Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Walter Raleigh

  ON a certain Wednesday in March, 1889, Walter Raleigh, then aged twenty-eight, gave his first lecture upon English literature in Manchester. It was not his first lecture by any means, for he had already lectured the natives of India on the same subject for two years. After Manchester came Liverpool; after Liverpool, Glasgow; after Glasgow, Oxford. At all these places he lectured incessantly upon English literature. Once he lectured three times a day. He became, indeed, such an adept at the art of lecturing that towards the end “sometimes he would prepare what he had to say in his half-hour’s walk from his home at Ferry Hinksey”. People who heard him said that his lectures stimulated them, opened their eyes, made them think for themselves. “ ‘Raleigh’s not always at his best, but when he’s good nobody can touch him’ — that was the general verdict.” Nevertheless, in the course of two large volumes filled with delightful and often brilliant letters it would be difficult to find a single remark of any interest whatsoever about English literature.

  There is necessarily a great deal of talk about the profession of teaching literature, and the profession of writing literary text books, of “doing Chaucer in six chapters and Wordsworth, better known as Daddy, also in six chapters”. But when one looks for the unprofessional talk, the talk which is talked among friends when business hours are over, one is bewildered and disappointed. Is this all that the Professor of English literature has to say? “Scott to-morrow — not a poet I think but fine old man. Good old Scott.”

  “The weak point in William [Blake] is not his Reason, which is A. I, but his imagination... Wonderful things the inspired old bustard said from time to time in conversation.”

  “As for old Bill Wordsworth he is the same old stick-in-the-mud as ever... He gets praised chiefly for his celebrated imitation of Shakespeare (which is really very good) and for his admirable reproduction of a bleat. But he has a turn of his own, if only he would do it and be damned to him.” Any clever man at a dinner party anxious not to scare the rowing blue or the city magnate who happens to be within earshot would have talked about books exactly as Raleigh wrote about them at his leisure. There is nothing to suggest that literature was a matter of profound interest to him when he was not lecturing about it. When we read the letters of Keats, the diary of the Goncourts, the letters of Lamb, the casual remarks of that unfashionable poet Tennyson, we feel that, waking or sleeping, these men never stopped thinking about literature. It is kneaded into the stuff of their brains. Their fingers are dyed in it. Whatever they touch is stained with it. Whatever they are doing their minds fill up involuntarily with some aspect of the absorbing question. Nor does it seem to have occurred to them to wonder what the rowing blue will think of them for talking seriously about books. “I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts and appear almost a remembrance,” wrote Keats, and there is not a damn in the sentence. But the Professor of English literature could scarcely open his lips without dropping into slang; he could never mention Bill Blake or Bill Shakespeare or old Bill Wordsworth without seeming to apologize for bringing books into the talk at all. Yet there is no doubt, Walter Raleigh was one of the best Professors of Literature of our time; he did brilliantly whatever it is that Professors are supposed to do. How then shall we compose the difference — solve the discrepancy?

  In the first place the Professor of English literature is not there to teach people how to write; he is there to teach them how to read. Moreover, those people include city magnates, politicians, schoolmistresses, soldiers, scientists, mothers of families, country clergymen in embryo. Many of them have never opened a book before. Many will seldom get a chance of opening a book again. They have to be taught — but what? Raleigh himself had no doubts on this point. His business was “only to get people to love the poets.”

  “To make people old or young,” he wrote, “care for say the principal English poets as much or half as much as I do — that would, I am vain enough to think, be something — if it can be done.” He obstinately refused to stuff his pupils with facts. “The facts, it is true, tell in examinations. But you will none of you be any nearer Heaven ten years hence for having taken a B.A. degree, while for a love and understanding of Keats you may raise yourself several inches.” He had himself spent no time scraping away the moss, repairing the broken noses on the fabric of English literature; and he did not press that pursuit upon his pupils. He talked his lectures almost out of his head. He joked, he told stories. He made the undergraduates rock with laughter. He drew them in crowds to his lecture room. And they went away loving something or other. Perhaps it was Keats. Perhaps it was the British Empire. Certainly it was Walter Raleigh. But we should be much surprised if anybody went away loving poetry, loving the art of letters.

  Nor is it difficult to find the reason. It is written large over Walter Raleigh’s books — the English Novel, Style, Shakespeare and the rest. They have every virtue; they are readable, just, acute, stimulating, and packed with information; they are as firm in style and hard in substance as a macadamised road. But the man who wrote them had no generous measure of the gifts of a writer. The maker of these rather tight, highly academic books had never been outside the critical fence. No novel, no poem, no play had ever lured him away from his prefaces, his summings up, his surveys. The excitement, the adventure, the turmoil of creation were unknown to him. But the critic who makes us love poetry is always sufficiently gifted to have had experiences of his own. He feels his way along a line spun by his own failures and successes. He may stumble; he may stammer; he may be incapable of orderly survey. But it is the Keats, the Coleridge, the Lamb, the Flaubert who get to the heart of the matter. It is in the toil and strife of writing that they have forced the door open and gone within and told us what they have seen there. When Walter Raleigh held a pen in his hand it behaved with the utmost propriety. He never wrote a bad sentence; but he never wrote a sentence which broke down barriers. He never pressed on over the ruins of his own culture to the discovery of something better. He remained trim and detached on the high road, a perfect example of the Professor of Literature who has no influence whatever upon the art of writing. Soon, therefore, for he was by temperament highly adventurous, he began to find literature a little dull. He began to separate literature from life. He began to cry out upon “culture” and “culture bugs”. He began to despise critics and criticism. “I can’t help feeling that critical admiration for what another man has written is an emotion for spinsters,” he wrote. He really believed, he said, “not in refinement and scholarly elegance, those are only a game; but in blood feuds, and the chase of wild beasts and marriage by capture.” In short, being incapable of humbug, a man of entire sincerity and great vitality, Walter Raleigh ceased to profess literature and became instead a Professor of Life.

  There is ample evidence in the letters alone that he had a remarkable aptitude for this branch of learning. He seems never to have been bored, never to have been doubtful, never to have been sentimental. He laid hold on things with enviable directness. The whole force of his being seems to have played spontaneously upon whatever he wished and yet to have been controlled by an unerring sense that some things matter and some things do not. His equilibrium was perfect. Whether he was set down in India or Oxford, among the simple or the learned, the aristocrats or the Dons, he found his balance at once and got the utmost out of the situation. It is easy to imagine the race and flash of his talk, and what fine unexpected things he said, and what pinnacles of fun he raised and how for all his extravagance and irresponsibility the world that his wit lit up was held steady by his fundamental sanity and good sense. He was the most enchanting of companions — upon that all are agreed.

  But the difficulty remained. Once make the fatal distinction between life and letters, once exalt life and find literature an occupation for old maids, and inevitably, if one is Walter Raleigh, one becomes discontented with mere praise. Professors m
ust talk; but the lover of life must live. Unfortunately life in the sense of “blood feuds and the chase of wild beasts, and marriage by capture” was hard to come by in the last years of the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria was on the throne, Lord Salisbury was in power, and the British Empire was growing daily more robust. A breath of fresh air blew in with the Boer War. Raleigh hailed it with a shout of relief “... the British officer (and man) restores one’s joy in the race,” he said. He was coming to feel that there is some close connexion between writing and fighting, that in an age like his when the fighter did not write and the writer did not fight the divorce was unfortunate — especially for literature. “Were it not better to seek training on a battlefield, and use the first words one learns at mess?” he asked. All his sympathies were tending towards action. He was growing more and more tired of culture and criticism, more definitely of opinion that the “learned critic is a beast,” that “education has taken the fine bloom off the writing of books,” less and less attracted by writing at all, until finally, in 1913, he bursts out that he “can’t read Shakespeare any more.... Not that I think him a bad author, particularly,” he adds, “but I can’t bear literature.” When the guns fired in August, 1914, no one saluted them more rapturously than the Professor of English Literature at Oxford. “The air is better to breathe than it has been for years,” he exclaimed. “I’m glad I lived to see it, and sick that I’m not in it.”

  It seemed indeed as if his chance of life had come too late. He still seemed fated to praise fighting but not to fight, to lecture about life but not to live. He did what a man of his age could do. He drilled. He marched. He wrote pamphlets. He lectured more frequently than ever; he practically ceased to read. At length he was made historian of the Air Force. To his infinite satisfaction he consorted with soldiers. To his immense delight he flew to Baghdad. He died within a week or two after his return. But what did that matter? The Professor of English Literature had lived at last.

  Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

  IT seems to me possible, perhaps desirable, that I may be the only person in this room who has committed the folly of writing, trying to write, or failing to write, a novel. And when I asked myself, as your invitation to speak to you about modern fiction made me ask myself, what demon whispered in my ear and urged me to my doom, a little figure rose before me — the figure of a man, or of a woman, who said, “My name is Brown. Catch me if you can.”

  Most novelists have the same experience. Some Brown, Smith, or Jones comes before them and says in the most seductive and charming way in the world, “Come and catch me if you can.” And so, led on by this will-o’-the-wisp, they flounder through volume after volume, spending the best years of their lives in the pursuit, and receiving for the most part very little cash in exchange. Few catch the phantom; most have to be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair.

  My belief that men and women write novels because they are lured on to create some character which has thus imposed itself upon them has the sanction of Mr. Arnold Bennett. In an article from which I will quote he says, “The foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else.... Style counts; plot counts; originality of outlook counts. But none of these counts anything like so much as the convincingness of the characters. If the characters are real the novel will have a chance; if they are not, oblivion will be its portion....” And he goes on to draw the conclusion that we have no young novelists of first-rate importance at the present moment, because they are unable to create characters that are real, true, and convincing.

  These are the questions that I want with greater boldness than discretion to discuss to-night. I want to make out what we mean when we talk about “character” in fiction; to say something about the question of reality which Mr. Bennett raises; and to suggest some reasons why the younger novelists fail to create characters, if, as Mr. Bennett asserts, it is true that fail they do. This will lead me, I am well aware, to make some very sweeping and some very vague assertions. For the question is an extremely difficult one. Think how little we know about character — think how little we know about art. But, to make a clearance before I begin, I will suggest that we range Edwardians and Georgians into two camps; Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy I will call the Edwardians; Mr. Forster, Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Strachey, Mr. Joyce, and Mr. Eliot I will call the Georgians. And if I speak in the first person, with intolerable egotism, I will ask you to excuse me. I do not want to attribute to the world at large the opinions of one solitary, ill-informed, and misguided individual.

  My first assertion is one that I think you will grant — that every one in this room is a judge of character. Indeed it would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practised character-reading and had some skill in the art. Our marriages, our friendships depend on it; our business largely depends on it; every day questions arise which can only be solved by its help. And now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more disputable perhaps, to the effect that in or about December, 1910, human character changed.

  I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910. The first signs of it are recorded in the books of Samuel Butler, in The Way of All Flesh in particular; the plays of Bernard Shaw continue to record it. In life one can see the change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character of one’s cook. The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat. Do you ask for more solemn instances of the power of the human race to change? Read the Agamemnon, and see whether, in process of time, your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra. Or consider the married life of the Carlyles and bewail the waste, the futility, for him and for her, of the horrible domestic tradition which made it seemly for a woman of genius to spend her time chasing beetles, scouring saucepans, instead of writing books. All human relations have shifted — those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910.

  I have said that people have to acquire a good deal of skill in character-reading if they are to live a single year of life without disaster. But it is the art of the young. In middle age and in old age the art is practised mostly for its uses, and friendships and other adventures and experiments in the art of reading character are seldom made. But novelists differ from the rest of the world because they do not cease to be interested in character when they have learnt enough about it for practical purposes. They go a step further, they feel that there is something permanently interesting in character in itself. When all the practical business of life has been discharged, there is something about people which continues to seem to them of overwhelming importance, in spite of the fact that it has no bearing whatever upon their happiness, comfort, or income. The study of character becomes to them an absorbing pursuit; to impart character an obsession. And this I find it very difficult to explain: what novelists mean when they talk about character, what the impulse is that urges them so powerfully every now and then to embody their view in writing.

  So, if you will allow me, instead of analysing and abstracting, I will tell you a simple story which, however pointless, has the merit of being true, of a journey from Richmond to Waterloo, in the hope that I may show you what I mean by character in itself; that you may realize the different aspects it can wear; and the hideous perils that beset you directly you try to describe it in words.

  One night some weeks ago, then, I was late for the train and jumped into the first carriage I came to. As I sat down I had the strange
and uncomfortable feeling that I was interrupting a conversation between two people who were already sitting there. Not that they were young or happy. Far from it. They were both elderly, the woman over sixty, the man well over forty. They were sitting opposite each other, and the man, who had been leaning over and talking emphatically to judge by his attitude and the flush on his face, sat back and became silent. I had disturbed him, and he was annoyed. The elderly lady, however, whom I will call Mrs. Brown, seemed rather relieved. She was one of those clean, threadbare old ladies whose extreme tidiness — everything buttoned, fastened, tied together, mended and brushed up — suggests more extreme poverty than rags and dirt. There was something pinched about her — a look of suffering, of apprehension, and, in addition, she was extremely small. Her feet, in their clean little boots, scarcely touched the floor. I felt that she had nobody to support her; that she had to make up her mind for herself; that, having been deserted, or left a widow, years ago, she had led an anxious, harried life, bringing up an only son, perhaps, who, as likely as not, was by this time beginning to go to the bad. All this shot through my mind as I sat down, being uncomfortable, like most people, at travelling with fellow passengers unless I have somehow or other accounted for them. Then I looked at the man. He was no relation of Mrs. Brown’s I felt sure; he was of a bigger, burlier, less refined type. He was a man of business I imagined, very likely a respectable corn-chandler from the North, dressed in good blue serge with a pocket-knife and a silk handkerchief, and a stout leather bag. Obviously, however, he had an unpleasant business to settle with Mrs. Brown; a secret, perhaps sinister business, which they did not intend to discuss in my presence.