A SURVEY BY MRS. WOOLF
The Years. By Virginia Woolf. (The Hogarth Press. 8s. 6d.) AFTER- The Waves, it was impossible not to wonder what Mrs.
Woolf's next book was to be. In The Waves—probably her finest, if not her most attractive, novel—she had carried her own peculiar method as far, it seemed, as it could be practicably taken. To describe events, to present characters, to unfold a plot, by simply recording the unspoken thoughts of the characters themselves—this was a tour de force of which only Mrs. Woolf was capable, and which even she, it seemed, could not well repeat. To repeat could hardly have been more than mere repetition ; to carry the method further would have led out of the field of art into the field of Pure psycho-analysis.
Now The Years has appeared, and it hardly satisfies curiosity as to what Mrs. Woolf's next step in literary _technique was to be : she has neither retreated nor advanced along the path of her own development, nor has she marked time by repetition ; she has turned aside, and written an ordinary book.
"Ordinary," indeed, is hardly a word to be applied to any- • thing written by Mrs. Woolf, but this book is ordinary in Several ways in which the word cannot be used of her other novels. To begin with, it is written in what the common reader will call a straightforward style. We do not overhear the interior monologue of the characters. The scenes are recorded as by an external observer, and set down in chronological order. Many of the scenes, it is true, are but glimpses, and they may appear to a casual reader to have been chosen capriciously ; but -Mrs. Woolf's reasons usually become apparent on a closer reading, and her selectiveness is not likely to trouble even the dullest- witted of her readers.
In the second place, the book is about ordinary people. True, there are, as the nineteenth century discovered, no ordinary people ; and certainly no one seems to us quite ordinary if our knowledge of him is as intimate and detailed as that know- ledge of her characters which Mrs. Woolf can give us by means of only a few slight touches. But it still is true that the charac- ters in this book (with the exception of Sara, who is wild and flighty and given to outbursts of lyric utterance—in short, a rather trying person—and perhaps Edward) are all of them ordinary people. They are individuals, for they were created by -Mrs: Woolf; but they were intended tube, and they are, also - types. They lead, too, for the most part, ordinary lives ; there is no dramatic incident, no agonised, no overmastering, emotion, nor are we anywhere persuaded to like or to dislike any of the characters unduly.
Finally, and this perhaps is the most interesting thing about the book, the pattern of the thought recorded, and the rhythin of the prose which expresses it, are 'those of every day. This was not so in all Mrs. Woolf's other novel. In The Waves; for instance, when we overheard each character talking to himself, the voice was the voice of Mrs. Woolf and the rhythm of his thought was recognisably hers. In her purely descriptive passages in The Years, the music, it is true, is her own ; but when she records the thoughts or speeches of her characters; she allows each to speak with the yoke of the ordinary man the thought, the accent, the rhythm, all are natural to the -class, the world, that she has undertaken to portray. It is interesting to observe how she has interwoven, throughout the fabric of the book, with a no doubt conscious artifice; phrases which seem to be echoed from a thousand sittingr- rooms, a thousand dinner-parties : "He was up in Scotland with the Lassviades shooting. It does him good; you know . . . Now tell me about the family " ; "I must ask you to be careful, because we're very short of water " ; "I wish she had children of her own. And .then they could-have settled here " ; "Brand new pyjamas ; only worn them twice.':' Such phrases form a kind of undersOng to the book, and by this means, and by a most meticulous reproduction of the scenes to which they belong, Mrs. Woolf succeeds in recreating the atmosphere in which an English middle-class family lived and moved from 1880 to the present day. .
The family is an ordinary family : Colonel Pargiter, with his wife (she dies at the beginning of the book), his house in Abercorn Terrace (which was not sold till, after his death, the family was finally broken up, just before the War), his club and his mistress ; Eleanor, the daughter who does mit marry but devotes her life to him, to committees, and to charitable works ; Morris, the son who goes to the Bar, and Martin, the son who goes to India ; Edward, who' is a little different from the others, who admires Sophocles and becomes a don at Oxford; and the nieces : Kitty, whom Edward loves, but who marries a well-to-do country gentleman, and Maggie and Sara, who live in a gay and squalid independence on the south bank of the Thames ; we see them and a score or so of other members of the family, growing up, then growing old, in the 'eighties, in the 'nineties, before the War, during the War, and finally reassembled at a family gathering at the present day. Nothing that can be called in any-sense exciting happens to them; even the War is not exciting; we see it simply as it was reflected in their lives, upsetting their way of life just as it upset the lives of all their class and their generation. The range of their emotional capacity is limited so as to avoid any approach to ecstasy or tragedy, and no one of them, accordingly, makes a very deep appeal to the reader.
This is the most solid, and in some ways the most admirable, but the least individual, perhaps the least superficially attractive of the novels of Mrs. Woolf. It is her Mansfie.k1 Park. ID range of observation, in strictness of personal -restraint, Mrs. Woolf has never approached so nearly to Jane Austen as in this book. But it was.undertalten, one feels, less from a desire to please herself or others than from a sense of duty. It is as if she had felt that the possession of her talents involved a corresponding obligation : that one living at the present time, and endowed with her gift of observation, of under.- standing, of expression, owed it—to herself, or to her coni- temporaries, fik to posterity—to employ Those gifts in setting doivn a dispassionate record of nineteenth and twentietio- century England. So she has brought her omniscience, terrify,- ing in its penetration, into play; she knows all her cha:acters, she knows the details of their physical and emotional reactions to each situation in which they find themselves : all form details in her panorama. If her picture is lacking in passion, broad rather than deep in its sympathy, it is at times exceelingly beattiful, and as a whole remarkably impressive. The Years is not a long book, but it contains the portrait of an age, and now that it is available, no one has any excuse for rea.dig the F.orsyte_ Saga.-
JOHN SPARROW.
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