A Woman’s College from Outside.
The feathery-white moon never let the sky grow dark; all night the chestnut blossoms were white in the green, and dim was the cow-parsley in the meadows. Neither to Tartary nor to Arabia went the wind of the Cambridge courts, but lapsed dreamily in the midst of grey-blue clouds over the roofs of Newnham. There, in the garden, if she needed space to wander, she might find it among the trees; and as none but women’s faces could meet her face, she might unveil it, blank, featureless, and gaze into rooms where at that hour, blank, featureless, eyelids white over eyes, ringless hands extended upon sheets, slept innumerable women. But here and there a light still burned.
A double light one might figure in Angela’s room, seeing how bright Angela herself was, and how bright came back the reflection of herself from the square glass. The whole of her was perfectly delineated - perhaps the soul. For the glass held up an untrembling image - white and gold, red slippers, pale hair with blue stones in it, and never a ripple or shadow to break the smooth kiss of Angela and her reflection in the glass, as if she were glad to be Angela. Anyhow the moment was glad - the bright picture hung in the heart of night, the shrine hollowed in the nocturnal blackness. Strange indeed to have this visible proof of the rightness of things; this lily floating flawless upon Time’s pool, fearless, as if this were sufficient - this reflection. Which meditation she betrayed by turning, and the mirror held nothing at all, or only the brass bedstead, and she, running here and there, patting, and darting, became like a woman in a house, and changed again, pursing her lips over a black book and marking with her finger what surely could not be a firm grasp of the science of economics. Only Angela Williams was at Newnham for the purpose of earning her living, and could not forget even in moments of impassioned adoration the cheques of her father at Swansea: her mother washing in the scullery: pink frocks out to dry on the line; tokens that even the lily no longer floats flawless upon the pool, but has a name on a card like another.
A. Williams - one may read it in the moonlight; and next to it some Mary or Eleanor, Mildred, Sarah, Phoebe upon square cards on their doors. All names, nothing but names. The cool white light withered them and starched them until it seemed as if the only purpose of all these names was to rise martially in order should there be a call on them to extinguish a fire, suppress an insurrection, or pass an examination. Such is the power of names written upon cards pinned upon doors. Such too the resemblance, what with tiles, corridors, and bedroom doors, to dairy or nunnery, a place of seclusion or discipline, where the bowl of milk stands cool and pure and there’s a great washing of linen.
At that very moment soft laughter came from behind a door. A prim-voiced clock struck the hour - one, two. Now if the clock were issuing his commands, they were disregarded. Fire, insurrection, examination, were all snowed under by laughter, or softly uprooted, the sound seeming to bubble up from the depths and gently waft away the hour, rules, discipline. The bed was strewn with cards. Sally was on the floor. Helena in the chair. Good Bertha clasping her hands by the fireplace. A. Williams came in yawning.
‘Because it’s utterly and intolerably damnable,’ said Helena.
‘Damnable,’ echoed Bertha. Then yawned.
‘We’re not eunuchs.’
‘I saw her slipping in by the back gate with that old hat on. They don’t want us to know.’
They?’ said Angela. ‘She.’
Then the laughter.
The cards were spread, falling with their red and yellow faces on the table, and hands were dabbled in the cards. Good Bertha, leaning with her head against the chair, sighed profoundly. For she would willingly have slept, but since night is free pasturage, a limitless field, since night is unmoulded richness, one must tunnel into its darkness. One must hang it with jewels. Night was shared in secret, day browsed on by the whole flock. The blinds were up. A mist was on the garden. Sitting on the floor by the window (while the others played), body, mind, both together, seemed blown through the air, to trail across the bushes. Ah, but she desired to stretch out in bed and to sleep! She believed that no one felt her desire for sleep; she believed humbly - sleepily - with sudden nods and lurchings, that other people were wide awake. When they laughed all together a bird chirped in its sleep out in the garden, as if the laughter-
Yes, as if the laughter (for she dozed now) floated out much like mist and attached itself by soft elastic shreds to plants and bushes, so that the garden was vaporous and clouded. And then, swept by the wind, the bushes would bow themselves and the white vapours blow off across the world.
From all the rooms where women slept this vapour issued, attaching itself to shrubs, like mist, and then blew freely out into the open. Elderly women slept, who would on waking immediately clasp the ivory rod of office. Now smooth and colourless, reposing deeply, they lay surrounded, lay supported, by the bodies of youth recumbent or grouped at the window; pouring forth into the garden this bubbling laughter, this irresponsible laughter: this laughter of mind and body floating away rules, hours, discipline: immensely fertilizing, yet formless, chaotic, trailing and straying and tufting the rose-bushes with shreds of vapour.
‘Ah,’ breathed Angela, standing at the window in her nightgown. Pain was in her voice. She leant her head out. The mist was cleft as if her voice parted it. She had been talking, while the others played, to Alice Avery, about Bamborough Castle; the colour of the sands at evening; upon which Alice said she would write and settle the day, in August, and stooping, kissed her, at least touched her head with her hand, and Angela, positively unable to sit still, like one possessed of a wind-lashed sea in her heart, roamed up and down the room (the witness of such a scene) throwing her arms out to relieve this excitement, this astonishment at the incredible stooping of the miraculous tree with the golden fruit at its summit - hadn’t it dropped into her arms? She held it glowing to her breast, a thing not to be touched, thought of, or spoken about, but left to glow there. And then, slowly putting there her stockings, there her slippers, folding her petticoat neatly on top, Angela, her other name being Williams, realized - how could she express it? - that after the dark churning of myriad ages here was light at the end of the tunnel; life; the world. Beneath her it lay - all good; all loveable. Such was her discovery.
Indeed, how could one then feel surprise if, lying in bed, she could not close her eyes? - something irresistibly unclosed them - if in the shallow darkness chair and chest of drawers looked stately, and the looking-glass precious with its ashen hint of day? Sucking her thumb like a child (her age nineteen last November), she lay in this good world, this new world, this world at the end of the tunnel, until a desire to see it or forestall it drove her, tossing her blankets, to guide herself to the window, and there, looking out upon the garden, where the mist lay, all the windows open, one fiery-bluish, something murmuring in the distance, the world of course, and the morning coming, ‘Oh,’ she cried, as if in pain.
On a Faithful Friend.
There is some impertinence as well as some foolhardiness in the way in which we buy animals for so much gold and silver and call them ours. One cannot help wondering what the silent critic on the hearthrug thinks of our strange conventions - the mystic Persian, whose ancestors were worshipped as gods whilst we, their masters and mistresses, grovelled in caves and painted our bodies blue. She has a vast heritage of experience, which seems to brood in her eyes, too solemn and too subtle for expression; she smiles, I often think, at our late-born civilization, and remembers the rise and fall of dynasties. There is something, too, profane in the familiarity, half contemptuous, with which we treat our animals. We deliberately transplant a little bit of simple wild life, and make it grow up beside ours, which is neither simple nor wild. You may often see in a dog’s eyes a sudden look of the primitive animal, as though he were once more a wild dog hunting in the solitary places of his youth. How have we the impertinence to make these wild creatures forgo their nature for ours, which at best they can but imitate? It is one of the r
efined sins of civilization, for we know not what wild spirit we are taking from its purer atmosphere, or who it is - Pan, or Nymph, or Dryad - that we have trained to beg for a lump of sugar at tea.
I do not think that in domesticating our lost friend Shag ‘ we were guilty of any such crime; he was essentially a sociable dog, who had his near counterpart in the human world. I can see him smoking a cigar at the bow window of his club, his legs extended comfortably, whilst he discusses the latest news on the Stock Exchange with a companion. His best friend could not claim for him any romantic or mysterious animal nature, but that made him all the better company for mere human beings. He came to us, however, with a pedigree that had all the elements of romance in it; he, when, in horror at his price, his would-be purchaser pointed to his collie head and collie body, but terribly Skye-terrier legs - he, we were assured, was no less a dog than the original Skye - a chieftain of the same importance as the O’Brien or the O’Connor Don in human aristocracy. The whole of the Skye-terrier tribe - who, that is, inherited the paternal characteristics - had somehow been swept from the earth; Shag, the sole scion of true Skye blood, remained in an obscure Norfolk village, the property of a low-born blacksmith, who, however, cherished the utmost loyalty for his person, and pressed the claims of his royal birth with such success that we had the honour of buying him for a very substantial sum. He was too great a gentleman to take part in the plebeian work of killing rats for which he was originally needed, but he certainly added, we felt, to the respectability of the family. He seldom went for a walk without punishing the impertinence of middle-class dogs who neglected the homage due to his rank, and we had to enclose the royal jaws in a muzzle long after that restriction was legally unnecessary. As he advanced in middle life he became certainly rather autocratic, not only with his own kind, but with us, his masters and mistresses; such a title though was absurd where Shag was concerned, so we called ourselves his uncles and aunts. The solitary occasion when he found it necessary to inflict marks of his displeasure on human flesh was once when a visitor rashly tried to treat him as an ordinary pet-dog and tempted him with sugar and called him ‘out of his name’ by the contemptible lap-dog title of ‘Fido’. Then Shag, with characteristic independence, refused the sugar and took a satisfactory mouthful of calf instead. But when he felt that he was treated with due respect he was the most faithful of friends. He was not demonstrative; but failing eyesight did not blind him to his master’s face, and in his deafness he could still hear his master’s voice.
The evil spirit of Shag’s life was introduced into the family in the person of an attractive young sheep-dog puppy - who, though of authentic breed, was unhappily without a tail - a fact which Shag could not help remarking with satisfaction. We deluded ourselves into the thought that the young dog might take the place of the son of Shag’s old age, and for a time they lived happily together. But Shag had ever been contemptuous of social graces, and had relied for his place in our hearts upon his sterling qualities of honesty and independence; the puppy, however, was a young gentleman of most engaging manners, and, though we tried to be fair, Shag could not help feeling that the young dog got most of our attention. I can see him now, as in a kind of blundering and shamefaced way he lifted one stiff old paw and gave it me to shake, which was one of the young dog’s most successful tricks. It almost brought the tears to my eyes. I could not help thinking, though I smiled, of old King Lear. But Shag was too old to acquire new graces; no second place should be his, and he determined that the matter should be decided by force. So after some weeks of growing tension the battle was fought; they went for each other with white teeth gleaming - Shag was the aggressor - and rolled round and round on the grass, locked in each other’s grip. When at last we got them apart, blood was running, hair was flying, and both dogs bore scars. Peace after that was impossible; they had but to see each other to growl and stiffen; the question was - Who was the conqueror? Who was to stay and who to go? The decision we came to was base, unjust, and yet, perhaps, excusable. The old dog has had his day, we said, he must give place to the new generation. So old Shag was deposed, and sent to a kind of dignified dower-house at Parson’s-green, and the young dog reigned in his stead. Year after year passed, and we never saw the old friend who had known us in the days of our youth; but in the summer holidays he revisited the house in our absence with the caretaker. And so time went on till this last year, which, though we did not know it, was to be the last year of his life. Then, one winter’s night, at a time of great sickness and anxiety, a dog was heard barking repeatedly, with the bark of a dog who waits to be let in, outside our kitchen-door. It was many years since that bark had been heard, and only one person in the kitchen was able to recognize it now. She opened the door, and in walked Shag, now almost quite blind and stone deaf, as he had walked in many times before, and, looking neither to right nor left, went to his old corner by the fireside, where he curled up and fell asleep without a sound. If the usurper saw him he slunk guiltily away, for Shag was past fighting for his rights any more. We shall never know - it is one of the many things that we can never know - what strange wave of memory or sympathetic instinct it was that drew Shag from the house where he had lodged for years to seek again the familiar doorstep of his master’s home. And it befell that Shag was the last of the family to live in the old house, for it was in crossing the road which leads to the gardens where he was taken for his first walks as a puppy, and bit all the other dogs and frightened all the babies in their perambulators, that he met his death. The blind, deaf dog neither saw nor heard a hansom; and the wheel went over him and ended instantly a life which could not have been happily prolonged. It was better for him to die thus out among the wheels and the horses than to end in a lethal-chamber or be poisoned in a stable-yard.
So we say farewell to a dear and faithful friend, whose virtues we remember - and dogs have few faults.
English Prose.
If it should be proposed to appoint Mr Pearsall Smith Anthologist Royal to the English-speaking races, I, for one, would willingly contribute rather more than I can afford to his stipend. For three hundred years and more a dead preacher called John Donne had cumbered our shelves. The other day Mr Pearsall Smith touched him with his wand, and behold! - the folios quake, the pages shiver, out steps the passionate preacher; the fibres of our secular hearts are bent and bowed beneath the unaccustomed tempest. But no figure could be more misleading than this of the wand and the wizard. Conceive, rather, a table piled with books; folio pages turned and turned again; collations, annotations, emendations, expurgations; voyages in omnibuses; hours of disillusionment - for who reads prose? life wasting under the rays of a green lamp; the prize of months one solitary paragraph - truly if Mr Pearsall Smith is a wizard he has learned his craft where none but the bold and the faithful dare follow him. Therefore if I go on to say that in one respect I am his superior, it will be understood that it is not to his learning that I refer. I refer to his taste. In reading the ‘Treasury of English Prose’ I became aware that my taste is far better than Mr Pearsall Smith’s; it is in fact impeccable. But I need scarcely hasten to add what everyone knows for himself; in matters of taste each man, woman and child in the British Isles is impeccable; so are the quadrupeds. A dog who did not rate his own taste better than his master’s would be a dog not worth drowning.
This being said, let us waste no more time but proceed at once to Stevenson. I had hoped, not very confidently, to look for Stevenson in vain. I had hoped that the habit of cutting out passages from Stevenson about being good and being brave and being happy was now confined to schoolmasters and people at the head of public institutions. I had hoped that private individuals were beginning to say, ‘What is the point of Stevenson? Why did they call him a master of prose? What did our fathers mean by comparing this thin-blooded mummery with Scott or Defoe?’ - but I had hoped in vain. Here is Stevenson occupying one of two hundred and fifteen pages with reflections upon Happiness - reflections addressed in a private letter
to a friend. It begins all right. Nobody can deny that it needs every sort of good quality to step along so briskly, with such apparent ease, such a nice imitation of talk running down the pen and flowing over the paper. Nor do I shiver when the pen steps more circumspectly. A writer’s letters should be as literary as his printed works. But all my spines erect themselves, all my prejudices are confirmed when I come to this: ‘But I know pleasure still; pleasure with a thousand faces, and none perfect, a thousand tongues all broken, a thousand hands and all of them with scratching nails. High among these I place this delight of weeding out here alone by the garrulous water, under the silence of the high wood, broken by incongruous sounds of birds.’ Then I know why I cannot read the novels; then I know why I should never allow him within a mile of the anthologies.
Skipping (for no one reads an anthology through), we next alight upon Walter Pater - nervously, prepared for disappointment. Can he possibly be what he once seemed? - the writer who from words made blue and gold and green; marble, brick, the wax petals of flowers; warmth too and scent; all things that the hand delighted to touch and the nostrils to smell, while the mind traced subtle winding paths and surprised recondite secrets. This, and much more than this, comes back to me with renewed delight in Mr Pearsall Smith’s quotations. The famous one still seems to me to deserve all its fame; the less famous, about a red hawthorn tree in full flower - ‘a plumage of tender crimson fire out of the heart of the dry wood’ - revives the old joys and makes the nerve of the eye vibrate again; but if one cannot praise fitly it is better to be silent and only say that there can be no doubt - from the quotations at least - about Walter Pater.
About Emerson there is I think considerable doubt; or rather there is no doubt at all that he must be altogether different from what we supposed to deserve eleven full pages where there is no room for a single line of Dryden, Cowper, Peacock, Hardy, the Brontës, Jane Austen, Meredith (to take the obvious omissions); only two scraps of Sterne and a page and a bit of Conrad. Yet one sees what Mr Pearsall Smith means. Emerson wrote for anthologies. Passages seem to break off in one’s hands like ripe fruit without damage to the tree. The first passage reads beautifully; the second almost as well. But then - what is it? Something bald and bare and glittering - something light and brittle - something which suggests that if this precious fruit were dropped it would shiver into particles of silvery dust like one of those balls that were plucked from the boughs of ancient Christmas trees, and slipped and fell - is Emerson’s fruit that kind of fruit? Of course the lustre is admirable - the dust, the dust of the stars.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 496
