The essays of virginia w.., p.60
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5, page 60
If this is so, if to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment, you may perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism. We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print. And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field. If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.fn29
Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves,fn30 and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards – their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, ‘Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.’fn31
Leslie Stephen, the Philosopher at Home: A Daughter’s Memoriesfn1
By the time that his children were growing up the great days of my father’s life were over. His feats on the river and on the mountains had been won before they were born. Relics of them were to be found lying about the house – the silver cup on the study mantelpiece; the rusty alpenstocks that leant against the bookcase in the corner; and to the end of his days he would speak of great climbers and explorers with a peculiar mixture of admiration and envy. But his own years of activity were over, and my father had to content himself with pottering about the Swiss valleys or taking a stroll across the Cornish moors.
That to potter and to stroll meant more on his lips than on other people’s is becoming obvious now that some of his friends have given their own version of those expeditions. He would start off after breakfast alone, or with one companion. Shortly before dinner he would return. If the walk had been successful, he would have out his great map and commemorate a new short cut in red ink. And he was quite capable, it appears, of striding all day across the moors without speaking more than a word or two to his companion. By that time, too, he had written the History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, which is said by some to be his masterpiece: and the Science of Ethics – the book which interested him most: and The Playground of Europe, in which is to be found ‘The Sunset on Mont Blanc’ – in his opinion the best thing he ever wrote.fn2
He still wrote daily and methodically, though never for long at a time. In London he wrote in the large room with three long windows at the top of the house. He wrote lying almost recumbent in a low rocking chair which he tipped to and fro as he wrote, like a cradle, and as he wrote he smoked a short clay pipe, and he scattered books round him in a circle. The thud of a book dropped on the floor could be heard in the room beneath. And often as he mounted the stairs to his study with his firm, regular tread he would burst, not into song, for he was entirely unmusical, but into a strange rhythmical chant, for verse of all kinds, both ‘utter trash,’ as he called it, and the most sublime words of Milton and Wordsworthfn3 stuck in his memory, and the act of walking or climbing seemed to inspire him to recite whichever it was that came uppermost or suited his mood.
But it was his dexterity with his fingers that delighted his children before they could potter along the lanes at his heels or read his books. He would twist a sheet of paper beneath a pair of scissors and out would drop an elephant, a stag, or a monkey, with trunks, horns, and tails delicately and exactly formed. Or, taking a pencil, he would draw beast after beast – an art that he practised almost unconsciously as he read, so that the fly-leaves of his books swarm with owls and donkeys as if to illustrate the ‘Oh, you ass!’ or ‘Conceited dunce,’ that he was wont to scribble impatiently in the margin. Such brief comments, in which one may find the germ of the more temperate statements of his essays, recall some of the characteristics of his talk. He could be very silent, as his friends have testified. But his remarks, made suddenly in a low voice between the puffs of his pipe, were extremely effective. Sometimes with one word – but his one word was accompanied by a gesture of the hand – he would dispose of the tissue of exaggerations which his own sobriety seemed to provoke. ‘There are 40,000,000 unmarried women in London alone!’ Lady Ritchie once informed him. ‘Oh, Annie, Annie!’ my father exclaimed in tones of horrified but affectionate rebuke. But Lady Ritchie, as if she enjoyed being rebuked, would pile it up even higher next time she came.fn4
The stories he told to amuse his children of adventures in the Alps – but accidents only happened, he would explain, if you were so foolish as to disobey your guidesfn5 – or of those long walks, after one of which, from Cambridge to London on a hot day, ‘I drank, I am sorry to say, rather more than was good for me,’ were told very briefly, but with a curious power to impress the scene. The things that he did not say were always there in the background. So, too, though he seldom told anecdotes, and his memory for facts was bad, when he described a person – and he had known many people, both famous and obscure – he would convey exactly what he thought of him in two or three words. And what he thought might be the opposite of what other people thought. He had a way of upsetting established reputations and disregarding conventional values that could be disconcerting, and sometimes perhaps wounding, though no one was more respectful of any feeling that seemed to him genuine. But when, suddenly opening his bright blue eyes, and rousing himself from what had seemed complete abstraction, he gave his opinion, it was difficult to disregard it. It was a habit, especially when deafness made him unaware that his opinion could be heard, that had its inconveniences.
‘I am the most easily bored of men,’ he wrote,fn6 truthfully as usual: and when, as was inevitable in a large family, some visitor threatened to stay not merely for tea but also for dinner, my father would express his anguish at first by twisting and untwisting a certain lock of hair. Then he would burst out, half to himself, half to the powers above, but quite audibly, ‘Why can’t he go? Why can’t he go?’fn7 Yet such is the charm of simplicity – and did he not say, also truthfully, that ‘bores are the salt of the earth’?fn8 – that the bores seldom went, or, if they did, forgave him and came again.
Too much, perhaps, has been said of his silence; too much stress has been laid upon his reserve.fn9 He loved clear thinking; he hated sentimentality and gush; but this by no means meant that he was cold and unemotional, perpetually critical and condemnatory in daily life. On the contrary, it was his power of feeling strongly and of expressing his feeling with vigour that made him sometimes so alarming as a companion. A lady, for instance, complained of the wet summer that was spoiling her tour in Cornwall. But to my father, though he never called himself a democrat, the rain meant that the corn was being laid; some poor man was being ruined; and the energy with which he expressed his sympathy – not with the lady – left her discomfited. He had something of the same respect for farmers and fishermen that he had for climbers and explorers. So, too, he talked little of patriotism, but during the South African War – and all wars were hateful to him – he lay awake thinking that he heard the guns on the battlefield. Again, neither his reason nor his cold common sense helped to convince him that a child could be late for dinner without having been maimed or killed in an accident. And not all his mathematics together with a bank balance which he insisted must be ample in the extreme, could persuade him, when it came to signing a cheque, that the whole family was not ‘shooting Niagara to ruin,’ as he put it. The pictures that he would draw of old age and the bankruptcy court, of ruined men of letters who have to support large families in small houses at Wimbledon (he owned a very small house at Wimbledon)fn10 might have convinced those who complain of his under-statements that hyperbole was well within his reach had he chosen.fn11
Yet the unreasonable mood was superficial, as the rapidity with which it vanished would prove. The cheque-book was shut; Wimbledon and the workhouse were forgotten. Some thought of a humorous kind made him chuckle. Taking his hat and his stick, calling for his dog and his daughter, he would stride off into Kensington Gardens, where he had walked as a little boy, where his brother Fitzjamesfn12 and he had made beautiful bows to young Queen Victoria and she had swept them a curtsey, and so, round the Serpentine, to Hyde Park Corner, where he had once saluted the great Duke himself; and so home. He was not then in the least ‘alarming’; he was very simple, very confiding; and his silence, though one might last unbroken from the Round Pond to the Marble Arch, was curiously full of meaning, as if he were thinking half aloud, about poetry and philosophy and people he had known.
He himself was the most abstemious of men. He smoked a pipe perpetually, but never a cigar. He wore his clothes until they were too shabby to be tolerable; and he held old-fashioned and rather puritanical views as to the vice of luxury and the sin of idleness. The relations between parents and children today have a freedom that would have been impossible with my father. He expected a certain standard of behaviour, even of ceremony, in family life. Yet if freedom means the right to think one’s own thoughts and to follow one’s own pursuits, then no one respected, and indeed insisted upon freedom more completely than he did. His sons, with the exception of the Army and Navy, should follow whatever profession they chose; his daughters, though he cared little enough for the higher education of women, should have the same liberty. If at one moment he rebuked a daughter sharply for smoking a cigarette – smoking was not in his opinion a nice habit in the other sex – she had only to ask him if she might become a painter, and he assured her that so long as she took her work seriously he would give her all the help he could. He had no special love for painting; but he kept his word. Freedom of that sort was worth thousands of cigarettes.fn13
It was the same with the perhaps more difficult problem of literature. Even today there may be parents who would doubt the wisdom of allowing a girl of 15 the free run of a large and quite unexpurgated library. But my father allowed it. There were certain facts – very briefly, very shyly he referred to them. Yet ‘Read what you like,’fn14 he said, and all his books, ‘mangy and worthless,’ as he called them, but certainly they were many and various, were to be had without asking. To read what one liked because one liked it, never to pretend to admire what one did not – that was his only lesson in the art of reading. To write in the fewest possible words, as clearly as possible, exactly what one meant – that was his only lesson in the art of writing. All the rest must be learnt for oneself. Yet a child must have been childish in the extreme not to feel that such was the teaching of a man of great learning and wide experience, though he would never impose his own views or parade his own knowledge. For, as his tailor remarked when he saw my father walk past his shop up Bond Street, ‘There goes a gentleman that wears good clothes without knowing it.’
In those last years, grown solitary and very deaf, he would sometimes call himself a failure as a writer: he had been ‘jack of all trades and master of none.’fn15 But whether he failed or succeeded as a writer, it is permissible to believe that he left a distinct impression of himself on the minds of his friends. Meredith saw him as ‘Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar’fn16 in his earlier days; Thomas Hardy, years later, looked at the ‘spare and desolate figure’ of the Schreckhorn and thought of
him,
Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb,
Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe,
Of semblance to his personality
In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim.fn17
But the praise he would have valued most, for though he was an agnostic nobody believed more profoundly in the worth of human relationships, was Meredith’s tribute after his death: ‘He was the one man to my knowledge worthy to have married your mother.’fn18 And Lowell, when he called him ‘L. S., the most lovable of men,’fn19 has best described the quality that makes him, after all these years, unforgettable.
Portrait of a Londonerfn1
Nobody can be said to know London who does not know one true Cockney – who cannot turn down a side street, away from the shops and the theatres, and knock at a private door in a street of private houses.
Private houses in London are apt to be much of a muchness. The door opens on a dark hall; from the dark hall rises a narrow staircase; off the landing opens a double drawing-room, and in this double drawing-room are two sofas on each side of a blazing fire, six armchairs, and three long windows giving upon the street.fn2 What happens in the back half of the drawing-room which looks upon the gardens of other houses is often a matter of considerable conjecture. But it is with the front drawing-room that we are here concerned; for Mrs Crowe always sat there in an armchair by the fire; it was there that she had her being; it was there that she poured out tea.
That she was born in the country seems, though strange, to be a fact: that she sometimes left London, in those summer weeks when London ceases to be London, is also true. But where she went or what she did when she was out of London, when her chair was empty, her fire unlit and her table unlaid, nobody knew or could imagine. To figure Mrs Crowe in her black dress and her veil and her cap, walking in a field among turnips or climbing a hill where cows were grazing, is beyond the scope of the wildest imagination.
There by the fire in winter, by the window in summer, she had sat for sixty years – but not alone. There was always someone in the armchair opposite, paying a call. And before the first caller had been seated ten minutes the door always opened, and the maid Maria, she of the prominent eyesfn3 and prominent teeth, who had opened the door for sixty years, opened it once more and announced a second visitor; and then a third, and then a fourth.
A tête-à-tête with Mrs Crowe was unknown. She disliked tête-à-têtes. It was part of a peculiarity that she shared with many hostesses that she was never specially intimate with anyone.fn4 For example, there was always an elderly man in the corner by the cabinet – who seemed, indeed, as much a part of that admirable piece of eighteenth-century furniture as its own brass claws. But he was always addressed as Mr Graham – never John, never William: though sometimes she would call him ‘dear Mr Graham’ as if to mark the fact that she had known him for sixty years.
The truth was she did not want intimacy; she wanted conversation. Intimacy has a way of breeding silence, and silence she abhorred. There must be talk, and it must be general, and it must be about everything. It must not go too deep, and it must not be too clever, for if it went too far in either of these directions somebody was sure to feel out of it, and to sit balancing his tea-cup, saying nothing.
Thus Mrs Crowe’s drawing-room had little in common with the celebrated salons of the memoir writers. Clever people often came there – judges, doctors, members of parliament, writers, musicians, people who travelled, people who played polo, actors and complete nonentities, but if anyone said a brilliant thing it was felt to be rather a breach of etiquettefn5 – an accident that one ignored, like a fit of sneezing, or some catastrophe with a muffin. The talk that Mrs Crowe liked and inspired was a glorified version of village gossip. The village was London, and the gossip was about London life. But Mrs Crowe’s great gift consisted in making the vast metropolis seem as small as a village with one church, one manor house and twenty-five cottages. She had first-hand information about every play, every picture show, every trial, every divorce case. She knew who was marrying, who was dying, who was in town and who was out. She would mention the fact that she had just seen Lady Umphleby’s car go by, and hazard a guess that she was going to visit her daughter whose baby had been born last night, just as a village woman speaks of the Squire’s lady driving to the station to meet Mr John, who is expected down from town.
