Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  But the poets, as Mr Thomas shows, are an extremely capricious race, and do for the most part show a bird’s or butterfly’s attachment to some particular locality. You will always find Shelley near the water; Wordsworth among the hills; and Meredith within sixty miles of London. Matthew Arnold, although associated with the Thames, is, as Mr Thomas points out in one of those critical passages which make his book like the talk of a very good talker, most particularly the poet of the garden and of the highly cultivated land.

  I know these slopes; who knows them, if not I? ‘has the effect of reducing the landscape to garden scale’.

  There is, he points out, ‘a kind of allegorical thinness’ about Arnold’s country, ‘as if it were chiefly a symbol of escape from the world of “men and towns” ‘. Indeed, if one takes a bird’s-eye view of Arnold’s poetry the background seems to consist of a moonlit lawn, with a sad but not passionate nightingale singing in a cedar tree of the sorrows of mankind. It is much less easy to reduce our vision of the landscape of Keats to something marked upon a map. We should be inclined to call him more the poet of a season than the poet of a place. Mr Thomas puts him down under London and the Home Counties because he lived there. But although he began as most writers do by describing what he saw, that was exercise work, and very soon he came to ‘hate descriptions’. And thus he wrote some of the most beautiful descriptions in the language, for in spite of many famous and exact passages the best descriptions are the least accurate, and represent what the poet saw with his eyes shut when the landscape had melted indistinguishably into the mood. This brings us, of course, into conflict with Tennyson. The Tennysonian method of sifting words until the exact shade and shape of the flower or the cloud had its equivalent phrase has produced many wonderful examples of minute skill, much like the birds’ nests and blades of grass of the pre-Raphaelite painters. Watching the dead leaves fall in autumn, we may remember that Tennyson has given precisely the phrase we want, ‘flying gold of the ruin’d woodlands’; but for the whole spirit of autumn we go to Keats. He has the mood and not the detail.

  The most exact of poets, however, is quite capable of giving us the slip if the occasion seems to him to demand it; and as his theme is most often a moment of life or of vision, so his frozen stream, or west wind, or ruined castle is chosen for the sake of that mood and not for themselves. When that ‘sense of England’, as Mr Thomas calls it, comes over us driving us to seek a book that expresses it, we turn to the prose writers most probably - to Borrow, Hardy, the Brontës, Gilbert White. The sense of country which both Mr Hardy and Emily Brontë possess is so remarkable that a volume might be spent in discussion of it. We should scarcely exaggerate our own belief if we said that both seem to forecast a time when character will take on a different aspect under the novelist’s hand, when he will be less fearful of the charge of unreality, less careful of the twitterings and chatterings which now make our puppets so animated and for the most part so ephemeral. Through the half-shut eyes with which we visualize books as a whole, we can see great tracts of Wessex and of the Yorkshire Moors inhabited by a race of people who seem to have the rough large outline of the land itself. It is not with either of these writers a case of the word-painter’s gift; for though they may have their detachable descriptions, the element we mean is rubbed deep into the texture and moulds every part. Ruskin, we observe, who did the description pure and simple to perfection, is not quoted by Mr Thomas; and the omission, which seems to us right, is a pleasant sign of the individual quality of the pilgrimage. We have seldom read a book indeed which gives a better feeling of England than this one. Never perfunctory or conventional, but always saying what strikes him as the true or interesting or characteristic thing, Mr Thomas brings the very look of the fields and roads before us; he brings the poets, too; and no one will finish the book without a sense that he knows and respects the author.

  Haworth, November 1904.

  I do not know whether pilgrimages to the shrines of famous men ought not to be condemned as sentimental journeys. It is better to read Carlyle in your own study chair than to visit the sound-proof room and pore over the manuscripts at Chelsea. I should be inclined to set an examination on Frederick the Great in place of entrance fee; only, in that case, the house would soon have to be shut up. The curiosity is only legitimate when the house of a great writer or the country in which it is set adds something to our understanding of his books. This justification you have for a pilgrimage to the home and country of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters.

  The Life, by Mrs Gaskell, gives you the impression that Haworth and the Brontës are somehow inextricably mixed. Haworth expresses the Brontës; the Brontës express Haworth; they fit like a snail to its shell. How far surroundings radically affect people’s minds, it is not for me to ask: superficially, the influence is great, but it is worth asking if the famous parsonage had been placed in a London slum, the dens of Whitechapel would not have had the same result as the lonely Yorkshire moors. However, I am taking away my only excuse for visiting Haworth. Unreasonable or not, one of the chief points of a recent visit to Yorkshire was that an expedition to Haworth could be accomplished. The necessary arrangements were made, and we determined to take advantage of the first day for our expedition. A real northern snowstorm had been doing the honours of the moors. It was rash to wait fine weather, and it was also cowardly. I understand that the sun very seldom shone on the Brontë family, and if we chose a really fine day we should have to make allowance for the fact that fifty years ago there were few fine days at Haworth, and that we were, therefore, for sake of comfort, rubbing out half the shadows in the picture. However, it would be interesting to see what impression Haworth could make upon the brilliant weather of Settle. We certainly passed through a very cheerful land, which might be likened to a vast wedding cake, of which the icing was slightly undulating; the earth was bridal in its virgin snow, which helped to suggest the comparison.

  Keighley - pronounced Keethly - is often mentioned in the Life; it was the big town four miles from Haworth in which Charlotte walked to make her more important purchases - her wedding gown, perhaps, and the thin little cloth boots which we examined under glass in the Brontë Museum. It is a big manufacturing town, hard and stony, and clattering with business, in the way of these Northern towns. They make small provision for the sentimental traveller, and our only occupation was to picture the slight figure of Charlotte trotting along the streets in her thin mantle, hustled into the gutter by more burly passers-by. It was the Keighley of her day, and that was some comfort. Our excitement as we neared Haworth had in it an element of suspense that was really painful, as though we were to meet some long-separated friend, who might have changed in the interval - so clear an image of Haworth had we from print and picture. At a certain point we entered the valley, up both sides of which the village climbs, and right on the hill-top, looking down over its parish, we saw the famous oblong tower of the church. This marked the shrine at which we were to do homage.

  It may have been the effect of a sympathetic imagination, but I think that there were good reasons why Haworth did certainly strike one not exactly as gloomy, but, what is worse for artistic purposes, as dingy and commonplace. The houses, built of yellow-brown stone, date from the early nineteenth century. They climb the moor step by step in little detached strips, some distance apart, so that the town instead of making one compact blot on the landscape has contrived to get a whole stretch into its clutches. There is a long line of houses up the moor-side, which clusters round the church and parsonage with a little clump of trees. At the top the interest for a Brontë lover becomes suddenly intense. The church, the parsonage, the Brontë Museum, the school where Charlotte taught, and the Bull Inn where Branwell drank are all within a stone’s throw of each other. The museum is certainly rather a pallid and inanimate collection of objects. An effort ought to be made to keep things out of these mausoleums, but the choice often lies between them and destruction, so that we must be grateful for the care which
has preserved much that is, under any circumstances, of deep interest. Here are many autograph letters, pencil drawings, and other documents. But the most touching case - so touching that one hardly feels reverent in one’s gaze - is that which contains the little personal relics, the dresses and shoes of the dead woman. The natural fate of such things is to die before the body that wore them, and because these, trifling and transient though they are, have survived, Charlotte Brontë the woman comes to life, and one forgets the chiefly memorable fact that she was a great writer. Her shoes and her thin muslin dress have outlived her. One other object gives a thrill; the little oak stool which Emily carried with her on her solitary moorland tramps, and on which she sat, if not to write, as they say, to think what was probably better than her writing.

  The church, of course, save part of the tower, is renewed since Brontë days, but that remarkable churchyard remains. The old edition of the Life had on its title-page a little print which struck the keynote of the book; it seemed to be all graves - gravestones stood ranked all round; you walked on a pavement lettered with dead names; the graves had solemnly invaded the garden of the parsonage itself, which was as a little oasis of life in the midst of the dead. This is no exaggeration of the artist’s, as we found: the stones seem to start out of the ground at you in tall, upright lines, like an army of silent soldiers. There is no hand’s breadth untenanted; indeed, the economy of space is somewhat irreverent. In old days a flagged path, which suggested the slabs of graves, led from the front door of the parsonage to the churchyard without interruption of wall or hedge; the garden was practically the graveyard too; the successors of the Brontës, however, wishing a little space between life and death, planted a hedge and several tall trees, which now cut off the parsonage garden completely. The house itself is precisely the same as it was in Charlotte’s day, save that one new wing has been added. It is easy to shut the eye to this, and then you have the square, box-like parsonage, built of the ugly, yellow-brown stone which they quarry from the moors behind, precisely as it was when Charlotte lived and died there. Inside, of course, the changes are many, though not such as to obscure the original shape of the rooms. There is nothing remarkable in a mid-Victorian parsonage, though tenanted by genius, and the only room which awakens curiosity is the kitchen, now used as an ante-room, in which the girls tramped as they conceived their work. One other spot has a certain grim interest - the oblong recess beside the staircase into which Emily drove her bulldog during the famous fight, and pinned him while she pommelled him. It is otherwise a little sparse parsonage, much like others of its kind. It was due to the courtesy of the present incumbent that we were allowed to inspect it; in his place I should often feel inclined to exorcise the three famous ghosts.

  One thing only remained: the church in which Charlotte worshipped, was married, and lies buried. The circumference of her life was very narrow. Here, though much is altered, a few things remain to tell of her. The slab which bears the names of the succession of children and of their parents - their births and deaths - strikes the eye first. Name follows name; at very short intervals they died - Maria the mother, Maria the daughter, Elizabeth, Branwell, Emily, Anne, Charlotte, and lastly the old father, who outlived them all. Emily was only thirty years old, and Charlotte but nine years older. ‘The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law, but thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ That is the inscription which has been placed beneath their names, and with reason; for however harsh the struggle, Emily, and Charlotte above all, fought to victory.

  PART TWO: MAINLY PORTRAITS

  The Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth.

  There is a memorable passage at the end of Froude’s History, in which, before summing up the qualities of the great Queen and delivering judgment, he bids us consider what it is to be a Sovereign. Their mean thoughts ‘rise like accusing spirits... out of the private drawers of statesmen’s cabinets’. They may not stand aside, but must always act. Their duties cling to them as their shadows. Their words and deeds live after them, and must bear a scrutiny to which few could look forward without dismay. Having pronounced this warning, he goes on to strip Elizabeth of every virtue that was claimed for her, save the virtue of her supreme bravery. In some degree such seems to be the fate of the majority of rulers of whom we can form a judgment. Human nature when set upon a throne seems unable to sustain the enormous enlargement. The very early kings alone, in whom courage was the essential virtue, are dubbed ‘the Good’. The later ones, grown subtle, are deformed by vice, stupidity, or bigotry. And yet, partly because it is extraordinary, the spectacle of Royalty never fails to surprise us. To see the pageant is strange enough, but it is far stranger to look into the mind of one of the great actors themselves and to watch the normal human being struggling, an ant laden with a pebble, beneath the superhuman burden laid upon it by its fellows. The difficulty of framing an opinion arises from the necessity that such a person is under of conforming to an unnatural standard, so that it is only at rare moments that one can see how he behaves as an individual. For the rest, one must use one’s imagination. Mr Rait, in introducing the present volume of Queen Elizabeth’s private letters, enumerates other difficulties that must beset the student of early documents. With their formalities and encumbrances, the very language they write is different from ours; they have a thousand inducements to tell lies, nor can they always tell the truth if they wish it. But, allowing for all obstacles, ‘it remains true’, he proceeds, ‘that in such letters as are contained in this book we have the very marrow of history’. By the very marrow in this case we mean the temperament of the woman who ruled England from the time she was twenty-five, and whose whims and qualities lay at the centre of the vast expansion of the Elizabethan age. If we can arrive at some knowledge of her nature and of the circumstances that formed it, we shall read our history with a greater understanding; and Mr Mumby’s collection gives us a splendid chance at least, by laying the original matter out of which history is fashioned before us. He has restricted himself to supplying the necessary links as briefly and as lucidly as possible.

  The story from the first is strange and violent. Her birth made enemies of her own kinsmen, for on that account her half-sister was degraded of her title and shorn of her household. Then three years later Elizabeth was deposed in her turn, without a mother, and left in the hands of a governess who confessed that she did not know what to do with her. The Princess, she wrote, had scarcely any clothes, and it was not good for a child of three who had ‘great pain with her great teeth and they come very slowly forth’ to sup every day at the board of Estate. ‘For there she shall see divers meats, and fruits, and wine, which it would be hard for me to restrain her Grace from.’ It was the third stepmother, Catherine Parr, who first noticed her, and encouraged her to learn. Elizabeth, aged eleven, recognizing her ‘fervent zeal... towards all goodly learning’, dedicated to her a translation which she had made of ‘The Mirror, or Glass, of the sinful soul’. Making allowance for the constraint put upon her, one may infer that Elizabeth was a very precocious and somewhat priggish child, whose precocity was sometimes disagreeable. At the age of fourteen she was ripe for a serious flirtation with her stepmother’s husband, Thomas Seymour, and was so outspoken in this precocious love-making as to bring all those concerned into trouble and herself, finally, to disgrace. Yet, though Elizabeth was forward enough according to her governess, it seems pitiable that a girl of that age should have her feelings made the subject of inquisition by a council of noblemen. She subdued her passions, and in the retreat at Hatfield vanity drove her to excel in the only direction now open to her. Grave scholars like William Grindal and Roger Ascham had been her tutors from the first, and had predicted great things of ‘that noble imp’. At the end of her sixteenth year Ascham reckoned up her accomplishments, and stated that she could speak French and Italian like English; Latin and Greek she could speak with fluency; she had read some of Cicero, Livy and Sophocles; she liked a styl
e that was ‘chaste in its propriety and beautiful in perspicuity’, but ‘greatly admired metaphors’; at that age (her tutor says) she preferred simple dress to ‘show and splendour’. This was one stage in her development. Such an educational one was enough to isolate her from her sex, save for the half-dozen noble ladies, the Greys and the Cecils, who were also prodigies.

  Then, when Mary came to the throne she had to summon all her ability and the composure which learning gives in order to devise a policy and steer ‘like a ship in tempestuous weather’ between the two parties. The Protestant party endangered her by their favouritism and made her the Queen’s most serious rival. Every movement was watched; after Wyatt’s conspiracy the Queen’s nerve was so much shaken that she dared the people’s rage and sent Elizabeth to the Tower. The three years that followed were sufficient to give her the habit of telling lies all her life. But the memory of her unhappiness was bitter enough also to rouse in her the one ‘sustained and generous feeling’ of her life; she showed, Mr Froude thinks, true pity for the Queen of Scots when, years afterwards, she too lay in prison. To be ‘cold and unemotional’, the faults with which Elizabeth is oftenest charged, was the natural refuge for a woman of powerful intellect in the midst of spies. To think perpetually and never to act without a motive was the one safe policy. But it makes it unusually difficult to arrive at her genuine feeling. Thus, someone wishing to endow the magnificent young woman with human tenderness suggests that she was really fond of children, because when she walked in the Tower Garden she liked to play with a child of four who gave her flowers. Yet it was at once suspected that her motive was not tender after all, but that letters from Courtenay lay hid among the leaves. Perhaps it is a trifle, yet it is our certain knowledge of the incidents of life that inspires our conception of character, for there is much less individuality in the way great acts are done. It would be interesting to know how far we still make use of tradition in giving colour to the great figures of the past when we are without details. But there are more definite statements about her appearance: she was tall, with a swarthy skin, and fine eyes - ‘above all a beautiful hand, of which she makes display’. She liked to have it said that she resembled her father, for ‘she prides herself on her father and glories in him’. In manner it is probable that she was overbearing and argumentative, insisting, ‘from vanity’, in talking Italian to Italians, and because she spoke it better than Mary.