Essays virginia woolf vo.., p.33
Essays Virginia Woolf, Volume 6, page 33
Venice
The most difficult tasks are always those that have a treacherous surface; it seems so easy to write of Venice if you have been there; and yet out of all the splendid structures of words that have been raised in her honour and likeness, how many are there that a reader cares to use at all? There is a passage in Ruskin, a phrase or two in Browningfn2 – but every one has his own specific; this only is probably true of all, that the words are numbered. The authors of Venice – Beryl de Sélincourt and May Sturge Henderson – are aware of this perversity in their Goddess[:] ‘each … has a new question to ask of her, and … the answer will be given to him alone.’fn3 But they believe that there may be marks on her stones still unperceived, words in her manuscript yet unread, music in her stars yet unheard, and that ‘with patience and love we may redeem … a chord … or a tone.’fn4 The profusion of images which this statement of their aims calls forth is typical of the method used throughout. They cannot fix their gaze on a single object; but they catch its shadow on the wall, or its reflection in the waters, or its mirage in the sky, and in doubt which is the real thing they preserve them all so that the reader may choose for himself. They are also in possession of a varied vocabulary, so that the heap of precious words increases fast and a substantial volume is the result. But a certain amount of solid history is included to illustrate Venice under different aspects; there is an account of a visit of Henry the Third to Venice in 1574 to illustrate a Venetian festival; tales out of Marco Polo to illustrate the travels of a Merchant of Venice; there is a description of a Crusade, and a chapter on the Venetian Painters of the Renaissance. But though we come across many of the striking phrases that are the outcome of real sympathy the effect is always dulled by the accumulation of phrases that are just wide of the mark. It seems extravagant, doubtless, to demand a gift great enough to see the single object clearly, but it is difficult to say what good purpose can be achieved, in a work of this kind, without a considerable touch of that power. There are several brightly-coloured illustrations by Mr R. Barrett.
‘A Mirror of Shalott’
‘With the Father Rector’s permission we will tell our tales, one each night…. And Mr Benson shall write them down, if he wishes to, and make an honest penny or two, if he can get any publisher to take the book.’fn2 So in A Mirror of Shalott, by Robert Hugh Benson, we have fourteen stories told by Reverend Fathers, in each of which there is some miracle or ghost story, or merely something irrelevant that cannot be explained. A candid inquirer, with no professional bias, might have written the stories; and at no point are we asked to believe that the meaning is this or that; ‘Catholics are the only genuine agnostics alive.’fn3 Indeed ‘miracle’ is far too bigoted a word to apply to any of Mr Benson’s stories; and for the most part they lack the substance of ghost stories. Let us call them then rather emotional experiences, to which the profession of the storyteller gives a religious setting, and, sometimes, a religious flavour. Such are the stories of the man who substituted himself for his brother who was losing his faith; of the woman whose devil was exorcised; of the artist who regained his faith and lost his art because evil had inspired it;fn4 and there are others again which any country gentleman might tell his guests at bedtime; nor would their rest be broken. In truth, qualities that are admirable elsewhere rather prevent Mr Benson from telling his tales so as to excite the feelings which people, whatever their faith, cherish for the supernatural. He is too surefooted, too painstaking. The most interesting, because the least dependent on help from without, are stories like Father Girdlestone’s story, and Mr Bosanquet’s story. Here Mr Benson has to describe the experiences of a mind – of a man who was tempted in one case, of a man who died in the other – in very remote and subtle conditions. But his method is too robust to deal with such intricate and at the same time poignant emotions; he sets everything in order, tells you how the basket chair clicked,fn5 and what happened next, and works out the situation methodically with the desire clearly to get at the truth. But when we reach the heart of this substantial edifice the thing, whatever it was, has gone. The Fathers, it is true, let their cigars go out and sit tense with emotion, for naturally Mr Benson is keenly alive to all the accessories of a good story; as naturally the stories which are most substantially shored up, as it were, with incident are the most successful. Only, while we are interested and even instructed, no sudden chasms open beneath us or above us; because perhaps Mr Benson is a little too much of an agnostic. But it is a great matter that every story makes an impression of sincerity and intelligence.
‘The Feast of Bacchus’
Mr E. G. Henham defines his novel, The Feast of Bacchus, as a ‘study in dramatic atmosphere’; but that does not go very far to explain his intentions, or, rather, the way in which he has carried them out. It is clear, at least, that he has written a novel to illustrate an idea; that it is something of an experiment, and that the success of the story depends upon the way in which the theory will achieve itself. He conceives a deserted house and garden, the Strath, in which hang two masks of tragedy and comedy, and whoever lives or wanders there feels the influence of one of them without knowing what it is. But the Strath is something much more important than an ordinary haunted house; ‘The lessons of the Strath were those of the didactic drama, which teaches that mortals must submit to unchanging laws. It had no phantasm to show, … it could only shape minds for good or evil … causing the puppets to act and speak in comic or in tragic mood, showing them that life is not a small thing, the world no passing scene, but rather a permanent stage.’fn2 From this quotation and from the sermon, delivered by an English parson, ‘on the birth and early history of the drama,’fn3 we may gather that Mr Henham has read Greek plays, and has his mind full of destinies and unities; but the work is not so formidable in execution as in design. Various people, a clergyman, a squire, a frivolous lady, living in the neighbourhood come beneath the influence; there are Bacchic revels, scenes from the eighteenth century, murders, as the comic or the tragic mask predominates. But the tremendous properties of the house are far less vivid than the little pictures which Mr Henham intersperses of life in the daylight, for he can write cleverly of substantial things when he chooses. But the presence of this mysterious place interferes with the action, and seems to confuse the lines of the characters without steeping them in the mystic beauty which Hawthorne,fn4 for example, could draw from the supernatural. When, finally, we reach the second scene of the fifth act called ‘Masque’ – for it is thus that Mr Henham names his chapters – the revelations which the spirits of the house make before they are destroyed are fantastical, whimsical; but not real in the very poignant way in which dreams can be real. In truth, you lay a great stress on your characters when you submit them to the supernatural and expect them to survive. But in spite of Aristotlefn5 and the rest, Mr Henham’s book is a graceful suggestion, and perhaps one day he will carry it out.
‘The Red Sphinx’
In calling The Red Sphinx, by E. U. Valentine and S. E. Harper, a ‘romance,’ the authors seem to wish to indicate a slight variety upon the usual form of fiction. And we may detect some difference, however we choose to christen it. It is clear that they have spent a great deal of care upon the story; it is not intricate, indeed, but of the kind that we may liken to some tremendous parasite sucking all the colour from the pale little characters it grows upon to maintain its own sleekness. There is a passionate American girl with a genius for the stage, who is for ever talking of her art and making the sacrifices that it requires. So, after rejecting a millionaire, she comes to Paris, and we hear a great deal about the Cours Bassot, about recitations – ‘Then with a gesture she seemed to awaken as from a trance’fn2 – about cabarets at Montmartre, and the precise way in which chansonniers make absinthe. But all this is merely sketched in so that we may realise the atmosphere in which actresses recite dialogues at cabarets and impersonate the ‘Red Sphinx of Anarchy’fn3 in poems written for them by sinister and half-insane men of genius. It is still more ominous, however, when the chivalrous young man to whom she is engaged takes to painting her in the same character. In this work she is shown as a ‘gigantic half-human figure’ hovering above the church of the Sacré Cœur, ‘the white dome of which was streaked crimson with sacrificial gore dripping from the outstretched wings.’fn4 The Salon refused the picture; and, as any one may guess, at the same moment that Leonore, the Sphinx, is reciting the poem before Notre Dame, early in the morning, the unfortunate painter is jumping into the Seine near by. The picture was too like her. And the end is equally appropriate. But it is not probable that the plot when detached from the context will give pleasure to any one; and we are thus guilty of some ingratitude to the writers. For there is a certain candour and good faith in the way in which they set out their wares before you, as who should say ‘Some people may like to hear about this, though we none of us believe it,’ which induces the reader to acquiesce. There are, moreover, some pieces of description of the Boulevards by night and the Halles in the early morning which bring you down with a shock upon the hard earth again. The characters themselves pass on the story from hand to hand; and really you can ask no more of them.
‘Love the Judge’
The conviction with which Love the Judge, by Wymond Carey is written, goes some way to achieve its end. If we cannot believe that such people lived, we can almost believe that some one thinks they do; indeed we can believe that a great many people are glad to accept them as one of those imitations which are rather better than the real thing. Mr Carey’s method is so confident, it treats such large matters so boldly, and declares the results so decisively that many will read him with something of gratitude mixed with their pleasure. Great financiers should be like Richard Forster; they should think in continents; they should not only wear their dinner jackets with remarkable ease, but power should stamp their foreheads ‘compensating for the absence of the hall-mark of birth.’fn2 Then it is pleasant to think, with a start of surprise of course, that such a man reads poetry, takes it like a pill to counteract the effects of ‘money grubbing’;fn3 and best of all that if you pick up the book lying on the seat beside him at Monte Carlo you will find it to be ‘The Book of the Spiritual Life.’fn4 This is simple, and somehow gratifying. Further we can all follow the problems which are strenuously debated in the course of the volume. What is it that a great man needs in his wife? Love or intellect? Which is the greater power? What constitutes true womanhood? and so forth; and the answers are rapped out as from a pulpit in Hyde-park. In the same way, too, we should like to believe in Kitty, and Dot, and Gertrude, because each is so simple a statement of what might be if life would arrange itself in such a way as to ask simple questions and admit simple replies. But in justice to Mr Carey we must add that he has done all in his power to throw his characters into strong relief, exhibiting them by means of financial crises, as by some crude white flashlight. Nor is his plot any less muscular, if we may say so, than the emotions it inspires; we are shown candidly what it is to control several companies, to juggle with thousands as with pence, to make stock-brokers turn and look at you with a shudder. There is no suspicion of satire or subtlety, and if it is to be done this is certainly the way to do it. But there are dreadful moments, not a few of them, when we can believe no more; as when Gertrude Wyatt, who represents intellect without love, advises Forster to learn Greek. ‘Only those who can understand great literature know what an anodyne it can be … the literature of modern Christian or of modern pagan culture rests on Greek thought … true statesmanship for our world to-day must begin, though it does not end, with the assimilation of Hellenism.’fn5 Can we ask our imagination to accept that? No; the burden is too great. If we are to read the novel we must not violate our consciences by bidding them take it for the truth. We must agree to enjoy it as the distortion of an earnest mind; and to find its value in the fact that it is a reflection.
‘Tales of Two People’
It would be hard to find a safer investment for four shillings and sixpence than to buy with them a novel from the hand of Mr Anthony Hope. He seems, as an artist, to have taken up the position which in the present volume of stories – Tales of Two People – he assigns to ‘Mr. Wynne,’ the gentleman of great experience and discretion who listens and gives advice. As a spectator he is amused; he is never a partisan; never startled, at a loss, or dull. His expense, so to speak, is always comfortably within his income, and that income is itself satisfactory; not splendid, indeed, but at the same time in no way precarious. The present volume contains some sixteen short stories, and in each we have to do with matter of much the same quality. The emotions which attract Mr Hope are those that fall to the lot of clean and well-mannered English people; they are sufficiently strong to put those good manners in action; they are never strong enough to disturb them. If he wishes to complicate the fortunes of his characters he will contrive some ingenious sport which threatens neither farce nor tragedy; but dissolves of its own accord when the exhibition is over. Take, for instance, the case of ‘Helena’s Path,’ the first and the longest of the stories. A lady of high birth, beauty, youth, owns a property bordering on that of the eccentric but also young and beautiful Lord Lynborough. There is a path between the estates which makes a convenient short cut to the sea from Lord Lynborough’s Castle. The lady asserts her right to padlock the gate, the gentleman sends her the padlock at breakfast time. The strategies on both sides become more and more whimsical until a legal document is made out in which Lord Lynborough promises, in recognition of his right to use the road, a yearly homage to the lady ‘by falling on his knee and kissing the hand of the said Marchesa.’fn2 Treated as Mr Hope treats it, this little drama is light and successful; you have, in addition to the diversities of the plot, an almost physical sense of the charm of sunny moors, healthy meals, and, as we come back to it, of excellent manners. But after a certain number of these stories, the reader may become conscious of the monotony of so much prosperity, and ask how, on wet days, or in harsher circumstances, these ladies and gentlemen comport themselves. They are capable, of course, but are they not exceedingly commonplace? There is no attempt to answer such a question; and the only relief we are offered is in the affairs of one of those conveniently exiled Royal Princesses. ‘I have always found something pathetic about a superseded will. It is like a Royal family in exile.’fn3 But to be able to write sixteen stories which are all of them respectable, efficient as some of the stupid, pleasant heroes themselves, is another proof of what Mr Hope somewhere calls ‘the triumph of externals.’fn4 To make them triumph once more in literature shows again how well Mr Hope knows his craft; and the present volume will satisfy all who admire that achievement; and will cause even those who distrust it to applaud the ingenuity and good workmanship with which it is done.
‘Mam Linda’
