To The Lighthouse

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by Virginia Woolf

who wondered why such concealments should be necessary; why he needed

  always praise; why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life;

  how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time.

  Teaching and preaching is beyond human power, Lily suspected. (She was

  putting away her things.) If you are exalted you must somehow come a

  cropper. Mrs Ramsay gave him what he asked too easily. Then the change

  must be so upsetting, Lily said. He comes in from his books and finds us

  all playing games and talking nonsense. Imagine what a change from the

  things he thinks about, she said.

  He was bearing down upon them. Now he stopped dead and stood looking in

  silence at the sea. Now he had turned away again.

  9

  Yes, Mr Bankes said, watching him go. It was a thousand pities. (Lily

  had said something about his frightening her--he changed from one mood to

  another so suddenly.) Yes, said Mr Bankes, it was a thousand pities that

  Ramsay could not behave a little more like other people. (For he liked

  Lily Briscoe; he could discuss Ramsay with her quite openly.) It was for

  that reason, he said, that the young don't read Carlyle. A crusty old

  grumbler who lost his temper if the porridge was cold, why should he

  preach to us? was what Mr Bankes understood that young people said

  nowadays. It was a thousand pities if you thought, as he did, that

  Carlyle was one of the great teachers of mankind. Lily was ashamed to say

  that she had not read Carlyle since she was at school. But in her opinion

  one liked Mr Ramsay all the better for thinking that if his little finger

  ached the whole world must come to an end. It was not THAT she minded.

  For who could be deceived by him? He asked you quite openly to flatter

  him, to admire him, his little dodges deceived nobody. What she disliked

  was his narrowness, his blindness, she said, looking after him.

  "A bit of a hypocrite?" Mr Bankes suggested, looking too at Mr Ramsay's

  back, for was he not thinking of his friendship, and of Cam refusing to

  give him a flower, and of all those boys and girls, and his own house,

  full of comfort, but, since his wife's death, quiet rather? Of course,

  he had his work... All the same, he rather wished Lily to agree that

  Ramsay was, as he said, "a bit of a hypocrite."

  Lily Briscoe went on putting away her brushes, looking up, looking down.

  Looking up, there he was--Mr Ramsay--advancing towards them, swinging,

  careless, oblivious, remote. A bit of a hypocrite? she repeated. Oh,

  no--the most sincere of men, the truest (here he was), the best; but,

  looking down, she thought, he is absorbed in himself, he is tyrannical,

  he is unjust; and kept looking down, purposely, for only so could she keep

  steady, staying with the Ramsays. Directly one looked up and saw them,

  what she called "being in love" flooded them. They became part of that

  unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen

  through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through

  them. And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr

  Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs Ramsay sitting with James in

  the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being

  made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became

  curled and whole like a wave which bore one up and threw one down with

  it, there, with a dash on the beach.

  Mr Bankes expected her to answer. And she was about to say something

  criticizing Mrs Ramsay, how she was alarming, too, in her way,

  high-handed, or words to that effect, when Mr Bankes made it entirely

  unnecessary for her to speak by his rapture. For such it was considering

  his age, turned sixty, and his cleanliness and his impersonality, and the

  white scientific coat which seemed to clothe him. For him to gaze as Lily

  saw him gazing at Mrs Ramsay was a rapture, equivalent, Lily felt, to the

  loves of dozens of young men (and perhaps Mrs Ramsay had never excited the

  loves of dozens of young men). It was love, she thought, pretending to

  move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to

  clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their

  symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and

  become part of the human gain. So it was indeed. The world by all means

  should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased

  him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him

  precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem, so that

  he rested in contemplation of it, and felt, as he felt when he had proved

  something absolute about the digestive system of plants, that barbarity

  was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued.

  Such a rapture--for by what other name could one call it?--made Lily

  Briscoe forget entirely what she had been about to say. It was nothing of

  importance; something about Mrs Ramsay. It paled beside this "rapture,"

  this silent stare, for which she felt intense gratitude; for nothing so

  solaced her, eased her of the perplexity of life, and miraculously raised

  its burdens, as this sublime power, this heavenly gift, and one would no

  more disturb it, while it lasted, than break up the shaft of sunlight,

  lying level across the floor.

  That people should love like this, that Mr Bankes should feel this for

  Mrs Ramsey (she glanced at him musing) was helpful, was exalting. She

  wiped one brush after another upon a piece of old rag, menially, on

  purpose. She took shelter from the reverence which covered all women; she

  felt herself praised. Let him gaze; she would steal a look at her

  picture.

  She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She

  could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been

  thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would

  have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour

  burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly's wing lying

  upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks

  scrawled upon the canvas remained. And it would never be seen; never be

  hung even, and there was Mr Tansley whispering in her ear, "Women can't

  paint, women can't write ..."

  She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs Ramsay. She

  did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something

  critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness.

  Looking along the level of Mr Bankes's glance at her, she thought that no

  woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could

  only seek shelter under the shade which Mr Bankes extended over them both.

  Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that

  she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the

  best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw

  there. But why different, and how different? she asked herself, scraping

  her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like

  clods with no life in them now,
yet she vowed, she would inspire them,

  force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did she differ?

  What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a

  crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its

  twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an

  arrow for directness. She was willful; she was commanding (of course,

  Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am

  much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She

  opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune

  of Mrs Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on

  one's bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her

  beauty was always that--hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it

  might be--Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr Carmichael snuffling and

  sniffing; Mr Bankes saying, "The vegetable salts are lost." All this she

  would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the

  window, in pretence that she must go,--it was dawn, she could see the sun

  rising,--half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing,

  insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole

  world whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs Ramsay cared not a

  fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs Ramsay had

  had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to

  her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she

  lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the

  best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs Ramsay

  listening; shaded lights and regular breathing.

  Oh, but, Lily would say, there was her father; her home; even, had she

  dared to say it, her painting. But all this seemed so little, so

  virginal, against the other. Yet, as the night wore on, and white lights

  parted the curtains, and even now and then some bird chirped in the

  garden, gathering a desperate courage she would urge her own exemption

  from the universal law; plead for it; she liked to be alone; she liked to

  be herself; she was not made for that; and so have to meet a serious stare

  from eyes of unparalleled depth, and confront Mrs Ramsay's simple

  certainty (and she was childlike now) that her dear Lily, her little

  Brisk, was a fool. Then, she remembered, she had laid her head on Mrs

  Ramsay's lap and laughed and laughed and laughed, laughed almost

  hysterically at the thought of Mrs Ramsay presiding with immutable calm

  over destinies which she completely failed to understand. There she sat,

  simple, serious. She had recovered her sense of her now--this was the

  glove's twisted finger. But into what sanctuary had one penetrated?

  Lily Briscoe had looked up at last, and there was Mrs Ramsay, unwitting

  entirely what had caused her laughter, still presiding, but now with every

  trace of wilfulness abolished, and in its stead, something clear as the

  space which the clouds at last uncover--the little space of sky which

  sleeps beside the moon.

  Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of

  beauty, so that all one's perceptions, half way to truth, were tangled in

  a golden mesh? or did she lock up within her some secret which certainly

  Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all?

  Every one could not be as helter skelter, hand to mouth as she was. But

  if they knew, could they tell one what they knew? Sitting on the floor

  with her arms round Mrs Ramsay's knees, close as she could get, smiling

  to think that Mrs Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she

  imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was,

  physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of

  kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them

  out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly,

  never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which

  one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming,

  like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the

  object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling

  in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? Could loving,

  as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge

  but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that

  could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which

  is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay's knee.

  Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing! as she leant her head against

  Mrs Ramsay's knee. And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored up

  in Mrs Ramsay's heart. How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one

  thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a

  bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch

  or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air

  over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with

  their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people.

  Mrs Ramsay rose. Lily rose. Mrs Ramsay went. For days there hung about

  her, as after a dream some subtle change is felt in the person one has

  dreamt of, more vividly than anything she said, the sound of murmuring

  and, as she sat in the wicker arm-chair in the drawing-room window she

  wore, to Lily's eyes, an august shape; the shape of a dome.

  This ray passed level with Mr Bankes's ray straight to Mrs Ramsay sitting

  reading there with James at her knee. But now while she still looked,

  Mr Bankes had done. He had put on his spectacles. He had stepped back.

  He had raised his hand. He had slightly narrowed his clear blue eyes,

  when Lily, rousing herself, saw what he was at, and winced like a dog who

  sees a hand raised to strike it. She would have snatched her picture off

  the easel, but she said to herself, One must. She braced herself to stand

  the awful trial of some one looking at her picture. One must, she said,

  one must. And if it must be seen, Mr Bankes was less alarming than

  another. But that any other eyes should see the residue of her

  thirty-three years, the deposit of each day's living mixed with something

  more secret than she had ever spoken or shown in the course of all those

  days was an agony. At the same time it was immensely exciting.

  Nothing could be cooler and quieter. Taking out a pen-knife, Mr Bankes

  tapped the canvas with the bone handle. What did she wish to indicate by

  the triangular purple shape, "just there"? he asked.

  It was Mrs Ramsay reading to James, she said. She knew his objection--

  that no one could tell it for a human shape. But she had made no attempt

  at likeness, she said. For what reason had she introduced them then? he

  asked. Why indeed?--except that if there, in that corner, it was bright,

  here, in this, she felt the need of darkness. Simple, obvious,

  commonplace, as it was, Mr Bankes was interested. Mother and child

  th
en--objects of universal veneration, and in this case the mother was

  famous for her beauty--might be reduced, he pondered, to a purple shadow

  without irreverence.

  But the picture was not of them, she said. Or, not in his sense. There

  were other senses too in which one might reverence them. By a shadow here

  and a light there, for instance. Her tribute took that form if, as she

  vaguely supposed, a picture must be a tribute. A mother and child might

  be reduced to a shadow without irreverence. A light here required a

  shadow there. He considered. He was interested. He took it

  scientifically in complete good faith. The truth was that all his

  prejudices were on the other side, he explained. The largest picture in

  his drawing-room, which painters had praised, and valued at a higher price

  than he had given for it, was of the cherry trees in blossom on the banks

  of the Kennet. He had spent his honeymoon on the banks of the Kennet, he

  said. Lily must come and see that picture, he said. But now--he turned,

  with his glasses raised to the scientific examination of her canvas. The

  question being one of the relations of masses, of lights and shadows,

  which, to be honest, he had never considered before, he would like to have

  it explained--what then did she wish to make of it? And he indicated the

  scene before them. She looked. She could not show him what she wished to

  make of it, could not see it even herself, without a brush in her hand.

  She took up once more her old painting position with the dim eyes and the

  absent-minded manner, subduing all her impressions as a woman to something

  much more general; becoming once more under the power of that vision which

  she had seen clearly once and must now grope for among hedges and houses

  and mothers and children--her picture. It was a question, she remembered,

  how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left. She

  might do it by bringing the line of the branch across so; or break the

  vacancy in the foreground by an object (James perhaps) so. But the danger

  was that by doing that the unity of the whole might be broken. She

  stopped; she did not want to bore him; she took the canvas lightly off the

  easel.

  But it had been seen; it had been taken from her. This man had shared

  with her something profoundly intimate. And, thanking Mr Ramsay for it

  and Mrs Ramsay for it and the hour and the place, crediting the world with

  a power which she had not suspected--that one could walk away down that

  long gallery not alone any more but arm in arm with somebody--the

  strangest feeling in the world, and the most exhilarating--she nicked

  the catch of her paint-box to, more firmly than was necessary, and the

  nick seemed to surround in a circle forever the paint-box, the lawn,

  Mr Bankes, and that wild villain, Cam, dashing past.

  10

  For Cam grazed the easel by an inch; she would not stop for Mr Bankes

  and Lily Briscoe; though Mr Bankes, who would have liked a daughter of

  his own, held out his hand; she would not stop for her father, whom she

  grazed also by an inch; nor for her mother, who called "Cam! I want

  you a moment!" as she dashed past. She was off like a bird, bullet, or

  arrow, impelled by what desire, shot by whom, at what directed, who

  could say? What, what? Mrs Ramsay pondered, watching her. It might

  be a vision--of a shell, of a wheelbarrow, of a fairy kingdom on the

  far side of the hedge; or it might be the glory of speed; no one knew.

  But when Mrs Ramsay called "Cam!" a second time, the projectile dropped

  in mid career, and Cam came lagging back, pulling a leaf by the way, to

  her mother.

  What was she dreaming about, Mrs Ramsay wondered, seeing her engrossed,

  as she stood there, with some thought of her own, so that she had to

  repeat the message twice--ask Mildred if Andrew, Miss Doyle, and Mr

 

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