Essays virginia woolf vo.., p.38
Essays Virginia Woolf, Volume 6, page 38
The Duke [she continued] required a fireside friend, and one quite without nerves. Mrs. Arbuthnot often said that he ought to have found this at his own fireside…. Alas, the Duchess had precisely the faults which annoyed him most.fn12 … Mrs. Arbuthnot, who was often the Duke’s adviser and gave him her clear and honest opinion on matters of which others were afraid to speak … was invaluable to the Duke. Their intimacy may have given gossips an excuse for scandal; but I, who knew them both so well, am convinced that the Duke was not her lover.fn13 … Mrs. Arbuthnot used to laugh at my reverence for and my shyness with the Duke; she had no such feeling.fn14
Her shyness and reverence made her almost faint with emotion when the Duke at last came to stay with them at Maresfield. She could scarcely sleep all night; and next morning she followed him when he shot, and rushed up to console an old country woman whose bare arms had been peppered by the Duke. ‘My good woman!’ she exclaimed, ‘this ought to be the proudest moment of your life. You have had the distinction of being shot by the Duke of Wellington!’fn15 ‘The pheasant,’fn16 she observes later, has been stuffed and put in her dressing-room with other treasures of the same kind.
Then, in the unexpected way in which catastrophes happen in diaries, this pleasant society is dispersed: we hear that Mrs Arbuthnot is dead, and a few pages later the Duke has broken off his friendship with Lady Shelley. It was an unlucky affair. The Duke having written a private letter to Sir John Burgoynefn17 on the defenceless state of England, Sir John thought good in the interests of England to make known its contents, in which pious duty, as she thought it, Lady Shelley did her utmost to help him. The consequence was that the Duke wrote her a series of tremendous-sarcastic letters (‘It is quite Delightful to live in times with your ladyship: with Sir John, Lady and Miss Burgoyne,’ &c.),fn18 and their friendship for two years was ruined. It was repaired to some extent by Sir John Shelley, who walked up to the Duke at a party and remarked in his most winning way how the cackling of geese had once saved Rome. ‘I had been thinking that perhaps the cackling of my old goose may yet save England!’ The Duke burst into a hearty laugh. ‘By G—d, Shelley, you are right,’ he exclaimed. ‘Give me your honest hand.’fn19 Two years after that Sir John is dead; the Duke followed him a few months later. Still the diaries continue, now in Ireland, now in Italy; but they are different. It is partly that the writer begins to look back, to compare and to despond; but the age also is changing. The world is no longer a place of ‘springy daisy-spangled turf’ upon which she gallops in the early morning, but a far more decorous place, where she meets Mr Gladstone and goes tours down the Rhine. ‘Alas!’ she exclaims. ‘I now see things as they are and not as they used to be when I cast around them a halo of historical and legendary romance.’fn20 She reads the third canto of ‘Childe Harold’fn21 on the very spot; but it is no good; the castles are repaired, or something else has changed. Without any analysis of her own emotion or description, she conveys the impression of age and change, and ugly new things rising up against the profound and tender past. The romantic woman who had lived in a profligate society, among men who drank and gambled and fought duels, turns from the window where, as the sun set over the lake, she had been thinking of these things, to behold ‘a large lady from Boston extended at full length on the only sofa in the room,’ while ‘odious Yankee boys and girls’ run in and out ‘who displayed their national independence by utterly ignoring the comfort of others.’fn22
But beneath all the changes that life brought her – for she lived until 1873 – there remains the memory of the years when she enjoyed the friendship of the great Duke. In the same way that this friendship underlies her fragmentary diaries it seems to have run through the scattered parts of her life, so that when she was very old and attempted to write her own life she wrote a few pages about him and then ceased. But we need not regret that she wrote no more; for it is difficult to believe that by any other method she could have conveyed more vividly than she has done this figure and that figure and the dress and manner and temper of the age, and shown us so clearly at the same time how strangely, in spite of the appearance of change and fragility, one life is involved with another.
‘Women of the Country’
It is very seldom that we find a book which, in dealing with the country, preserves that particular aspect of it which sometimes seems to us to be the most profound. It is the impression which is made upon us by a stretch of rather ugly country, scattered with commonplace farms, and small villages set in the midst of great fields. Such is the country which forms the background in Women of the Country, by Gertrude Bone. ‘There were no hills, no grandeur, no proximity to the sea,’fn2 and the lives of the women who live there are in harmony with it. It is a plain dumb country, and the people who live in it are plain and dumb, but it is the plainness, the peace, the dumbness that appeal to us, and the sense of mighty endurance which arises from it.
The women of the country are for the most part shrewd and practical people, full of charity and full of brutality. They live so near to and so much at the mercy of the harsh and petty things of daily life that their narrowness of vision and brutality of speech are more than superficial. ‘“Other people’s got to live in the house besides you,” said the woman. “If you want so much attention, you know where you can get it.” The bed-ridden woman lay still at the threat of the workhouse.’fn3 As so often happens in real life, it is the queer woman who seems to have glimpses of higher understanding than all the rest. Anne Hilton, the unpractical, pious, eccentric woman who goes from house to house supplying advice or reproof or charity according to a point of view of her own, is the central figure of the book. A rich horse-breeder has taken a farm girl to be his mistress, and Anne goes hither and thither, until we are made aware of the state of public opinion in the village concerning her. There is the enormously fat farmer’s wife, who was so respectable herself that she could ‘spare great charity for the rest of the world,’fn4 and there is the poor woman who had ‘lain many years in the kitchen, whose narrow hot space was all she saw of the world.’fn5 From very different reasons she too had learnt charity – ‘“They’re all afraid of the trouble to themselves about the girl,” she said with her bitter intonation. “They’re afraid they’ll be called on to do something for her sooner or later.”’fn6 But perhaps the most vivid picture in the book is that of the workhouse infirmary, where the girl, who has finally been deserted by her husband, goes before the birth of her child. The room is full of very old women and very young women with babies. The old women are quarrelling for a place next the fire, and, when a stranger comes in they begin screaming out, ‘Give me a ha’penny! Spare a ha’penny!’fn7 until a tiny imbecile old woman lifts up her skirts and begins to dance for a halfpenny. These are pictures of an impressionist – that is to say, it is left to us to make a body for a few vivid words, but Mrs Bone’s skill is indisputable. She never allows us to forget that there is much beauty even in a plain country, but the great merit of her book is that, without shirking either the plainness or the meanness, she yet makes us feel the fine quality of the human nature which persists in its life, in spite of everything.
Butterflies and Moths: Insects in September
Are there as many butterflies now as there were when we were children? Where are the Small Coppers, the Wood Arguses, the Clouded Yellows which were then so frequent? You may sit in the sun for an hour surrounded by flowers and count only one Tortoiseshell, 20 Common Whites,fn2 and three Meadow Browns; and these are all dull butterflies as butterflies go. The truth may be, as we learnt in ‘Eyes and No-Eyes,’fn3 that having ceased to collect, we have also ceased to notice.
Outside the garden, at any rate, there is no reason to complain of a lack of butterflies, once we look for them, though certain species, once common, seem now curiously scarce. Almost every step through the long grass sends some brown insect on a swift, curved flight to the next resting place, and suddenly one finds oneself on the outskirts of a great camp of blue butterflies. One little butterfly seems to be attached to each grass stem near the top, serving as a flag or highly decorated sail as it sways in the breeze. If you wade among them the air is full at once of exquisite little blue flakes, which settle the moment after with close folded wings. But you may walk another mile without meeting even the hardy brown butterfly which seems like a spray of the heath taking wings and returning to heath again. And next moment you come to a patch of clover or a sunny hollow among trees which seems to possess some irresistible charm for insects, some sweetness or stillness or echo – what is it that charms a dragon fly? for they circle by the score, floating joyfully and silently on their red and blue and white wings, as if they were at worship about a shrine of sun-baked turf.fn4
No one who has ever dogged a Clouded Yellow for an hour up and down a moor strewn with rocks and caught it at last with a swoop of the net high in air can see butterflies dancing in the wild without feeling the lust of the chase again. What if a Purple Emperor should descend or a Camberwell Beauty? Is that a Common Blue and not a Mazarine or an Adonis? Ironically enough, it is when one’s hunting days are over that the greatest chances come our way. One fine September morning a black patch appeared on the wall of the house. Smouldering ambitions instantly revived and we declared that it was a moth, a large Hawk moth – why not a Death’s Head Hawk moth? And so, when carefully brought to land, it proved to be; as large and soft as a mouse, with the skull and crossbones marked as if in velvet. All day it lay drowsily inert, squeaking if disturbed,fn5 and in the evening took its flight.
The autumn nights are full of moths. As the light fades they begin to busy themselves among the flowers, and few sights have a greater enchantment than that of a Hawk moth with its vibrating wings blurred in movement, suspended above a tobacco plant or an evening primrose. The pursuit of them, too, must surely have given many children their first perceptions of natural loveliness. There is, to begin with, the fascination of sugaring the trees. At dusk, rags steeped in treacle with a dash of rum are pinned to the trunks; and when it is dark these are visited and the light cautiously allowed to play upon them. The treacle has run down the bark in rivulets and upon each there sits a moth or two with his proboscis deep-plunged in the flood, and often so drunk that a tap sends him helpless to the ground. It is an exciting moment. On a good night the tree is covered with little dark knobs. They are mostly common moths, yellow underwings, Hearts and Darts, and a persistent visitor called in the books ‘Setacious Hebrew Character.’ But sometimes as the light approaches a flash of scarlet shows that a Crimson Underwing is tasting delight, for though he is not rare, there is always a certain pomp and splendour about him.fn6 But whatever we catch, there is mystery and charm in the night and the insects whom we arrest in the dark ocean of the air.
Best of all is it to sugar for moths in the New Forest. A little distance within the wood it is completely still and dark, even on a September night. The lantern seems to shove aside the blackness, as a snow-plough drives a path through the snow. When it is stood upon the ground, what strange creatures of the underworld edge up to it – spiders and beetles and perhaps a great green grasshopper, to whom light seems to give an ecstasy of joy. The circle of pale-green grass where the radiance falls is soon full of grotesque insects, who come with angular and crab-like movements through the grass blades, so that you can hear tiny brittle sounds as they move.
The Rough Road
In Mr W. J. Locke’s The Rough Road the question is, Was Doggie Trevor a ‘pom’fn2 or a mastiff? Appearances were at first sight against him; he played the flute; he was an authority upon wall-papers; he had the finest collection of china dogs in England; and he slept in green silk pyjamas. In his genial way Mr Locke spends his first hundred pages in positively smothering his hero in effeminacies; he is devoted to music; his books are bound in white vellum; lawn tennis tires him; he never drinks; he never swears; he dresses for dinner; his robust cousin Oliver puts the matter in a nutshell when he assures him that he has no idea ‘how men talk to one another in a gale of wind.’fn3 But, according to Mr Locke, almost every one had forgotten that art in the opening years of the twentieth century. ‘We were in danger of perishing from fatty degeneration of the soul. As it was, it took a year or more of war to cure us.’fn4 The great charm of Mr Locke’s work lies in the assurance that is wafted us by innumerable touches of irrepressible good nature that the worse the disease the more certain the cure; the darker the cloud the brighter the lining; the steeper the hill – but Mr Locke puts it at greater length and more persuasively than we can. His difficulty lies always in the first part of the proposition. It is amusing to see how persistently in spite of every effort his faith in human nature keeps breaking in. At Doggie’s worst, ‘be it said that he held his word sacred’;fn5 at his most degraded ‘he was always responsive to human kindness.’fn6 Mr Locke can hardly stay his hand until the outbreak of war to begin that process of unveiling and vindication and making good in which he delights so heartily that we can scarcely help enjoying it too.
Soon after the war Doggie found a white feather upon his breakfast table. The shock cracks the shell of his soul, which is born soon afterwards in a very cramped and bedraggled condition upon drinking a glass of whisky and water for the first time. He applies for a commission, which he is forced very soon to resign, and his further experiences as a private are as broken and as painful as Mr Locke has the heart to make them. But in spite of every obstacle he improves steadily. By degrees he gives up music and reading and the rest of his ‘æsthetic superficialities,’fn7 so that the stages of his pilgrimage may be said to be marked by tumblers of whisky and natural outbursts of bad language – the outward signs of his conversion to manliness, good fellowship, and democratic convictions. The liveliness of the narrative is such that even a teetotaller must smile and the misanthropist own himself beaten. To every character in the book the war brings some treasure of sorrow or discipline, so that they end either happier or better than they began, and the only person who is killed is the rough cousin Oliver, who, being originally able to talk to men in a gale of wind, is perhaps incapable of further advancement. Nor is there any need to fear that Doggie will ever take to the habits of a toy dog again. In the first place, he has pledged himself to reconstruct the world after the war; and in the second, he is married to a French wife, who not only ‘personifies the heroic womanhood of France,’fn8 but believes that it is the peculiar mission of women to see that heroes are kept permanently up to the scratch.
‘The Old Madhouse’
Mr de Morgan was not a first-rate novelist, since very few people manage to assemble all the necessary gifts. Yet he had enough to make him appear constantly on the high road to that goal; and many of his readers would say that he possessed in addition a gift difficult to analyse, but productive of a warm feeling of affection and sympathy. The Old Madhouse, his last novel, is rich in all the qualities and peculiarities which we are used to find in his work. It is unfinished; he laid down his pen in the middle of a sentence; but Mrs de Morgan was happily able to explain how the story was to end. A few words of hers throw light also upon the processes of the writer’s mind. ‘When my husband started upon one of his novels,’ she says, ‘he did so without making any definite plot. He created his characters, and then waited for them to act and evolve their own plot. In this way the puppets in the show became real living personalities to him, and he waited, as he expressed it, “to see what they would do next.”’fn2
Her words will confirm what many readers must have suspected for themselves. Mr de Morgan was a story-teller rather than a novelist. He had the story-teller’s freshness and charm, also his diffuseness and lack of form. He lived in his characters, but for that reason had little authority over them. Thus the story of The Old Madhouse easily swells in its unfinished state to 565 pages of close print. The story which provides the skeleton for this rather obese body could be disposed of in a less number of words. Two young men are engaged to marry two young women. They propose to rent and share between them a vast empty house known as the Old Madhouse. But before Fred Carteret can sign his share of the lease his guardian, the Rev. Dr Carteret, must give his consent. Dr Carteret goes to inspect the house, is left alone there for a moment, and is never seen alive again. The mystery broods very effectively over the entire book. Then Miss Fraser breaks off her engagement with Fred Carteret on the ground that his admiration for the other lady, Lucy Hinchcliffe, who is engaged to the other gentleman, Charley Smith, is excessive. Indeed, when Charley and Lucy are married and gone by themselves to live in the Old Madhouse, Fred finds himself passionately in love with his friend’s wife. It is not until they have eloped together that the Doctor is discovered – but we will not lift the veil of that mystery any further.
That is the story; but Mr de Morgan tells it as people who make up stories are apt to tell them. Things come into his head; people start talking; he becomes engrossed; there is always something further to be added, and once you get interested in a story it is difficult not to bring in the dachshund, and the cabman, and the gardener’s boy. There is a good deal that might be said about the furniture too. Yet, rather surprisingly, our interest thrives on this well-nigh suffocating abundance of nourishment. Mr de Morgan liked to go into things so thoroughly because he found them so absorbing. He was garrulous not from infirmity or slackness of mind, but from fecundity. He gives us the impression that he was so intimate with his characters that he talked aloud to them as he made them, and persuaded them to behave better than they would otherwise have done. But, besides being extremely benevolent, his attitude to his world was highly individual. With the mid-Victorian jocosity which shows itself chiefly in his treatment of the lower classes, who are all characters, and christened accordingly Grewbeer or Gorhambury,fn3 he had a share, too, of the later subtlety. He is not only humorous and benignant, but he is what we are apt to call ‘interesting.’ There is much of Dickens in him, but there is also a streak of Henry James.fn4 But his admirers would insist that he is above everything else William de Morgan. His method had the merit of giving ample opportunity for that quality to show itself. He can switch off from Fred or Charley at any moment and go on in his own proper person. He can play any tricks he chooses with grammar, for he has only to say ‘Excuse style’fn5 and we forgive him everything. Perhaps for the sake of all this one is ready to sacrifice the more purely intellectual or artistic quality for lack of which The Old Madhouse fails to be the first-rate novel that it shows signs of being. Fred and Charley, Lucy and Elbows, and their crises and entanglements, are all human enough and true enough; and yet the sharpness, the creative vigour which would cast them out of Mr de Morgan’s mind and into the world of reality, is absent. A kind of mist swims over the whole.
