Essays After Tea
By PATRICK ANDERSON
IN what sense was Virginia Woolf a literary critic?* She was a brilliant experimental novelist, passionately devoted to books, who con- tinued her reviewing less for the money-150 in each of our pockets by September'—than for the 'divine relief' from her creative work and the 'vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me.' A regime of 'my fiction before lunch and then essays after tea' provided her with a kind of cross-fertilisation. Now the six volumes of her criticism are being reissued : two volumes of generally literary essays are already to hand; they will be followed by a further pair chiefly concerned with biography. Her views on writers and writing thus become more easily accessible, although the careful planning of The Common Reader, based on her belief that The collection of articles is in my view an inartistic method' and that what was wanted was 'a current of life,' a prevailing them, has had to be aban- doned.
We see at once that Mrs Woolf was neither a scholar nor, in the strict sense, an intellectual. She had little interest in general ideas; she looked through a book at the author, whose 'perspective' or 'angle of vision' it was essential to catch, whose 'different world' it was necessary to enter, rather than around a book at the philosophical and cul- tural movements of its time. George Eliot's long equine face, Gibbon's ridiculously top-heavy body, Goldsmith's dressy clothes are all found indicative. Even Horace Walpole's teeth make a picturesque appearance, for his letters shared their 'fine hard glaze.' Familiar modes of criticism, such as the laying of passages side by side so that they strike sparks off each other, or the illumination of a great work by reference to unfamiliar or unexpected quarters, or the placing of an author in his ideological and sociological context, or the detailed examination of pages where an author's intelligence and imagination may be watched characteristically at play, are, on the whole, not for her.
Her approach is personal, impressionistic and often brilliantly generalising and it does best with prose—especially with individual authors: affinities like Sterne and De Quincey, novelists posing interesting problems like Scott and Meredith. But it also leads to the obviousness of her view of the Greeks, the superficiality with which she emphasises certain qualities in the lesser Elizabethan dramatists, and the quite un- acceptable isolation in which she places the figure of Donne. Few readers today would hold that 'outside Shakespeare or perhaps Ben Jonson, there are no characters in Elizabethan drama, only violences . . .' Her Donne is less effective than that of her friend, Desmond MacCarthy: there are serious misreadings, I feel, and some • COLLECTED ESSAYS. By Virginia Woolf. (Chatto and Windus, Vol. I, 35s.; Vol. H, 30s.)
of the quotations are neither carefully chosen nor justly used.
If this implies a certain failure in scholarship, or simply in intellectual range, we must remem- ber that Mrs Woolf scorned the 'heavily furred and gowned,' advised her schoolgirl listeners against authorities, found university courses in English stultifying and made a bitter attack upon Walter Raleigh, a professor who had never 'been outside the critical fence.' In the two fat volumes of his Letters, 'it would be difficult to find a single remark of any interest whatever about English Literature.' Her preference was for the writer-critic and the reader who, having himself tried to write, dispensed with teachers by 'riding into battle alone.' Education was self-education, and, as such, the 'gold' in her Leaning Tower of the 'thirties, of which the 'stucco' was class. One may add that literature courses today have begun to accept these ideas, although they temper the cloudiness and distortion of what may be only an enthusiastic personal impression by recourse to Mrs Woolf's contemporary, L A. Richards, with whose ideas she was not in agreement.
Perhaps I should admit here to a prejudice in favour of the kind of criticism which sets the work of art firmly in front of the reader (who may not have already read it) and then attempts some sort of selective description : the mode of Mr Edmund Wilson and, in a far less urbane way, of Dr Leavis. And also that I enjoy the sense of fresh air when a lively and sensitive mind plays about a culture and its writers and other artists : I am thinking here, among many possible choices, of Professor Lionel Trilling. It is perhaps a matter of attitude and tone. The attitude is one of patient and earnest inquiry; the tone is that of persuasive argument leading to shared discovery, a tone that is susceptible to hesitance and doubt and will generally be humble.
The essay is no more than an introduction, a threshold to the work discussed. The critic is a guide who grows a little grave with his burden of responsibility. But this, I think, is rarely Mrs Woolf's way. She is already inside the building, very much a figure in her own right; as a friend of the family, she has kept a flat there for years, so that much of the interior is too well known for her to think it worth discussing and much is already part of her own autobiography; she appears at the door, vivacious, sparkling, flushed of cheek and bright of eye, and as we follow her in we catch a scrap of anecdote, a joke about the original architect-owner, a phrase deliciously evoking the sense of the past, a general com- ment about the inconvenience of certain rooms,. for the house is not quite perfect; lights are switched on and off with disconcerting rapidity, certain important-looking doors remain inscrut- ably closed; and then we're on the street again —for the visit has been brief—and the shower of phrases embroiders itself into a dramatic and grandiloquent sentence of farewell. 'He had Only to write and all was clear and melodious; be had only to write and he was among the angels, speaking with a silver tongue in a world where all is ordered, rational, and serene' (from the neat essay on Goldsmith). What fireworks! What expressive gestures! How well the lady has proved that she's every bit as good as a man! But is it the memory of the house we carry away with us, or of a general feeling that houses are important and that more women should have rooms of their own in them, or is it the per- sonality of Mrs Woolf herself? Jane Austen, now: wasn't the point of that particular guided tour that if Jane Austen had lived to the age of sixty she would have been writing very much like Virginia Woolf?
If a re-reading finds the essays a little clut- tered and strained, it is because the tone is so obtrusive, so highly worked. There is the easy escape into purple: 'Beauty leaps from the scab- bard,' etc., or those references to a 'flash of poetry'—opposed, we learn, to the 'dirty work' of prose, for Mrs Woolf's lip-service to Don Juan implies little appreciation of poetic realism or bawdy. There is the aunt-like coyness of her rejection of 'bowels' and 'buggers' in contem- porary verse: 'I feel a jar. I feel a shock. I feel as if I had stubbed my toe on the corner of the wardrobe.' There is the whimsy, the fanci- fulness, the references to 'Liverpool' and omni- buses, to the street-cleaner and the servants' hall. There is 'That fiction is a lady, and a lady who has somehow got herself into trouble, is a thought that must often have struck her admirers.' And beyond' this busy, artful approach there loom —in these two volumes at least—the compara- tively sparse and frequently repeated features of her literary landscape: the Russians (specialists in soul), the Elizabethans (colourists of the cloudy imagination), the Americans (tin-cans, isolated farmsteads and credulous ploughboys), Defoe and Sterne, Jane Austen and Trollope and Meredith, 'the keepers of the keys of solitude,' 'the great plain writers' and, again and again, Proust. We feel a Pageant of Literature to be somewhere in the offing.
But what is perhaps most revealing is that so much of her work is criticism by imagery. Many of these images are beautiful and just. Defoe is expressed by 'a plain earthenware pot'; the people in Henry James live in 'a cocoon spun from the finest shades of meaning'; eighteenth- century poetry has 'such a sediment of good sense that it naturally crystallises into epigram'; Hazlitt's solid rock of demonstration turns into a quagmire of mud and flowers. George Moore's egotism fails to project Esther Waters outside himself so that 'its virtues collapse and fall about it like a tent with a broken pole.' Sometimes, though, the metaphors get mixed, grow exceed- ingly imprecise or reveal a distracting quaintness. Lewis Carroll's dull life becomes an untinted jelly containing the hard crystal of childhood. Poor Ernest Hemingway is devoured 'as one drops a lump of fish into a cage of fringed and eager anemones.'
The image of digestion is indeed frightening: the beautiful critic and the lumpy, fishy author. But if Mrs Woolf appropriated some authors too completely and left important ones almost un- noticed—Lawrence, Joyce, Fitzgerald, the Ger- mans—her essays are full of insights and her views on the novel are always interesting. We may leave her there, less a critic than a working novelist 'terribly exposed to life,' within whose 'luminous halo' we may still see her, as Lily Briscoe saw Mrs Ramsay at the window.
Previous page
