Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  And then we wake. None of the transitions in Alice in Wonderland is quite so queer. For we wake to find — is it the Rev. C. L. Dodgson? Is it Lewis Carroll? Or is it both combined? This conglomerate object intends to produce an extra-Bowdlerised edition of Shakespeare for the use of British maidens; implores them to think of death when they go to the play; and always, always to realise that “the true object of life is the development of character....” Is there, then, even in 1293 pages, any such thing as “completeness”?

  Edmund Gosse

  WHEN famous writers die it is remarkable how frequently they are credited with one particular virtue — the virtue of kindness to the young and obscure. Every newspaper has lately contained that eulogy upon Arnold Bennett. And here is the same tribute paid to another writer who differed in every possible way from Arnold Bennett — Sir Edmund Gosse. He too, it is said, was generous to the young and obscure. Of Bennett it was certainly, although on some occasions rather obliquely, true. He might, that is to say, have formed a very low opinion of a book; he might have expressed that opinion as his habit was, blundy and emphatically in print; and yet if he met the writer his sincerity, his concern, his assumption that both cared equally for the craft of letters made it perfecdy easy for that unfortunate person to say, “It is all true, and more than true, Mr. Bennett; but if you hate my books, I can’t tell you how completely I loathe yours” — after which a frank discussion of fiction and its nature was possible; and a very obscure novelist was left with the feeling that a very famous one was indeed the kindest of men.

  But what would have happened if, taking advantage of Sir Edmund’s generosity, and assuming a common respect for letters, one had said, “But you can’t hate my books, Sir Edmund, more than I hate yours”? Instant annihilation would have been the only and the happiest solution of the situation. But nobody who had ever seen Sir Edmund in the flesh would have risked such folly. Bristling and brilliant, formal but uneasy, he radiated even from a distance all the susceptibilities that make young writers draw in their horns. Generous was not the adjective that sprang to the lips at the sight of him, nor is it one that frequently occurs on reading the life of him by Mr. Charteris. He could be as touchy as a housemaid and as suspicious as a governess. He could smell out an offence where none was meant, and hoard a grievance for years. He could quarrel permanently because a lamp wick was snuffed out too vigorously at a table under his nose. Hostile reviews threw him into paroxysms of rage and despair. His letters are full of phrases like “Mr. Clement Shorter, in terms of unexampled insolence, speaks of me as ‘the so-called critic.’... If that insolent notice in The Times is true... it is better I should know it.... I feel I shall never have the heart to write another sentence.” It seems possible that one severe review by Churton Collins gave him more pain than he suffered from any private or public sorrow in the course of seventy-nine years. All this must have made him the most prickly of companions, and the young must have been possessed of greater tact than the young usually possess to reach the kindness that no doubt lay hid behind the thorns. For the great merit of the present biography is that it does not attempt to conceal the fact that Sir Edmund was a complex character composed of many different strains. Plain virtue was not a sure passport to his affection. He could disregard genius and ignore merit if they trod too clumsily upon his toes. On the other hand the House of Lords possessed a distinct glamour for him; the rigours of high society delighted him; and to see the words “Marlborough Club” at the head of his notepaper did, it seems, shed a certain lustre upon the page.

  But these foibles, amusing and annoying as they are, become at once more interesting and less irritating when we learn that there lay behind them a very good cause — his education, his childhood. “Far more than might be supposed of his conduct in life,” writes Mr. Charteris, “was due to unconscious protest against... the things which darkened his childhood.” Readers of Father and Son know well what those things were — the narrowness, the ugliness of his upbringing; the almost insane religious mania of his father; the absence from his home of culture, beauty, urbanity, graciousness — in fact, of all those elements in life to which Edmund Gosse turned as instinctively and needed as profoundly as a flower the sun. What could be more natural than that the flower, once transplanted, should turn, almost violently, the other way, should climb too high, should twine too lavishly, should — to drop these metaphors — order clothes in Savile Row and emerge from behind the form of Dr. Fog uttering what appear at this distance of time rather excessive praises of the now little known Danish poet, Paludin Miiller? — a surly poet who objected to visitors. But young Edmund Gosse triumphed. “Slowly, the poet murmured, ‘You flatter me too much, but thank you.’ The most stubborn of all the citadels had capitulated.”

  Few people can have been pitchforked, as Mr. Charteris calls it, into the world by a more violent propulsion than that which Gosse was given by the bleakness of his upbringing. It was no wonder that he overshot the mark, never quite got his equilibrium at parties which he loved, required to know the maiden names of married guests, and observed formalities punctiliously which are taken as a matter of course by those who have never lived in dread of the instant coming of the Lord, and have ordered their clothes for generations in Savile Row. But the impulse itself was generous, and the tokens of kindling and expansion more admirable than ridiculous. The “sensual sufficiency in life” delighted one who had been starved of it. Happiness formed the staple of what he would certainly not have called his creed. “To feel so saturated with the love of things,” to enjoy life and “suck it as a wasp drains a peach,” to “roll the moments on one’s tongue and keep the flavour of them”; above all, to cherish friendship and exalt the ideals of friendship — such were the enjoyments that his nature, long repressed, stretched out to, generously, naturally, spontaneously. And yet...

  Those who are acquainted with Sir Edmund’s lively portraits know what demure but devastating qualifications he was able to insinuate after those two small words. “He possessed the truth and answered to the heavenly calling,” he wrote of Andrew Lang, “and yet...” Such expansion was natural, was right, was creditable, and yet, we echo, how much better Gosse would have been as a writer, how much more important he would have been as a man if only he had given freer rein to his impulses, if only his pagan and sensual joy had not been dashed by perpetual caution! The peculiarity which Mr. Charteris notes in his walk— “curiously suggestive at once of eagerness and caution” — runs through his life and limits his intelligence. He hints, he qualifies, he insinuates, he suggests, but he never speaks out, for all the world as if some austere Plymouth Brother were lying in wait to make him do penance for his audacity. Yet it seems possible, given the nature of his gifts, that if only he had possessed greater boldness, if only he had pushed his curiosity further, had incurred wrath instead of irritation, and complete confusion instead of some petty social tribulation, he might have rivalled the great Boswell himself. When we read how young Edmund Gosse insinuated himself under cover of Dr. Fog into the presence of an irascible poet and won the day by the adroitness of his flattery, we are reminded of the methods of Boswell in pursuit of Paoli or Voltaire or Johnson. Both men were irresistibly attracted by genius. Both had “a medium-like” power of drawing other people’s confidences into the open. Both were astonishingly adept at reporting the talk and describing the appearance of their friends. But where Boswell is drawn headlong by the momentum of his hero and his own veneration beyond discretion, beyond vanity, beyond his fear of what people will say, down into the depths, Gosse is kept by his respect for decorum, by his decency and his timidity dipping and ducking, fingering and faltering upon the surface. Thus where Boswell left us that profound and moving masterpiece, the Life of Johnson, Gosse left us Father and Son, a classic doubdess, as Mr. Charteris claims, certainly a most original and entertaining book, but how little and light, how dapper and superficial Gosse’s portraits appear if we compare them with the portraits left by Boswell hims
elf! Fear seems always to dog his footsteps. He dips his fingers with astonishing agility and speed into character, but if he finds something hot or gets hold of something large, he drops it and withdraws with the agility of a scalded cat. Thus we never know his sitters intimately; we never plunge into the depths of their minds or into the more profound regions of their hearts. But we know all that can be known by someone who is always a little afraid of being found out.

  But if Gosse’s masterpiece and his portraits suffer from his innate regard for caution, much of the fault must be laid upon his age. Even the most superficial student of letters must be aware that in the nineteenth century literature had become, for one reason or another, a profession rather than a vocation, a married woman rather than a lady of easy virtue. It had its organisation, its functions, its emoluments, and a host of people, not primarily writers, were attached to its service. Among them Gosse, of course, was one of the most eminent... No public dinner where literature was involved,” writes Mr. Charteris, “was complete without Gosse to propose or to return thanks for the cause.” He welcomed strangers, addressed bodies, celebrated centenaries, presented prizes, and represented letters on all occasions and with the highest delight in the function. Then, again, some intellectual curiosity had risen in the nineties and ardent if uninstructed ladies wished to be enlightened. Here again Gosse was invaluable. By an odd irony, while Churton Collins, his deadly foe, was lecturing in St. James’s Square, Gosse was serving up Matthew Arnold to “some of the smartest women in London” in Bruton Street. After this, says Mr. Charteris, he became “a much more frequent guest in Mayfair” and his appetite for social life was whetted. Nothing would be more foolish than to sneer at a natural love of ceremony or a natural respect for the aristocracy, and yet it seems possible that this concern with the ritual of literature, this scrupulous observance of the rites of society encouraged Edmund Gosse in his growing decorum. Friendship had been his ideal; nobody can question the warmth of his youthful affection for Hamo Thornycroft; and yet when one of his friends, Robert Ross, was involved in a famous scandal he could write “I miss your charming company in which I have always delighted... I would say to you — be calm, be reasonable, turn for consolation to the infinite resources of literature.... Write to me when you feel inclined, and however busy I am I will write in reply, and in a more happy season you must come back and be truly welcomed in this house.” Is that the voice of friendship, disinterested, fearless, sincere, or the voice of an uneasy man of letters, who is terribly afraid that dear Lady C. will not ask him to dine, or that divine being the Countess of D. will not invite him for the week-end if they suspect him of harbouring Robert Ross, the friend of Oscar Wilde? And later his decorum seems to have drawn a film over his wonted perspicacity as a critic. M. Gide, for example, thought it well to mention certain facts openly in the third volume of his memoirs. “Was it wise? Was it necessary? Is it useful?” Sir Edmund cried, in “painful perplexity.” And he was terribly shocked by an incident in E. M. Forster’s Howards End. “I should like to know,” he wrote to Mr. Marsh, “what you think of the new craze for introducing into fiction the high-born maiden who has had a baby?... I do not know how an Englishman can calmly write of such a disgusting thing, with such sangfroid.... I cannot help hoping that you may be induced to say something that will redeem him.” But when Sir Edmund goes on to say that no high-bred maiden has ever had a baby illegitimately in a French novel one can only suppose that he was thinking, not unnaturally, of the House of Lords.

  But if Gosse was no Boswell and still less a St. Francis, he was able to fill a place and create a legend, and perhaps we have no right to demand more. To be oneself is, after all, an achievement of some rarity, and Gosse, as everybody must agree, achieved it, both in literature and in life. As a writer he expressed himself in book after book of history, of biography, of criticism. For over fifty years he was busily concerned, as he put it, with “the literary character and the literary craft.” There is scarcely a figure of any distinction, or a book of any importance in modern letters, upon which we cannot have Gosse’s opinion if we wish for it. For instance, one may have a curiosity about Disraeli’s novels and hesitate which to begin upon. Let us consult Gosse. Gosse advises on the whole that we shall try Coningsby. He gives his reasons. He rouses us with a suggestive remark. He defines Disraeli’s quality by comparing him with Bulwer, with Mrs. Gore and Plumer Read. He tells an anecdote about Disraeli that was told him by his friend the Duke of Rutland. He breaks off a phrase here and there for our amusement or admiration. All this he does with perfect suavity and precision, so that by the time he has done Disraeli is left glowing and mantling like an old picture lit up by a dozen bright candles. To illumine, to make visible and desirable, was his aim as a critic. Literature to him was an incomparable mistress and it was his delight “to dress her charms and make her more beloved.” Lovers of course sometimes go further and a child is the result. Critics too sometimes love literature creatively and the fruit of their devotion has a toughness and a fibre that the smooth strains of Sir Edmund’s platonic devotion are entirely without. Like all critics who persist in judging without creating he forgets the risk and agony of childbirth. His criticism becomes more and more a criticism of the finished article, and not of the article in the making. The smoothness, the craftsmanship of the work rouse his appreciation and he directs our attention only to its more superficial aspects. In other words, he is a critic for those who read rather than for those who write. But then no creator possesses Gosse’s impartiality, or his width of reading, or his lightness and freedom of mind, so that if we want to hold a candle to some dark face in the long portrait gallery of literature there is no better illuminant than Edmund Gosse.

  As for his own face, his own idiosyncrasy, only those who saw him at home among his books, or heard him, mimicking, remembering, in one of those club corners that he made, so characteristically, his own, can bring the odds and ends of this excitable but timid, this enthusiastic but worldly, this kindly but spiteful man into one complete synthesis. It was only in talk that he completely expressed himself. “I was not born for solitude,” he wrote. Neither was he born for old age and meditation. “You speak of ‘the peace which the years bring,’ but they bring no peace for me,” he wrote. Thought and the ardours and agonies of life were not for him. “I have no idea,” he said, “how the spiritual world would look to me, for I have never glanced at it since I was a child and gorged with it.” It is a cruel fate that makes those who only come into being when they talk fall silent. It is a harsh necessity that brings these warm and mobile characters into the narrow confines of the grave. Sir Edmund was not in the least anxious to depart and leave a world which, with the solitary exception of Churton Collins, had showered upon him so many delightful gifts for seventy-nine years.

  Notes on D. H. Lawrence

  THE partiality, the inevitable imperfection of contemporary criticism can best be guarded against, perhaps, by making in the first place a full confession of one’s disabilities, so far as it is possible to distinguish them. Thus by way of preface to the following remarks upon D. H. Lawrence, the present writer has to state that until April 1931 he was known to her almost solely by reputation and scarcely at all by experience. His reputation, which was that of a prophet, the exponent of some mystical theory of sex, the devotee of cryptic terms, the inventor of a new terminology which made free use of such words as solar plexus and the like, was not attractive; to follow submissively in his tracks seemed an unthinkable aberration; and as chance would have it, the few pieces of his writing that issued from behind this dark cloud of reputation seemed unable to rouse any sharp curiosity or to dispel the lurid phantom. There was, to begin with, Trespassers, a hot, scented, overwrought piece of work, as it seemed; then A Prussian Officer, of which no clear impression remained except of starting muscles and forced obscenity; then The Lost Girl, a compact and seamanlike piece of work, stuffed with careful observation rather in the Bennett manner; then one or two sketch
es of Italian travel of great beauty, but fragmentary and broken off; and then two little books of poems, Nettles and Pansies, which read like the sayings that small boys scribble upon stiles to make housemaids jump and titter.

  Meanwhile, the chants of the worshippers at the shrine of Lawrence became more rapt; their incense thicker and their gyrations more mazy and more mystic. His death last year gave them still greater liberty and still greater impetus; his death, too, irritated the respectable; and it was the irritation roused by the devout and the shocked, and the ceremonies of the devout and the scandal of the shocked, that drove one at last to read Sons and Lovers in order to see whether, as so often happens, the master is not altogether different from the travesty presented by his disciples.

  This then was the angle of approach, and it will be seen that it is an angle that shuts off many views and distorts others. But read from this angle, Sons and Lovers emerged with astonishing vividness, like an island from off which the mist has suddenly lifted. Here it lay, clean cut, decisive, masterly, hard as rock, shaped, proportioned by a man who, whatever else he might be — prophet or villain, was undoubtedly the son of a miner who had been born and bred in Nottingham. But this hardness, this clarity, this admirable economy and sharpness of the stroke are not rare qualities in an age of highly efficient novelists. The lucidity, the ease, the power of the writer to indicate with one stroke and then to refrain indicated a mind of great power and penetration. But these impressions, after they had built up the lives of the Morels, their kitchens, food, sinks, manner of speech, were succeeded by another far rarer, and of far greater interest. For after we have exclaimed that this coloured and stereoscopic representation of life is so like that surely it must be alive — like the bird that pecked the cherry in the picture — one feels, from some indescribable brilliance, sombreness, significance, that the room is put into order. Some hand has been at work before we entered. Casual and natural as the arrangement seems, as if we had opened the door and come in by chance, some hand, some eye of astonishing penetration and force, has swiftly arranged the whole scene, so that we feel that it is more exciting, more moving, in some ways fuller of life than one had thought real life could be, as if a painter had brought out the leaf or the tulip or the jar by pulling a green curtain behind it. But what is the green curtain that Lawrence has pulled so as to accentuate the colours? One never catches Lawrence — this is one of his most remarkable qualities— “arranging.” Words, scenes flow as fast and direct as if he merely traced them with a free rapid hand on sheet after sheet. Not a sentence seems thought about twice: not a word added for its effect on the architecture of the phrase. There is no arrangement that makes us say: “Look at this. This scene, this dialogue has the meaning of the book hidden in it.” One of the curious qualities of Sons and Lovers is that one feels an unrest, a little quiver and shimmer in his page, as if it were composed of separate gleaming objects, by no means content to stand still and be looked at. There is a scene of course; a character; yes, and people related to each other by a net of sensations; but these are not there — as in Proust — for themselves. They do not admit of prolonged exploration, of rapture in them for the sake of rapture, as one may sit in front of the famous hawthorn hedge in Swann’s Way and look at it. No, there is always something further on, another goal. The impatience, the need for getting on beyond the object before us, seem to contract, to shrivel up, to curtail scenes to their barest, to flash character simply and starkly in front of us. We must not look for more than a second; we must hurry on. But to what?