Essays virginia woolf vo.., p.49
Essays Virginia Woolf, Volume 6, page 49
But to continue my story. The Angel was dead; what then remained? You may say that what remained was a simple and common object – a young woman in a bedroom with an inkpot. In other words, now that she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be herself. Ah, but what is ‘herself’? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill. That indeed is one of the reasons why I have come here – out of respect for you, who are in process of showing us by your experiments what a woman is, who are in process of providing us, by your failures and successes, with that extremely important piece of information.
But to continue the story of my professional experiences. I made one pound ten and six by my first review; and I bought a Persian cat with the proceeds. Then I grew ambitious. A Persian cat is all very well, I said; but a Persian cat is not enough. I must have a motor car. And it was thus that I became a novelist – for it is a very strange thing that people will give you a motor car if you will tell them a story.fn7 It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories. It is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous novels. And yet, if I am to obey your secretary and tell you my professional experiences as a novelist, I must tell you about a very strange experience that befell me as a novelist. And to understand it you must try first to imagine a novelist’s state of mind. I hope I am not giving away professional secrets if I say that a novelist’s chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living – so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings round, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination. I suspect that this state is the same both for men and women. Be that as it may, I want you to imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance. I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl’s fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist’s state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers – they are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realise or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women.
These then were two very genuine experiences of my own. These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first – killing the Angel in the House – I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful – and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?
Those are the questions that I should like, had I time, to ask you. And indeed, if I have laid stress upon these professional experiences of mine, it is because I believe that they are, though in different forms, yours also. Even when the path is nominally open – when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant – there are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and define them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labour be shared, the difficulties be solved. But besides this, it is necessary also to discuss the ends and the aims for which we are fighting, for which we are doing battle with these formidable obstacles. Those aims cannot be taken for granted; they must be perpetually questioned and examined. The whole position, as I see it – here in this hall surrounded by women practising for the first time in history I know not how many different professions – is one of extraordinary interest and importance. You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labour and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think are questions of the utmost importance and interest. For the first time in history you are able to ask them; for the first time you are able to decide for yourselves what the answers should be. Willingly would I stay and discuss those questions and answers – but not tonight. My time is up; and I must cease.
Crabbe
Nothing is more remarkable in reading the life of Crabbe than his passion for weeds. After his wife’s death – she was mad for the last years of her life, alternately melancholic and exalted – he gave up weed collecting and took to fossils. But he always went fossilising alone; though if children insisted upon coming he suffered them. ‘Playing with fossils,’fn2 he called it. When he went to stay with his son George he went off, always alone, to grout for fossils in the blue lias quarries; ‘stopping to cut up any herb not quite common that grew in his path’; and he would return loaded with them. ‘The dirty fossils were placed in our best bedroom, to the great diversion of the female part of my family, the herbs stuck in the borders, among my choice flowers, that he might see them when he came again. I never displaced one of them.’fn3 This gnarled and sea-salted man was no smug clergyman underneath. He had a passion for the rejected and injured, the stunted, the hardy, the wild self-grown, self-supported unsightly weed. He was himself a weed. His birth and breeding had been the weeds – at Aldborough, where he was born on Christmas Eve, 1754. His father was a warehouse keeper, and rose to be collector of Salt Duties, or Salt Master, in that miserable dull sea village, the sound of whose waves never went out of George’s ears, even at Belvoir or Trowbridge. His mother had kept a public house, and his father, a short powerful man, who used sometimes to read poetry – Milton or Youngfn4 – to his children but was fondest of mathematics, became, owing to the death of his only daughter, violent sometimes; her ‘untimely death drew from him those gloomy and savage tokens of misery, which haunted, fifty years after, the memory of his gentler son’.fn5 His mother was pious, resigned, and dropsical.
Such, then, was his original weedlike life, on the quays rolling casks, waiting for a signal from the offing. And nothing is more remarkable than that this pale boy should have raised himself once and for all, by the force of one letter to Burke,fn6 into a luxurious, educated, cushioned career for life. Nothing of the kind would now be possible. Burke has been supplanted by the elementary school and scholarships.
Then there were his amorous propensities. This has to be referred to by the most respectful of sons – did he not let his father’s weeds grow among his own choice flowers? – because ‘These things were so well-known among the circle of which at this period he formed the delight and ornament that I have thought it absurd not to dwell on them.’fn7 He suffered at the age of sixty-four more acutely from love and jealousy than most young men of twenty. Crabbe’s nature, indeed, included more than one full-grown human being. He could shine – witness his diary, brief, pointed – in the very highest society. He had admirable manners, but, though he always gave way, yet always expected to be given way to. Moreover he was untidy in the extreme. His study table was notorious. And he was genial; called his sons ‘old fellows’fn8 and liked to offer his friends good claret. He tipped servants, gave presents, was loved and plundered by the poor, who pestered him for shillings so that his birthday was a kind of levée for the whole neighbourhood. As a preacher too he was unconventional, and would stand in a seat near the window to finish reading his sermon in the dark. And he took opium, with very good results, in a constant and slightly increasing dose. He would wander with his children in the fields at Glemham till the moon rose, reading aloud from some novel as he walked, while the boys chased moths, filled their caps with glow worms, and the nightingales sang. He wrote innumerable books which he afterwards burnt in his garden, the children stirring up the fire and flinging on it fresh manuscripts. Thus was burnt his Essay on Botany because it was in English and his friend, Mr Davies of Trinity College, Cambridge, ‘could not stomach the notion of degrading such a science by treating of it in a modern language’.fn9 For this reason he missed the honour of being known as the discoverer of the humble trefoil now known as Trifolium suffocatum.fn10 And in 1787 he was seized one fine summer’s day with so intense a longing for the sea that he mounted his horse, rode alone to the coast of Lincolnshire sixty miles from his home, dipped in the waves that washed the beach of Aldborough, and returned home to sit in his untidy study, arranging minerals, shells, and insects.fn11
‘The Faery Queen’
The Faery Queen, it is said, has never been read to the end; no one has ever wished Paradise Lost,fn2 it is said, a word longer; and these remarks however exaggerated probably give pleasure, like a child’s laugh at a ceremony, because they express something we secretly feel and yet try to hide. Dare we then at this time of day come out with the remark that The Faery Queen is a great poem? So one might say early rising, cold bathing, abstention from wine and tobacco are good; and if one said it, a blank look would steal over the company as they made haste to agree and then to lower the tone of the conversation. Yet it is true. Herefna are some general observations made by one who has gone through the experience, and wishes to urge others, who may be hiding their yawns and their polite boredom, to the same experience.
The first essential is of course not to read The Faery Queen. Put it off as long as possible. Grind out politics; absorb science; wallow in fiction; walk about London; observe the crowds; calculate the loss of life and limb; rub shoulders with the poor in markets; buy and sell; fix the mind firmly on the financial columns of the newspapers; weather; on the crops; on the fashions. At the mere mention of chivalry shiver and snigger; detest allegory; revel in direct speech; adore all the virtues of the robust, the plain spoken; and then when the whole being is red and brittle as sandstone in the sun make a dash for The Faery Queen and give yourself up to it.
But reading poetry is a complex art. The mind has many layers, and the greater the poem the more of these are roused and brought into action. They seem, too, to be in order. The faculty we employ upon poetry at the first reading is sensual; the eye of the mind opens. And Spenser rouses the eye softly and brilliantly with his green trees, his pearled women, his crested and plumed knights. (Then we need to use our sympathies, not the strong passions, but the simple wish to go with our knight and his lady to feel their heat and cold, and their thirst and hunger.) And then we need movement. Their figures as they pass along the grass track must reach a hovel or a palace or find a man in weeds reading his book. That too is gratified. And then living thus with our eyes, with our legs and arms, with the natural quiet feelings of liking and disliking tolerantly and gently excited, we realise a more complex desire that all these emotions should combine. There must be a pervading sense of belief, or much of our emotion will be wasted. The tree must be part of the knight; the knight of the lady. All these states of mind must support one another, and the strength of the poem will come from the combination, just as it will fail if at any point the poet loses belief.
But it may be said, when a poet is dealing with Faery Land and the supernatural people who live there, belief can only be used in a special sense. We do not believe in the existence of giants and ogres, but in something that the poet himself believed them to represent. What then was Spenser’s belief, when he wrote his poem? He has himself declared that the ‘general intention and meaning’ of The Faery Queen was ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and noble discipline’.fn3 It would be absurd to pretend that we are more than intermittently conscious of the poet’s meaning. Yet as we read we half consciously have the sense of some pattern hanging in the sky so that without referring any of the words to a special place, they have that meaning which comes from their being parts of a whole design, and not an isolated fragment of unrelated loveliness. The mind is being perpetually enlarged by the power of suggestion. Much more is imagined than is stated. And it is due to this quality that the poem changes, with time, so that after four hundred years it still corresponds to something which we who are momentarily in the flesh feel at the moment.
The question asks itself, then, how Spenser, himself imprisoned in so many impediments of circumstance, remote from us in time, in speech, in convention, yet seems to be talking about things that are important to us too? Compare for example his perfect gentleman with Tennyson’s Arthur.fn4 Already, much in Tennyson’s pattern is unintelligible; an easy butt for satire. Among living writers again, there is none who is able to display a typical figure. Each seems limited to one room of the human dwelling. But with Spenser, though here in this department of our being, we seem able to unlock the door and walk about. We miss certain intensities and details; but on the other hand we are uncabined. We are allowed to give scope to a number of interests, delights, curiosities and loves that find no satisfaction in the poetry of our own time. But though it would be easy to frame a reason for this and to generalise about the decay of faith, the rise of machines, the isolation of the human being, let us, however, work from the opposite point of view. In reading The Faery Queen the first thing, we said, was that the mind has different layers. It brings one into play and then another. The desire of the eye, the desire of the body, desires for rhythm, movement, the desire for adventure – each is gratified. And this gratification depends upon the poet’s own mobility. He is alive in all his parts. He scarcely seems to prefer one to another. We are reminded of the old myth of the body which has many organs, and the lesser and the obscure are as important as the kingly and important. Here at any rate the poet’s body seems all alive. A fearlessness, a simplicity that is like the movement of a naked savage possesses him. He is not merely a thinking brain; he is a feeling body, a sensitive heart. He has hands and feet, and, as he says himself, a natural chastity, so that some things are judged unfit for the pen. ‘My chaster muse for shame doth blush to write.’fn5 In short, when we read The Faery Queen, we feel that the whole being is drawn upon, not merely a separate part.
To say this is to say that the conventions that Spenser uses are not tough enough to cut us off from the inner meaning. And the reason soon makes itself apparent. When we talk of the modern distaste for allegory, we are only saying that we prefer our qualities in another form. The novelist uses allegory; that is to say, when he wishes to expound his characters, he makes them think; Spenser impersonated his psychology. Thus if the novelist now wished to convey his hero’s gloom, he would tell us his thoughts; Spenser creates a figure called Despair. He has the fullest sense of what sorrow is. But he typifies it; he creates a dwelling, an old man who comes out of the house and says I cannot tell; and then the figure of Despair with his beautiful elegy.fn6 Instead of being prisoned in one breast we are shown the outer semblance. He is working thus on a larger, freer, more depersonalised scale. By making the passions into people, he gives them an amplitude. And who shall say that this is the less natural, the less realistic? For the most exact observer has to leave much of his people’s minds obscure.
