Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Coleridge’s mind was so fertile in such ideas that it is difficult to conceive that, given the health of a coal-heaver and the industry of a bank clerk, he could ever have succeeded in tracking each to its end, or in embracing the whole of them with their innumerable progeny in one vast synthesis. A great number spring directly from literature, but almost any topic had power at once to form an idea capable of splitting into an indefinite number of fresh ideas. Here are some chosen for their brevity. ‘You abuse snuff! Perhaps it is the final cause of the human nose!’ ‘Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense at all events.’ There is no subjectivity whatever in the Homeric poetry.’ ‘Swift was anima Rabelaisii habitons in sicco - the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place.’ ‘How inimitably graceful children are before they learn to dance!’ There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy.’ ‘You see many scenes which are simply Shakespeare’s, disporting himself in joyous triumph and vigorous fun after a great achievement of his highest genius.’ A respectable library could be, and no doubt has been, made out of these ideas; and Coleridge, not content with carrying the stuff of many libraries in his head, had what in England is more remarkable, the germs of an equal susceptibility to painting and to music. The gifts should go together; all three are perhaps needed to complete each one. But if such gifts complete a Milton or a Keats they may undo a Coleridge. The reader of the Table Talk’ will sometime reflect that although, compared with Coleridge, he must consider himself deaf and blind as well as dumb, these limitations, in the present state of the world, have protected him and most of his work has been done within their shelter. For how can a man with Coleridge’s gifts produce anything? His demands are so much greater than can be satisfied by the spiritual resources of his age. He is perpetually checked and driven back; life is too short; ideas are too many; opposition is too great. If Coleridge heard music he wanted hours and hours of Mozart and Purcell; if he liked a picture he fell into a trance in front of it; if he saw a sunset he almost lost consciousness in the rapture of gazing at it. Our society makes no provision for these apparitions. The only course for such a one to pursue is that which Coleridge finally adopted - to sink into the house of some hospitable Gillman and there for the rest of his life to sit and talk. In better words, ‘My dear fellow! never be ashamed of scheming! - you can’t think of living less than 4,000 years, and that would nearly suffice for your present schemes. To be sure, if they go on in the same ratio to the performance, then a small difficulty arises; but never mind! look at the bright side always and die in a dream!’

  Patmore’s Criticism.

  Books of collected essays are always the hardest to read, because, collected though they may be, it is often only the binding that joins them together. And when the author was a man whose main work in life was to write poetry, it is more than likely that his essays will be mere interjections and exclamations uttered spasmodically in the intervals of his proper pursuits. The list of contents makes us suspect the sort of thing we are to find. One day Coventry Patmore will write upon Mr Gladstone; another upon December in Garden and Field; again upon Coleridge; next upon dreams; and finally it will strike him to set down his views upon Liverpool Cathedral and Japanese houses. But our foreboding that we shall be jerked from topic to topic and set down in the end with a litter of broken pieces is in this case quite unfounded. For one thing, these thirty-seven papers were written within the compass of eleven years. Next, as Mr Page points out, Coventry Patmore’s criticism was based upon considered principles. ‘The book is a book of doctrine, and is “original” only in that it goes back to origins; the doctrines are those of Aristotle, of Goethe, of Coleridge, indeed, as one can imagine Patmore saying, “of all sensible men”. The style only that holds them together is his own.’

  The style which holds so many separate parts so firmly is undoubtedly a good one. One would perhaps feel some discomfort, some unfitness in finding a column of such solid construction among the blurred print of an evening newspaper. Clearly one must look not among ephemeral scribblers but among established worthies if one is to find a writer against whom to test the merits and defects of Patmore’s style. It is much in the eighteenth-century manner - concise, plain, with little imagery, extravagance, adventure, or inequality. Placed directly after one of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets one of Patmore’s essays can be read, so far as the diction goes, without any of that gradual loosening of the attention which attacks us as prose weakens under the adulteration of unnecessary words, slack cadences, and worn-out metaphors. But thus read we shall somehow gather the impression that while Johnson is constantly outrageous and Patmore almost invariably civilized, Johnson’s papers are the small visible fragment of a monster, Mr Patmore’s essays have about them no such suggestion of unexpressed magnitude. A few pages seem to hold quite comfortably all that he has to say. He is small and wiry, rather than large and loose.

  But the chief distinction of Mr Patmore’s criticism is that to which Mr Page draws attention. He had a great dislike for the impressionist criticism which is ‘little more than an attempt to describe the feelings produced in the writers by the works they profess to judge’ and tried consistently to base his own judgments upon doctrines set beyond the reach of accident and temperament. His pages provide many examples of the successful practice of this form of criticism, and some also of the defects which, though not inherent in the method, seem most apt to attack those who pursue it.

  In the essay upon out-of-door poetry, for instance, instead of dallying with roses and cabbages and all the other topics which so pleasantly suggest themselves, he makes straight for the aesthetic problem. The quality which distinguishes good descriptive poetry from bad descriptive poetry is, he says, that the poet in the first case has seen things ‘in their living relationships’. The heather is not much, and the rock is not much; but the heather and the rock, discerned in their living expressional relationship by the poetic eye, are very much indeed - a beauty which is living with the life of man, and therefore inexhaustible... but true poets and artists know that this power of visual synthesis can only be exercised, in the present state of our faculties, in a very limited way; hence there is generally, in the landscapes and descriptions of real genius, a great simplicity in and apparent jealousy of their subjects, strikingly in contrast with the works of those who fancy that they are describing when they are only cataloguing.’ This is fruitful criticism because it helps us to define our own vaguer conceptions. Much of Wordsworth (here Mr Patmore would not agree) is oppressive because the poet has not seen nature with intensity either in relation to his poem, to himself, or to other human beings; but has accepted her as something in herself so desirable that description can be used in flat stretches without concentration. Tennyson is of course the master of those Victorian poets who carried descriptive writing to such a pitch that if their words had been visible the blackbirds would certainly have descended upon their garden plots to feed upon the apples and the plums. Yet we do not feel that this is poetry so much as something fabricated by an ingenious craftsman for our delight. Of the moderns, Mr Hardy is without rival in his power to make nature do his will, so that she neither satiates nor serves as a curious toy, but appears at the right moment to heighten, charm, or terrify, because the necessary fusion has already taken place. The first step towards this absorption is to see things with your own eyes, in which faculty Patmore held the English poets to be easily supreme.

  Then, from poetry we turn to the little essay which is, of course, quite insufficient to deal with Sir Thomas Browne; but here again Patmore speaks to the point, drawing attention not to his own qualities, but to those which are in the work itself. ‘The prose of the pre-revolutionary period was a fine art. In proportion to the greatness of its writers, it was a continually varying flow of music, which aimed at convincing the feelings as the words themselves the understanding. The best post-revolutionary prose appeals to the understanding alone.’ The prose of the Religio Medic
i (oddly enough Patmore values neither Urn Burial nor Christian Morals) is certainly fine art. Yet in reading it again one is struck as much by the easy colloquial phrases as by the famous passages. There is an intensity of the modern sort as well as the poetic sonority of the ancient. The art of the deliberate passages is evident; but in addition to that Sir Thomas has something impulsive, something we may call, in default of a better word, amateurish about him as if he wrote for his own pleasure with language not yet solidified, while the best modern prose writers seem to remember, unwillingly no doubt, that prose writing is a profession.

  Whether or not we agree with what Patmore says on these points, it is good criticism because it makes us turn to think about the book under consideration. But the criticism which is based upon the ‘doctrines of Aristotle, of Goethe, and of Coleridge’, especially when practised in the columns of a newspaper, is apt to have the opposite effect. It is apt to be sweeping and sterile. The laws of art can be stated in a little essay only in so compressed a form that unless we are prepared to think them out for ourselves, and apply them to the poem or novel in question, they remain barren, and we accept them without thinking. There is no true poem or novel without a moral; least of all such as, being all beauty (that is to say, all order), are all moral.’ A statement of that kind applied with little elaboration to the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ does not illumine the book, but, especially when coupled with an uncalled for fling at Blake, ‘who seems to have been little better than an idiot’, withdraws attention from the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ and concentrates it upon Coventry Patmore. For it is evident that though the manner remains oracular this is the voice of a private person - of a person, moreover, who has written poetry himself, has been attacked by the critics, and has evolved a highly individual philosophy, into which Goldsmith and Coventry Patmore fit precisely as they are, but Blake, Shelley, and Miss Austen can only be made to fit by taking a knife to their edges. Blake was little better than an idiot; ‘Pride and Prejudice’ was inferior to ‘Barchester Towers’; Shelley was an immoral writer; and by the side of Thomas Hardy, not indeed his equal but worthy of comparison and of the highest eulogy, appears the author of the ‘Mischief of Monica’, a lady, it is now perhaps necessary to say, called Mrs Walford. For these freaks and oddities it is, of course, unnecessary to make Aristotle responsible. The Angel in the House is the undoubted parent. In an impressionist critic of the school Which Patmore condemned you will meet precisely the same freaks of prejudice and partisanship, but with the difference that as no attempt is made to relate them to doctrines and principles they pass for what they are, and, the door being left wide open, interesting ideas may take the opportunity to enter in. But Patmore was content to state his principle and shut the door.

  But if Patmore was an imperfect critic the very imperfections which make it sometimes useless to argue further about literature prove that he was a man of great courage and conviction, much out of harmony with his age, intolerant of the railway, a little strident we may think in his conservatism, and over-punctilious in his manners, but never restrained by sloth or cowardice from coming out into the open and testifying to his faith like a bright little bantam (if we may use the figure without disrespect) who objects to express trains, and says so twice a day, flying to the top of the farmyard wall and flapping his wings.

  Papers on Pepys.

  The number of those who read themselves asleep at night with Pepys and awake at day with Pepys must be great. By the nature of things, however, the number of those who read neither by night nor by day is infinitely greater; and it is, we believe, by those who have never read him that Pepys is, as Mr Wheatley complains, treated with contempt. The Pepys Club ‘may be considered’, Mr Wheatley writes, ‘as a kind of missionary society to educate the public to understand that they are wrong in treating Pepys with affection, tempered with lack of respect’. The papers published in the present volume would not have suggested to us so solemn a comparison. A missionary society, however, which dines well, sings beautifully old English songs, and delivers brief and entertaining papers upon such subjects as Pepys’s portraits, Pepys’s stone, Pepys’s Ballads, Pepys’s health, Pepys’s musical instruments, although it differs, we imagine, in method from some sister institutions, is well calculated to convert the heathen. Lack of respect for Pepys, however, seems to us a heresy which is beyond argument, and deserving of punishment rather than of the persuasive voices of members of the Pepys Club singing ‘Beauty retire.’

  For one of the most obvious sources of our delight in the Diary arises from the fact that Pepys, besides being himself, was a great Civil Servant. We are glad to remember that it has been stated on authority, however well we guessed it for ourselves, that Pepys was ‘without exception the greatest and most useful Minister that ever filled the same situation in England, the acts and registers of the Admiralty proving this beyond contradiction’. He was the founder of the modern Navy, and the fame of Mr Pepys as an administrator has had an independent existence of its own within the walls of the Admiralty from his day to ours. Indeed, it is possible to believe that we owe the Diary largely to his eminence as an official. The reticence, the pomposity, the observance of appearances which their duties require, or at least exact, of great public servants must make it more congenial to them than to others to unbend and unbosom themselves in private. We can only regret that the higher education of women now enables the wives of public men to receive confidences which should have been committed to cipher. Happily for us, Mrs Pepys was a very imperfect confidante. There were other matters besides those naturally unfit for a wife’s ear that Pepys brought home from the office and liked to deliver himself upon in private. And thus it comes about that the Diary runs naturally from affairs of State and the characters of Ministers to affairs of the heart and the characters of servant girls; it includes the buying of clothes, the losing of tempers, and all the infinite curiosities, amusements, and pettinesses of average human life. It is a portrait where not only the main figure, but the surroundings, ornaments, and accessories are painted in. Had Mrs Pepys been as learned, discreet, and open-minded as the most advanced of her sex are now reputed to be, her husband would still have had enough over to fill the pages of his Diary. Insatiable curiosity, and unflagging vitality were the essence of a gift to which, when the possessor is able to impart it, we can give no lesser name than genius.

  It is worth reminding ourselves that because we are without his genius it does not follow that we are without his faults. The chief delight of his pages for most of us may lie not in the respectable direction of historical investigation, but in those very weaknesses and idiosyncrasies which in our own case we would die rather than reveal; but our quick understanding betrays the fact that we are fellow-sinners, though unconfessed. The state of mind that makes possible such admission of the undignified failings even in cipher may not be heroic, but it shows a lively, candid, unhypocritical nature which, if we remember that Pepys was an extremely able man, a very successful man and honourable beyond the standard of his age, fills out a figure which is perhaps a good deal higher in the scale of humanity than our own.

  But those select few who survive the ‘vast and devouring space’ of the centuries are judged not by their superiority to individuals in the flesh, but by their rank in the society of their peers, those solitary survivors of innumerable and nameless multitudes. Compared with most of these figures, Pepys is small enough. He is never passionate, exalted, poetic, or profound. His faults are not great ones, nor is his repentance sublime. Considering that he used cipher, and on occasion double cipher, to screen him in the confessional, he did not lay bare very deep or very intricate regions of the soul. He has little consciousness of dream or mystery, of conflict or perplexity. Yet it is impossible to write Pepys off as a man of the dumb and unanalytic past, or of the past which is ornate and fabulous; if ever we feel ourselves in the presence of a man so modern that we should not be surprised to meet him in the street and should know him and speak to him at once,
it is when we read this Diary, written more than two hundred and fifty years ago.

  This is due in part to the unstudied ease of the language, which may be slipshod but never fails to be graphic, which catches unfailingly the butterflies and gnats and falling petals of the moment, which can deal with a day’s outing or a merrymaking or a brother’s funeral so that we latecomers are still in time to make one of the party. But Pepys is modern in a deeper sense than this. He is modern in his consciousness of the past, in his love of pretty, civilized things, in his cultivation, in his quick and varied sensibility. He was a collector and a connoisseur; he delighted not only in books, but in old ballads and in good furniture. He was a man who had come upon the scene not so early but that there was already a fine display of curious and diverting objects accumulated by an older generation. Standing midway in our history, he looks consciously and intelligently both backwards and forwards. If we turn our eyes behind us we see him gazing in our direction, asking with eager curiosity of our progress in science, of our ships and sailors. Indeed, the very fact that he kept a diary seems to make him one of ourselves.

  Yet in reckoning, however imperfectly, the sources of our pleasure we must not forget that his age is among them. Sprightly, inquisitive, full of stir and life as he is, nevertheless Mr Pepys is now two hundred and eighty-five years of age. He can remember London when it was very much smaller than it is now,” with gardens and orchards, wild duck and deer. Men ‘justled for the wall and did kill one another’. Gentlemen were murdered riding out to their country houses at Kentish-town. Mr Pepys and Lady Paulina were much afraid of being set upon when they drove back at night, though Mr Pepys concealed his fears. They very seldom took baths, but, on the other hand, they dressed in velvet and brocade. They acquired a great deal of silver plate too, especially if they were in the public service, and a present of gloves for your wife might well be stuffed with guineas. Ladies put on their vizards at the play - and with reason if their cheeks were capable of blushing. Sir Charles Sedley was so witty once with his companion that you could not catch a word upon the stage. As for Lady Castlemaine, we should never persuade Mr Pepys that the sun of beauty did not set once and for all with her decline. It is an atmosphere at once homely and splendid, coarse and beautiful, of a world far away and yet very modern that is preserved in his pages.