Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  But it is time to say something of the poetic gift which brought silver forks from Milwaukee, and letters and visits from complete strangers, so that she cannot remember ‘any period of my existence when I have not been before the public eye’. She was taught very little; there were odd volumes of Shakespeare, Ouida, and Gauthier scattered about the house, but no complete sets. She did not wish to read, however. Her passion for writing seems to have been a natural instinct - a gift handed down mature from Heaven, and manifesting itself whenever it chose, without much control or direction from Mrs Wilcox herself. Sometimes the Muse would rise to meet an emergency. ‘Fetch me a pencil and pad!’ she would say, and in the midst of a crowd, to the amazement of the beholders, and to the universal applause, she would dash off precisely the verse required to celebrate the unexpected arrival of General Sherman. Yet sometimes the Muse would obstinately forsake her. What could have been more vexatious than its behaviour in the Hotel Cecil, when Mrs Wilcox wished to write a poem about Queen Victoria’s funeral? She had been sent across the Atlantic for that very purpose. Not a word could she write. The newspaperman was coming for her copy at nine the next morning. She had not put pen to paper when she went to bed. She was in despair. And then at the inconvenient hour of three a.m. the Muse relented. Mrs Wilcox woke with four verses running in her head. ‘I felt an immense sense of relief. I knew I could write something the editor would like; something England would like.’ And, indeed, The Queen’s Last Ride’ was set to music by a friend of King Edward’s, and sung in the presence of the entire Royal family, one of whom afterwards graciously sent her a message of thanks.

  Capricious and fanciful, nevertheless the Muse has a heart of gold; she never does desert Mrs Wilcox. Every experience turns, almost of its own accord and at the most unexpected moments, to verse. She goes to stay with friends; she sits next a young widow in the omnibus. She forgets all about it. But as she stands before the looking-glass fastening her white dress in the evening, something whispers to her:

  Laugh and the world laughs with you, Weep and you weep alone, For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, It has trouble enough of its own.

  The following morning at the breakfast table I recited the quatrain to the Judge and his wife... and the Judge, who was a great Shakespearean scholar said, ‘Ella, if you keep the remainder of the poem up to that epigrammatic standard, you will have a literary gem.’

  She did keep the poem up to that standard! and two days later he said, ‘Ella, that is one of the biggest things you ever did, and you are mistaken in thinking it uneven in merit, it is all good and up to the mark.’ Such is the depravity of mankind, however, that a wretched creature called Joyce, belonging to ‘the poison-insect order of humanity,’ as Mrs Wilcox says, afterwards claimed that he had written ‘Solitude’ himself - written it, too, upon the head of a whisky barrel in a wine-room.

  A poetess also was very trying. Mrs Wilcox, who is generosity itself, detected unusual genius in her verse, and fell in love with the idea of playing Fairy Godmother to the provincial poetess. She invited her to stay at an hotel, and gave a party in her honour. Mrs Croly, Mrs Leslie, Robert Ingersoll, Nym Crinkle, and Harriet Webb all came in person. The carriages extended many blocks down the street. Several of the young woman’s poems were recited; ‘there was some good music and a tasteful supper’. Moreover, each guest, on leaving, was given a piece of ribbon upon which was printed the verse that Mrs Wilcox so much admired. What more could she have done? And yet the ungrateful creature went off with the barest words of thanks; scarcely answered letters; refused to explain her motives, and stayed in New York with an eminent literary man without letting Mrs Wilcox know.

  To this day when I see the occasional gems of beauty which still fall from this poet’s pen I feel the old wound ache in my heart... Life, however, always supplies a balm after it has wounded us... The spring following this experience my husband selected a larger apartment.

  For by this time Ella Wheeler was Wilcox She first met Mr Wilcox in a jeweller’s shop in Milwaukee. He was engaged in the sterling-silver business, and she had run in to ask the time. Ironically enough, she never noticed him. There was Mr Wilcox, a large, handsome man with a Jewish face and a deep bass voice, doing business with the jeweller, and she never noticed his presence. Out she went again, anxious only to be in time for dinner, and thought no more about it. A few days later a very distinguished-looking letter arrived in a blue envelope. Might Mr Wilcox be presented to her? ‘I knew it was, according to established ideas, bordering on impropriety, yet I so greatly admired the penmanship and stationery of my would-be acquaintance that I was curious to know more of him.’ They corresponded. Mr Wilcox’s letters were ‘sometimes a bit daring’, but never sentimental; and they were always enclosed in envelopes ‘of a very beautiful shade’, while ‘the crest on the paper seemed to lead me away from everything banal and common’. And then the Oriental paper-knife arrived. This had an extraordinary effect upon her such as had hitherto been produced only by reading ‘a rare poem, or hearing lovely music, or in the presence of some of Ouida’s exotic descriptions’. She went to Chicago and met Mr Wilcox in the flesh. He seemed to her - correctly dressed and very cultured in manner as he was - ‘like a man from Mars’. Soon afterwards they were married, and almost immediately Mr Wilcox, to the profound joy of his wife, expressed his belief in the immortality of the soul.

  Mrs Wilcox was now established in New York, the admired centre of a circle of “very worth-while people’. Her dreams in the sunset were very nearly realized. The Bungalow walls were covered with autographs of brilliant writers and the sketches of gifted artists. Universal brotherhood was attempted. It was the rule of the house ‘to treat mendicants with sympathy and peddlers with respect’. No one left without ‘some little feeling of uplift’. What was wanting? In the first place, ‘the highbrows have never had any use for me’. The highbrows could be dispatched with a phrase. “May you grow at least a sage bush of a heart to embellish your desert of intellect!’

  All the same, in her next incarnation she will have nothing to do with genius. To be a gifted poet is a glory; to be a worth-while woman is a greater glory.’ There are moments when she wishes that the Muse would leave her at peace. To be the involuntary mouthpiece of Songs of Purpose, Passion, and Power, greet the war with Hello, Boys, and death with Sonnets of Sorrow and Triumph, to feel that at any moment a new gem may form or a fresh cameo compose itself, what fate could be more appalling? Yet such has been the past, and such must be the future, of Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

  The Genius of Boswell.

  The letters which are here reprinted have had an adventurous history. It was in the year 1850 that a gentleman making a purchase at Boulogne found that his parcel was wrapped in sheets of old manuscript. The sheets proved to be letters written by Boswell to the Rev. W. J. Temple, an ancestor of the archbishop, and when the rest of the series had been recovered from the paper merchant they were published in 1857 by Richard Bentley, with an introduction from the hand of an anonymous editor. Mr Seccombe, who introduces the present edition, conjectures that his predecessor was Sir Philip Francis, of the Supreme Consular Court of the Levant. If, as there is reason to think, Boswell never wrote without some thought of posterity, his ghost must have gone through a long time of suspense. The edition of 1857 was greeted with applause by the critics; ‘The Times devoted six entire columns to a review of the book’; but it was sold out in under two years (a fire, it is thought, helping to destroy it), and there has been no reprint of the book until the present time. There must be many, then, who love their Boswell, but have never read his letters - many, therefore, who will thank Messrs Sidgwick and Jackson for the handsome shape of the volume and Mr Seccombe for the skill and humour with which he has introduced his subject. When a man has had the eyes of Carlyle and Macaulay fixed upon him it may well seem that there is nothing fresh to be said. And yet each of these observers came to a very different conclusion; Carlyle, although he called Boswell ‘an ill-
assorted, glaring mixture of the highest and the lowest’ contrived to make him glow with much of the splendour of the true hero-worshipper; and Macaulay indulged in the famous paradox, which, like the twisted mirror in the fair, shows us the human body with corkscrew legs and an undulating face. Mr Seccombe is not so amusing, but he is far more judicious. He has no theory to parade, and he has had the advantage of studying the letters; he can talk thus of ‘a tender-hearted man’ in spite of ‘ludicrous immoralities’; he can see that Boswell was a ‘great artist’ as well as a ‘freak’. The letters certainly tend to make the usual discrepancies less marked, because they show that Boswell existed independently of Johnson, and had many qualities besides those that we are wont to allow him. To read a man’s letters after reading his works has much the same effect as staying with him in his own house after meeting him in full dress at dinner parties.

  The letters begin in 1758, when Boswell was a boy of eighteen; they end a few months only before his death, and though they are scattered with wide gaps over a great many years, the story is continuous - there is a glimpse of Boswell on every page. The Rev. W. J. Temple met Boswell in the Greek class at Edinburgh University; he held the living of Mamhead and then the living of St Gluvias in Cornwall, and Mr Seccombe describes him, judging from published correspondence (unluckily it is not to Boswell), as a ‘dissatisfied atrabilious man’. But there is no doubt that he provided Boswell with a perfect audience. He was neither illustrious, like Johnson, nor a humorous correspondent, like the Hon. Andrew Erskine, but he was a contemporary, a man with literary ambitions, and a cleric. They shared their loves and their ‘hopes of future greatness’; and it was under ‘the solemn yew’ at Mamhead that Boswell made one of his vows. Temple, who had received the earliest of Boswell’s confidences, who had reflected the image of what Boswell would like to be, was used ever after as the person who had a right to know what became of Boswell. During the first years of the correspondence he acted the part of the brilliant but irresponsible young man, whose follies are a proof of his spirit. He was a Newmarket courser yoked to a dung-cart; he was ‘a sad dupe - a perfect Don Quixote’; his life was ‘one of the most romantic that I believe either you or I really know of; his scenes with his ‘charmers’ were incredible. In short, with such a turmoil of gifts and failings buzzing through his brain, he was often really at a loss to account for himself. There were so many attitudes, and they were all so striking; should he be a Don Juan, or the friend of Johnson and Paoli, or the ‘great man at Adamtown’? And then, because he finds himself writing ‘in a library forty feet long’, these visions fade, and he determines to live like ‘the most privileged spirits of antiquity’. He imagines himself with his folios before him the head of a great family and an erudite country gentleman. He was always imagining himself; it is difficult to decide how much of genuine feeling he put into these imaginations. He had affairs with half-a-dozen ladies before he married; he went through ecstasy and anguish; they failed him or they did not deserve him; but he was never driven from his elegant and half quizzical attitude, like a man who is conscious that he has the eye of the audience upon him. ‘Come why do I allow myself to be uneasy for a Scots lass? Rouse me, my friend! I must have an Englishwoman... You cannot say how fine a woman I may marry; perhaps a Howard or some other of the noblest in the kingdom.’

  Was it his vanity that made him such good company? For the vanity of Boswell was a rare quality. It kept him alive and it gave a point to him. He was not anxious merely to display all his emotions, but he was anxious to make them tell. He left out much that other people put in, and directly that he had a pen in his hand he became a natural artist. One may go further, indeed, and credit him with a sense that was oddly at variance with his egoism and his garrulity; a sense, as it seems, that something of value lay hidden in other people also beneath the babble of talk. ‘I got from my lord a good deal of his life. He says he will put down some particulars of himself if I will put them together and publish them.’ In order to get from a man a good deal of his life you must be able to convince him that you see something that he wishes to have seen, so that your curiosity is not impertinent. Boswell was not content, after all, with a view of a ‘visible progress through the world’; it was ‘a view of the mind in letters and conversation’ that he sought, and sought with all the rashness of a hero. He had the gift, which is rare as it is beautiful, of being able ‘to contemplate with supreme delight those distinguished spirits by which God is sometimes pleased to honour humanity’. Perhaps that was the reason why most people found something to like in him; it was a part of his wonderful sense of the romance and excitement of life.

  His intense consciousness of himself made his progress like a pageant, and every day was a fresh adventure. If he dined out he noticed that there were ‘three sorts of ice creams’; he noticed the handsome maid; he noticed whether people liked him, and he remembered what clothes he wore. ‘It is hardly credible what ground I go over, and what a variety of men and manners I contemplate every day, and all the time I am myself pars magna, for my exuberant spirits will not let me listen enough.’ But as time went on this same exuberance was his undoing; he could never cease imagining, and settle to what lay before him. He made vows in St Paul’s Church and under solemn yews; he vowed to reform and read the classics; he broke them the day after and was carried home drunk; and then ‘all the doubts which have ever disturbed thinking men’ came over him, and he lay awake at night ‘dreading annihilation’. It is characteristic that he helped himself out of his depression by remembering that worthy men like Temple cared for him. He used his friends to reflect his virtues. It is possible, too, that as the years failed to fulfil his hopes he was teased by a suspicion that other people had found something that he had missed. He had conceived too many possibilities to be content to realize one only, and now again he was able to see, as he saw everything, that he had somehow failed in life. ‘O Temple, Temple, is this realizing any of our towering hopes which have so often been the subject of our conversations and letters?” he exclaimed. Was there, perhaps, as he was wont to hint, some strain of madness in him that made his will shake always before an effort? ‘Why should I struggle?’ he breaks out. ‘I certainly am constitutionally unfit for any employment.’ Was it madness or some power allied to genius that let him see in sudden incongruous flashes, as the scene shifted round him, how strange it all was? To get the full impression it would be necessary to quote letters at length; but when we read (for example) the letter upon the death of his wife with its grief for ‘my dear, dear Peggy’, and its glory in the nineteen carriages that followed the hearse, and its repentance and its genuine cry of dismay and bewilderment, we feel that Boswell, as he sat and wrote it, had something of the clown in Shakespeare in him. It was granted to this scatter-brained and noisy man with a head full of vanity and grossness to exclaim with the poets and the sages, ‘What a motley scene is life!’

  It would be more rash in his case than in another’s to say what he felt or how strongly he felt it; and yet, whether it was due to his wife’s death or whether his system really proved impossible, his fortunes from that time dwindled away. His hopes of preferment were disappointed; he failed at the English bar; and to hearten himself he drank more than ever. But we should underrate the amazing vitality that clung to the shreds of him if we believed that he shuffled out of life, a dejected and disreputable figure, by some back door. There was still a twinkle of curiosity in his eye; the great lips were moist and garrulous as ever. But there is a harsh strain henceforward in his chatter, as though some note had cracked with too much strumming. Someone stole his wig, ‘a jest that was very ill-timed to one in my situation’, but was probably irresistible. Then he began to finger ‘several matrimonial schemes’, to plume himself that his classical quotations had not deserted him, and to run after a certain Miss Bagnal. Mr Temple, near the end of their strange correspondence, had to admonish him, for Boswell answers, Tour suggestion as to my being carried off in a state of intoxication is
awful.’ How was he ‘carried off’ in the end? Were his wits fuddled with wine and was his imagination dazed with terror, and did some snatch of an old song come to his lips? It is strange how one wonders, with an inquisitive kind of affection, what Boswell felt; it always seems possible with him as with living people that if one watches closely enough one will know. But when we try to say what the secret is, then we understand why Boswell was a genius.