Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  But if Mr Pearsall Smith puts in and leaves out according to a rule of his own, that is an indispensable merit in an anthologist. He puts in, for example, Jeremy Taylor, and so reveals a great English writer, who, to my shame, had been no more than an obscure clerical shade among the folios. For that I could forgive him - I was going to say the neglect of Mr Hardy; but Mr Pearsall Smith can hardly have neglected all, or almost all, the great English novelists. He has rejected them, and that is another matter, that leads one to consider what may be his reasons. I suppose there are at least twenty of them, and all so profound and lying at the roots of things that to lay bare a single one would need more columns than I have words. Lightly then will I run over a few suggestions and leave them to wither or perhaps fall on fertile soil. To begin with, every novelist would, I suppose, suspect a critic who complimented him on the beauty of his writing. ‘But that’s not what I’m after,’ he would say, and add, a moment later, with the susceptibility of his kind. You mean, I’m dull.’ And as a matter of fact the great novelists very seldom stop in the middle or in the beginning of their great scenes to write anything that one could cut out with a pair of scissors or loop round with a line of red ink. The greatest of novelists - Dostoevsky - always, so Russian scholars say, writes badly. Turgenev, the least great of the Russian trinity, always, they say, writes exquisitely. That Dostoevsky would have been a greater novelist had he written beautifully into the bargain no one will deny. But the novelist’s task lays such a load upon every nerve, muscle, and fibre that to demand beautiful prose in addition is, in view of human limitations, to demand what can only be given at the cost of a sacrifice. Let us choose two instances from among the writers of our own tongue. There is no novel by Mr Conrad which has not passages of such beauty that one hangs over them like a humming-bird moth at the mouth of a flower. Yet I believe that one pays for such beauty in a novel. To achieve it the writer has had to shut off his energy in other directions. Hence, I think, so many pages of Mr Conrad’s novels are slack and slumberous, monotonous like the summer sea. Mr Hardy, on the other hand, has not in the course of some twenty volumes written a single passage fit to be included in a treasury of English prose. Impossible! Yet I could not, at a moment’s notice, lay my hand on one. The greater number of our novelists are in the same boat with him. But what, then, can we be talking about? What is this “beautiful English prose’?

  Surely the most beautiful of all things! the reader of Mr Pearsall Smith’s selection will exclaim - the most subtle, the most profound, the most moving and imaginative. And who are the people who keep it alive, extend its powers and increase its triumphs? The novelists. Only we must not go to them for perfect passages, descriptions, perorations, reflections so highly wrought that they can stand alone without their context. We must go to them for chapters, not for sentences; for beauty, not tranquil and contained, but wild and fleeting like the light on rough waters. We must seek it particularly where the narrative breaks and gives way to dialogue. But it must be conceded that the novelists put their English to the most menial tasks. She has to do all the work of the house; to make the beds, dust the china, boil the kettle, sweep the floors. In return she has the priceless privilege of living with human beings. When she has warmed to her task, when the fire is burning, the cat here, the dog there, the smoke rising from the chimney, the men and women feasting or love-making, dreaming or speculating, the trees blowing, the moon rising, the autumn sun gold upon the corn - then read Mr Hardy and see whether the common prose of English fiction does not carry herself like the Queen she is - the old Queen, wise in the secrets of our hearts; the young Queen with all her life before her. For though English poetry was a fine old potentate - but no, I dare not breathe a word against English poetry. All I will venture is a sigh of wonder and amazement that when there is prose before us with its capacities and possibilities, its power to say new things, make new shapes, express new passions, young people should still be dancing to a barrel organ and choosing words because they rhyme.

  Impressions at Bayreuth.

  The commonplace remark that music is in its infancy is best borne out by the ambiguous state of musical criticism. It has few traditions behind it, and the art itself is so much alive that it fairly suffocates those who try to deal with it. A critic of writing is hardly to be taken by surprise, for he can compare almost every literary form with some earlier form and can measure the achievement by some familiar standard. But who in music has tried to do what Strauss is doing, or Debussy? Before we have made up our minds as to the nature of the operatic form we have to value very different and very emphatic examples of it. This lack of tradition and of current standards is of course the freest and happiest state that a critic can wish for; it offers someone the chance of doing now for music what Aristotle did 2,000 years ago for poetry. The fact however that so little has yet been done to lay bare the principles of the art accounts for the indecision which marks our attempts to judge new music. As for the old, we take it for granted, or concentrate our minds upon the prima donna’s cold. It is criticism of a single hour, in a particular day, and tomorrow the mark has faded.

  There is only one way open thus for a writer who is not disposed to go to the root of the matter and is yet dissatisfied with the old evasions - he may try to give his impressions as an amateur. The seats in the great bare house in Bayreuth are packed with them; they have a secret belief that they understand as well as other people, although they seldom venture an opinion; and, at any rate, there is no doubt that they love music. If they hesitate to criticize, it is perhaps that they have not sufficient technical knowledge to fasten upon details; a criticism of the whole resolves itself into vague formulas, comparisons, and adjectives. Nevertheless, no one can doubt that the audience at Bayreuth, pilgrims possessed with tranquillity at the same time, for the words are continued by the music so that we hardly notice the transition.

  It may be that these exalted emotions, which belong to the essence of our being, and are rarely expressed, are those that are best translated by music; so that a satisfaction, or whatever one may call that sense of answer which the finest art supplies to its own question, is constantly conveyed here. Like Shakespeare, Wagner seems to have attained in the end to such a mastery of technique that he could float and soar in regions where in the beginning he could scarcely breathe; the stubborn matter of his art dissolves in his fingers, and he shapes it as he chooses. When the opera is over, it is surely the completeness of the work that remains with us. The earlier operas have always their awkward moments, when the illusion breaks; but Parsifal seems poured out in a smooth stream at white heat; its shape is solid and entire. How much of the singular atmosphere which surrounds the opera in one’s mind springs from other sources than the music itself it would be hard to say. It is the only work which has no incongruous associations.

  It has been possible, during these last performances, to step out of the opera-house and find oneself in the midst of a warm summer evening. From the hill above the theatre you look over a wide land, smooth and without hedges; it is not beautiful, but it is very large and tranquil. One may sit among rows of turnips and watch a gigantic old woman, with a blue cotton bonnet on her head and a figure like one of Durer’s, swinging her hoe. The sun draws out strong scents from the hay and the pine trees, and if one thinks at all, it is to combine the simple landscape with the landscape of the stage. When the music is silent the mind insensibly slackens and expands, among happy surroundings: heat and the yellow light, and the intermittent but not unmusical noises of insects and leaves smooth out the folds. In the next interval, between seven and eight, there is another act out here also; it is now dusky and perceptibly fresher; the light is thinner, and the roads are no longer crossed by regular bars of shade. The figures in light dresses moving between the many of them from distant lands, attend with all their power. As the lights sink, they rustle into their seats, and scarcely stir till the last wave of sound has ceased; when a stick falls, there is a nervous shudder, like a ri
pple in water, through the entire house. During the intervals between the acts, when they come out into the sun, they seem oppressed with a desire to disburden themselves somehow of the impression which they have received. Parsifal, in particular, lays such a weight upon the mind that it is not until one has heard it many times over that one can begin, as it were, to move it to and fro. The unfamiliarity of the ideas hinders one at the outset from bringing the different parts together. One feels vaguely for a crisis that never comes, for, accustomed as one is to find the explanation of a drama in the love of man and woman, or in battle, one is bewildered by a music that continues with the utmost calm and intensity independently of them. Further, the change from the Temple of the Grail to the magic garden, with its swarms of flower-maidens and its hot red blossoms, is too violent a break to be bridged conveniently.

  Nevertheless, although they are great, these difficulties scarcely do more than disturb the surface of a very deep and perhaps indescribable impression. Puzzled we may be, but it is primarily because the music has reached a place not yet visited by sound. An anthem sung with perfect skill in some great church will suggest a part of the scene in the vast hall, with its green distances, and yet a part only. Ecclesiastical music is too rigidly serene and too final in its spirit to penetrate as the music of Parsifal penetrates. Somehow Wagner has conveyed the desire of the Knights for the Grail in such a way that the intense emotion of human beings is combined with the unearthly nature of the thing they seek. It tears us, as we hear it, as though its wings were sharply edged. Again, feelings of this kind that are equally diffused and felt for one object in common create an impression of largeness and, when the music is played as it was played on the night of the nth, of an overwhelming unity. The Grail seems to burn through all superincumbences; the music is intimate in a sense that none other is; one is fired with emotion and yet trees of the avenue, with depths of blue air behind them, have a curiously decorative effect. Finally, when the opera is over, it is quite late; and half-way down the hill one looks back upon a dark torrent of carriages descending, their lamps wavering one above another, like irregular torches.

  These strange intervals in the open air, as though a curtain were regularly drawn and shut again, have no disturbing effect, upon Parsifal at least. A bat from the woods circled Kundry’s head in the meadow, and little white moths dance incessantly over the footlights. It was curious, although scarcely fair, to test Lohengrin two days after one had heard Parsifal. The difference which a chorus, alive in all its parts so that eyes and arms are moving when the voice is silent, can make to a work in which the chorus means so much is surprising certainly; and yet, recognizing the admirable performance, other reflections were suggested by it. The same surroundings that were so congenial to Parsifal turn much of Lohengrin to tinsel and sham armour; one thinks of gorgeous skirts and the mantles of knights trailed along the dusty paths and pricked by the stubble. An opera house which shelters such a troop should be hemmed in by streets with great shop windows; their splendour somehow dwindles away and falls flat in the empty country.

  But although this was one of the impressions that Lohengrin gave rise to, can it be held to be any reflection upon the music? No one, perhaps, save a writer properly versed in the science, can decide which impressions are relevant and which impertinent, and it is here that the amateur is apt to incur the contempt of the professional. We know the critic who, in painting, prefers the art of Fra Angelico because ‘ that painter worked upon his knees; others choose books because they teach one to rise early; and one has only to read the descriptive notes in a concert programme to be led hopelessly astray. Apart from the difficulty of changing a musical impression into a literary one, and the tendency to appeal to the literary sense because of the associations of words, there is the further difficulty in the case of music that its scope is much less clearly defined than the scope of the other arts. The more beautiful a phrase of music is the richer its burden of suggestion, and if we understand the form but slightly, we are little restrained in our interpretation. We are led on to connect the beautiful sound with some experience of our own, or to make it symbolize some conception of a general nature. Perhaps music owes something of its astonishing power over us to this lack of definite articulation; its statements have all the majesty of a generalization, and yet contain our private emotions. Something of the same effect is given by Shakespeare, when he makes an old nurse the type of all the old nurses in the world, while she keeps her identity as a particular old woman. The comparative weakness of Lohengrin urges one to such speculations, for there are many passages which fit loosely to the singer’s mood, and yet carry one’s mind out with a beauty of their own.

  In the meantime, we are miserably aware how little words can do to render music. When the moment of suspense is over, and the bows actually move across the strings, our definitions are relinquished, and words disappear in our minds. Enormous is the relief, and yet, when the spell is over, how great is the joy with which we turn to our old tools again! These definitions indeed, which would limit the bounds of an art and regulate our emotions, are arbitrary enough; and here at Bayreuth, where the music fades into the open air, and we wander with Parsifal in our heads through empty streets at night, where the gardens of the Hermitage glow with flowers like those other magic blossoms, and sound melts into colour, and colour calls out for words, where, in short, we are lifted out of the ordinary world and allowed merely to breathe and see - it is here that we realize how thin are the walls between one emotion and another; and how fused our impressions are with elements which we may not attempt to separate.

  Modes and Manners of the Nineteenth Century.

  When one has read no history for a time the sad-coloured volumes are really surprising. That so much energy should have been wasted in the effort to believe in something spectral fills one with pity. Wars and Ministries and legislation - unexampled prosperity and unbridled corruption tumbling the nation headlong to decay - what a strange delusion it all is! - invented presumably by gentlemen in tall hats in the forties who wished to dignify mankind. Our point of view they ignore entirely: we have never felt the pressure of a single law; our passions and despairs have nothing to do with trade; our virtues and vices flourish under all Governments impartially. The machine they describe; they succeed to some extent in making us believe in it; but the heart of it they leave untouched - is it because they cannot understand it? At any rate, we are left out, and history, in our opinion, lacks an eye. It is with unusual hope that we open the three volumes in which a nameless author has dealt with the Modes and Manners of the Nineteenth Century. Thin and green, with innumerable coloured pictures and a fair type, they are less like a mausoleum than usual; and modes and manners - how we feel and dress - are precisely what the other historian ignores.

  The connection between dress and character has been pointed out often enough. Because dress represents some part of a man picturesquely it lends itself happily to the satirist. He can exaggerate it without losing touch with the object of his satire. Like a shadow, it walks beside the truth and apes it. The device of making the smaller ridicule the greater by representing it recommended itself to Swift and Carlyle. But to discover soberly how far thought has expressed itself in clothes, and manners as we call them, is far more difficult. There is the temptation to hook the two together by the most airy conjectures. A gentleman had the habit, for example, of walking in the streets of Berlin with tame deer; that was characteristic, we are told, of a certain middle-class section of German society, in the twenties, thirties, and forties, which was learned, pedantic, Philistine, and vulgar; for to make oneself conspicuous is a mark of the vulgarian, and to walk with tame deer is to make oneself conspicuous. But there are more solid links. The French Revolution, of course, sundered the traditions of ages. It decreed that man in future must be mainly black, and should wear trousers instead of breeches. The waistcoat alone remained aristocratic, and drew to itself all the reds and oranges of the other garments, and, as they beca
me cotton, turned to plush and brocade. At length this rich territory was conquered, and sparks of colour only burnt in the cravat and on the fob. The different garments moved up and down, swelled and shrank at intervals, but after 1815 a man’s clothes were ‘essentially the same as they are now’. Men wished to obliterate classes, and a dress that could be worn at work became necessary. Women, on the other hand, were exposed to fewer influences, so that it may be easier to trace one idea in their clothes. The effect of the Revolution seems to be definite enough. Rousseau had bidden them return to nature; the Revolution had left them poor; the Greeks were ancient, and therefore natural; and their dress was cheap enough for a democracy. Accordingly, they dressed in pure white cottons and calicoes, without a frill or an exuberance; nature alone was to shape the lines; nature was to suffer not more than eight ounces of artificial concealment. The effect of these tapering nymphs, dancing on a hilltop among slim trees, is exquisite but chill. Because Greek temples were white, they whitewashed their walls; the bedroom was the Temple of Sleep; the tables were altars; the chair legs were grooved into columns; reticules were shaped like funeral urns, and classical cameos were worn at the neck. The absolute consistency of their attitude may be ridiculous, but it is also remarkable. In fact, the society of the Empire is the last to ‘boast a style of its own, owing to the perfect correspondence between its aims, ideas, and character, and their outward manifestations’. Any unanimity is overwhelming; it is one of the great gifts we bestow upon the Greeks; and, although there were many beautiful episodes in the nineteenth century, no single style was again strong enough to make everything consistent. Before the Revolution some sort of order was stamped upon fashion by the will of the Queen, who could afford to make beauty the prime virtue; but in 1792 Mlle Bertin, Marie Antoinette’s modiste, fled from Paris, and although she touched at other Courts, eventually settling in England, her rule was over; shops for ready-made clothing opened as she left. For ten years, 1794-1804, the didactic classic spirit served instead of the Royal will; and then a confusion set in which threatens never to grow calm. Still the author does his best to make one change account for another, at the risk of wide generalizations. ‘Feeling and sensibility took the place in this generation [the generation of the Napoleonic wars] of religion... During the First Empire love and passion had been but the passing gratification of the moment, but now love was to be the one lasting object of life and being’ - therefore puffs and ruffs were worn; the furniture became rococo, and Gothic cathedrals influenced the chairs and the clocks.