regret to say, however, that several t’s were uncrossed and the grammar of one sentence seems to me dubious – I replied after all these years to that elderly nekrophilist – Nonsense. The art of letter-writing has only just come into existence. It is the child of the penny post. And there is some truth in that remark, I think. Naturally when a letter cost half a crown to send, it had to prove itself a document of some importance; it was read aloud; it was tied up with green silk; after a certain number of years it was published for the infinite delectation of posterity. But your letter, on the contrary, will have to be burnt. It only cost three-halfpence to send.fn4 Therefore you could afford to be intimate, irreticent, indiscreet in the extreme. What you tell me about poor dear C. and his adventure on the Channel boat is deadly private; your ribald jests at the expense of M. would certainly ruin your friendship if they got about; I doubt, too, that posterity, unless it is much quicker in the wit than I expect, could follow the line of your thought from the roof which leaks (‘splash, splash, splash into the soap dish’) past Mrs Gape, the charwoman, whose retort to the greengrocer gives me the keenest pleasure, via Miss Curtis and her odd confidence on the steps of the omnibus; to Siamese cats (‘Wrap their noses in an old stocking my Aunt says if they howl’); so to the value of criticism to a writer; so to Donne; so to Gerard Hopkins;fn5 so to tombstones; so to gold-fish; and so with a sudden alarming swoop to ‘Do write and tell me where poetry’s going, or if it’s dead?’ No, your letter, because it is a true letter – one that can neither be read aloud now, nor printed in time to come – will have to be burnt. Posterity must live upon Walpole and Madame de Sévigné. The great age of letter-writing, which is, of course, the present, will leave no letters behind it. And in making my reply there is only one question that I can answer or attempt to answer in public; about poetry and its death.
But before I begin, I must own up to those defects, both natural and acquired, which, as you will find, distort and invalidate all that I have to say about poetry. The lack of a sound university training has always made it impossible for me to distinguish between an iambic and a dactyl, and if fna this were not enough to condemn one for ever, the practice of prose has bred in me, as in most prose writers, a foolish jealousy, a righteous indignation – anyhow, an emotion which the critic should be without. For how, we despised prose writers ask when we get together, could one say what one meant and observe the rules of poetry? Conceive dragging in ‘blade’ because one had mentioned ‘maid’; and pairing ‘sorrow’ with ‘borrow’? Rhyme is not only childish, but dishonest, we prose writers say. Then we go on to say, And look at their rules! How easy to be a poet! How strait the path is for them, and how strict! This you must do; this you must not. I would rather be a child and walk in a crocodile down a suburban path than write poetry, I have heard prose writers say. It must be like taking the veil and entering a religious order – observing the rites and rigours of metre. That explains why they repeat the same thing over and over again. Whereas we prose writers (I am only telling you the sort of nonsense prose writers talk when they are alone) are masters of language, not its slaves; nobody can teach us; nobody can coerce us; we say what we mean; we have the whole of life for our province. We are the creators, we are the explorers…. So we run on – nonsensically enough, I must admit.
Now that I have made a clean breast of these deficiencies, let us proceed. From certain phrases in your letter I gather that you think that poetry is in a parlous way, and that your case as a poet in this particular autumn of 1931 is a great deal harder than Shakespeare’s, Dryden’s, Pope’s, or Tennyson’s.fn6 In fact it is the hardest case that has ever been known. Here you give me an opening, which I am prompt to seize, for a little lecture. Never think yourself singular, never think your own case much harder than other people’s. I admit that the age we live in makes this difficult. For the first time in history there are readers – a large body of people, occupied in business, in sport, in nursing their grandfathers, in tying up parcels behind counters – they all read now; and they want to be told how to read and what to read; andfnb their teachers – the reviewers, the lecturers, the broadcasters – must in all humanity make reading easy for them; assure them that literature is violent and exciting, full of heroes and villains; of hostile forces perpetually in conflict; of fields strewn with bones; of solitary victors riding off on white horses wrapped in black cloaks to meet their death at the turn of the road. A pistol shot rings out. ‘The age of romance was over. The age of realism had begun’ – you know the sort of thing. Now of course writers themselves know very well that there is not a word of truth in all this – there are no battles, and no murders, and no defeats and no victories. But as it is of the utmost importance that readers should be amused, writers acquiesce. They dress themselves up. They act their parts. One leads; the other follows. One is romantic, the other realist. One is advanced,fnc the other out of date. There is no harm in it, so long as you take it as a joke, but once you believe in it, once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader, or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance tofnd anybody. Think of yourself rather as something much humbler and less spectacular, but to my mind far more interesting – a poet in whom live all the poets of the past, from whom all poets in time to come will spring. You have a touch of Chaucer in you, and something of Shakespeare; Dryden, Pope, Tennyson – to mention only the respectable among your ancestors – stir in your blood and sometimes move your pen a little to the right or to the left. In short you are an immensely ancient, complex, and continuous character, for which reason please treat yourself with respect and think twice before you dress up as Guy Fawkesfn7 and spring out upon timid old ladies at street corners, threatening death and demanding twopence-halfpenny.
However, as you say that you are in a fix (‘it has never been so hard to write poetry as it is to-day’) and that poetry may be, you think, at its last gasp in England (‘the novelists are doing all the interesting things now’), let me while away the time before the post goes in imagining your state and in hazarding one or two guesses which, since this is a letter, need not be taken too seriously or pressed too far. Let me try to put myself in your place; let me try to imagine, with your letter to help me, what it feels like to be a young poet in the autumn of 1931. (And, taking my own advice, I shall treat you not as one poet in particular, but as several poets in one.) On the floor of your mind, then – is it not this that makes you a poet? – rhythmfne keeps up its perpetual beat. Sometimes it seems to die down to nothing; it lets you eat, sleep, talk like other people. Then again it swells and rises and attempts to sweep all the contents of your mind into one dominant dance. To-night is such an occasion. Although you are alone, and have taken one boot off and are about to undo the other, you cannot go on with the process of undressing,fn8 but must instantly write at the bidding of the dance. You snatch pen and paper; you hardly trouble to hold the one or to straighten the other. And while you write, while the first stanzas of the dance are being fastened down, I will withdraw a little and look out of the window. A woman passes, then a man; a car glides to a stop and then – but there is no need to say what I see out of the window, nor indeed is there time, for I am suddenly recalled from my observationsfnf by a cry of rage or despair. Your page is crumpled in a ball; your pen sticks upright by the nib in the carpet. If there were a cat to swing or a wife to murder now would be the time. So at least I infer from the ferocity of your expression. You are rasped, jarred, thoroughly out of temper. And if I am to guess the reason, it is, I should say, that the rhythm which was opening and shutting with a force that sent shocks of excitement from your head to your heels has encountered some hard and hostile object upon which it has smashed itself to pieces. Something has worked in which cannot be made into poetry; some foreign body, angular, sharp-edged, gritty, has refused to join in the dance. Obviously, suspicion attaches to Mrs Gape; she has asked you to make a poem of her; then to Miss Curtis and her confidences on the omnibus; then to C., who has infected you with a wish to tell his story – and a very amusing one it was – in verse. But for some reason you cannot do their bidding. Chaucer could; Shakespeare could; so could Crabbe, Byron, and perhaps Robert Browning.fn9 But it is October 1931, and for a long time now poetry has shirked contact with – what shall we call it? – Shall we shortly and no doubt inaccurately call it life? And will you come to my help by guessing what I mean? Well then, itfng has left all that to the novelist. Here you see how easy it would be for me to write two or three volumes in honour of prose and in mockery of verse; to say how wide and ample is the domain of the one, how starved and stunted the little grove of the other. But it would be simpler and perhaps fairer to check these theories by opening one of the thin books of modern verse that lie on your table. I open and I find myself instantly confuted. Here are the common objects of daily prose – the bicycle and the omnibus. Obviously the poet is making his muse face facts. Listen:
