Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  These, at least, are the little bits of cork which mark a circle upon the top of the waves while the net drags the floor of the sea and encloses stranger monsters than have ever been brought to the light of day before. The substance of the book is made out of the relationship between Velchaninov and Pavel. Pavel is a type of what Velchaninov calls ‘the eternal husband’. ‘Such a man is born and grows up only to be a husband, and, having married, is promptly transformed into a supplement of his wife, even when he happens to have an unmistakable character of his own... [Pavel] could only as long as his wife was alive have remained all that he used to be, but, as it was, he was only a fraction of a whole, suddenly cut off and set free, that is something wonderful and unique.’ One of the peculiarities of the eternal husband is that he is always half in love with the lovers of his wife, and at the same time wishes to kill them. Impelled by this mixture of almost amorous affection and hatred, he cannot keep away from Velchaninov, in whom he breeds a kind of reflection of his own sensations of attraction and repulsion. He can never bring himself to make any direct charge against Velchaninov; and Velchaninov is never able to confess or to deny his misconduct. Sometimes, from the stealthy way in which he approaches, Velchaninov feels certain that he has an impulse to kill him; but then he insists upon kissing him and cries out, ‘So, you understand, you’re the one friend left me now!’ One night when Velchaninov is ill and Pavel has shown the most enthusiastic devotion Velchaninov wakes from a nightmare to find Pavel standing over him and attempting to murder him with a razor. Pavel is easily mastered and slinks away shamefaced in the morning. But did he mean to murder him, Velchaninov muses, or did he want it without knowing that he wanted it?

  But did he love me yesterday when he declared his feeling and said ‘Let us settle our account’? Yes, it was from hatred that he loved me; that’s the strongest of all loves... It would be interesting to know by what I impressed him. Perhaps by my clean gloves and my knowing how to put them on... He comes here ‘to embrace me and weep’, as he expressed it in the most abject way - that is, he came here to murder me and thought he came ‘to embrace me and to weep’. But who knows? If I had wept with him, perhaps, really, he would have forgiven me, for he had a terrible longing to forgive me!... Ough! wasn’t he pleased, too, when he made me kiss him! Only he didn’t know then whether he would end by embracing me or murdering me... The most monstrous monster is the monster with noble feelings... But it was not your fault, Pavel Pavlovitch, it was not your fault: you’re a monster, so everything about you is bound to be monstrous, your dreams and your hopes.

  Perhaps this quotation may give some idea of the labyrinth of the soul through which we have to grope our way. But being only a quotation it makes the different thoughts appear too much isolated; for in the context Velchaninov, as he broods over the blood-stained razor, passes over his involved and crowded train of thought without a single hitch, just, in fact, as we ourselves are conscious of thinking when some startling fact has dropped into the pool of our consciousness. From the crowd of objects pressing upon our attention we select now this one, now that one, weaving them inconsequently into our thought; the associations of a word perhaps make another loop in the line, from which we spring back again to a different section of our main thought, and the whole process seems both inevitable and perfectly lucid. But if we try to construct our mental processes later, we find that the links between one thought and another are submerged. The chain is sunk out of sight and only the leading points emerge to mark the course. Alone among writers Dostoevsky has the power of reconstructing these most swift and complicated states of mind, of re-thinking the whole train of thought in all its speed, now as it flashes into light, now as it lapses into darkness; for he is able to follow not only the vivid streak of achieved thought but to suggest the dim and populous underworld of the mind’s consciousness where desires and impulses are moving blindly beneath the sod. Just as we awaken ourselves from a trance of this kind by striking a chair or a table to assure ourselves of an external reality, so Dostoevsky suddenly makes us behold, for an instant, the face of his hero, or some object in the room.

  This is the exact opposite of the method adopted, perforce, by most of our novelists. They reproduce all the external appearances - tricks of manner, landscape, dress, and the effect of the hero upon his friends - but very rarely, and only for an instant, penetrate to the tumult of thought which rages within his own mind. But the whole fabric of a book by Dostoevsky is made out of such material. To him a child or a beggar is as full of violent and subtle emotions as a poet or a sophisticated woman of the world; and it is from the intricate maze of their emotions that Dostoevsky constructs his version of life. In reading him, therefore, we are often bewildered because we find ourselves observing men and women from a different point of view from that to which we are accustomed. We have to get rid of the old tune which runs so persistently in our ears, and to realize how little of our humanity is expressed in that old tune. Again and again we are thrown off the scent in following Dostoevsky’s psychology; we constantly find ourselves wondering whether we recognize the feeling that he shows us, and we realize constantly and with a start of surprise that we have met it before in ourselves, or in some moment of intuition have suspected it in others. But we have never spoken of it, and that is why we are surprised. Intuition is the term which we should apply to Dostoevsky’s genius at its best. When he is fully possessed by it he is able to read the most inscrutable writing at the depths of the darkest souls; but when it deserts him the whole of his amazing machinery seems to spin fruitlessly in the air. In the present volume, The Double’, with all its brilliancy and astonishing ingenuity, is an example of this kind of elaborate failure; ‘The Gentle Spirit’, on the other hand, is written from start to finish with a power which for the time being turns everything we can put beside it into the palest commonplace.

  Dostoevsky in Cranford.

  It is amusing sometimes to freshen one’s notion of a great, and thus semi-mythical, character by transplanting him in imagination to one’s own age, shore, or country village. How, one asks, would Dostoevsky have behaved himself upon the vicarage lawn? In ‘Uncle’s Dream’, the longest story in Mrs Garnett’s new volume, he enables one to fancy him in those incongruous surroundings. Mordasov bears at any rate a superficial resemblance to Cranford. All the ladies in that small country town spend their time in drinking tea and talking scandal. A newcomer, such as Prince K., is instantly torn to pieces like a fish tossed to a circle of frenzied and ravenous seagulls. Mordasov cannot be altogether like Cranford, then. No such figure of speech could be used with propriety to describe the demure activities and bright-eyed curiosities of the English circle of ladies. After sending our imaginary Dostoevsky, therefore, pacing up and down the lawn, there can be no doubt that he suddenly stamps his foot, exclaims something unintelligible, and rushes off in despair. ‘The instinct of provincial newsmongers sometimes approaches the miraculous... They know you by heart, they know even what you don’t know about yourself. The provincial ought, one would think, by his very nature to be a psychologist and a specialist in human nature. That is why I have been sometimes genuinely amazed at meeting in the provinces not psychologists and specialists in human nature, but a very great number of asses. But that is aside; that is a superfluous reflection.’ His patience is already exhausted; it is idle to expect that he will linger in the High-street or hang in a rapture of observation round the draper’s shop. The delightful shades and subtleties of English provincial life are lost upon him.

  But Mordasov is a very different place from Cranford. The ladies do not confine themselves to tea, as their condition after dinner sometimes testifies. Their tongues wag with a fury that is rather that of the open market-place than of the closed drawing-room. Though they indulge in petty vices such as listening at keyholes and stealing the sugar when the hostess is out of the room, they act with the brazen boldness of viragos. One would be alarmed to find oneself left alone with one of them. Nevertheless
, in his big rough way, Dostoevsky is neither savagely contemptuous nor sadly compassionate; he is genuinely amused by the spectacle of Mordasov. It roused, as human life so seldom did, his sense of comedy. He tries even to adapt his dialogue to the little humours of a gossiping conversation.

  ‘Call that a dance! I’ve danced myself, the shawl dance, at the breaking-up party at Madame Jamis’s select boarding-school - and it really was a distinguished performance. I was applauded by senators! The daughters of princes and counts were educated there!... Only fancy’ [she runs on, as if she were imitating the patter of Miss Bates] ‘chocolate was handed round to everyone, but not offered to me, and they did not say a word to me all the time... The tub of a woman, I’ll pay her out!’

  But Dostoevsky cannot keep to that tripping measure for long. The language becomes abusive, and the temper violent. His comedy has far more in common with the comedy of Wycherly than with the comedy of Jane Austen. It rapidly runs to seed, and becomes a helter-skelter, extravagant farce. The restraint and aloofness of the great comic writers are impossible to him. It is probable, for one reason, that he could not allow himself the time. ‘Uncle’s Dream’, ‘The Crocodile’, and ‘An Unpleasant Predicament’ read as if they were the improvisations of a gigantic talent reeling off its wild imaginations at breathless speed. They have the diffuseness of a mind too tired to concentrate, and too fully charged to stop short. Slack and un girt as it is, it tumbles out rubbish and splendour pell-mell.

  Yet we are perpetually conscious that, if Dostoevsky fails to keep within the proper limits, it is because the fervour of his genius goads him across the boundary. Because of his sympathy his laughter passes beyond merriment into a strange violent amusement which is not merry at all. He is incapable, even when his story is hampered by the digression, of passing by anything so important and lovable as a man or a woman without stopping to consider their case and explain it. Thus at one moment it occurs to him that there must be a reason why an unfortunate clerk could not afford to pay for a bottle of wine. Immediately, as if recalling a story which is known to him down to its most minute detail, he describes how the clerk had been born and brought up; it is then necessary to bring in the career of his brutal father-in-law, and that leads him to describe the peculiarities of the five unfortunate women whom the father-in-law bullies. In short, once you are alive, there is no end to the complexity of your connections, and sorrow and misery are so rubbed into the texture of life that the more you examine it the more cloudy and confused it becomes. Perhaps it is because we know so little about the family history of the ladies of Cranford that we can put the book down with a smile. Still, we need not underrate the value of comedy because Dostoevsky makes the perfection of the English product appear to be the result of leaving out all the most important things. It is the old, unnecessary quarrel between the inch of smooth ivory and the six feet of canvas with its strong coarse grains.

  The Russian Background.

  Thanks chiefly to the labours of Mrs Garnett we are now not so much at sea when a new translation from the Russian novelists comes our way. Since ‘The Bishop’ is the seventh volume of the tales of Tchehov, this comparative degree of enlightenment does not say much perhaps for our perspicacity. We ought not, as we read, to be still drawing a rough plan, with the left hand, of this strange Russian temperament; we ought not to feel any warmth of self-approbation when the sketch rapidly fills itself in and wears a momentary air of completeness.

  Yet the seventh volume finds us not quite so ill-prepared as its predecessors. No one now is going to be so foolish as to complain that the story of The Bishop’ is not a story at all but only a rather vague and inconclusive account of a bishop who was distressed because his mother treated him with respect, and soon after died of typhoid. We are by this time alive to the fact that inconclusive stories are legitimate; that is to say, though they leave us feeling melancholy and perhaps uncertain, yet somehow or other they provide a resting point for the mind - a solid object casting its shade of reflection and speculation. The fragments of which it is composed may have the air of having come together by chance. Certainly it often seems as if Tchehov made up his stories rather in the way that a hen picks up grain. Why should she pick here and there, from side to side, when, so far as we can see, there is no reason to prefer one grain to another? His choice is strange, and yet there is no longer any doubt that whatever Tchehov chooses he chooses with the finest insight. He is like the peasant in his story ‘The Steppe’, who could see the fox lying on her back playing like a dog far in the distance, where no one else could see her. Like Vassya, Tchehov’s sight is so keen that he has, ‘besides the world seen by everyone, another world of his own, accessible to no one else, and probably a very beautiful one’.

  All these doubts and false starts are now powerless to disturb our enjoyment of Tchehov. We may, therefore, attempt to press on a step further. Is it possible to adopt with Tchehov the position that comes so easily in the case of writers of one’s own tongue? We want to understand the great sum of things which a writer takes for granted, which is the background of his thought; for if we can imagine that, the figures in the foreground, the pattern he has wrought upon it, will be more easily intelligible. Our own background, so far as we can detach ourselves from it, is presumably a very complex and yet very orderly civilization. The peasant, even in the depths of the country, has his station assigned to him, and is in a thousand ways controlled by London; and there must be very few windows in England from which it is not possible to see the smoke of a town by day or its lamps by night. We become more aware of the detail and of the intricacy of all that we hold in our minds when Tchehov describes ‘the things that come back to your mind’, ‘the things one has seen and treasured’ - the things, that is, which form his background.

  ... of the unfathomable depth and infinity of the sky one can only form a conception at sea and on the steppes by night when the moon is shining. It is terribly lonely and caressing... Everything looks different from what it is... You drive on and suddenly see standing before you right in the roadway a dark figure like a monk... the figure comes closer, grows bigger; now it is on a level with the chaise, and you see it is not a man, but a solitary bush, or a great stone... You drive on for one hour, for a second... You meet upon the way a silent old barrow or a stone figure put up God knows when and by whom... the soul responds to the call of the lovely austere fatherland, and longs to fly over the steppes with the nightbird.

  Tchehov is here describing, very beautifully we can guess even through the coarse mesh of a foreign tongue, the effect of the steppe upon a little company of travellers. The steppe is the background for that particular story. Yet, as the travellers move slowly over the immense space, now stopping at an inn, now overtaking some shepherd or waggon, it seems to be the journey of the Russian soul, and the empty space, so sad and so passionate, becomes the background of his thought. The stories themselves, in their inconclusiveness and intimacy, appear to be the result of a chance meeting on a lonely road. Fate has sent these travellers across our path; whoever they may be, it is natural to stop and talk, and as they will never come our way again it is possible to say all kinds of things that we do not say to friends. The English reader may have had something of the same experience when isolated on board ship on a sea voyage. From the surrounding emptiness, from the knowledge that they will soon be over, those meetings have an intensity, as if shaped by the hand of an artist, which long preserves their significance in memory. ‘All this,’ says Tchehov, describing a camp by the wayside where the men sit gathered together over the camp fire - ‘all this was of itself so marvellous and terrible that the fantastic colours of legend and fairy tale were pale and blended with life.’ Take away the orderly civilization: look from your window upon nothing but the empty steppe, feel towards each human being that he is a traveller who will be seen once and never again, and then life ‘of itself’ is so terrible and marvellous that no fantastic colouring is necessary. Almost all the stories in the
present volume are stories of peasants; and whether or not it is the effect of this solitude and emptiness, each obscure and brutish mind has had rubbed in it a little transparency through which the light of the spirit shines amazingly. Thus the convict Yakov, as he walks in chains, comes by this means to the conviction that ‘at last he had learned the true faith... He knew it all now and understood where God was.’ But this is not merely the end of a Tchehov story; it is also the light which, falling fitfully here and there, marks out their conformity and form. Without metaphor, the feelings of his characters are related to something more important and far more remote than personal success or happiness.

  A Scribbling Dame.

  There are in the Natural History Museum certain little insects so small that they have to be gummed to the cardboard with the lightest of fingers, but each of them, as one observes with constant surprise, has its fine Latin name spreading far to the right and left of the miniature body. We have often speculated upon the capture of these insects and the christening of them, and marvelled at the labours of the humble, indefatigable men who thus extend our knowledge. But their toil, though comparable in its nature, seems light and certainly agreeable compared with that of Mr Whicher in the book before us. It was not for him to wander through airy forests with a butterfly net in his hand; he had to search out dusty books from desolate museums, and in the end to pin down this faded and antique specimen of the domestic house fly with all her seventy volumes in orderly array around her. But it appears to the Department of English and Comparative Literature in Columbia University that Mrs Haywood has never been classified, and they approve therefore of the publication of this book on her as ‘a contribution to knowledge worthy of publication’. It does not matter, presumably, that she was a writer of no importance, that no one reads her for pleasure, and that nothing is known of her life. She is dead, she is old, she wrote books, and nobody has yet written a book about her.