Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  But is she, even when the great moments are on her, a great actress? She doubts it. “I cared more for love and life,” she says. Her face, too, has been no help to her. She cannot sustain emotion. Certainly she is not a great tragic actress. Now and again, perhaps, she has acted some comic part to perfection. But even while she analyses herself, as one artist to another, the sun slants upon an old kitchen chair. “Thank the Lord for my eyes!” she exclaims. What a world of joy her eyes have brought her! Gazing at the old “rush-bottomed, sturdy-legged, and wavy-backed” chair, the stage is gone, the limelights are out, the famous actress is forgotten.

  Which, then, of all these women is the real Ellen Terry? How are we to put the scattered sketches together? Is she mother, wife, cook, critic, actress, or should she have been, after all, a painter? Each part seems the right part until she throws it aside and plays another. Something of Ellen Terry it seems overflowed every part and remained unacted. Shakespeare could not fit her; not Ibsen; nor Shaw. The stage could not hold her; nor the nursery. But there is, after all, a greater dramatist than Shakespeare, Ibsen, or Shaw. There is Nature. Hers is so vast a stage, and so innumerable a company of actors, that for the most part she fobs them off with a tag or two. They come on and they go off without breaking the ranks. But now and again Nature creates a new part, an original part. The actors who act that part always defy our attempts to name them. They will not act the stock parts — they forget the words, they improvise others of their own. But when they come on the stage falls like a pack of cards and the limelights are extinguished. That was Ellen Terry’s fate — to act a new part. And thus while other actors are remembered because they were Hamlet, Phèdre, or Cleopatra, Ellen Terry is remembered because she was Ellen Terry.

  To Spain

  YOU, who cross the Channel yearly, probably no longer see the house at Dieppe, no longer feel, as the train moves slowly down the street, one civilisation fall, another rise — from the ruin and chaos of British stucco this incredible pink and blue phoenix four stories high, with its flowerpots, its balconies, its servant-girl leaning on the window-sill indolendy looking out. Quite unmoved you sit reading — Thomas Hardy perhaps — bridging abysses, preserving continuity, a little contemptuous of the excitement which is moving those who feel themselves liberated from one civilisation, launched upon another, to such odd gestures, such strange irreticences. But reflect how much they have already gone through. Try to recall the look of London streets seen very early, perhaps very young, from a cab window on the way to Victoria. Everywhere there is the same intensity, as if the moment instead of moving lay suddenly still, because suddenly solemn, fixed the passers-by in their most transient aspects eternally. They do not know how important they have become. If they did, perhaps they would cease to buy newspapers and scrub doorsteps. But we who are about to leave them feel all the more moved that they should continue to do these homely things on the brink of that precipice — our departure. Therefore it is natural that those who have survived the crossing, with its last scrutiny of passing faces so like a little rehearsal of death, should be shaken; should move handbags; start conversations; and tremble for one intoxicating moment upon the brink of that ideal society where everyone without fear or hesitation reveals the depths of his soul.

  But it is only for a moment. Next, the disembodied spirit fluttering at the window desires above all things to be admitted to the new society where the houses are painted in lozenges of pale pink and blue; women wear shawls; trousers are baggy; there are crucifixes on hill-tops; yellow mongrel dogs; chairs in the streets; cobbles — gaiety, frivolity, drama, in short. “I’m awfully sorry for Agnes because now they can’t be married till he gets a job in London. It’s too far to get back from the works for midday dinner. I should have thought the father would have done something for them.” These detached sentences, spoken a little brokenly (for they are frowning into tiny mirrors and drawing combs intendy through fair bobbed hair) by two English girls, fall like the bars of a prison-house heavily across the mind. It is from them that we must escape; the hours, the works, the divisions, rigid and straight, of the old British week. Already as the train moves out of Dieppe these obstructions seem bubbling and boiling in the cauldron of a more congenial civilization. The days of the week diminished; the hours disappeared. It was five o’clock, but no banks had simultaneously shut their doors, nor from innumerable lifts had millions of citizens emerged in time for dinner, or in the poorer suburbs for slices of cold meat and Swiss roll laid orderly in shallow glass dishes. There must be divisions even for the French, but where they fall we cannot tell, and the lady in the corner, so pale, so plump, so compact, seemed as she sat smiling to be riding life over ditches and boundaries smoothed out by the genius of the Latin race.

  She rose to go to the dining-car. As she sat down she took a small frying-pan from her handbag and hid it discreetly beneath a tent made from a copy of Le Temps Deftly as each dish was served she secreted a portion in the absence of the waiter. Her husband smiled. Her husband approved. We only knew that she was brave. They might be poor. The helpings were large. The French have mothers. To redress perpetually the extravagances of life, and make the covering fit the fact instead of bulging in ostentatious emptiness, was part, no doubt, of the French genius for living. Still, when it comes to the thick yellow rind of a not fresh cheese — . Ironically smiling, she condescended, in that exquisite tongue which twinkles like diamonds with all its accents, to explain that she kept a dog. But she might have kept — anything. “Life is so simple,” she seemed to say.

  “Life is so simple — life is so simple,” said the wheels of the Sud Express all night long, in that idiotic or ironic way they have, for any message less appropriate to the uneasy darkness, the clank of chains, the anguished cries of railwaymen, and in the dawn the misery of the unrested body, could scarcely be imagined. But travellers are much at the mercy of phrases. Taken from home, which like a shell has made them hard, separate, individual, vast generalisations formulate in their exposed brains; the stress of wheel or window-blind beats into rhythm idiotic sayings of false profundity about life, repeats to distraction fragments of prose, and makes them stare with ferocious melancholy at the landscape, which in the middle of France is dull enough. The French are methodical; but life is simple; the French are prosaic; the French have roads. Yes, they have roads which strike from that lean poplar there to Vienna, to Moscow; pass Tolstoy’s house, climb mountains, then march, all shop decorated, down the middle of famous cities. But in England the road runs out on to a cliff; wavers into sand at the edge of the sea. It begins to seem dangerous to live in England. Here actually one could build a house and have no neighbours; go for a walk along this eternal white road for two, three, four miles, and meet only one black dog and one old woman who, depressed perhaps by the immensity of the landscape and the futility of locomotion, has sat herself down on a bank, attached her cow to her by a rope, and there sits, unmoved, incurious, monumental. Could our English poets for a moment share her seat and think her thoughts, forget the parish, the pansy, and the sparrow’s egg, and concentrate (as she appears to do) upon the fate of men!

  But as the country grows larger and larger outside Bordeaux, the concentration which is needed to produce even the simplest of little thoughts is rent as a glove is torn by the thrust of a large hand. Blessed are painters with their brushes, paints, and canvases. But words are flimsy things. They turn tail at the first approach of visual beauty. They let one down in the most literal sense into a chaotic, an alarming chasm filled — for the eye pours it all in — with white towns, with mules in single file, with solitary farms, with enormous churches, with vast fields crumbling at evening into pallor, with fruit-trees blazing askew like blown matches, and trees burning with oranges, and clouds and storms. Beauty seemed to have closed overhead and one washes this way and that in her waters. It is always on the shoulders of a human being that one climbs out; a profile in the corridor; a lady in deep mourning who steps into a motor-car and
drives across an arid plain — where and why? a child in Madrid throwing confetti effusively upon the figure of Christ; an Englishman discussing, while his hat obscures half the Sierra Nevada, Mr. Churchill’s last article in The Times. “No,” one says to beauty — as one rebukes an importunate dog, “down, down; let me look at you through the eyes of human beings.”

  But the Englishman’s hat is no measure of the Sierra Nevada. Setting out next day upon foot and mule-back, this wrinkled red and white screen, this background for hats, this queer comment (especially at sunset) upon Mr. Churchill’s article in The Times is found to consist of stones, olive trees, goats, asphodels, irises, bushes, ridges, shelves, clumps, tufts, and hollows innumerable, indescribable, unthinkable. The mind’s contents break into short sentences. It is hot; the old man; the frying-pan; it is hot; the image of the Virgin; the bottle of wine; it is time for lunch; it is only half-past twelve; it is hot. And then over and over again come all those objects — stones, olives, goats, asphodels, dragon-flies, irises, until by some trick of the imagination they run into phrases of command, exhortation, and encouragement such as befit soldiers marching, sentinels on lonely nights, and leaders of great battalions. But must one give up the struggle? Must one relinquish the game? Yes, for the clouds are drifting across the pass; mules mind not what they carry; mules never stumble; they know the way. Why not leave everything to them?

  Riders, as night comes on (and the pass was very misty), seem to be riding out of life towards some very enticing prospect, while the four legs of their beasts carry on all necessary transactions with the earth. Riders are at rest; on they go, and on and on. And, they muse, what does it all matter; and what harm can come to a good man (behold two priests stepping out of the drizzle, bowing and disappearing) in life or after death? And then, since a fox has crossed the path, which is on turf and must be nearly at the top of the mountain, how strangely it seems as if they were riding in England, a long day’s journey, hundreds of years ago, and the danger is over, and they see the lights of the inn, and the hostess comes into the courtyard and bids them sit round the fire while she cooks dinner, which they do, half-dreaming, while clumsy boys and girls with red flowers pass and repass in the background, and the mother suckles her baby, and the old man who never speaks breaks tufts from the brushwood and throws them on the fire, which blazes up, and the whole company stares.

  But good heavens! One never knows what days follow what nights. Good heavens again! “Don Fernando had a passion for pigeon pie, and so kept pigeons up here” — on his roof, that is, from which one has this astonishing, this strange, this disturbing view of the Alpujarras. “He died last summer in Granada.” Did he, indeed? It is the light, of course; a million razor-blades have shaved off the bark and the dust, and out pours pure colour; whiteness from fig-trees; red and green and again white from the enormous, the humped, the everlasting landscape. But listen to the sounds on the roof — first the fluttering pigeons; then water rushing; then an old man crying chickens for sale; then a donkey braying in the valley far below. Listen; and as bne listens this random life begins to be issued from the heart of a village which has faced the African coast with a timeless and aristocratic endurance for a thousand years. But how say this (as one descends from the blaze) to the Spanish peasant woman who bids one enter her room, with its lilies and its washing, and smiles and looks out of the window as if she too had looked for a thousand years?

  Fishing

  WHILE there is a Chinese proverb which says that the fisherman is pure at heart “as a white sea-shell,” there is a Japanese poem, four lines long, which says something so true but at the same time so crude about the hearts of politicians that it had better be left in its original obscurity. It may be this contradiction — Major Hills, says his publisher, “has been a member of the House of Commons for thirty years.... Throughout his long parliamentary life he has remained faithful to his favourite sport” — which has produced a collision in his book; a confusion in the mind of the reader between fish and men.

  All books are made of words, but mostly of words that flutter and agitate thought. This book on the contrary, though made of words, has a strange effect on the body. It lifts it out of the chair; stands it on the banks of a river, and strikes it dumb. The river rushes by; a voice commands: “Stand absolutely motionless.... Cast up and slighdy across.... Shoot the line out.... Let the flies come well round.... On no account pull.... Do not be in a hurry to lift....” But the strain is too great, the excitement too intense. We have pulled — we have lifted. The fish is off. “Wait longer next time,” the voice commands; “wait longer and longer.”

  Now, if the art of writing consists in laying an egg in the reader’s mind from which springs the thing itself — whether man or fish — and if this art requires such ardour in its practitioners that they will readily, like Flaubert, give up all their bright spring mornings to its pursuit, how does it come about that Major Hills, who has spent thirty years in the House of Commons, can do the trick? Sometimes at four in the morning, in the early spring dawn, he has roused himself, not to dandle words, but to rush down to the river— “the exquisite river, with its vivid green wooded banks, its dark rose-coloured sandstone rocks, its rushing crystalline water,” and there he has stood with his rod. There we stand too.

  Look at the rod. It was bought of Strong of Carlisle and cost one pound. “It consisted of a piece of whole bamboo with a lancewood top spliced on.... Never have I had a rod sweeter to cast with and throwing a longer line.” It is not a rod; it is a tool, more beautiful than a Persian pot, more desirable than a lover. “... A friend broke it... and I could never get another like it... and I grieved sorely, for bamboo cannot be mended.” What death or disaster could be more pungent? But this is no time for sentiment. There deep under the bank lies the old male salmon. What fly will he take? The grey turkey, with a body of violet silk, the archdeacon in fact, number one? The line is cast; out it floats; down it settles. And then? “... The fish went perfectly mad, overran my reel... jammed it, and broke my twisted gut trace. It all happened in a few seconds....” But they were seconds of extraordinary intensity, seconds lived alone “in a world of strong emotion, cut off from all else.” When we look up Corby’s walks have changed. “The trees had their young light leaves, some of them golden, the wild cherry was covered with drifts of snow and the ground was covered with dog mercury, looking as though it had been newly varnished.

  ... I felt receptive to every sight, every colour and every sound, as though I walked through a world from which a veil had been withdrawn.”

  Is it possible that to remove veils from trees it is necessary to fish? — our conscious mind must be all body, and then the unconscious mind leaps to the top and strips off veils? Is it possible that, if to bare reality is to be a poet, we have, as Mr. Yeats said the other day, no great poet because since the war farmers preserve or net their waters, and vermin get up? Has the deplorable habit of Clubs to fetter anglers with ridiculous restrictions, to pamper them with insidious luxuries, somehow cramped our poets’ style? And the novelists — if we have no novelist in England today whose stature is higher than the third button on Sir Walter’s waistcoat, or reaches to the watch-chain of Charles Dickens, or the ring on the little finger of George Eliot, is it not that the Cumberland poachers are dying out? “They were an amusing race, full of rare humour, delightful to talk to.... We often had chats on the banks and they would tell me quite openly of their successes.” But now “the old wild days are over”; the poachers are gone. They catch trout, commercially, innumerably, for hotels. Banish from fiction all poachers’ talk, the dialect, the dialogue of Scott, the publicans, the farmers of Dickens and George Eliot, and what remains? Mouldy velvet; moth-eaten ermine; mahogany tables; and a few stuffed fowls. No wonder, since the poachers are gone, that fiction is failing.... “But this is not catching trout,” the voice commands. “Do not dawdle.... Start fishing again without delay.”

  It is a bad day; the sun is up; the trout are no
t feeding. We fail again and again. But fishing teaches a stern morality; inculcates a remorseless honesty. The fault may be with ourselves. “Why do I go on missing at the strike?... If I had more delicacy in casting, more accuracy, if I had fished finer, should I not have done better? And the answer is — Yes!... I lost him through sinning against the light.... I failed through obstinate stupidity.” We are sunk deep in the world of meditation and remorse. “Contradiction lies at the root of all powerful emotions. We are not ruled by reason. We follow a different law, and recognise its sanctions....” Sounds from the outer world come through the roar of the river. Barbarians have invaded the upper waters of the Eden and Driffield Beck. But happily the barbarians are grayling; and the profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait — whether to fish with worms or not; some will; to others the thought is unutterably repulsive.

  But the summer’s day is fading. Night is coming on — the Northern night, which is not dark, for the light is there, but veiled. “A Cumberland night is something to remember,” and trout — for trout are “curious pieces of work” — will feed in Cumberland at midnight. Let us go down to the bank again. The river sounds louder than by day. “As I walked down I heard its varied cadence, obscured during sunlight, at one moment deep, then clamorous, then where thick beech trees hid the river subdued to a murmur.... The flowering trees had long since lost their blossoms, but on coming to a syringa bush I walked suddenly into its scent, and was drenched as in a bath. I sat on the path. I stretched my legs. I lay down, finding a tuft of grass for pillow, and the yielding sand for mattress. I fell asleep.”