Often in a shallow book, when we wake, we wake to nothing at all; but here when we wake we wake to the presence of a personage – a retired naval officer with an active mind and a caustic tongue, who as he trundles his wife and family across the Continent in the year 1835 is forced to give expression to his opinions in a diary. Sick though he was of story-writing and bored by a literary life – ‘If I were not rather in want of money’, he tells his mother, ‘I certainly would not write any more’ – he must express his mind somehow; and his mind was a courageous mind, an unconventional. The Press-gang, he thought an abomination. Why, he asked, do English philanthropists bother about slaves in Africa when English children are working seventeen hours a day in factories? The Game Laws are, in his opinion, a source of much misery to the poor; the law of primogeniture should be altered, and there is something to be said for the Roman Catholic religion. Every kind of topic – politics, science, religion, history – comes into view, but only for a fleeting glance. Whether the diary form was to blame or the jolting of a stage coach, or whether lack of book learning and a youth spent in cutting out brigs is a bad training for the reflective powers, the Captain’s mind, as he remarked when he stopped for two hours and had a look at it, ‘is like a kaleidoscope’. But no, he added with just self-analysis, it was not like a kaleidoscope; ‘for the patterns of kaleidoscopes are regular, and there is very little regularity in my brain, at all events’. He hops from thing to thing. Now he rattles off the history of Liège; next moment he discourses upon reason and instinct; then he considers what degree of pain is inflicted upon fish by taking them with the hook; and then, taking a walk through the streets, it strikes him how very seldom you now meet with a name beginning with X. ‘Rest!’ he exclaims with reason; ‘no, the wheels of a carriage may rest, even the body for a time may rest, but the mind will not.’ And so, in an excess of restlessness, he is off to America.
Nor do we catch sight of him again – for the six volumes in which he recorded his opinion of America, though they got him into trouble with the inhabitants, now throw light upon nothing in particular – until his daughter, having shut up her Dictionaries and Gazettes, bethinks her of a few ‘vague remembrances’. They are only trifles, she admits, and put together in a very random way, but still she remembers him very vividly. He was five foot ten and weighed fourteen stone, she remembers; he had a deep dimple in his chin, and one of his eyebrows was higher than the other, so that he always wore a look of inquiry. Indeed, he was a very restless man. He would break into his brother’s room and wake him in the middle of the night to suggest that they should start at once to Austria and buy a chateau in Hungary and make their fortunes. But, alas! he never did make his fortune, she recalls. What with his building at Langham, and the great decoy which he had made on his best grazing land, and other extravagances not easy for a daughter to specify, he left little wealth behind him. He had to keep hard at his writing. He wrote his books sitting at a table in the dining-room, from which he could see the lawn and his favourite bull Ben Brace grazing there. And he wrote so small a hand that the copyist had to stick a pin in to mark the place. Also he was wonderfully neat in his dress, and would have nothing but white china on his breakfast table, and kept sixteen clocks and liked to hear them all strike at once. His children called him ‘Baby’, though he was a man of violent passions, dangerous to thwart, and often ‘very grave’ at home.
‘These trifles put on paper look sadly insignificant’, she concludes. Yet as she rambles on they do in their butterfly way bring back the summer morning and the dying Captain after all his voyages stretched on the mattress in the boudoir room dictating those last words to his daughter about love and roses. ‘The more fancifully they were tied together the better he liked it’, she says. Indeed, after his death a bunch of pinks and roses was ‘found pressed between his body and the mattress’.
A Note on the Text
Virginia Woolf published selections of her critical essays, in revised form, in The Common Reader (first series 1925, second series 1932). The texts of all the essays gathered in this volume appear as they did on first publication in the TLS, barring the silent correction of typos and minor infelicities of punctuation. Their original publication dates are:
‘Charlotte Brontë’, April 13, 1916
‘Hours in a Library’, November 30, 1916
‘George Eliot’, November 20, 1919
‘The Letters of Henry James’, April 8, 1920
‘John Evelyn’, October 28, 1920
‘On Re-reading Novels’, July 20, 1922
‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’, April 5, 1923
‘Montaigne’, January 31, 1924
‘Joseph Conrad’, August 14, 1924
‘Notes on an Elizabethan Play’, March 5, 1925
‘Thomas Hardy’s Novels’, January 19, 1928
‘Fanny Burney’s Half-Sister’, August 29, 1930
‘Aurora Leigh’, July 2, 1931
‘The Captain’s Death Bed’, September 26, 1935
About the Author
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) is one of the world’s great writers. Born Virginia Stephen, she became a professional writer in 1904, and began writing for the TLS a few years later. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf; they founded the Hogarth Press five years later. Her novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), but she is also celebrated as the author of short stories and non-fiction, including A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).
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