Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  The words, as we know, were to have tremendous consequences, but it is worth while to consider the whole scene apart from them as an example of that curious gift which gives to so many passages in this autobiography the precision and vitality of coloured and animated photographs. No emotion that could express itself in gesture or action was lost upon her eye, and even though such incidents had nothing to do with the matter in hand, her brain treasured them and could, if necessary, use them to explain something. It is often something quite trivial, but for that reason, perhaps, almost startling in its effect. Thus the little sister was sitting on the floor ‘plaiting the fringe of the sofa’; Madame Guérard came in ‘without a hat; she was wearing an indoor gown of indienne with a design of little brown leaves’. Later, a little drama is given thus. ‘My godfather shrugged his shoulders, and getting up, left the box, banging the door after him. Mamma, losing all patience with me, proceeded to review the house through her opera-glasses. Mlle de Brabender passed me her handkerchief, for I had dropped mine and dared not pick it up.’ That perhaps may be taken as a simple example of the way in which it is natural for an actress, be she only twelve years old, to see things. It is her business to be able to concentrate all that she feels into some gesture perceptible to the eye, and to receive her impressions of what is going on in the minds of others from the same tokens also. The nature of her gift becomes increasingly obvious as the memoirs proceed, and the actress matures and takes her station at this point of view. And when, as is here the case, the alien art of letters is used to express a highly developed dramatic genius, some of the effects that it produces are strange and brilliant, and others pass beyond this limit and become grotesque and even painful. On the way back from her examination at the Conservatoire, in which she had been successful, she prepared a scene for her mother. She was to enter with a sad face, and then, when her mother exclaimed ‘I told you so,’ she was to cry ‘I have passed!’ But the faithful Madame Guérard spoilt the effect by shouting the true story in the courtyard. ‘I must say that the kind woman continued so long as she lived... to spoil my effects... so that before beginning a story or a game I used to ask her to go out of the room.’ Not seldom we find ourselves in the same position as Madame Guérard, although perhaps we might be able to offer an excuse. There are two stories, out of a bewildering variety, which will serve to show how it is that Sarah Bernhardt sometimes crosses the boundary, and becomes either ludicrous or painful - or is it that we, like Madame Guérard, should leave the room?

  After her astonishing exertions in the Franco-Prussian war she felt the need of a change, and went accordingly to Brittany. ‘I adore the sea and the plain... but I neither care for mountains nor for forests... they crush me... and stifle me.’ In Brittany she found horrid precipices, set in the ‘infernal noise of the sea’, and rocks to crawl beneath, which had fallen there ‘in unknown ages, and were only held in equilibrium by some inexplicable cause’. There was a crevasse also, the Enfer du Plogoff, which she was determined to descend in spite of the mysterious warnings of her guide. Accordingly she was lowered by a rope attached to a belt, in which additional holes had to be pierced, for her waist ‘was then but forty-three centimetres’. It was dark, and the sea roared, and there was a din as of cannons and whips and the howling of the damned. At last her feet touched ground, the point of a little rock in a swirl of waters, and she looked fearfully about her. Suddenly she saw that she was observed by two enormous eyes; a little further, and she saw another pair of eyes. ‘I saw no body to these beings... I thought for a minute that I was losing my senses.’ She tugged violently, and was slowly raised; ‘the eyes were lifted up also... and while I mounted through the air I saw nothing but eyes everywhere - eyes throwing out long feelers to reach me’. Those are the eyes of the shipwrecked ones,’ said her guide, crossing himself. ‘I knew very well that they were not the eyes of shipwrecked ones... but it was only at the hotel that I heard about the octopus.’ It might puzzle a scrupulous chronicler to assign their original parts in this drama to the octopus, the fisherman, and to Sarah Bernhardt; for the others it does not matter.

  Then, again, ‘my dear governess, Mlle de Brabender,’ was dying, and she went to visit her.

  ‘She had suffered so much that she looked like a different person. She was lying in her little white bed, a little white cap covering her hair; her big nose was drawn with pain, her washed-out eyes seemed to have no colour in them. Her formidable moustache alone bristled up with constant spasms of pain. Besides all this she was so strangely altered that I wondered what had caused the change. I went nearer, and bending down, kissed her gently. I then gazed at her so inquisitively that she understood instinctively. With her eyes she signed to me to look on the table near her, and there in a glass I saw all my dear old friend’s teeth.’

  There is one quality that most of the stories she tells have in common: they are clearly the productions of a very literal mind. She will accumulate fact upon fact, multiply, her octopuses indefinitely, in order to achieve her effect, but she will never invoke any mystical agency. How could one manage ‘the souls of the drowned’? All the vast unconscious forces of the world, the width of the sky and the immensity of the sea, she crinkles together into some effective scenery for her solitary figure. It is for this reason that her gaze is so narrow and so penetrating. And although her convictions as an artist hardly enter these pages, it may be guessed that something of her unmatched intensity on the stage comes from the capacity which she shows for keen and sceptical vision where character is concerned; she is under no illusions. ‘I had played badly, looked ugly, and been in a bad temper.’ One figures her the most practical of women when she chooses, a cheapener of fowls with the best of them, who will only suffer herself to be cheated from the same cynicism with which, no doubt, she would cheat herself if she wished it. For so clear an insight does not seem in her case at least consistent with a very exalted view of her kind; if she had it by nature she may have found that it would not lend itself easily to the resources of her art, that the effects to be got by it were uncertain, and it is her glory to make any sacrifice that her art demands. Certainly, when you have read some way in the book you become aware of a hardness and limitation in her view, which perhaps may be accounted for by the fact that all these violent scenes are the result of certain well-contrived explosions which serve but to illumine the curious face, so unlike any other face, of the actress. And in a world thus lit for us in lurid bursts of violet and crimson light the one figure in all its poses is always vivid enough, but the others which fall just outside the circle are strangely discoloured. Thus, she saved a lady from falling downstairs on board ship, who murmured ‘in a voice that was scarcely audible “I am the widow of President Lincoln”... A thrill of anguish ran through me... her husband had been assassinated by an actor, and it was an actress who prevented her from joining her beloved husband. I went to my cabin and stayed there two days.’ And what was Mrs Lincoln feeling meanwhile?

  Such a multiplication of crude visible objects upon our senses wearies them considerably by the time the book is finished, but what we suffer - it is the final triumph of ‘the personality’ - is exhaustion and not boredom. Even the stars, when she draws her curtain at night, shine not upon the earth and the sea, but upon ‘the new era’ which her second volume will reveal to us also.

  With our eyes dazzled by this unflinching stare we are urged to say something of the revelation - and vainly, no doubt. For the more you are under the obsession of a book the less of articulate language you have to use concerning it. You creep along after such shocks, like some bewildered animal, whose head, struck by a flying stone, flashes with all manner of sharp lightnings. It is possible, as you read the volume, to feel your chair sink beneath you into undulating crimson vapours, of a strange perfume, which presently rise and enclose you entirely. And then they draw asunder and leave clear spaces, still shot with crimson, in which some vivid conflict goes forward between bright pigmies; the clouds ring with high Fr
ench voices perfect of accent, though so strangely mannered and so monotonous of tone that you hardly recognize them for the voices of human beings. There is a constant reverberation of applause, chafing all the nerves to action. But where after all does dream end, and where does life begin? For when the buoyant armchair grounds itself at the end of the chapter with a gentle shock that wakes you and the clouds spin round you and. disappear, does not the solid room which is suddenly presented with all its furniture expectant appear too large and gaunt to be submerged again by the thin stream of interest which is all that is left you after your prodigal expense? Yes - one must dine and sleep and register one’s life by the dial of the clock, in a pale light, attended only by the irrelevant uproar of cart and carriage, and observed by the universal eye of sun and moon which looks upon us all, we are told, impartially. But is not this a gigantic falsehood? Are we not each in truth the centre of innumerable rays which so strike upon one figure only, and is it not our business to flash them straight and completely back again, and never suffer a single shaft to blunt itself on the far side of us? Sarah Bernhardt at least, by reason of some such concentration, will sparkle for many generations a sinister and enigmatic message; but still she will sparkle, while the rest of us -is the prophecy too arrogant? - lie dissipated among the floods.

  Lady Strachey.

  There are some people who without being themselves famous seem to sum up the qualities of an age and to represent it at its best. Lady Strachey, who died last week at the age of eighty-eight, was among them. She seemed the type of the Victorian woman at her finest - many-sided, vigorous, adventurous, advanced. With her large and powerful frame, her strongly marked features, her manner that was so cordial, so humorous, and yet perhaps a little formidable, she seemed cast on a larger scale, made of more massive material than the women of today. One could not but be aware even to look at her that she was in the line of a great tradition. She came of a family famous for its administrators and public servants; she married into one of the great Anglo-Indian families of the nineteenth century. One could easily imagine how, had she been a man, she would have ruled a province or administered a Government department. She had all that instinct for affairs, that broad-minded grasp of politics that made the great public servant of the nineteenth century. But, in addition, like all Victorian women of her stamp, she was emphatically a mother and a wife. Even while she wrote dispatches at her husband’s dictation and debated - for she was in the counsels of the men who governed India - this problem, that policy, she was bringing up, now in India, now in England, a family of ten children. She was presiding over one of those vast Victorian households which, chaotic as they seem now, had a character and a vitality about them which it is hard to suppose will ever be matched again. Memory provides a picture of the many-roomed house; of people coming and going; of argument; of laughter; of different voices speaking at once; of Lady Strachey herself a little absent-minded, a little erratic, but nevertheless the controller and inspirer of it all, now wandering through the rooms with a book, now teaching a group of young people the steps of the Highland reel, now plunging into ardent debate about politics or literature, now working out, with equal intentness, some puzzle in a penny paper which if solved would provide her with thirty shillings a week and a workman’s cottage for life.

  In her old age she wrote down a few memories of the past which show, very briefly, how naturally, how as a matter of course, she was in touch with the great figures of the Victorian world. She joked with Huxley; she exchanged spectacles with Tennyson; she was a special favourite with George Eliot, and, ‘though much ashamed of my vanity in recording it’, could not help remembering how ‘Lewes told a friend of mine that I was his idea of Dorothea in Middlemarch’. She sat up to all hours of the night, ‘eagerly discussing every aspect of humanity’, with the most distinguished men of her time, openly but impersonally, rather as if they were in full evening dress, so it seems to a less formal age. For together with her keen interest in public questions, particularly in the education and emancipation of women, went an interest as vigorous in music and the drama, and especially in literature. She had a vast capacity for enthusiasm which fed happily and confidently as was common with the Victorians upon her own contemporaries and their works. She had no doubts whatever about the greatness of the men she knew and the lasting importance of their books. When she met Browning for the first time at a concert she wrote on her programme:

  ‘And did you once see Browning plain?

  And did he stop and speak to you?’

  and kept it, a sacred relic. She counted it one of her great pieces of good luck that she was born contemporary with Salvini. She went to the theatre every night on which he acted. But she was not only attracted by the great figures of her own age. She was an omnivorous reader. She had her hands upon the whole body of English literature, from Shakespeare to Tennyson, with the large loose grasp that was so characteristic of the cultivated Victorian. She had a special love for the Elizabethan drama, and for English poetry - Beddoes was one of the obscure writers whom she championed and discovered - a little incongruously perhaps, for her own affinities seemed rather with the age of reason and the robust sense of the great English prose writers. She was, above all things, rational, positive, agnostic, like the distinguished men who were her friends. Later in life, after her husband’s death, when her activities were somewhat lessened, though they were still varied enough to have filled the life of a younger woman, she would spend an entire winter’s afternoon in reading an Elizabethan play from end to end. For reading aloud was one of her great natural gifts. She read with fire and ardour, and with a great clarity and distinction of utterance. Often she would pause to point out the beauty of some passage, or propound with extreme ingenuity some emendation, or impart a curious illustration that had stuck in her mind from her wide and miscellaneous foraging among books. Then, when the reading was over, she would launch out into stories of the past; of Lord Lytton and his sky-blue dressing-gown; of Lord Roberts helping to mend her sewing machine; of Lawrence and Outram (she never passed the statue of Outram without making a salute, she said); of Patties and Prinseps; of bygone beauties and scandals - for though she observed the conventions she was not in the least a prude; of Indian society fifty years, eighty years, a hundred years ago. For she had the Scottish love of following family histories and tracing the friendships and alliances of the present back to their roots in the past. Thus a haphazard party would come in her presence to have a patriarchal air, as she recalled the memories and the marriages that had bound parents and grandparents together years ago, in the distant past.

  Gradually, though the vigour of her mind was as great as ever, it seemed to withdraw from modern life and to focus itself more and more upon the past. She did not remember clearly what had happened the week before, but Calcutta in 1870, Robert Browning’s laugh, some saying of George Eliot’s, were as clear, as dear, and as vivid as ever. It was her hard fate to lose her sight almost entirely some years before she died. She could no longer go foraging and triumphing through English literature - for it seemed as if she carried on even the passive act of reading with something of the vigour with which she strode the streets, peering forward with her short-sighted eyes, or tossed her head high in a shout of laughter. But she could talk, she could argue, she could join in the disputes of the younger generation and follow with pride the successes of her children. Her mind was still busy with literature, still active with suggestions for reviving forgotten plays, for editing old texts, for bringing to light some hidden splendour in those old books which she could no longer read herself, but almost commanded the younger generation to love as she had loved them. Her memory, grown to be the strongest part of her, still kept unimpaired in its depths some of the loveliest things in English poetry. When she was past eighty, she stopped one summer evening under a tree in a London square and recited the whole of ‘Lycidas’ without a fault. Last summer, though too weak to walk any more, she sat on her balcony and showered down
upon the faces that she could not see a vast maternal benediction. It was as if the Victorian age in its ripeness, its width, with all its memories and achievements behind it were bestowing its blessing. And we should be blind indeed if we did not wave back to her a salute full of homage and affection.