Gathering Up the Fragments
Granite and Rainbow. Essays by Virginia Woolf. (Hogarth Press, 18s.) VIRGINIA WOOLF had two great merits as a critic : her common sense, which shows itself in the recognition, visible everywhere in her work, that since literature is made out of life, literature (like life) is very various and there are many different kinds of beauty; and secondly her technical, prac- titioner's interest in just how this or that effect was got, what was the particular problem this particular artist had set himself, what could be learned, or not learned, from his successes or mis- takes. Her light, informal prose often carries the findings of quite rigorous detailed analysis. Her manner may be impressionistic, but her matter is the matter of serious criticism: Mrs. Woolf was an aesthete, a spectator, but she was not a dilettante. Her famed `aesthetic sensibility' was at its best the characteristic manifestation of her intelligence. The cool, steely, incisive quality of her mind appears in the way she dismisses a bid academic work—in the essay called 'The Anatomy of Fic- tion'—where she is very much the daughter of Leslie Stephen. It appears in the admirably un- discouraging examination of a talented but un- satisfactory author (Ernest Hemingway). But it even appears, and this is more significant, in the most consciously lyrical flights. Her mstheticism was a moral position consciously adopted by an intellectual who was also a woman of character.
This book is worth having for the sake of the long essay 'Phases of Fiction,' which contains an analysis of Jane Austen's method. The • other essays make it sadly clear that this is a last gleaning of Mrs. Woolf's criticism. It is a collection made by two women scholars, Miss B. L. Kirkpatrick and.Dr. Mary Lyon, of various articles, reviews, and odds and ends of journalism. It will not change anyone's view of Mrs. Woolf as a critic. Her gifts are apparent in it, but so are her weaknesses and her irritating mannerisms. The most irritating is the feminist strain, in- separable in her writing from an element of neuroticism, and, one must add, an element of sheer silliness. It is irritating, not because one objects to feminism, but because Mrs. Woolf uses the inconsequentiality men put up with, patronis- ingly, as 'typically feminine,' to support the intel- lectual claims of women. Several essays repeat, in varying keys of whimsicality or querulousness, the argument of 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.' Mrs. Woolf was thought in the Thirties to have won this argument : but, reading these resuscitated weaker versions of it, the unconverted are likely to remain so. They may react querulously to her querulousness. Just what, they may ask, is this LIFE that flutters so exasperatingly away when one tries to talk about it? And what is the justifica- tion of the claim, everywhere implicit, for the moral or artistic primacy of a dithering impres- sionism over the prosaic activities of the mind— those sortings, rankings, judgings, which are much too characteristic of any use of intelligence to be written off as mere impositions of the dominating male?
One or two pieces sound the coterie-note rather obtrusively. 'Waxworks in the Abbey' is in Lytton Strachey's cheaper manner : 'William and Mary are an amiable pair of monarchs; bazaar-opening, hospital-inspecting, modern; though the King, un- fortunately, is a little short in the legs.' We cannot praise a superiority based solely on having lived later than some celebrity. But this is not the note to end on. We must be grateful for a last glimpse of that clever, wayward, exasperating mind; a pleasure tinged with regret that it is no longer
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