Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  There were horses. I see your eyes turned with longing to Dorothea Conyers and John Porter. Now you can get up and come to the stables. Now, I assure you, things are going to hum a little. In both these books we get what I own was somewhat disguised in the others — a passion for life. I confess that I like John Porter’s view of life better than Dorothea Conyers’, though, from the lips of a novelist, there is charm in her reflection: ‘Unfortunately, I shall never be a popular short-story writer: I do something just wrong’; one feels inclined to tell her to shorten her stirrups or have her fetlocks fired and see whether that wouldn’t do the trick. But this cherry-cheeked elderly gentleman, this quintessence of all good coachmen and trusty servants, this lean old trainer with his shrewd little eyes, and the horseshoe tiepin and the look of integrity and service honestly performed, of devotion given and returned — I can’t help feeling that he is the pick of the bunch. I like his assumption that the whole world exists for racing, or, as he is careful to put it, for ‘ the amelioration of the thoroughbred’. I like the warmth with which he praises his horses for holding their own on the course and begetting fine children at the stud. ‘ I thought the world of him,’ he says of Isonomy, ‘and his achievements as a sire strengthened my regard and admiration.’

  ‘That the horse I almost worshipped was afflicted with wind infirmity’, he says in another place, nearly killed him; and when Ormonde, for he it was, proved incurable and went to Australia, John Porter plucked a few hairs from tail and mane to keep, doubtless in some inner pocket, ‘as a memento of a great and noble creature’. What character he detects in them, and how humanely he respects it! Madam Eglantyne must be humoured in her fancy to be delivered of her children under a tree in the park. Sir Joseph Hawley — not a racehorse, but the owner of race-horses — what a character — what a fine fellow he was!— ‘a really great man... a noble friend to me and my family... stern, straight and fearless’; so John Porter writes of him, and when the Baronet for the last time left his cigar to waste on the mantelpiece, John Porter pocketed the ashes and has them now ‘ put carefully away’ in memory of his master. Then I like to read how Ormonde was born at half-past six on a Sunday evening, as the stable boys were going to Church, with a mane three inches long, and how always at the critical moment Fred Archer made a little movement in the saddle and ‘ lengthening his stride, Ormonde shot ahead, to win in a canter’; and how he was not only a giant among giants, but, like all magnanimous heroes, had the disposition of a lamb, and would eat cakes and carnations out of a Queen’s hand. How splendid we should think it if it were written in Greek! Indeed, how Greek it all is! Judith: Are you sure there is nothing about the village church? Ann: Well, yes. John Porter did in token of gratitude add ‘ some suitable embellishments to the village church’; but, then (as there are no gentlemen present) so did the Greeks, and we think no worse of them for doing so. Judith: Perhaps. Anyhow, John Porter is the pick of the bunch. He enjoyed life; that’s what the Victorians — but, go on — tell me how Orme was poisoned.

  Sir Walter Raleigh

  TO most of us, says Miss Hadow in her introduction to a book of selections from the prose of Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘the Elizabethan Age stands for one of two things: it is the age of jewelled magnificence, of pomp and profusion and colour, of stately ceremonial and Court pageant, of poetry and drama; or it is the age of enterprise and exploration’. But though we have every reason for being grateful to Miss Hadow for her part in the production of this astonishing little book, we cannot go with her in this initial distinction. If Shakespeare, as literature is the only thing that survives in its completeness, may be held to represent the Elizabethan age, are not enterprise and exploration a part of Shakespeare? If there are some who read him without any thought save for the poetry, to most of us, we believe, the world of Shakespeare is the world of Hakluyt and of Raleigh; on that map Guiana and the River of the Plate are not very far distant or easily distinguishable from the Forest of Arden and Elsinore. The navigator and the explorer made their voyage by ship instead of by the mind, but over Hakluyt’s pages broods the very same lustre of the imagination. Those vast rivers and fertile valleys, those forests of odorous trees and mines of gold and ruby, fill up the background of the plays as, in our fancy, the blue of the distant plains of America seems to lie behind the golden cross of St. Paul’s and the bristling chimneys of Elizabethan London.

  No man was a truer representative of this Elizabethan world than Sir Walter Raleigh. From the intrigues and splendours of the Court he sailed to an unknown land inhabited by savages; from discourse with Marlowe and Spenser he went to sea-battle with the Spaniard. Merely to read over the list of his pursuits gives one a sense of the space and opportunity of the Elizabethan age; courtier and admiral, soldier and explorer, member of Parliament and poet, musician and historian — he was all those things, and still kept such a curiosity alive in him that he must practise chemistry in his cabin when he had leisure at sea, or beg an old henhouse from the Governor of the Tower in which to pursue his search for ‘the Great Elixir’. It is little wonder that Rumour should still be telling her stories about his cloak, his pipe with the silver bowl, his potatoes, his mahogany, his orange trees, after all these years; for though Rumour may lie, there is always good judgment in her falsehood.

  When we come to read what remains of his writing — and in this little book the indispensable part of it is preserved — we get what Rumour cannot give us: the likeness of an extremely vigorous and individual mind, scarcely dominated by the ‘vast and devouring space’ of the centuries. It is well, perhaps, to begin by reading the last fight of the Revenge, the letters about Cadiz and Guiana, and that to his wife written in expectation of death, before reading the extracts from the Historié of the World, and to end with the preface to that work, as one leaves a church with the sound of the organ in one’s ears. His adventures by sea and land, his quest of Eldorado and the great gold mine of his dreams, his sentence of death and long imprisonment — glimpses of that ‘day of a tempestuous life’ are to be found in these pages. They give us some idea of its storm and its sunshine. Naturally the style of them is very different from that of the preface. They are full of hurry and turmoil, or impetuosity and self-assertiveness. He is always eager to justify his own daring, and to proclaim the supremacy of the English among other peoples. Even ‘our common English soldier, leavied in haste, from following the Cart, or sitting on the shop-stall’, surpasses in valour the best of Roman soldiers. Of the landing in Fayal in the year 1597 he writes, ‘For I thought it to belong unto the honor of our Prince & Nation, that a few islanders should not think any advantage great enough, against a fleet set forth by Q. Elizabeth ‘; although he had to admit that ‘ I had more regard of reputation, in that businesse, than of safetie’.

  But if we had to justify our love of these old voyagers we should not lay stress upon the boastful and magnificent strain in them; we should point, rather, to the strain of poetry — the meditative mood fostered by long days at sea, sleep and dreams under strange stars, and lonely effort in the face of death. We would recall the words of Sir Humfrey Gilbert, when the storm broke upon his ship, ‘sitting abaft with a book in his hand... and crying (so oft as we did approach within hearing) “We are as near to Heaven by sea as by land’”. And so Sir Walter Raleigh, whose character was subject to much criticism during his lifetime, who had been alternately exalted and debased by fortune, who had lived with the passion of a great lover, turns finally to thoughts of the littleness of all human things and to a magnanimous contemplation of the lot of mankind. His thoughts seem inspired by a knowledge of life both at its best and its worst; in the solitude of the Tower his memory is haunted by the sound of the sea. From the sea he takes his most frequent and splendid imagery. It comes naturally to him to speak of the ‘ Navigation of this life ‘, of ‘ the Port of death, to which all winds drive us’. Our false friends, he says, ‘ forsake us in the first tempest of misfortune and steere away before the Sea and Winde.’ So in old a
ge we find that our joy and our woe have ‘sayled out of sight’. Often he must have looked into the sky from the deck of his ship and thought how ‘The Heavens are high, farr off, and unsearcheable’; and his experience as a ruler of uncivilized races must have made him consider what fame ‘ the boundless ambition in mortal men’ is wont to leave behind it:

  ‘They themselves would then rather have wished, to have stolen out of the world without noise, than to be put in minde, that they have purchased the report of their actions in the world, by rapine, oppression, and crueltie, by giving in spoile the innocent and labouring soul to the idle and insolent, and by having emptied the cities of the world of their ancient Inhabitants, and filled them againe with so many and so variable sorts of sorrowes.’

  But although the sounds of life and the waves of the sea are constantly in his ears, so that at any moment he is ready to throw away his pen and take command of an expedition, he seems in his deepest moods to reject the show and splendour of the world, to see the vanity of gold mines and of all expeditions save those of the soul.

  ‘ For the rest, as all fables were commonly grounded upon some true stories of other things done; so might these tales of the Griffins receive this moral. That if those men which fight against so many dangerous passages for gold, or other riches of this world, had their perfect senses... they would content themselves with a quiet and moderate estate.’

  The thought of the passing of time and the uncertainty of human lot was a favourite one with the Elizabethans, whose lives were more at the mercy of fortune than ours are. In Raleigh’s prose the same theme is constantly treated, but with an absence of the characteristic Elizabethan conceits, which brings it nearer to the taste of our own time; a divine unconsciousness seems to pervade it. Take this passage upon the passing of youth:

  ‘ So as who-so-ever hee bee, to whome Fortune hath beene a servant, and the Time a friend: let him but take the accompt of his memory (for wee have no other keeper of our pleasures past) and truelie examine what it hath reserved, either of beauty and youth, or foregone delights; what it hath saved, that it might last, of his dearest affections, or of whatever else the amorous Springtime gave his thoughts of contentment, then unvaluable; and hee shall finde that all the art which his elder yeares have, can draw no other vapour out of these dissolutions, than heavie, secret, and sad sighs.... Onely those few blacke Swans I must except; who having had the grace to value worldly vanities at no more than their owne price; doe, by retayning the comfortable memorie of a well acted life, behold death without dread, and the grave without feare; and embrace both, as necessary guides to endlesse glorie.’

  This is no sudden effort of eloquence; it is prefaced and continued by words of almost equal beauty. In its melody and strength, its natural symmetry of form, it is a perfect speech, fit for letters of gold and the echoes of cathedral aisles, or for the tenderness of noble human intercourse. It reaches us almost with the very accent of Raleigh’s voice. There is a magnificence with which such a being relinquishes his hopes in life and dismisses the cares of ‘this ridiculous world’ which is the counterpart of his great zest in living. We hear it in the deeply burdened sigh with which he takes his farewell of his wife. ‘For the rest, when you have travailled and wearied all your thoughts, over all sorts of worldly cogitations, you shall but sitt downe by sorrowe in the end.’ But it is most evident in his thought upon death. The thought of death tolls all through Elizabethan literature lugubriously enough in our ears, for whom, perhaps, existence has been made less palpable by dint of much thinking and death more of a shade than a substance. But to the Elizabethans a great part of the proper conduct of life consisted in meeting the idea of death, which to them was not an idea but a person, with fortitude. And to Raleigh in particular, death was a very definite enemy — death, ‘which doth pursue us and hold us in chace from our infancy’. A true man, he says, despises death. And yet even as he says this there come to life before his eyes the ‘mishapen and ouglye shapes’ with which death tortures the imagination. And at last, when he has taken the idea of death to him and triumphed over it, there rises from his lips that magnificent strain of reconciliation and acknowledgment which sounds for ever in the ears of those who have heard it once: ‘O eloquent, just and mightie Death! whom none could advise, thou hast perswaded: what none hath dared, thou hast done.’