BOOKS AND WRITERS .
LADY HESTER STANHOPE kept a milk-white horse in her stable in readiness for the Messiah, and was for ever scanning the mountain tops, impatiently but with confidence, for signs of his approach. Virginia Woolf thought that critics should ,emulate her. " Let us ask them," shd wrote in How It Strikes A Contemporary, " to follow her example ; scan the horizon ; see the past in relation to the future ; and so prepare the way for masterpieces to come." How characteristic is the bizarre, the mildly malicious image! But, she might well herself have added, but, well, yes . . . did her own critical activity follow the drift of her exhortation ?
In the essays published in The Common Reader, The Death of the Moth, The Moment, and her latest and last collection,* Virginia Woolf was more concerned to work out her own salvation, with the mystic's intense self-absorption in the immediacy of ex- perience, than to peer for putative Redeemers beyond the sky-line. Her essays are autobiography, not prophetic books. She saw the past—and in them she is usually looking at the past—in relation o herself, not to the future ; they are prolegomena to her own ovels, not to the masterpieces of others. She is never the detached bjective assessor, " who Present, Past, and Future sees." She s engaged ; she is emotionally involved in the books she writes bout ; she is the creative artist alert for grist and not a scanner f distances and horizons. " It is the Keats, the Coleridge, the amb, the Flaubert, who get to the heart of the matter. It is in he toil and strife of creative writing that they have forced the nor open and gone in and told us what they have seen there."
o she comments in The Captain's Death Bed, stabbing at the rofessorial Walter Raleigh. She was commenting on herself. Certainly she read and pondered on and published her con- emporaries ; could write A Letter to a Young Poet, flick a bull's- ye on to Forster or Conrad or Lawrence, dissect without mercy he dead tissue in Bennett or Wells or Galsworthy. But her critical ssays, the secretion of her devouring delight in books, are mainly oncerned with centuries earlier than her own, and to work through heir corpus is like turning the pages of a highly selective history f English literature. Reading, in this new volume, begins with picture of her in a library. " Here they all are ; Homer and uripides ; Chaucer ; then Shakespeare ; and the Elizabethans, and ollowing come. the plays of the Restoration . . . and so down o our own time, or very near it, Cowper, Burns, Scott, Wordsworth nd the rest. I liked that room." Read what you like. As a hild she got that lesson from her father, Leslie Stephen, and in his new collection her delightful description of him en pantoufles efines it. " To read what one liked because one liked it, never o pretend to admire what one did not—that was his only lesson the art of reading. To write in the fewest possible words, as learly as possible, exactly what one meant—that was his only esson in the art of writing. All the rest must be learnt for neself."
So for herself she opens the door and goes in and tells us- what he sees there. It is Goldsmith, in this volume, and Gilbert White, rabbe and Marryat, Ruskin and James Woodforde. And perhaps er especial grace is that when she looks through the door she es only the book and its author. The jungle of secondary authori- es, commentaries and books about books might never exist ; she liminates them by her disregard ; all she is concerned with is hat the man wrote and what she feels about it. Her response the originals is her own, untainted ; and maybe that is why ere speaks through these last essays an audible, living voice, un- uffied by the reverential hush which so often blankets a post- umous volume. She is reporting on the insinuation of herself to another writer's mind. " Influences," thank goodness, have o pressing interest for her, and her reports never read, as much cent criticism does, like the begetting chapters of the Bible:
Thi Captain's Death Bed, and other Essays. (Hogarth Press. 10 /6.)
" The sons of Merari ; Mahli and Mushi. The sons of Mahli ; Eleazar and Kish. The son of George Eliot, Henry James " Her netting of instants of intense subjective experience was, of course, conditioned by her impressionist's view of experience as resolving itself into " Life: London: this moment in June." It seems, in fact, that the daughter of Leslie Stephen had also gone to school with Walter Pater. " Examine for a moment," she says when writing on modern fiction, " an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms ; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old." But we have been here before with Pater. " Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face ; some tone on the hills of the sea is choicer than the rest ; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excite- ment is irresistibly real and attractive to us—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end." No wonder that she who, as E. M. Forster wrote, worked in a storm of atoms and seconds, could say with approval of Sterne, " There is, he seems to hint, no universal scale of values. A girl may be more interesting than a cathedral ; a dead donkey more instructive than a living philosopher. It is all a question of one's point of view."
Such relativism is the natural result when the impressionist turns critic. And perhaps Virginia Woolf is at her best when she accepts the limitations of her method, refuses to generalise from her moments of passion and insight and intellectual experience to a universal scale of values, and ignores the dangerous dogma of Remy de Gourmont: "Eriger en lois ses impressions personelles, c'est le grand effort d'un homnze s'il est sincere." For it is precisely the graceful communication of her personal impressions, rather than any formal definition of critical principles, which places her occasional writing among the most agreeable of its kind.
But the defects of subjective criticism are quirks and prejudice, and occasionally, there is no doubt, she wore blinkers. Her essay on Walter Raleigh in this volume is a masterpiece of imperfect sympathy. " The only sting in it," said George Meredith of her father's style, " was an inoffensive humorous irony that now and then stole out for a roll over, like a furry cub." On these occasions the daughter's irony bit like a vixen's teeth. But the aesthetic of " Life: London: this moment in June " had no room for the historian of the Air Force who called Shakespeare Bill and Blake an inspired old bustard, and believed in " blood feuds and the chase of wild beasts, and marriage by capture." There is, in this volume, an essay called Life Itself, but the mountain only delivers a mouse—Parson Woodforde.
She was more at ease, it is clear, with " Life Itself " than with some of the facts of life. The letter called Memories of a Working Women's Guild (the final paper in this volume, though it wail written in 1930) is a moving demonstration of her awareness that library windows have a restricted view. In her novels and, for example, Three Guineas, she communicated her horror and her agony at what she saw when she left the library behind her. The liberal Russian intellectuals of the nineteenth century—Herzen is an example—were known as " the conscience-stricken gentry." That nerve was alive in Mrs. Woolf, and even in her critical work it was sometimes exposed.
But such exposures mean Angst, self-questioning, dust and ashes ; a negative mood, quite alien to the essential spirit of her occasional writing, which is happiness, assurance, fulfilment in the act of reading and interpretation. " I liked that room." And in that room it is pleasant to think of her, finally, content in serendipity— rambling around Evelyn, prodding the Elizabethan lumber, cata- loguing the lives of the obscure, and noting, with her magpie's eye for detail, that as Marryat lay dying clove pinks and moss roses
brightened the Captain's death-bed. RONALD LEWIN.
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