Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  So we argued. But how reserved we were! Brothers and sisters today talk quite freely about — oh everything. We never talked about ourselves even, so far as I can remember. I can recall no confidences; no compliments; no kisses; no emotional scenes. As for sex, he passed from childhood to boyhood and from boyhood to manhood under our eyes, without saying a single thing that could have shown us, by word of mouth, what he was feeling. Did other boys fall in love with him? Not he with them, I suspect. From Clive I learned later that Lytton’s sodomy was to him one of the jokes: one of ‘the Strache’s’ amiable absurdities, eccentricities. Yet beneath that silence — it may be kept cool and sweet, it may be given a depth, a seriousness, an emotional quality that speech destroys — dwelt, as I felt, great susceptibility; great sensibility; great pride and love; and all the beliefs and desires which had he been put on would have made him privately a lover, a husband, a father; and publicly a Judge for sure: Mr Justice Stephen he would have been today; with several books to his credit, I suppose: some on law; one or two on birds; and for a side line there would have been something about pictures; perhaps the Hogarth Press would have published a history of birds with illustrations; some essays on literature; and history; public matters; some attacks on abuses; and by this time he would have been a figure much liked, a typical Englishman? No, not that, for he was melancholy; original; not able to take the ordinary ambitions seriously. I suppose he would have been more a figure than a success.

  The knell of those words of course comes in; and affects my memory of a time when we had no idea that our relationship was to end when he was twenty-six and I was twenty-four. This is one of the falsifications that one cannot guard against; save by noting it. At the time, when he argued with me in my room at Hyde Park Gate, I never saw him as I now see him, with all his promise ended. I thought, if I thought, simply of the moment: it was a moment in which we were both emerging from childhood; and every day, certainly every time he came back from Clifton or from Cambridge, more of him, more of me, had emerged. Those were days of discovery. Very exciting our discoveries were. I remember discovering one October day, when he was about to go to Cambridge for the first time, his beauty. He wore a Hill suit for the first time. That summer, I discovered that he smoked a pipe. I discovered Bell, ‘the Strache’, and Sydney-Turner. But I am going too far ahead of myself in Hyde Park Gate. I will return to the year Stella died — 1897.

  I could sum it all up in one scene. I always see when I think of the month after her death the certain leafless bush; a skeleton tree in the dark of a summer night. This tree stands outside a garden house. Inside I am sitting with Jack Hills. He grips my hand in his. He groans. “It tears one asunder” he groaned. He was in agony. He gripped my hand to make his agony endurable; as if he were in physical torture. “But you can’t understand” he broke off. “Yes, I can”, I murmured. Subconsciously I knew that he meant that his sexual desires tore him asunder, together with his anguish at her loss. Both were torturing him. And the tree, outside in the dark garden, was to me the emblem, the symbol, of the skeleton agony to which her death had reduced him; and us; everything. Either Vanessa or I would go off alone with Jack after dinner. He would come down every week-end — it was to Painswick. Every day one or other of us had a letter. “Poor boy, he looks very bad”, father once muttered audibly. And Jack, overhearing, stammered some awkward sentence to prevent him from saying more. The leafless tree and Jack’s agony — I always see them as if they were one and the same, when I think of that summer.

  The leafless tree was a very painful element in our life. Trees don’t remain leafless. They begin to have little red chill buds. By that image I would convey the discomfort and misery and the quarrels, the suppressed irritations, the sharp words, the insinuations — which as soon as family life started again in Hyde Park Gate began to cover over the fact that Stella’s death had left us all to take up new relationships.

  Another garden scene — this time at Fritham — comes back to me. George had taken my arm in his. Indoors father was playing whist with the others. George singled me out; and walked me off round the lawn. I cannot remember any phrase exactly. A mumbling comes back — his emotional pressure on my arm; as he — with much circumlocution and more emotion and some vague threat about its being against the law and as Stella was her sister, marriage was illegal — told me that people were saying that Vanessa was in love with Jack; and asked me to do what I could (this flattered me) to make her give up seeing him alone. It was a pity that people should say such things. And I could tell her — I could persuade her. What I said to her I do not remember — only her rather bitter answer: “So you take their side too.”

  Then I realised that she had her side: if that were so, of course I was on her side, as I said, very confusedly. I wobbled at once from George’s side to her side. But my vagueness and confusion show that I knew very little of the exact state of things. Presumably George had not asked my help till he had tried other means — for one thing, as Nessa told me later, [he] had spoken his fears to father who, much to his credit, said that she was to do as she liked: he would not interfere.

  These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device — a means of summing up and making innumerable details visible in one concrete picture. Details there were; still, if I stopped to think, I could collect a number. But, whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past. Always a scene has arranged itself: representative; enduring. This confirms me in my instinctive notion: (it will not bear arguing about; it is irrational) the sensation that we are sealed vessels afloat on what it is convenient to call reality; and at some moments, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is, these scenes — for why do they survive undamaged year after year unless they are made of something comparatively permanent? Is this liability to scenes the origin of my writing impulse? Are other people also scene makers? These are questions to which I have no answer. Perhaps some time I will consider it more carefully. Obviously I have developed the faculty, because, in all the writing I have done, I have almost always had to make a scene, cither when I am writing about a person; I must find a representative scene in their lives; or when I am writing about a book, I must find their poem, novel... But this may not be the same faculty.

  So that was one of the little red buds, or thorns, on the skeleton tree: Vanessa was in love with Jack; Jack was behaving selfishly; people were talking; and George and Gerald (to a lesser degree) were getting their hackles up. That is one of the aspects of death which is left out when people talk of the message of sorrow: they never mention its unbecoming side: its legacy of bitterness, bad temper, ill adjustment.

  For some months that winter (1897-8) Jack stayed with us, until he took a house — 14 Victoria Grove. It “had associations.” I believe one of our Great Aunts — Aunt Louisa Bayley? — had lived there. Kitty and Leo had lived there. There Jack went to live with the Scotchers — Mr and Mrs Scotchbrook. He came to grief through drink and she, as Flora Baker used to hint — for the ladies of the family adopted Jack and his interests as if he were an orphan — threatened to have another baby.

  (November 17th.) But we never spoke, during those unhappy years, of these scenes. Thoby, I imagine, may have had some vague conception that something, as I think he would have put it, was up between Jack and Vanessa. But his general attitude was aloof, judicial, conventional. From his remote station, as a schoolboy, as an undergraduate, he felt generally. We should accept our place: if George wanted us to go to parties, why not? If father wanted us to walk with him, why not? Once, at Salisbury, when the Fishers were our neighbours, and Vanessa, detesting Aunt Mary, who had most viciously intervened, writing surreptitious letters addressed to Copes School, in the chronic warfare between Vanessa and Jack and Vanessa and George, refused to visit them and cut them in the street, he made one of his rare impressive statements: gruffly he said it was not right to treat Aunt Mary like that.

  It thus came about that Nessa and I for
med together a very close conspiracy. In that world of many men, coming and going, we formed our private nucleus. There we were, alone, with father all day. In the evening Adrian would come back from Westminster; then Jack from Lincoln’s Inn; then Gerald from Dent’s or Henrietta Street; then George from the Post Office or the Treasury; and Thoby would be at Clifton or at Cambridge. The staple day would be a day spent together. And therefore we made together a small world inside the big world. We had an alliance that was so knit together that everything (with the exception of Jack perhaps) was seen from the same angle; and took its shape from our own vantage point. Very soon after Stella’s death we saw life as a struggle to get some kind of standing place for ourselves in this [illegible]. We were always battling for that which was always being interfered with, muffled up, snatched away. The most imminent obstacle and burden was of course father. How could we, to take a concrete case, arrange that he should be out when perhaps Kitty Maxse, perhaps Katie Thynne, came to tea? How could we escape Mr Bryce? Must I spend the afternoon walking round Kensington Gardens? Could we possibly arrange to take our friends straight up to the Studio (the day nursery)? Then, what could one talk about at luncheon? Could we avoid Brighton at Easter? Must we be in because Aunt Mary was coming?

  Over the whole week of these evasions and propitiations brooded the horror of Wednesday. On that day the weekly books were shown him. If they were over eleven pounds, that lunch was a torture. The books were presented. Silence. He was putting on his glasses. He had read the figures. Down came his fist on the account book. There was a roar. His vein filled. His face flushed. Then he shouted “I am ruined.” Then he beat his breast. He went through an extraordinary dramatization of self-pity, anger and despair. He was ruined — dying... tortured by the wanton extravagance of Vanessa and Sophie. “And you stand there like a block of stone. Don’t you pity me? Haven’t you a word to say to me?” and so on. Vanessa stood by his side absolutely dumb. He flung at her all the phrases — about shooting Niagara and so on — that came handy. She remained static. Another attitude was adopted. With a deep groan he picked up his pen and with ostentatiously trembling fingers wrote out the cheque. This was wearily tossed to Vanessa. Slowly and with many groans the pen, the account book were put away. Then he sank into his chair and sat with his head on his breast. And then at last, after glancing at a book, he would look up and say half plaintively, “And what are you doing this afternoon, Ginny?”

  Never have I felt such rage and such frustration. For not a word of my feeling could be expressed.

  This, as far as I can describe it, is an unexaggerated account of a bad Wednesday. Even now I can find nothing to say of his behaviour save that it was brutal. If, instead of words, he had used a whip the brutality would have been no greater. How can one explain it? He had been indulged of course ever since he broke the flower pot and threw the fragments at his mother (whatever the truth of that story, it ran something like that). Delicacy excused that. Then as he grew older there was the genius legend to which I have already referred. Men of genius are very ill to live with... But there are certain qualifications to be noted. These scenes were never indulged in before men. Fred Maitland; for example resolutely refused to believe in them when Caroline Emelia (the Quaker sister) tried to insinuate that Leslie had a temper. If Thoby had presented those books or George, the explosion would have been suppressed. Why had he no shame in front of women? Partly of course because the woman was his slave — being the most typical of Victorians. But that does not explain the self-dramatization, the attitudinizing, the histrionic element, the breast beating, the groaning, which played so large a part, so disgusting a part in these scenes. His dependence upon women perhaps explains that. He needed always a woman to sympathize, to flatter, to console. Why? Because he was conscious of his failure as a philosopher, as a writer. But his creed made him ashamed to confess this need of sympathy to men. The attitude that his intellect made him adopt with men, made him the most modest, the most reasonable of men. [illegible] Vanessa, on Wednesdays, was the recipient of much discontent that he had suppressed; and her refusal to accept her role, part slave, part angel of sympathy, exacerbated him so that he was probably unconscious of his own barbarous violence: and would have been horrified had anyone said straight out “You are a blackguard to treat a girl like that.!’ I cannot conceive how he would have taken an honest expression of opinion. And the reason for that is to be found in the disparity, so obvious in his books, between his critical and his creative powers. Give him a thought to analyse, the thought of Mill, Bentham, Hobbes; and his is (so Maynard has told me) acute, clear, concise: an admirable model of the Cambridge analy[tical spirit]. But give him life, a character, and he is so crude, so elementary, so conventional, that a child with a box of coloured chalks is as subtle a portrait painter as he is. To explain this, one would have to discuss the crippling effect of Cambridge; and its one-sided education; and to follow that by a discussion of the professional writer, in the nineteenth century; and the crippling effect of intensive brain work; and to illustrate that by his lack of any distracting interests — music, art, the theatre, travel; and one would have to discover how much of this intensification and narrowness was natural; how much imposed by circumstances. But the fact does seem to be that at the age of sixty-five he was almost completely isolated, imprisoned. Whole tracts of his sensibility had atrophied. He had so ignored, or refused to face, or disguised his own feelings, that not only had he no conception of what he himself did and said; he had no idea what other people felt. Hence the horror and the terror of these violent displays of rage. These were sinister, blind, animal, savage. He did not realise what he did. No one could enlighten him. He suffered. We suffered. There was no possibility of communication. Vanessa stood silent. He shouted.

  Here of course, from my distance of time, I perceive what one could not then see — the difference of age. Two different ages confronted each other in the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate: the Victorian age; and the Edwardian age. We were not his children, but his grandchildren. When we both felt that he was not only terrifying but also ridiculous we were looking at him with eyes that saw ahead of us something — something so easily seen now by every boy and girl of sixteen and eighteen that the sight is perfectly familiar. The cruel thing was that while we could see the future, we were completely in the power of the past. That bred a violent struggle. By nature, both Vanessa and I were explorers, revolutionists, reformers. But our surroundings were at least fifty years behind the times. Father himself was a typical Victorian: George and Gerald were unspeakably conventional. So that while we fought against them as individuals we also fought against them in their public capacity. We were living say in 1910: they were living in 1860.

  In 22 Hyde Park Gate round about 1900 there was to be found a complete model of Victorian society. If I had the power to lift out a month of life as we lived it about 1900 I could extract a section of Victorian life, like one of those cases with glass covers in which one is shown ants or bees going about their affairs. Our day would begin with family breakfast at 8.30. Adrian bolted his; and whichever of us, Vanessa or myself, was down, would see him off. Standing at the front door we would wave a hand till he disappeared round the Martins’ bulging wall. This was a relic left us by Stella — a flutter of the dead hand which lay beneath the surface of family life. Father would eat his breakfast sighing and snorting. If no letters, “Everyone has forgotten me”, he would groan. A long envelope from Barkers would mean of course a sudden roar. George and Gerald came down. Vanessa disappeared behind the curtain. Dinner ordered, she would dash for the red bus to take her to the Academy. If Gerald coincided, he would give her a lift in his daily hansom — the same hansom, generally; the cabman in summer wore a carnation. George having breakfasted more deliberately — sometimes he would persuade me to sit on, on the three-cornered chair, and tell me gossip from last night’s party — he too would button on his frock coat and give his top hat a promise with the velvet glove and disappear — smar
t and debonair, in his ribbed socks and very small well polished shoes, to the Treasury. Left alone in the great house, with Father shut in his study at the top, the housemaid polishing brass rods, Shag asleep on his mat, and some maid doing bedrooms while Sophie I suppose took in joints and milk from tradespeople at the back door, I mounted to my room and spread my Liddell and Scott upon my table and sat down to make out Euripides or Sophocles for my bi-weekly lesson with Janet Case. From ten to one we escaped the pressure of Victorian society.

  Vanessa, I suppose, under the eye of Val Prinsep or Ouless or occasionally Sargent, painted from the life — she would bring home now and then very careful pencil drawings of Hermes perhaps, and spray them with fixative; or an oil head of a very histrionic looking male nude. And for the same three hours I would be reading perhaps Plato’s Republic, or spelling out a Greek chorus. Our minds would escape to the world which on this November morning of 1940 she inhabits at Charleston and I in my garden room at Monks House. Our clothes would not be much different. She wore a blue painting smock; I perhaps a blouse and skirt. If our skirts were longer, that would be the only difference. Forty years ago she was rather tidier, rather better dressed than I. The change would come in the afternoon. About 4.30 Victorian society exerted its pressure. Then we must be ‘in’. For at 5 father must be given his tea. And we must be better dressed and tidier, for Mrs Green was coming; Mrs H. Ward was coming; or Florence Bishop; or C. B. Clarke; or... We would have to sit at that table, either she or I, decently dressed, having nothing better to do, ready to talk.