Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  He proved the wisdom of his own saying by marrying, in spite of his debts, a widow with two children, and by having in quick succession six more children of his own. With all this weight on his shoulders he sank steadily more and more deeply into the mud. For his genius never deserted him. It was always flourishing irresistible subjects before his eyes. He was always rushing at his canvas and “rubbing in” the head of Alexander “gloriously,” or dashing off some gigantic group of warriors and lions when his room was bare of necessities, his furniture pawned, his wife screaming in childbirth, and the baby (it was a way they had) sickening of a mortal illness. Where a smaller man would have been content to deal with private difficulties, Haydon took upon himself the cares of the world. He was feverishly interested in politics, in the Reform Bill, in the Trades Union movement, in the success of the British arms. Above all, he was the champion of the High Art in England. He must badger Wellington, Peel, and every Minister in turn to employ young English painters to decorate Westminster Hall and the Houses of Parliament. Nor could he let the Royal Academy sleep in peace. His friends begged him to stop; but no. “The idea of being a Luther or a John Knox in art got the better of my reason.... I attacked the Academy. I exposed their petty intrigues; I laid open their ungrateful, cruel, and heartless treatment of Wilkie. I annihilated Payne Knight’s absurd theories against great works. I proved his ignorance of Pliny,” with the result that “I had brought forty men and all their high connections on my back at twenty-six years old, and there was nothing left but Victory or Westminster Abbey. I made up my mind for the conflict, and ordered at once a larger canvas for another work.”

  But on the road to Victory and Westminster Abbey lay a more sordid lodging-house, through which Haydon passed four times — the King’s Bench Prison. Servants and children, he noted, became familiar with the signs of an approaching execution. He himself learned how to pawn and how to plead, how to flatter the sheriff’s officer, how to bombard the great, who were certainly generous if they were not clever; how to appeal to the hearts of landlords, whose humanity was extraordinary; but one thing he could not do: deny the demands of his own genius. Portrait painting was an obvious resource. But then how odious to paint a little private individual, a mere Mayor, or Member of Parliament, when one’s head was swarming with Solomons and Jerusalems and Pharaohs and Crucifixions and Macbeths! He could scarcely bring himself to do it. One could make them larger than life, it is true, but then the critics sneered and said that if the ex-Mayor was the size that Haydon painted him, he must have stuck in the doorway. It was paltry work. “The trash that one is obliged to talk! The stuff that one is obliged to copy! The fidgets that are obliged to be borne! My God!”

  The name of God was often on his lips. He was on terms of cordial intimacy with the deity. He could not believe that one great spirit could consent to the downfall of another. God and Napoleon and Nelson and Wellington and Haydon were all of the same calibre, all in the grand style. His mind harped on these great names constantly. And as a matter of fact, though poor Mrs. Haydon would smile when he bade her “trust in God,” his trust was often justified. He left his house in the morning with the children fighting, with Mary scolding, with no water in the cistern, to trudge all day from patron to pawn-shop, and came home at night “tired, croaking, grumbling and muddy,” when, just as hope seemed extinct, a letter arrived; it was from Lord Grey; it contained a cheque. Once more they were saved.

  With it all, he declared, he was a very happy man, pink and plump, in spite of all his worries, when Wilkie, who led an abstemious bachelor’s life, was cadaverous and plaintive. Now and again they took the children to the sea or snatched an afternoon in Kensington Gardens, and if they were in the depths of despair on Wednesday, likely enough some stroke of fortune would put them in the seventh heaven by Thursday. He had his friends, too — Wordsworth and Scott and Keats and Lamb — with whom he supped and he talked. He had, above all, a mind which was for ever tossing and tumbling like a vigorous dolphin in the seas of thought. “I never feel alone,” he wrote, “with visions of ancient heroes, pictures of Christ, principles of ancient Art, humorous subjects, deductions, sarcasms against the Academy, piercing remembrance of my dear children all crowding upon me, I paint, I write, conceive, fall asleep... lamenting my mortality at being fatigued.” The power which drove him to these extremities did at least reward him with some of its delights.

  But as the symptoms of inspiration multiply — this passionate joy in creation, this conviction of a divine mission — one asks oneself what then is false, for falsity there certainly seems to be. First there is something in the superabundance of protest, in the sense of persecution, which rouses suspicion; next these vast pictures of crowds, armies, raptures, agonies begin, even as he sketches them in words, to scar and wound our eyes; and finally we catch ourselves thinking, as some felicity of phrase flashes out or some pose or arrangement makes its effect, that his genius is a writer’s. He should have held a pen; of all painters, surely he was the best read. “The truth is I am fonder of books than of anything else on earth,” he wrote. He clung to his Shakespeare and his Homer when his lay figure had to go to the pawnbroker. There was even one moment when he doubted his own vocation and accused the sublime art of hampering his powers. But his instinct to express himself in words was undeniable. Overworked as he was, he always found time to write a diary which is in no way perfunctory, but follows with ease and sinuosity the ins and outs of his life. Phrases form naturally at the tip of his pen. “He sat and talked easily, lazily, gazing at the sun with his legs crossed,” he says of Chantrey. “Poor fellow,” he wrote on hearing of the burial of Wilkie at sea, “I wonder what the fish think of him, with their large glassy eyes in the gurgling deep.” Always his painter’s eye lights up his phrases, and scenes which would have been repulsive in paint shape themselves naturally and rightly into words. It was some malicious accident that made him, when he had to choose a medium, pick up a brush when the pen lay handy.

  But if accident it was, his genius was unrelenting. Paint he must; paint he did. When his cartoons were rejected he learned to toss off pictures of Napoleon Musing, at the rate of one in two hours and a half. When the public deserted his last exhibition in favour of Tom Thumb next door, he darted at another picture, finished the Saxon Lord, dashed in Alfred, “worked,” he declared, “gloriously.” But at last even his prayers sound a little hoarse, and his protests without conviction. One morning after quoting Lear and writing out a list of his debts and his thoughts, he put a pistol to his forehead, gashed a razor across his throat, and spattered his unfinished picture of Alfred and the first British Jury with his blood. He was the faithful servant of genius to the last. If we seek now any relic of all those acres of canvas, those crowds of heroes, we find clean white walls, people comfortably dining, and a vague rumour that a big picture did hang here once, but the management took it away when the place was done up. The pictures are vanished; Allan, “the celebrated painter,” Du Fresne, who saw Marie Antoinette executed, Millingen, Liz of Rathbone Place, all are passed away; but still these pages that he scribbled without thought of Genius or Art or Posterity remain, holding vividly before us the struggling, greedy life with all its black smoke and its flame.

  The Enchanted Organ

  THE enormous respectability of Bloomsbury was broken one fine morning about 1840 by the sound of an organ and by the sight of a little girl who had escaped from her nurse and was dancing to the music. The child was Thackeray’s elder daughter, Anne. For the rest of her long life, through war and peace, calamity and prosperity, Miss Thackeray, or Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, or Lady Ritchie, was always escaping from the Victorian gloom and dancing to the strains of her own enchanted organ. The music, at once so queer and so sweet, so merry and so plaintive, so dignified and so fantastical, is to be heard very distinctly on every page of the present volume.

  For Lady Ritchie was incapable at any stage of her career of striking an attitude or hiding a feeling. The guns are firin
g from Cremorne for the taking of Sebastopol, and there she sits scribbling brilliant nonsense in her diary about “matches and fairy tales.”

  “Brother Tomkins at the Oratory is starving and thrashing himself because he thinks it is right,” and Miss Thackeray is reading novels on Sunday morning “because I do not think it is wrong.” As for religion and her grandmother’s miseries and the clergyman’s exhortations to follow “the one true way,” all she knows is that it is her business to love her father and grandmother, and for the rest she supposes characteristically “that everybody is right and nobody knows anything.”

  Seen through this temperament, at once so buoyant and so keen, the gloom of that famous age dissolves in an iridescent mist which lifts entirely to display radiant prospects of glittering spring, or clings to the monstrous shoulders of its prophets in many-tinted shreds. There are Mr. Fitz-Gerald and Mr. Spedding coming to dinner “as kind and queer and melancholy as men could be”; and Mrs. Norton “looking like a beautiful slow sphinx”; and Arthur Prinsep riding in Rotten Row with violets in his buttonhole—” ‘I like your violets very much,’ said I, and of course they were instandy presented to me” — and Carlyle vociferating that a cheesemite might as well understand a cow as we human mites our maker’s secrets; and George Eliot, with her steady little eyes, enunciating a prodigious sentence about building one’s cottage in a valley, and the power of influence, and respecting one’s work, which breaks off in the middle; and Herbert Spencer stopping a Beethoven sonata with “Thank you, I’m getting flushed”; and Ruskin asserting that “if you can draw a strawberry you can draw anything”; and Mrs. Cameron paddling about in cold water till two in the morning; and Jowett’s four young men looking at photographs and sipping tumblers of brandy and water until at last “poor Miss Stephen,” who has been transplanted to an island where “everybody is either a genius, or a poet, or a painter, or peculiar in some way,” ejaculates in despair, “Is there nobody commonplace?”

  “Poor Miss Stephen,” bored and bewildered, staying with several cousins at the hotel, represented presumably the Puritanical conscience of the nineteenth century when confronted by a group of people who were obviously happy but not obviously bad. On the next page, however, Miss Stephen is significantly “strolling about in the moonlight”; on the next she has deserted her cousins, left the hotel, and is staying with the Thackerays in the centre of infection. The most ingrained Philistine could not remain bored, though bewildered she might be, by Miss Thackeray’s charm. For it was a charm extremely difficult to analyse. She said things that no human being could possibly mean; yet she meant them. She lost trains, mixed names, confused numbers, driving up to Town, for example, precisely a week before she was expected, and making Charles Darwin laugh— “I can’t for the life of me help laughing,” he apologised. But then, if she had gone on the right day, poor Mr. Darwin would have been dying. So with her writing, too. Her novel Angelica “went off suddenly to Australia with her feet foremost, and the proofs all wrong and end first!!!” But somehow nobody in Australia found out. Fortune rewarded the generous trust she put in it. But if her random ways were charming, who, on the other hand, could be more practical, or see things, when she liked, precisely as they were? Old Carlyle was a god on one side of his face but a “cross-grained, ungrateful, self-absorbed old nutcracker” on the other. Her most typical, and, indeed, inimitable sentences rope together a handful of swiftly gathered opposites. To embrace oddities and produce a charming, laughing harmony from incongruities was her genius in life and in letters. “I have just ordered,” she writes, “two shillings’ worth of poetry for my fisherman... we take little walks together, and he carries his shrimps and talks quite enchantingly.” She pays the old dropsical woman’s fare in the omnibus, and in return the “nice jolly nun hung with crucifixes” escorts her across the road. Nun and fisherman and dropsical old woman had never till that moment, one feels sure, realised their own charm or the gaiety of existence. She was a mistress of phrases which exalt and define and set people in the midst of a comedy. With Nature, too, her gift was equally happy. She would glance out of the window of a Brighton lodging-house and say: “The sky was like a divine parrot’s breast, just now, with a deep, deep, flapping sea.” As life drew on, with its deaths and its wars, her profound instinct for happiness had to exert itself to gild those grim faces golden, but it succeeded. Even Lord Kitchener and Lord Roberts and the South African War shine transmuted. As for the homelier objects which she preferred, the birds and the downs and the old charwoman “who has been an old angel, without wings, alas! and only a bad leg,” and the smut-black chimney-sweeps, who were “probably gods in disguise,” they never cease to the very end to glow and twinkle with merriment in her pages. For she was no visionary. Her happiness was a domestic flame, tried by many sorrows. And the music to which she dances, frail and fantastic, but true and distinct, will sound on outside our formidable residences when all the brass bands of literature have (let us hope) blared themselves to perdition.

  Two Women

  UP to the beginning of the nineteenth century the distinguished woman had almost invariably been an aristocrat. It was the great lady who ruled and wrote letters and influenced the course of politics. From the huge middle class few women rose to eminence, nor has the drabness of their lot received the attention which has been bestowed upon the splendours of the great and the miseries of the poor. There they remain, even in the early part of the nineteenth century, a vast body, living, marrying, bearing children in dull obscurity, until at last we begin to wonder whether there was something in their condition itself — in the age at which they married, the number of children they bore, the privacy they lacked, the incomes they had not, the contentions which stifled them, and the education they never received — which so affected them that, though the middle class is the great reservoir from which we draw our distinguished men, it has thrown up singularly few women to set beside them.

  The profound interest of Lady Stephen’s life of Miss Emily Davies lies in the light it throws upon this dark and obscure chapter of human history. Miss Davies was born in the year 1830, of middle-class parents who could afford to educate their sons but not their daughters. Her education was, she supposed, much the same as that of other clergymen’s daughters at that time. “Do they go to school? No. Do they have governesses at home? No. They have lessons and get on as they can.” But if their positive education had stopped at a little Latin, a little history, a little housework, it would not so much have mattered. It was what may be called the negative education, that which decrees not what you may do but what you may not do, that cramped and stifled. “Probably only women who have laboured under it can understand the weight of discouragement produced by being perpetually told that, as women, nothing much is ever expected of them.... Women who have lived in the atmosphere produced by such teaching know how it stifles and chills; how hard it is to work courageously through it.” Preachers and rulers of both sexes nevertheless formulated the creed and enforced it vigorously. Charlotte Yonge wrote: “I have no hesitation in declaring my full belief in the inferiority of woman, nor that she brought it upon herself.” She reminded her sex of a painful incident with a snake in a garden which had settled their destiny, Miss Yonge said, for ever. The mention of Women’s Rights made Queen Victoria so furious that “she cannot contain herself.” Mr. Greg, underlining his words, wrote that “the essentials of a woman’s being are that they are supported by, and they minister to, men.” The only other occupation allowed them, indeed, was to become a governess or a needlewoman, “and both these employments were naturally overstocked.” If women wanted to paint, there was, up to the year 1858, only one life class in London where they could learn. If they were musical there was the inevitable piano, but the chief aim was to produce a brilliant mechanical execution, and Trollope’s picture of four girls all in the same room playing on four pianos, all of them out of time, seems to have been, as Trollope’s pictures usually are, based on fact. Writing was the most
accessible of the arts, and write they did, but their books were deeply influenced by the angle from which they were forced to observe the world. Half occupied, always interrupted, with much leisure but little time to themselves and no money of their own, these armies of listless women were either driven to find solace and occupation in religion, or, if that failed, they took, as Miss Nightingale said, “to that perpetual day-dreaming which is so dangerous.” Some, indeed, envied the working classes, and Miss Martineau frankly hailed the ruin of her family with delight. “I, who had been obliged to write before breakfast, or in some private way, had henceforth liberty to do my own work in my own way, for we had lost our gentility.” But the time had come when there were occasional exceptions, both among parents and among daughters. Mr. Leigh Smith, for example, allowed his daughter Barbara the same income that he gave his sons. She at once started a school of an advanced character. Miss Garrett became a doctor because her parents, though shocked and anxious, would be reconciled if she were a success. Miss Davies had a brother who sympathised and helped her in her determination to reform the education of women. With such encouragement the three young women started in the middle of the nineteenth century to lead the army of the unemployed in search of work. But the war of one sex upon the rights and possessions of the other is by no means a straightforward affair of attack and victory or defeat. Neither the means nor the end itself is clear-cut and recognised. There is the very potent weapon, for example, of feminine charm — what use were they to make of that? Miss Garrett said she felt “so mean in trying to come over the doctors by all kinds of little feminine dodges.” Mrs. Gurney admitted the difficulty, but pointed out that “Miss Marsh’s success among the navvies” had been mainly won by these means, which, for good or bad, were certainly of immense weight. It was agreed therefore that charm was to be employed. Thus we have the curious spectacle, at once so diverting and so humiliating, of grave and busy women doing fancy work and playing croquet in order that the male eye might be gratified and deceived. “Three lovely girls” were placed conspicuously in the front row at a meeting, and Miss Garrett herself sat there looking “exactly like one of the girls whose instinct it is to do what you tell them.” For the arguments that they had to meet by these devious means were in themselves extremely indefinite. There was a thing called “the tender home-bloom of maidenliness” which must not be touched. There was chastity, of course, and her handmaidens, innocence, sweetness, unselfishness, sympathy; all of which might suffer if women were allowed to learn Latin and Greek. The Saturday Review gave cogent expression to what men feared for women and needed of women in the year 1864. The idea of submitting young ladies to local university examinations “almost takes one’s breath away,” the writer said. If examined they must be, steps must be taken to see that “learned men advanced in years” were the examiners, and that the presumably aged wives of these aged gentlemen should occupy “a commanding position in the gallery.” Even so it would be “next to impossible to persuade the world that a pretty first-class woman came by her honours fairly.” For the truth was, the reviewer wrote, that “there is a strong and ineradicable male instinct that a learned or even an accomplished young woman is the most intolerable monster in creation.” It was against instincts and prejudices such as these, tough as roots but intangible as sea mist, that Miss Davies had to fight. Her days passed in a round of the most diverse occupations. Besides the actual labour of raising money and fighting prejudice, she had to decide the most delicate moral questions which, directly victory was within sight, began to be posed by the students and their parents. A mother, for example, would only entrust her with her daughter’s education on condition that she should come home “as if nothing had happened,” and not “take to anything eccentric.” The students, on the other hand, bored with watching the Edinburgh express slip a carriage at Hitchin or rolling the lawn with a heavy iron roller, took to playing football, and then invited their teachers to see them act scenes from Shakespeare and Swinburne dressed in men’s clothes. This indeed was a very serious matter; the great George Eliot was consulted; Mr. Russell Gurney was consulted, and also Mr. Tomkinson. They decided that it was unwomanly; Hamlet must be played in a skirt.