Virginia Woolf (10 page)

“As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyer’s clerks will have to make flying leaps into the mud; young lady typists will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty and it is better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand.

“One afternoon in the beginning of October when the traffic was becoming brisk a tall man strode along the edge of the
pavement with a lady on his arm. Angry glances struck upon their backs … But some enchantment had put both man and woman beyond the reach of malice and unpopularity …

“The embankment juts out in angles here and there, like pulpits; instead of preachers, however, small boys occupy them, dangling string, dropping pebbles, or launching wads of paper for a cruise. With their sharp eye for eccentricity, they were inclined to think Mr. Ambrose awful; but the quickest witted cried ‘Bluebeard!’ as he passed …

“Although Mrs. Ambrose stood quite still, much longer than is natural, the little boys let her be. Some one is always looking into the river near Waterloo Bridge; a couple will stand there talking for half an hour on a fine afternoon; most people, walking for pleasure, contemplate for three minutes; when, having compared the occasion with other occasions, or made some sentence, they pass on. Sometimes the flats and churches and hotels of Westminster are like the outlines of Constantinople in a mist; sometimes the river is an opulent purple, sometimes mud-coloured, sometimes sparkling blue like the sea … Then there struck close upon her ears —

Lars Porsena of Clusium

By the nine Gods he swore—

and then more faintly, as if the speaker had passed her on his walk—

That the Great House of Tarquin Should suffer wrong no more.”
¹³

The lyrical feminine tone permeating the novel is definitely set here, in the colorfulness of the diction, in the strength of the verbs of action and the vivid adjectives. Feminine too are the profuse observations, the comparisons and the musical rhythm. But in her second novel, the language becomes denotative rather than suggestive, the sentences involved and architecturally constructed. In place of the melodic “opulent purple” and the romantic “outlines of Constantinople in a mist” are such Latinities as “unoccupied faculties” and “unmitigated truth.”

“It was a Sunday evening in October, and in common with many other young ladies of her class, Katherine Hilberry was pouring out tea. Perhaps a fifth part of her mind was thus occupied, and the remaining parts leapt over the little barrier of day which interposed between Monday morning and this rather subdued moment, and played with the things one does voluntarily and normally in the daylight. But although she was silent, she was
evidently mistress of a situation which was familiar enough to her, and inclined to let it take its way for the six hundredth time, perhaps, without bringing into play any of her unoccupied faculties. …

“Considering that the little party had been seated round the tea-table for less than twenty minutes, the animation observable on their faces, and the amount of sound they were producing collectively, were very creditable to the hostees.”
¹⁴

Feminine imagination is not obliterated, but is self-consciously guarded. An attempt to confine herself to facts is striking after the associative flights of “The Voyage Out.” There, grief, the grief of a mother had been depicted in short native Anglo-Saxon idioms with rhythmic graphic imagery. “What with misery for her children, the poor, and the rain, her mind was like a wound exposed to dry in the air.”
¹⁵
Three words, “misery”, “children” and “exposed”, in the whole cadenced sentence deviate from the monosyllabic pattern. Grief in “Night and Day” is no longer the emotional grief of a mother, but the intellectual grievance of a lawyer at odds with his environment. Comparatively analyzed, its expression is devoid of sentiment and imagery, slowly deliberative. “He tried to recall the actual words of his little outburst, and unconsciously supplemented them by so many words of greater expressiveness that the irritation of his failure was somewhat assuaged. Sudden stabs of the unmitigated truth assailed him now and then … ”
¹⁶

There is a maturity in such writing which unveils the reversion from the bubbling, overflowing expressiveness common to youth. Here Virginia Woolf denies her arbitrary associations; the “true” style lies in a more factual reality than her lyrical imagination imposes. Yet a complete suppression of the earlier poetry is impossible; traces of her former imagery and rhythmic romantizations appear, suggesting that they are more native to her than the stoic adherence to logic and objectivity. Objects are no longer unquestionably like something else, but the “smaller room was
something
like a chapel in a cathedral, or a grotto in a cave, for the booming sound of the traffic in the distance
suggested
the soft surge of waters, and the oval mirrors, with their silver surface, were like deep pools trembling beneath starlight.”
¹⁷
The lyric, feminine romanticism has returned only to be
shattered directly by a cold analysis of the imagery. “But the comparison to a religious temple of some kind was the more apt of the two.”
¹⁸
A defined reaction against emotional creativeness is conspicuous; she is seeking like the Joyceans and the humanists, anti-sentimentality and restraint.

Apologetically, she tries to justify her effeminate, romantic impulse for illusions, for conceits. “To put it figuratively”, becomes the excuse. The world is no longer a delightful vision, “like an apple in a tub”, but “a good world, although not a romantic or beautiful place or, to put it figuratively, a place where any line of blue mist softly linked tree to tree upon the horizon.”
¹⁹
Her poetic urge to associate, to explain one sensation through another, seems irrepressible, yet she gives it a new form, distorted under apologies.

In the mentality of her characters, she personifies her conflict between rhapsody and pragmatic restraint. The sentimental exuberance of youth she encloses in Cassandra, (the very name is typical), and in Mrs. Hilberry, daughter of a poet. But in Katherine, her daughter, she personifies mature sobriety. Seen through one of the characters, descriptions of beauty are allowed; loveliness is no longer the observation of the author. A dinner table, always an object of ornamental worship for Virginia Woolf, is suffered here only through Cassandra’s vision. “Had the scene been looked at only through her eyes, it must have been described as one of magical brilliancy.”
²⁰
But her pleasure in the refulgent patterns and colors “must be repressed”, Virginia Woolf decrees ironically, conscious of the restraint she is teaching herself, “because she was grown up and the world held no more for her to marvel at.”
²¹
Yet the poetess consoles herself; if she has forsaken the world of mysterious wonders, of woods and fairies and breathless sensations, she has found a new world, profounder in its broader scope. Life, reality, human beings have taken the place of fanciful illusions. “The world held no more for her to marvel at, it is true; but it held other people, and each other person possessed in Cassandra’s mind some fragment of what privately she called ‘reality’.”
²²
Cassandra does not lose her romantic spirit of wonder, but diverts it from fascinating flowers or poems to fascinating human beings. She retains her exuberance in expressing this new fixation, while Virginia Woolf seeks, less
naturally, to adapt an intellectual form to her psychological interest in man. The idea, the Platonic concept, stands now as the impetus of life, with God or love or nature. The poet has matured into the philosopher. It is Katherine who embodies this newly evolved mode. “What is it that makes these people go one way rather than the other? It’s not love; it’s not reason; I think it must be some idea. Perhaps … our affections are the shadow of an idea. Perhaps there isn’t any such thing as affection in itself … ”
²³

If the change in her style be the inevitable result of a profound conversion in her concept of life, it would signalize maturity rather than a loss of integrity, or doubt. But the self-consciousness of this new tone, the startling echoes of the earlier lyricism and its apologetic concessions, suggest that she has come to this style while she is still in conflict. She has neither obliterated her poetry nor ascertained the beauty of unrhythmic prose. Where before, imagery and tone were an integral part of her writing, she has now become uneasily style-conscious. She is wary of purple prose, and speaks of it with abstract or learned criticism. She disintegrates conceits from her style and analyzes their value. With quizzical irony, she makes Rodney, the poet of classical formalism, read a scientific paper on the use of metaphors in Elizabethan poetry. “It had been crammed” she derides it “with assertions that such-and-such passages, taken liberally from English, French, and Italian, are the supreme pearls of literature. Further, he was fond of using metaphors which, compounded in the study, were apt to sound either cramped or out of place as he delivered them in fragments. Literature was a fresh garland of spring flowers, he said, in which yew-berries and the purple nightshade mingled with the various tints of the anemone; and somehow or other this garland encircled marble brows.”
²⁴

The vague impossible associations of overwrought purple prose, observed in herself, she condemns in him. She has assumed, with doubtful integrity, the compensating role of destructive critic; having denied the poetry in herself, she begins to criticize it in others. But her criticism is not bitter. She is still too uncertain of her new convictions to laugh devastatingly at the old. She has still not taken an absolute stand; her mind has not “consumed impediments” and become “incandescent”. She wavers between denying, or giving expression to her romantic femininity and emotional hallucinations. It is the tortuous problem which
she later satirizes in “Orlando”, detailing her struggle and solution. With acute insight, her travesty is that of a man laughing at himself. She mocks with no injured hatred of the world, no polemics, no fear of retaliation. In portraying her own conflict, she has objectified it. “Orlando” seems as much the history of her own literary growth as that of Miss Sackville-West or of England. Virginia Woolf appears to trace her poetic development from that of a romantic child to a woman seeking the realities modulated by her sex.

The primary impulse of her youth, which is the urge to write, she depicts in Orlando, “a nobleman afflicted with a love of literature.”
²⁵
The parallel is close, Virginia Woolf being a noblewoman by birth, the daughter of the essayist, Sir Leslie Stephen. Mocking the creative urge, she analyzes her concept of literary style. “It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality”
²⁶
definitely the romantic concept of writing. Style becomes the expression of a personal illusion rather than of absolute, objective truth.

Just as Monsieur Rolland had attempted to set down the processes by which his hero created, and succeeded in showing himself more than Jean Christophe in the flux and reflux of inspiration, so Virginia Woolf depicts the struggle with which she, like Orlando, “undertook to win immortality against the English language.”
²⁷
With obvious intimations of self-characterization, she confesses that “Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; …
vacillated between this style and that
; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.”
²⁸

His style is a burlesque upon her own. He experiences the same conflict of impulsive romantic writing against the restraint produced by destructive criticism. And like Virginia Woolf, maturity awakens him to the reality beyond his imagination. Imagery, profuse in her early writing is, with conscious travesty, wild and unconstrained in his. Making love to a Russian princess, he calls her “a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds;
he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.”
²⁹

Both Orlando and Virginia Woolf are essentially visual-minded, and aural in their sensitivity to life’s rhythm. “Sights disturbed him,” she says of Orlando, “sights exalted him—the birds and the trees; and made him in love with death, the evening sky, the homing rooks; and so, mounting up the spiral stairway into his brain-which was a roomy one—all these sights, and the garden sounds too, the hammer beating, the wood chopping, began that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests.”
³⁰
She seems not only to be classifying her own faults but even chastising herself. The young Orlando is not a clear worshipper of the eye, desiring to see objects in their structural truth. The eye for Orlando is only the quick passage between the object and his imagination, his memory and his consciousness. He goes to nature to satisfy his need for beauty, but he perceives this beauty only through the associations it has stimulated. The beauty of a tree lies not in its tangibility, but in its likenesses; in its strange outline against the horizon or its wavering reflection in a stream. The fantastic shapes cast by nature suggest images of wildest romanticism. “Trees were wooded hags, and sheep were grey boulders.”
³¹
Orlando “likened the hills to ramparts, to the breasts of doves, and the flanks of kine … compared the flowers to enamel and the turf to Turkey rugs worn thin.”
³²
In the same manner that she had satirized Rodney’s confusion of conceits in “Night and Day”, Virginia Woolf now mocks Orlando’s. “Images, metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in his mind.”
³³