Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  It is true that she was a lady’s-maid, and that Lady Dorothy Nevill, had she encountered her on the stairs, would have made an opportunity to point out that that is a very different thing from being a lady.

  My mother never failed to point out the folly of workwomen, shop-girls, and the like calling each other “Ladies”. All this sort of thing seemed to her to be mere vulgar humbug, and she did not fail to say so.

  What can we point out to Lady Dorothy Nevill? that with all her advantages she had never learned to spell? that she could not write a grammatical sentence? that she lived for eighty-seven years and did nothing but put food into her mouth and slip gold through her fingers? But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady’s-maid that high birth is a form of congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

  Moreover, the Walpoles are not ducal. Horace Walpole’s mother was a Miss Shorter; there is no mention of Lady Dorothy’s mother in the present volume, but her great-grandmother was Mrs. Oldfield the actress, and, to her credit, Lady Dorothy was “exceedingly proud” of the fact. Thus she was not an extreme case of aristocracy; she was confined rather to a bird-cage than to an asylum; through the bars she saw people walking at large, and once or twice she made a surprising little flight into the open air. A gayer, brighter, more vivacious specimen of the caged tribe can seldom have existed; so that one is forced at times to ask whether what we call living in a cage is not the fate that wise people, condemned to a single sojourn upon earth, would choose. To be at large is, after all, to be shut out; to waste most of life in accumulating the money to buy and the time to enjoy what the Lady Dorothys find clustering and glowing about their cradles when their eyes first open — as hers opened in the year 1826 at number eleven Berkeley Square. Horace Walpole had lived there. Her father, Lord Orford, gambled it away in one night’s play the year after she was born. But Wolterton Hall, in Norfolk, was full of carving and mantelpieces, and there were rare trees in the garden, and a large and famous lawn. No novelist could wish a more charming and even romantic environment in which to set the story of two little girls, growing up, wild yet secluded, reading Bossuet with their governess, and riding out on their ponies at the head of the tenantry on polling day. Nor can one deny that to have had the author of the following letter among one’s ancestors would have been a source of inordinate pride. It is addressed to the Norwich Bible Society, which had invited Lord Orford to become its president:

  I have long been addicted to the Gaming Table. I have lately taken to the Turf. I fear I frequently blaspheme. But I have never distributed religious tracts. All this was known to you and your Society. Notwithstanding which you think me a fit person to be your president. God forgive your hypocrisy.

  It was not Lord Orford who was in the cage on that occasion. But, alas! Lord Orford owned another country house, Ilsington Hall, in Dorsetshire, and there Lady Dorothy came in contact first with the mulberry tree, and later with Mr. Thomas Hardy; and we get our first glimpse of the bars. We do not pretend to the ghost of an enthusiasm for Sailors’ Homes in general; no doubt mulberry trees are much nicer to look at; but when it comes to calling people “vandals” who cut them down to build houses, and to having footstools made from the wood, and to carving upon those footstools inscriptions which testify that “often and often has King George III taken his tea” under this very footstool, then we want to protest— “Surely you must mean Shakespeare?” But as her subsequent remarks upon Mr. Hardy tend to prove, Lady Dorothy does not mean Shakespeare. She “warmly appreciated” the works of Mr. Hardy, and used to complain “that the county families were too stupid to appreciate his genius at its proper worth”. George the Third drinking his tea; the county families failing to appreciate Mr. Hardy: Lady Dorothy is undoubtedly behind the bars.

  Yet no story more aptly illustrates the barrier which we perceive hereafter between Lady Dorothy and the outer world than the story of Charles Darwin and the blankets. Among her recreations Lady Dorothy made a hobby of growing orchids, and thus got into touch with “the great naturalist”. Mrs. Darwin, inviting her to stay with them, remarked with apparent simplicity that she had heard that people who moved much in London society were fond of being tossed in blankets. “I am afraid”, her letter ended, “we should hardly be able to offer you anything of that sort.” Whether in fact the necessity of tossing Lady Dorothy in a blanket had been seriously debated at Down, or whether Mrs. Darwin obscurely hinted her sense of some incongruity between her husband and the lady of the orchids, we do not know. But we have a sense of two worlds in collision; and it is not the Darwin world that emerges in fragments. More and more do we see Lady Dorothy hopping from perch to perch, picking at groundsel here, and at hempseed there, indulging in exquisite trills and roulades, and sharpening her beak against a lump of sugar in a large, airy, magnificently equipped bird-cage. The cage was full of charming diversions. Now she illuminated leaves which had been macerated to skeletons; now she interested herself in improving the breed of donkeys; next she took up the cause of silkworms, almost threatened Australia with a plague of them, and “actually succeeded in obtaining enough silk to make a dress”; again she was the first to discover that wood, gone green with decay, can be made, at some expense, into little boxes; she went into the question of funguses and established the virtues of the neglected English truffle; she imported rare fish; spent a great deal of energy in vainly trying to induce storks and Cornish choughs to breed in Sussex; painted on china; emblazoned heraldic arms, and, attaching whistles to the tails of pigeons, produced wonderful effects “as of an aerial orchestra” when they flew through the air. To the Duchess of Somerset belongs the credit of investigating the proper way of cooking guinea-pigs; but Lady Dorothy was one of the first to serve up a dish of these little creatures at luncheon in Charles Street.

  But all the time the door of the cage was ajar. Raids were made into what Mr. Nevill calls “Upper Bohemia”; from which Lady Dorothy returned with “authors, journalists, actors, actresses, or other agreeable and amusing people”. Lady Dorothy’s judgement is proved by the fact that they seldom misbehaved, and some indeed became quite domesticated, and wrote her “very gracefully turned letters”. But once or twice she made a flight beyond the cage herself. “These horrors”, she said, alluding to the middle class, “are so clever and we are so stupid; but then look how well they are educated, while our children learn nothing but how to spend their parents’ money!” She brooded over the fact. Something was going wrong. She was too shrewd and too honest not to lay the blame partly at least upon her own class. “I suppose she can just about read?” she said of one lady calling herself cultured; and of another, “She is indeed curious and well adapted to open bazaars”. But to our thinking her most remarkable flight took place a year or two before her death, in the Victoria and Albert Museum:

  I do so agree with you, she wrote — though I ought not to say so — that the upper class are very — I don’t know what to say — but they seem to take no interest in anything — but golfing, etc. One day I was at the Victoria and Albert Museum, just a few sprinkles of legs, for I am sure they looked too frivolous to have bodies and souls attached to them — but what softened the sight to my eyes were 2 little Japs poring over each article with a handbook . . . our bodies, of course, giggling and looking at nothing. Still worse, not one soul of the higher class visible: in fact I never heard of any one of them knowing of the place, and for this we are spending millions — it is all too painful.

  It was all too painful, and the guillotine, she felt, loomed ahead. That catastrophe she was spared, for who could wish to cut off the head of a pigeon with a whistle attached to its tail? But if the whole bird-cage had been overturned and the aerial orchestra sent screaming and fluttering through the air, we can be s
ure, as Mr. Joseph Chamberlain told her, that her conduct would have been “a credit to the British aristocracy”.

  IV

  ARCHBISHOP THOMSON

  The origin of Archbishop Thomson was obscure. His great-uncle “may reasonably be supposed” to have been “an ornament to the middle classes”. His aunt married a gentleman who was present at the murder of Gustavus III of Sweden; and his father met his death at the age of eighty-seven by treading on a cat in the early hours of the morning. The physical vigour which this anecdote implies was combined in the Archbishop with powers of intellect which promised success in whatever profession he adopted. At Oxford it seemed likely that he would devote himself to philosophy or science. While reading for his degree he found time to write the Outlines of the Laws of Thought, which “immediately became a recognised text-book for Oxford classes”. But though poetry, philosophy, medicine, and the law held out their temptations he put such thoughts aside, or never entertained them, having made up his mind from the first to dedicate himself to Divine service. The measure of his success in the more exalted sphere is attested by the following facts: Ordained deacon in 1842 at the age of twenty-three, he became Dean and Bursar of Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1845; Provost in 1855, Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol in 1861, and Archbishop of York in 1862. Thus at the early age of forty-three he stood next in rank to the Archbishop of Canterbury himself; and it was commonly though erroneously expected that he would in the end attain to that dignity also.

  It is a matter of temperament and belief whether you read this list with respect or with boredom; whether you look upon an archbishop’s hat as a crown or as an extinguisher. If, like the present reviewer, you are ready to hold the simple faith that the outer order corresponds to the inner — that a vicar is a good man, a canon a better man, and an archbishop the best man of all — you will find the study of the Archbishop’s life one of extreme fascination. He has turned aside from poetry and philosophy and law, and specialised in virtue. He has dedicated himself to the service of the Divine. His spiritual proficiency has been such that he has developed from deacon to dean, from dean to bishop, and from bishop to archbishop in the short space of twenty years. As there are only two archbishops in the whole of England the inference seems to be that he is the second best man in England; his hat is the proof of it. Even in a material sense his hat was one of the largest; it was larger than Mr. Gladstone’s; larger than Thackeray’s; larger than Dickens’s; it was in fact, so his hatter told him and we are inclined to agree, an “eight full.” Yet he began much as other men begin. He struck an undergraduate in a fit of temper and was rusticated; he wrote a text-book of logic and rowed a very good oar. But after he was ordained his diary shows that the specialising process had begun. He thought a great deal about the state of his soul; about “the monstrous tumour of Simony”; about Church reform; and about the meaning of Christianity. “Self-renunciation”, he came to the conclusion, “is the foundation of Christian Religion and Christian Morals. . . . The highest wisdom is that which can enforce and cultivate this self-renunciation. Hence (against Cousin) I hold that religion is higher far than philosophy.” There is one mention of chemists and capillarity, but science and philosophy were, even at this early stage, in danger of being crowded out. Soon the diary takes a different tone. “He seems”, says his biographer, “to have had no time for committing his thoughts to paper”; he records his engagements only, and he dines out almost every night. Sir Henry Taylor, whom he met at one of these parties, described him as “simple, solid, good, capable, and pleasing”. Perhaps it was his solidity combined with his “eminently scientific” turn of mind, his blandness as well as his bulk, that impressed some of these great people with the confidence that in him the Church had found a very necessary champion. His “brawny logic” and massive frame seemed to fit him to grapple with a task that taxed the strongest — how, that is, to reconcile the scientific discoveries of the age with religion, and even prove them “some of its strongest witnesses for the truth”. If any one could do this Thomson could; his practical ability, unhampered by any mystical or dreaming tendency, had already proved itself in the conduct of the business affairs of his College. From Bishop he became almost instantly Archbishop; and in becoming Archbishop he became Primate of England, Governor of the Charterhouse and King’s College, London, patron of one hundred and twenty livings, with the Archdeaconries of York, Cleveland, and the East Riding in his gift, and the Canonries and Prebends in York Minster. Bishopthorpe itself was an enormous palace; he was immediately faced by the “knotty question” of whether to buy all the furniture— “much of it only poor stuff” — or to furnish the house anew, which would cost a fortune. Moreover there were seven cows in the park; but these, perhaps, were counterbalanced by nine children in the nursery. Then the Prince and Princess of Wales came to stay, and the Archbishop took upon himself the task of furnishing the Princess’s apartments. He went up to London and bought eight Moderator lamps, two Spanish figures holding candles, and reminded himself of the necessity of buying “soap for Princess”. But meanwhile far more serious matters claimed every ounce of his strength. Already he had been exhorted to “wield the sure lance of your brawny logic against the sophistries” of the authors of Essays and Reviews, and had responded in a work called Aids to Faith. Near at hand the town of Sheffield, with its large population of imperfectly educated working men, was a breeding ground of scepticism and discontent. The Archbishop made it his special charge. He was fond of watching the rolling of armour plate, and constantly addressed meetings of working men. “Now what are these Nihilisms, and Socialisms, and Communisms, and Fenianisms, and Secret Societies — what do they all mean?” he asked. “Selfishness,” he replied, and “assertion of one class against the rest is at the bottom of them all”. There was a law of nature, he said, by which wages went up and wages went down. “You must accept the declivity as well as the ascent. . . . If we could only get people to learn that, then things would go on a great deal better and smoother.” And the working men of Sheffield responded by giving him five hundred pieces of cutlery mounted in sterling silver. But presumably there were a certain number of knives among the spoons and the forks.

  Bishop Colenso, however, was far more troublesome than the working men of Sheffield; and the Ritualists vexed him so persistently that even his vast strength felt the strain. The questions which were referred to him for decision were peculiarly fitted to tease and annoy even a man of his bulk and his blandness. Shall a drunkard found dead in a ditch, or a burglar who has fallen through a skylight, be given the benefit of the Burial Service? he was asked. The question of lighted candles was “most difficult”; the wearing of coloured stoles and the administration of the mixed chalice taxed him considerably; and finally there was the Rev. John Purchas, who, dressed in cope, alb, biretta and stole “cross-wise”, lit candles and extinguished them “for no special reason”; filled a vessel with black powder and rubbed it into the foreheads of his congregation; and hung over the Holy Table “a figure, image, or stuffed skin of a dove, in a flying attitude”. The Archbishop’s temper, usually so positive and imperturbable, was gravely ruffled, “Will there ever come a time when it will be thought a crime to have striven to keep the Church of England as representing the common sense of the Nation?” he asked. “I suppose it may, but I shall not see it. I have gone through a good deal, but I do not repent of having done my best.” If, for a moment, the Archbishop himself could ask such a question, we must confess to a state of complete bewilderment. What has become of our superlatively good man? He is harassed and cumbered; spends his time settling questions about stuffed pigeons and coloured petticoats; writes over eighty letters before breakfast sometimes; scarcely has time to run over to Paris and buy his daughter a bonnet; and in the end has to ask himself whether one of these days his conduct will not be considered a crime.

  Was it a crime? And if so, was it his fault? Did he not start out in the belief that Christianity had something to do with renunciati
on and was not entirely a matter of common sense? If honours and obligations, pomps and possessions, accumulated and encrusted him, how, being an Archbishop, could he refuse to accept them? Princesses must have their soap; palaces must have their furniture; children must have their cows. And, pathetic though it seems, he never completely lost his interest in science. He wore a pedometer; he was one of the first to use a camera; he believed in the future of the typewriter; and in his last years he tried to mend a broken clock. He was a delightful father too; he wrote witty, terse, sensible letters; his good stories were much to the point; and he died in harness. Certainly he was a very able man, but if we insist upon goodness — is it easy, is it possible, for a good man to be an Archbishop?

  THE PATRON AND THE CROCUS

  Young men and women beginning to write are generally given the plausible but utterly impracticable advice to write what they have to write as shortly as possible, as clearly as possible, and without other thought in their minds except to say exactly what is in them. Nobody ever adds on these occasions the one thing needful: “And be sure you choose your patron wisely”, though that is the gist of the whole matter. For a book is always written for somebody to read, and, since the patron is not merely the paymaster, but also in a very subtle and insidious way the instigator and inspirer of what is written, it is of the utmost importance that he should be a desirable man.