|
|
 |
Electronic Reserve
Text: Viriginia Woolf, from A Room of One's Own (1928) adapted
from The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume IIC, The
Twentieth Century
---------------- Woolf delivered her essay in a shorter version to meetings first at two women's colleges, Newnham and Girton College, Cambridge University, in October 1928. 2. Important 19th-century novelists. |
|
[2487] truth than fact,
Therefore I propose, making use of all the liberties and licences of
a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming
here--how, bowed down by the weight of the subject which you have laid
upon my shoulders, I pondered it, and made it work in and out of my
daily life, I need not say that what I am about to describe has no existence;
Oxbridge is an invention; so is Fernham;3 "I" is only a convenient
term for somebody who has no real being, Lies will flow from my lips,
but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you
to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth
keeping, If not, you will of course throw the whole of it into the wastepaper
basket and forget all about it. Here then was I
(call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael4 or by any name you
please--it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on the banks of
a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought,
That collar I have spoken of, women and fiction, the need of coming
to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices
and passions, bowed my head to the ground, To the right and left bushes
of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed
burnt with the heat, of fire, On the further bank the willows wept in
perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders, The river reflected
whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate
had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely,
as if he had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost
in thought, Thought-to call it by a prouder name than it deserved--had
let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither
and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift
it and sink it, until--you know the little tug--the sudden conglomeration
of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of
it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how
small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish
that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter
and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with
that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves
in the course of what I am going to say. But however small
it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind--put
back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important;
and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such
a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was
thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass
plot. Instantly a man's figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first
understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a
cutaway coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed
horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help;
he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path.
Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place
for me.5 Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the
path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose,
and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was
done. The only ------------------ 3. "Oxbridge"
was in fact the common slang term for Oxford and Cambridge universities
"Fernham" suggests Newnham College. [2488] charge I could
bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might
happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled
for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding. What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I could not now remember. The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning. Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls the roughness of the present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts (unless one trespassed on the turf again), was at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment. As chance would have it, some stray memory of some old essay about revisiting Oxbridge in the long vacation brought Charles Lamb to mind--Saint Charles, said Thackeray,6 putting a letter of Lamb's to his forehead. Indeed, among all the dead (I give you my thoughts as they came to me), Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, Tell me then how you wrote your essays? For his essays
are superior even to Max Beerbohm's, I thought, with all their perfection,
because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius
in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred
with poetry. Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years ago.
Certainly he wrote an essay-the name escapes me-about the manuscript
of one of Milton's poems which he saw here.7 It was Lycidas perhaps,
and Lamb wrote how it shocked him to think it possible that any word
in Lycidas could have been different from what it is. To think
of Milton changing the words in that poem seemed to him a sort of sacrilege.
This led me to remember what I could of Lycidas and to amuse myself
with guessing which word it could have been that Milton had altered,
and why. It then occurred to me that the very manuscript itself which
Lamb had looked at was only a few hundred yards away, so that one could
follow Lamb's footsteps across the quadrangle to that famous library
where the treasure is kept. Moreover, I recollected, as I put this plan
into execution, it is in this famous library that the manuscript of
Thackeray's Esmond is also preserved. The critics often say that
Esmond is Thackeray's most perfect novel. But the affectation
of the style, with its imitation of the eighteenth century, hampers
one, so far as I remember; unless indeed the eighteenth-century style
was natural to Thackeray--a fact that one might prove by looking at
the manuscript and seeing whether the alterations were for the benefit
of the style or of the sense. But then one would have to decide what
is style and what is meaning, a question which--but here I was actually
at the door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened
it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way
with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating,
silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved
me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied
by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction. That a famous library
has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a
famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe locked
within its breast, it sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am concerned,
so sleep forever. Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for
that hospitality again, I ----------------------- 6 William Makepeace
Thackeray (1811-1863), novelist and journalist, Woolf's father's first
father-in-law. 7. Lamb's Oxford
in the Vacation--describing the locales. Lamb himself was too poor
to attend in term time. The manuscript of Milton's elegy Lycidas
(1638) is in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, together
with that of Thackeray's novel The History of Henry Esmond (1852). [2489] vowed as I descended the steps in anger. Still an hour remained before luncheon, and what was one to do? Stroll on the meadows? sit by the river? Certainly it was a lovely autumn morning; the leaves were fluttering red to the ground; there was no great hardship in doing either. But the sound of music reached my ear. Some service or celebration was going forward. The organ complained magnificently as I passed the chapel door. Even the sorrow of Christianity sounded in that serene air more like the recollection of sorrow than sorrow itself; even the groanings of the ancient organ seemed lapped in peace. I had no wish to enter had I the right, and this time the verger might have stopped me, demanding perhaps my baptismal certificate, or a letter of introduction from the Dean. But the outside of these magnificent buildings is often as beautiful as the inside. Moreover,. it was amusing enough to watch the congregation assembling, coming in and going out again, busying themselves at the door of the chapel like bees at the mouth of a hive. Many were in cap and gown; some had tufts of fur on their shoulders; others were wheeled in bath-chairs; others, though not past middle age, seemed creased and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giant crabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquarium. As I leant against the wall the University indeed seemed a sanctuary in which are preserved rare types which would soon be obsolete if left to fight for existence on the pavement of the Strand.5 Old stories of old deans and old dons came back to mind, but before I had summoned up courage to whistle--it used to be said that at the sound of a whistle old Professor --instantly broke into a gallop--the venerable congregation had gone inside. The outside of the chapel remained. As you know, its high domes and pinnacles can be seen, like a sailing-ship always voyaging never arriving, lit up at night and visible for miles, far away across the hills. Once, presumably, this quadrangle with its smooth lawns, its massive buildings, and the chapel itself was marsh too, where the grasses waved and the swine rootled. Teams of horses and oxen, I thought, must have hauled the stone in wagons from far countries, and then with infinite labour the grey blocks in whose shade I was now standing were poised in order one on top of another, and then the painters brought their glass for the windows, and the masons were busy for centuries up on that roof with putty and cement, spade and trowel. Every Saturday somebody must have poured gold and silver out of a leathern purse into their ancient fists, for they had their beer and skittles presumably of an evening. An unending stream of gold and silver, I thought, must have flowed into this court perpetually to keep the stones coming and the masons working; to level, to ditch, to dig and to drain. But it was then the age of faith, and money was poured liberally to set these stones on a deep foundation, and when the stones were raised, still more money was poured in from the coffers of kings and queens and great nobles to ensure that hymns should be sung here and scholars taught. Lands were granted; tithes were paid. And when the age of faith was over and the age of reason had come, still the same flow of gold and silver went on; fellowships were founded; lectureships endowed; only the gold and silver flowed now, not from the coffers of the king., but from the chests of merchants and manufacturers, from the purses of men who had made, say, a fortune from industry, and returned, in their wills, a bounteous share of it to endow more chairs, more lectureships, more fellowships in the university where they had learnt their craft. Hence the libraries and laboratories; the observatories; the splendid equipment of costly and delicate instruments which now stands on glass shelves, where centuries ago the grasses waved and ----------------- 5. A thoroughfare in central London. [2490] the swine rootled.
Certainly, as I strolled round the court, the foundation of gold and
silver seemed deep enough; the pavement laid solidly over the wild grasses.
Men with trays on their heads went busily from staircase to staircase.
Gaudy blossoms flowered in window-boxes. The strains of the gramophone
blared out from the rooms within. It was impossible not to reflect--the
reflection whatever it may have been was cut short. The clock struck.
It was time to find one's way to luncheon. It is a curious
fact that hovelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties
are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or
for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word
for what was eaten. It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention
soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were
of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank
a glass of wine. Here, however, I shall take the liberty to defy that
convention and to tell you that the lunch on this occasion began with
soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a
counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and
there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe. After
that came the partridges, but if this suggests a couple of bald, brown
birds on a plate you are mistaken. The partridges, many and various,
came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the
sweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard;
their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent. And no sooner
had the roast and its retinue been done with than the silent serving-man,
the Beadle himself perhaps in a milder manifestation, set before us,
wreathed in napkins, a confection which rose all sugar from the waves.
To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an
insult. Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson;
had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, halfway
down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little
electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon
our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow, which
is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse; No need to hurry.
No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going
to heaven and Vandyck9 is of the company--in other words, how good life
seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance,
how admirable friendship and the society of one's kind, as, lighting
a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat. If by good luck
there had been an ash-tray handy, if one had not knocked the ash out
of the window in default, if things had been a little different from
what they were; one would not have seen, presumably, a cat without a
tail. The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal padding softly across
the quadrangle changed by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence
the emotional light for me. It was as if some one had let fall a shade.
Perhaps the excellent hock was relinquishing its hold. Certainly, as
I watched the Manx cat pause in the middle of the lawn as if it too
questioned the universe, something seemed lacking, something seemed
different. But what was lacking, what was different, I asked myself,
listening to the talk. And to answer that question I had to think myself
out of the room, back into the past, before the war indeed,1 and to
set before my eyes the model of another luncheon party held in rooms
not very far distant from these; but different. Everything was different.
Meanwhile the talk went on among the guests, who were many and young,
some of this sex, some of that; it went on swimmingly, it went on agreeably,
freely, amusingly. And as it went on I set it against the background -------------- 9. Sir Anthony
Van Dyck, prominent 17th-century society painter [2491] of that other talk, and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was the descendant, the legitimate heir of the other. Nothing was changed; nothing was different save only--here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current behind it. Yes, that was it--the change was there. Before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said preciseLy the same things but they would have sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves. Could one set that humming noise to words? Perhaps with the help of the poets one could. A book lay beside me and, opening it, I turned casually enough to Tennyson. And here I found Tennyson was singing:
There was something
so ludicrous in thinking of people humming such things even under their
breath at luncheon parties before the war that I burst out laughing--
and had to explain my laughter by pointing at the Manx cat, who did
look a little absurd, poor beast, without a tail, in the middle of the
lawn. Was he really born so, or had he lost his tail in an accident?
The tailless cat, though some are said to exist in the Isle of Man,
is rarer than one thinks. It is a queer animal, quaint rather than beautiful.
It is strange what a difference a tail makes-you know the sort of things
one says as a lunch party breaks up and people are finding their coats
and hats. This one, thanks
to the hospitality of the host, had lasted far into the afternoon. The
beautiful October day was fading and the leaves were falling from the
trees in the avenue as I walked through it. Gate after gate seemed to
close with gentle finality behind me. Innumerable beadles were fitting
innumerable keys into well-oiled locks; the treasure-house was being
made secure for another night. After the avenue one comes out upon a
road--I forget its name--which leads you, if you take the right --------------------- 2 From Tennyson's
Maud (1855), lines 908-915. [2492] turning, along to Femham.4 But there was plenty of time. Dinner was not till halfpast seven. One could almost do without dinner after such a luncheon. It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road. Those words
sang in my blood as I stepped quickly along towards Headingley. And then, switching off into the other measure, I sang, where the waters are churned up by the weir:
In a sort of jealousy, I suppose, for our own age, silly and absurd though these comparisons are, I went on to wonder if honestly one could name two living poets now as great as Tennyson and Christina Rossetti were then. Obviously it is impossible, I thought, looking into those foaming waters, to compare them. The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment. One does not recognize it in the first place; often for some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew. Hence the difficulty of modern poetry; and it is because of this difficulty that one cannot remember more than two consecutive lines of any good modern poet. For this reason--that my memory failed me--the argument flagged for want of material. But why, I continued, moving on towards Headingley, have we stopped humming under our breath at luncheon parties? Why has Alfred ceased to sing
---------------------- 4. Both Girton and Newnham Colleges. established only in the late 19th century, are outside the old university area of Cambridge [2493]
As I have said
already that it was an October day, I dare not forfeit your respect
and imperil the fair name of fiction by changing the season and describing
lilacs hanging over garden walls, crocuses, tulips and other flowers
of spring. Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer. the facts the
better the fiction--so we are told. Therefore it was still autumn and
the leaves were still yellow and falling, if anything, a little faster
than before, because it was now evening (seven twenty-three to be precise)
and a breeze (from the south-west to be exact) had risen. But for all
that there was something odd at work:
perhaps the words
of Christina Rossetti were partly responsible for the folly of the fancy--it
was nothing of course but a fancy--that the lilac was shaking its flowers
over the garden walls, and the brimstone butterflies were scudding hither
and thither, and the dust of the pollen was in the air. A wind blew,
from what quarter I know not, but it lifted the half-grown leaves so
that there was a flash of silver grey in the air. It was the time between
the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and
golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when
for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish
(here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open
and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon
to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the
heart asunder. The gardens of Fernham lay before me in the spring twilight,
wild and open, and in the long grass, sprinkled and carelessly flung,
were daffodils and bluebells, not orderly perhaps at the best of times,
and now wind blown and waving as they tugged at their roots. The windows
of the building, curved like ships' windows among generous waves of
red brick, changed from lemon to silver under the flight of the quick
spring clouds. Somebody was in a hammock, somebody, but in this light
they were phantoms only, half guessed, half seen, raced across the grass--would
no one stop her?--and then on the terrace, as if popping out to breathe
the air, to glance at the garden, came a bent figure, formidable yet
humble, with her great forehead and her shabby dress--could it be the
famous scholar, could it be J-- H-- herself?5 All was dim, yet intense
too) as if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn
asunder by star or sword--the flash of some terrible reality leaping,
as its way is, out of the heart of the spring. For youth----- [2494] Here was my soup.
Dinner was being served in the great dining-hall. Far from being spring
it was in fact an evening in October. Everybody was assembled in the
big dining-room. Dinner was ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain
gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that. One could have
seen through the transparent liquid any pattern that there might have
been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate was plain.
Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes--a homely trinity,
suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts curled
and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening, and women with
string bags on Monday morning. There was no reason to complain of human
nature's daily food, seeing that the supply was sufficient and coal-miners
doubtless were sit ting down to less. Prunes and custard followed. And
if anyone complains that prunes, even when mitigated by custard, are
an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they are not), stringy as a miser's
heart and exuding a fluid such as might run in misers' veins who have
denied themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given
to the poor, he should reflect that there are people whose charity embraces
even the prune. Biscuits and cheese came next, and here the water-jug
was liberally passed round, for it is the nature of biscuits to be dry,
and these were biscuits to the core. That was all. The
meal was over. Everybody scraped their chairs back; the swing doors
swung violently to and fro; soon the hall was emptied of every sign
of food and made ready no doubt for breakfast next morning. Down corridors
and up staircases the youth of England went banging and singing. And
was it for a guest, a stranger (for I had no more right here in Fernham
than in Trinity or Somerville or Girton or Newnham or Christchurch),6
to say, "The dinner was not good," or to say (we were now,
Mary Seton and I, in her sitting-room), "Could we not have dined
up here alone ?" for if I had said anything of the kind I should
have been prying and searching into the secret economies of a house
which to the stranger wears so fine a front of gaiety and courage. No,
one could say nothing of the sort. Indeed, conversation for a moment
flagged. The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all
mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will
be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance
to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has
not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.
We are all probably going to heaven, and Vandyck is, we hope, to meet
us round the next corner-that is the dubious and qualifying Happily my friend, who taught science, had a cupboard where there was a squat bottle and little glasses--(but there should have been sole and partridge to begin with)--so that we were able to draw up to the fire and repair some of the damages of the day's living. In a minute or so we were slipping freely in and out among all those objects of curiosity and interest which form in the mind in the absence of a particular person, and are naturally to be discussed on coming together again--how somebody has married, another has not; one thinks this, another that; one has improved out of all knowledge, the other most amazingly gone to the bad--with all those speculations upon human nature and the character of the amazing world we live in which spring naturally from such beginnings. While these things were being said, however, I became shamefacedly aware of a current setting in of its own accord and carrying everything forward to an end of its own. One might be talking of Spain or Portugal, [2495] of book or racehorse,
but the real interest of whatever was said was none of those things,
but a scene of masons on a high roof some five centuries ago. Kings
and nobles brought treasure in huge sacks and poured it under the earth.
This scene was for ever coming alive in my mind and placing itself by
another of lean cows and a muddy market and withered greens and the
stringy hearts of old men-these two pictures, disjointed and disconnected
and nonsensical as they were, were for ever coming together and combating
each other and had me entirely at their mercy. The best course, unless
the whole talk was to be distorted, was to expose what was in my mind
to the air, when with good luck it would fade and crumble like the head
of the dead king when they opened the coffin at Windsor. Briefly, then,
I told Miss Seton about the masons who had been. all those years on
the roof of the chapel, and about the kings and queens and nobles bearing
sacks of gold and silver on their shoulders, which they shovelled into
the earth; and then how the great financial magnates of our own time
came and laid cheques and bonds, I suppose, where the others had laid
ingots and rough lumps of gold. All that lies beneath the colleges down
there, I said; but this college, where we are now sitting, what lies
beneath its gallant red brick and the wild unkempt grasses of the garden?
What force is behind the plain china off which we dined, and (here it
popped out of my mouth before I could stop it) the beef, the custard
and the prunes? Well, said Mary
Seton; about the year 1860--Oh, but you know the story, she said, bored,
I suppose, by the recital. And she told me--rooms were hired. Committees
met. Envelopes were addressed. Circulars were drawn up. Meetings were
held; letters were read out; so-and-so has promised so much; on the
contrary, Mr---- won't give a penny. The Saturday Review has
been very rude. How can we raise a fund to pay for offices? Shall we
hold a bazaar? Can't we find a pretty girl to sit in the front row? Let us look up
what John Stuart Mill said on the subject.7 Can anyone persuade the
editor of the---to print a letter? Can we get Lady---to sign it? Lady---is
out of town. That was the way it was done, presumably, sixty years ago,
and it was a prodigious effort, and a great deal of time was spent on
it. And it was only after a long struggle and with the utmost difficulty
that they got thirty thousand pounds together.8 So obviously we
cannot have wine and partridges and servants carrying tin dishes on
their heads, she said. We cannot have sofas and separate rooms. "The
amenities," she said, quoting from some book or other, "will
have to wait." 9 At the thought
of all those women working year after year and finding it hard to get
two thousand pounds together, and as much as they could do to get thirty
thousand pounds, we burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty
of our sex. What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth
to leave us? Powdering their noses? Looking in at shop windows? Flaunting
in the sun at Monte Carlo? There were some photographs on the mantel-piece.
Mary's mother--if that was her picture--may have been a wastrel in her
spare time (she had thirteen children by a minister of the church),
but if so her gay and dissipated life had left too few traces of its
pleasures on her face. She was a homely body; an old lady in a plaid
shawl which was fastened 7. In 1869 Mill
published his essay The Subjection of Women, which argued forcefully
for women's suffrage and their right to equality with men. 8. "We are
told that we ought to ask for £30,000 at least. ..It is not a
large sum, considering that there is to be but one college of this sort
for Great Britain, Ireland and the Colonies, and considering how easy
it is to raise immense sums for boys' schools. But considering how few
people really wish women to be educated, it is a good deal."--Lady
Stephen, Life of Miss Emily Davies [Woolf's note] 9. Every penny
which could be scraped together was set aside for building, and the
amenities had to be postponed.--R Strachey, The Cause [Woolf's
note] [2496] by a large cameo;
and she sat in a basket-chair, encouraging a spaniel to look at the
camera, with the amused, yet strained expression of one who is sure
that the dog will move directly the bulb is pressed. Now if she had
gone into business; had become a manufacturer of artificial silk or
a magnate on the Stock Exchange; if she had left two or three hundred
thousand pounds to Fernham, we could have been sitting at our ease tonight
and the subject of our talk might have been archaeology, botany, anthropology,
physics, the nature of the atom, mathematics, astronomy, relativity,
geography. If only Mrs Seton and her mother and her mother before her
had learnt For, to endow a
college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making
a fortune and bearing thirteen children--no human being could stand
it. Consider the facts, we said. First there are nine months before
the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four
months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly
five years spent in playing with the baby. You can not, it seems, let
children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild
in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one. People say, too,
that human nature takes its shape in the years between one and five.
If Mrs Seton, I said, had been making money, what sort of memories would
you have had of games and quarrels? What would you have known of Scotland,
and its fine air and cakes and all the rest of it? But it is useless
to ask these questions, because you would never have come into existence
at all. Moreover, it is equally useless to ask what might have happened
if Mrs Seton and her mother and her mother before her had amassed great
wealth and laid it under the foundations of college and library, because,
in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the
second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess
what money they earned. It is only for the last forty eight years that
Mrs Seton has had a penny of her own. For all the centuries before that
it would have been her husband's property--a thought which, perhaps,
may have had its share in keeping Mrs Seton and her mothers off the
Stock Exchange.l Every penny I earn, they may have said, will be taken from me and disposed of --------------------------- 1. The late 19th
century saw the passage of legislation designed to improve the legal
status of women In 1870 the Married Women's Property Act allowed women
to retain £200 of their own earnings (which previously had automatically
become the property of her husband); in 1884 a further act gave married
women the same rights over property as unmarried women, and allowed
them to carryon trades or businesses using their property. [2497] according to my
husband's wisdom--perhaps to found a scholarship or to endow a fellowship
in Balliol or Kings,2 so that to earn money, even if I could earn money,
is not a matter that interests me very greatly. I had better leave it
to my husband. At any rate, whether
or not the blame rested on the old lady who was looking at the spaniel,
there could be no doubt that for some reason or other our mothers had
mismanaged their affairs very gravely. Not a penny could be spared for
"amenities"; for partridges and wine, beadles and turf, books
and cigars, libraries and leisure. To raise bare walls out of the bare
earth was the utmost they could do. So we talked standing
at the window and looking, as so many thousands look every night, down
on the domes and towers of the famous city beneath us. It was very beautiful,
very mysterious in the autumn moonlight. The old stone looked very white
and venerable. One thought of all the books that were assembled down
there; of the pictures of old prelates and worthies hanging in the panelled
rooms; of the painted windows that would be throwing strange globes
and crescents on the pavement; of the tablets and memorials and inscriptions;
of the fountains and the grass; of the quiet rooms looking across the
quiet quadrangles. And (pardon me the thought) I thought, too, of the
admirable smoke and drink and the deep armchairs and the pleasant carpets:
of the urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are the offspring
of luxury and privacy and space. Certainly our mothers had not provided
us with anything comparable to all this-our mothers who found it difficult
to scrape together thirty thousand pounds, our mothers who bore thirteen
children to ministers of religion at St Andrews. So I went back to my inn, and as I walked through the dark streets I pondered this and that, as one does at the end of the day's work. I pondered why it was that Mrs Seton had no money to leave us; and what effect poverty has on the mind; and what effect wealth has on the mind; and I thought of the queer old gentlemen I had seen that morning with tufts of fur upon their shoulders; and I remembered how if one whistled one of them ran; and I thought of the organ booming in the chapel and of the shut doors of the library; and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperityof the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and itsimpressionsand its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society. All human beings were laid asleep--prone, horizontal, dumb. Nobody seemed stirring in the streets of Oxbridge. Even the door of the hotel sprang open at the touch of an invisible hand-not a boots was sitting up to light me to bed, it was so late.
from Chapter 3
-------------------------------- 2 Balliol is a college of Oxford University; King's is at Cambridge. [2498]
That, more or less,
is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shake speare's day
had had Shakespeare's genius. But for my part, I agree with the deceased
bishop, if such he was--it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare's
day should have had Shakespeare's genius. For genius like Shakespeare's
is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was not
born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born today
among the working classes. How, then, could it have been born among
women whose work began, according to Professor ------------------------- 3. A tavern on the outskirts of South London. [2499] Trevelyan,4 almost
before they were out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their
parents and held to it by all the power of law and custom? Yet genius
of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among
the working classes. Now and again an Emily Brontë or a Robert
Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got
itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked,
of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even
of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the
track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious
Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the
moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture
that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that
Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
It was a woman Edward Fitzgerald,5 I think, suggested who made the ballads
and the folk-songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her spinning
with them, or the length of the winter's night. This may be true
or it may be false--who can say?--but what is true in it, so it seemed
to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare's sister as I had made it,
is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would
certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some
lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared
and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that
a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would
have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and
pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost
her health and sanity to a certainty. No girl could have walked to London
and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actor-managers
without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may
have been irrational-for chastity may be a fetish invented by certain
societies for unknown reasons-but were none the less inevitable. Chastity
had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a woman's life,
and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut
it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.
To have lived a free Life in London in the sixteenth century would have
meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma
which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had
written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained
and morbid imagination. And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf
where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned.
That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the
sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the
nineteenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand,6 all the
victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively
to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did homage
to the convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally
encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of,
said Pericles, himself a muchtalked-of man), that publicity in woman
is detestable.7 Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled
still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health
of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone
or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names
on it, ------------------------------ 4. George Trevelyan
(1816-1962), historian 5. Poet and translator (1809-1883). [2500] as Alf, Bert or
Chas. must do in obedience to their instinct, which murmurs if it sees
a fine woman go by, or even a dog, Ce chien est a moi [that dog
is mine]. And, of course, it may not be a dog, I thought, remembering
Parliament Square, the Sieges Allee8 and other avenues; it may
be a piece of land or a man with curly black hair. It is one of the
great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine
negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her. That woman, then,
who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century, was an
unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself. All the conditions
of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind
which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain. But what is the
state of mind that is most propitious to the act of creation, I asked.
Can one come by any notion of the state that furthers and makes possible
that strange activity? Here I opened the volume containing the Tragedies
of Shakespeare. What was Shakespeare's state of mind, for instance,
when he wrote Lear and Antony and Cleopatra? It was certainly
the state of mind most favourable to poetry that there has ever existed.
But Shakespeare himself said nothing about it. We only know casually
and by chance that he "never blotted a line." Nothing indeed
was ever said by the artist himself about his state of mind until the
eighteenth century perhaps. Rousseau perhaps began it.9 At any rate,
by the nineteenth century self-consciousness had developed so far that
it was the habit for men of letters to describe their minds in confessions
and autobiographies. Their lives also were written, and their letters
were printed after their deaths. Thus, though we do not know what Shakespeare
went through when he wrote Lear, we do know what Carlyle went through
when he wrote the French Revolution; what Flaubert went through when
he wrote Madame Bovary; what Keats was going through when he
tried to write poetry against the coming of death and the indifference
of the world. And one gathers
from this enormous modern literature of confession and selfanalysis
that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious
difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from
the writer's mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances
are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be
made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties
and making them harder to bear is the world's notorious indifference.
It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does
not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word
or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally,
it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats,
Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth,
every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony,
rises from those books of analysis and confession. "Mighty poets
in their misery dead"--that is the burden of their song. If anything
comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no
book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived. But for women,
I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely
more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own, let
alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless
her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning
of the nineteenth century. Since her pin money, which depended on the
good will of her father,. was only enough to keep her clothed, she was
debarred from such alleviations as came even to Keats or Tennyson or
Carlyle, all poor men, from a walking tour, a little journey to ------------------------- 8. Victory Road,
a thoroughfare in Berlin. [2501] France, from the
separate lodging which, even if it were miserable enough, sheltered
them from the claims and tyrannies of their families. Such material
difficulties were formidable; but much worse were the immaterial. The
indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of
genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but
hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if
you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw,
Write? What's the good of your writing? Here the psychologists of Newnham
and Girton might come to our help, I thought, looking again at the blank
spaces on the shelves. For surely it is time that the effect of discouragement
upon the mind of the artist should be measured, as I have seen a dairy
company measure the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A milk upon the
body of the rat. They set two rats in cages side by side, and of the
two one was furtive, timid and small, and the other was glossy, bold
and big. Now what food do we feed women as artists upon? I asked, remembering,
I suppose, that dinner of prunes and custard. To answer that question
I had only to open the evening paper and to read that Lord Birkenhead
is of opinion-but really I am not going to trouble to copy out Lord
Birkenhead's opinion upon the writing of women. What Dean Inge says
I will leave in peace. 1 The Harley Street specialist may be allowed
to rouse the echoes of Harley Street with his vociferations without
raising a hair on my head. I will quote, however, Mr Oscar Browning,2
because Mr Oscar Browning was a great figure in Cambridge at one time,
and used to examine the students at Girton and Newnham. Mr Oscar Browning
was wont to declare "that the impression left on his mind, after
looking over any set of examination papers, was that, irrespective of
the marks he might give, the best woman was intellectually the inferior
of the worst man." After saying that MrBrowning went back to his
roomsand it is this sequel that endears him and makes him a human figure
of some bulk and majesty--he went back to his rooms and found a stable-boy
lying on the sofa--"a mere skeleton, his cheeks were cavernous
and sallow, his teeth were black, and he did not appear to have the
full use of his limbs. ...'That's Arthur' [said Mr Browning]. 'He's
a dear boy really and most high-minded.'" The two pictures always
seem to me to complete each other. And happily in this age of biography
the two pictures often do complete each other, so that we are able to
interpret the opinions of great men not only by what they say, but by
what they do. But though this is possible now, such opinions coming from the lips of important people must have been formidable enough even fifty years ago. Let us suppose that a father from the highest motives did not wish his daughter to leave home and become writer, painter or scholar. "See what Mr Oscar Browning says," he would say; and there was not only Mr Oscar Browning; there was the Saturday Review; there was Mr Greg3--the "essentials of a woman's being," said Mr Greg emphatically, "are that they are supported by, and they minister to, men"--there was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually. Even if her father did not read out loud these opinions, any girl could read them for herself; and the reading, even in the nineteenth century, must have lowered her vitality, and told profoundly upon her work. There would always have been that assertion--you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that--to protest against, to overcome. Probably for a novelist this germ is no longer of much effect; --------------------------- 1. F. E. Smith,
Lord Birkenhead (1872-1930), British statesman; William Ralph Inge (1860-1954),
Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. [2502] for there have
been women novelists of merit. But for painters it must still have some
sting in it; and for musicians, I imagine, is even now active and poisonous
in the extreme. The woman composer stands where the actress stood in
the time of Shakespeare. Nick Greene, I thought, remembering the story
I had made about Shakespeare's sister, said that a woman acting put
him in mind of a dog dancing. Johnson repeated the phrase two hundred
years later of women preaching.4 And here, I said, opening a book about
music, we have the very words used again in this year of grace, 1928,
of women who try to write music. "Of Mlle. Germaine Tailleferre
one can only repeat Dr. Johnson's dictum concerning a woman preacher,
transposed into terms of music. 'Sir, a woman's composing is like a
dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised
to find it done at all."'5 So accurately does history repeat itself. Thus, I concluded,
shutting Mr Oscar Browning's life and pushing away the rest, it is fairly
evident that even in the nineteenth century a woman was not encouraged
to be an artist. On the contrary, she was snubbed, slapped, lectured
and exhorted. Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered
by the need of opposing this, of disproving that. For here again we
come within range of that very interesting and obscure masculine complex
which has had so much influence upon the woman's movement; that deep-seated
desire, not so much that she shall be inferior as that he shall be superior,
which plants him wherever one looks, not only in front of the arts,
but barring the way to politics too, even when the risk to himself seems
infinitesimal and the suppliant humble and devoted. Even Lady Bessborough,
I remembered, with all her passion for politics, must humbly bow herself
and write to Lord Granville Leveson-Gower:6 ".. .notwithstanding
all my violence in politics and talking so much on that subject, I perfectly
agree with you that no woman has any business to meddle with that or
any other serious business, farther than giving her opinion (if she
is ask'd)." And so she goes on to spend her enthusiasm where it
meets with no obstacle whatsoever upon that immensely important subject,
Lord Granville's maiden speech in the House of Commons. The spectacle
is certainly a strange one, I thought. The history of men's opposition
to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of
that emancipation itself. An amusing book might be made of it if some
young student at Girton or Newnham would collect examples and deduce
a theory--but she would need thick gloves on her hands, and bars to
protect her of solid gold. But what is amusing now, I recollected, shutting Lady Bessborough, had to be taken in desperate earnest once. Opinions that one now pastes in a book labelled cock-a-doodle-dum and keeps for reading to select audiences on summer nights once drew tears, I can assure you. Among your grandmothers and great-grandmothers there were many that wept their eyes out. Florence Nightingale shrieked aloud in her agony.7 Moreover, it is all very well for you, who have got yourselves to college and enjoy sitting-rooms--or is it only bed-sitting-rooms ?--of your own to say that genius should disregard such opinions; that genius should be above caring what is said of it. Unfortunately, it is precisely the men or women of genius who mind most what is said of them. Remember Keats. Remember the words he had cut on his tombstone. ------------------- 4 Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), poet and man of letters. 5 A Survey of
Contemporary Music, Cecil Gray, page 246 [Woolf's note]. |
||
| [2503]
Think of Tennyson;
think--but I need hardly multiply instances of the undeniable, if very
unfortunate, fact that it is the nature of the artist to mind excessively
what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men
who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. And this susceptibility
of theirs is doubly unfortunate, I thought, returning again to my original
enquiry into what state of mind is most propitious for creative work,
because the mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort
of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent,
like Shakespeare's mind, I conjectured, looking at. the book which lay
open at Antony and Cleopatra. There must be no obstacle in it,
no foreign matter unconsumed. For though we say
that we know nothing about Shakespeare's state of mind, even as we say
that, we are saying something about Shakespeare's state of mind. The
reason perhaps why we know so little of Shakespeare--compared with Donne
or Ben Jonson or Milton--is that his grudges and spites and antipathies
are hidden from us. We are not held up by some "revelation"
which reminds us of the writer. All desire to protest, to preach, to
proclaim an injury, to payoff a score, to make the world the witness
of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore
his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded. If ever a human being
got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind
was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought, turning again to the bookcase,
it was Shakespeare's mind. from Chapter 4 The extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth century among women--the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the translating of the classics--was founded on the solid fact that women could make money by writing. Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for. It might still be well to sneer at "blue stockings with an itch for scribbling," but it could not be denied that they could put money in their purses. Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write. For if Pride and Prejudice matters, and Middlemarch and Villette and Wuthering Heights matter,8 then it matters far more than I can prove in an hour's discourse that women generally, and not merely the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers, took to writing. Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Matlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter--the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek. All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of -------------------------- 8. Pride and
Prejudice (1813). a novel by Jane Austen; Middlemarch (1871-1872)
by George Eliot; Villette (1853) by Charlotte Brontë; Wuthering
Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë. [2504] Aphra Behn9 which
is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey,
for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is
she--shady and amorous as she was--who makes it not quite fantastic
for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits. Here, then, one
had reached the early nineteenth century. And here, for the first time,
I found several shelves given up entirely to the works of women. But
why, I could not help asking, as I ran my eyes over them, were they,
with very few exceptions, all novels? The original impulse was to poetry.
The "supreme head of song" was a poetess. Both in France and
in England the women poets precede the women novelists. Moreover, I
thought, looking at the four famous names, what had George Eliot in
common with Emily Brontë? Did not Charlotte Brontë fail entirely
to understand Jane Austen? Save for the possibly relevant fact that
not one of them had a child, four more incongruous characters could
not have met together in a room-so much so that it is tempting to invent
a meeting and a dialogue between them. Yet by some strange force they
were all compelled, when they wrote, to write novels. Had it something
to do with being born of the middle class, I asked; and with the fact,
which Miss Emily Davies a little later was so strikingly to demonstrate,
that the middleclass family in the early nineteenth century was possessed
only of a single sittingroom between them? If a woman wrote, she would
have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was
so vehemently to complain,--"women never have an half hour. ..that
they can call their own"--she was always interrupted. Still it
would be easier to write prose and fiction there than to write poetry
or a play. Less concentration is required. Jane Austen wrote like that
to the end of her days. "How she was able to effect all this,"
her nephew writes in his Memoir, "is surprising, for she
had no separate study to repair to, and most of the work must have been
done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions.
She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants
or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party."2 Jane
Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper.
Then, again, all the literary training that a woman had in the early
nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in
the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries
by the influences of the common sitting-room. People's feelings were
impressed on her; personal relations were always before her eyes. Therefore,
when the middle-class woman took to writing, she naturally wrote novels,
even though, as seems evident enough, two of the four famous women here
named were not by nature novelists. Emily Brontë should have written
poetic plays; the overflow of George Eliot's capacious mind should have
spread itself when the creative impulse was spent upon history or biography.
They wrote novels, however; one may even go further, I said, taking
Pride and Prejudice from the shelf, and say that they wrote good
novels. Without boasting or giving pain to the opposite sex, one may
say that Pride and Prejudice is a good book. At any rate, one
would not have been ashamed to have been caught in the act of writing
Pride and Prejudice. Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked,
so that she might hide her manusctipt before anyone came in. To Jane
Austen there ------------------------ 9. A dramatist
and the first English woman to earn a living by writing (1640-1689).
Westminster Abbey, in central London, is the burial place of many of
the English kings and queens, as well as of famous poets and statesmen. [2505] was something discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice. And, I wondered, would Pride and Prejudice have been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors? I read a page or two to see; but I could not find any signs that her circumstances had harmed her work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare. If Jane Austen suffered in any way from her circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed upon her. It was impossible for a woman to go about alone. She never travelled; she never drove through London in an omnibus or had luncheon in a shop by herself. But perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not. Her gift and her circumstances matched each other completely. But I doubt whether that was true of Charlotte Brontë, I said, opening Jane Eyre and laying it beside Pride and Prejudice.3
"Who blames
me? Many, no doubt, and I shall be called discontented. I could not
help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.
... "It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced --------------------------- 3 Woolf goes on
to describe parts of the plot of Jane Eyre; Jane Eyre, a penniless orphan,
having suffered greatly during her schooling, takes up the post of governess
to Adele, the daughter of Mr Rochester, a man of strange moods. Rochester
falls in love with Jane, who agrees to marry him; however this is prevented
by Rochester's mad wife--whom Rochesrer has locked in the attic, concealing
her existence from Jane--who tears Jane's wedding veil on the eve of
the marriage. [2506] "When thus
alone I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole's laugh ...." That is an awkward
break, I thought. It is upsetting to come upon Grace Poole all of a
sudden. The continuity is disturbed. One might say, I continued, laying
the book down beside Pride and Prejudice, that the woman who
wrote those pages had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one
reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees
that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books
will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should
write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely.
She will write of herself where she should write of her characters.
She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped
and thwarted? One could not but
play for a moment with the thought of what might have happened if Charlotte
Brontë had possessed say three hundred a year--but the foolish
woman sold the copyright of her novels outright for fifteen hundred
pounds; had somehow possessed more knowledge of the busy world, and
towns and regions full of life; more practical experience, and intercourse
with her kind and acquaintance with a variety of character. In those
words she puts her finger exactly not only upon her own defects as a
novelist but upon those of her sex at that time. She knew, no one better,
how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spent itself
in solitary visions over distant fields; if experience and intercourse
and travel had been granted her. But they were not granted; they were
withheld; and we must accept the fact that all those good novels, Villette,
Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, were written
by women without more experience of life than could enter the house
ofa respectable clergyman; written too in the common sitting-room of
that respectable house and by women so poor that they could not afford
to buy more thana few quires of paper at a time upon which to write
Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. One of them, it is true, George
Eliot, escaped after much tribulation, but only to a secluded villa
in St John's Wood. And there she settled down in the shadow of the world's
disapproval.4 "I wish it to be understood," she wrote, "that
I should never invite anyone to come and see me who did not ask for
the invitation"; for was she not living in sin with a married man
and might not the sight of her damage the chastity of Mrs Smith or whoever
it might be that chanced to call? One must submit to the social convention,
and be "cut off from what is called the world." At the same
time, on the other side of Europe, there was a young man living freely
with this gipsy or with that great lady; going to the wars; picking
up unhindered and uncensored all that varied experience of human life
which served him so splendidly later when he came to write his books.
Had Tolstoi lived at the Priory in seclusion with a married lady "cut
off from what is called the world," however edifying the moral
lesson, he could scarcely, I thought, have written War and Peace. But one could perhaps
go a little deeper into the question of novel-writing and the effect
of sex upon the novelist. If one shuts one's eyes and thinks of the
novel as a whole, it would seem to be a creation owning a certain looking-glass
likeness to life, though of course with simplifications and distortions
innumerable. At any rate, it is a structure leaving a shape on the mind's
eye, built now in squares, now pagoda shaped, now throwing out wings
and arcades, now solidly compact and domed like the 4 Following a strictly religious childhood. the novelist George Eliot lost her faith and eloped with G. H Lewes. a married man, with whom she lived for the rest of his life; her family never forgave her. [2507] Cathedral of Saint
Sofia at Constantinople.5 This shape, I thought, thinking back over
certain famous novels, starts in one the kind of emotion that is appropriate
to it. But that emotion at once blends itself with others, for the "shape"
is not made by the relation of stone to stone, but by the relation of
human being to human being. Thus a novel starts in us all sorts of antagonistic
and opposed emotions. Life conflicts with something that is not life.
Hence the difficulty of coming to any agreement about novels, and the
immense sway that our private prejudices have upon us. On the one hand,
we feel, You--John the hero--must live, or I shall be in the depths
of despair. On the other, we feel, Alas, John, you must die, because
the shape of the book requires it. Life conflicts with something that
is not life. Then since life it is in part, we judge it as life. James
is the sort of man I most detest, one says. Or, This is a farrago of
absurdity. I could never feel anything of the sort myself. The whole
structure, it is obvious, thinking back on any famous novel, is one
of infinite complexity, because it is thus made up of so many different
judgments, of so many different kinds of emotion. The wonder is that
any book so composed holds together for more than a year or two, or
can possibly mean to the English reader what it means for the Russian
or the Chinese. But they do hold together occasionally very remarkably.
And what holds them together in these rare instances of survival (I
was thinking of War and Peace) is something that one calls integrity,
though it has nothing to do with paying one's bills or behaving honourably
in an emergency. What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist,
is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one
feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never
known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it
is, so it happens. One holds every phrase, every scene to the light
as one reads--for Nature seems, very oddly,to have provided us with
an inner light by which to judge of the novelist's integrity or disintegrity.
Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has
traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which
these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to
the fire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees
it come to life one exclaims in rapture. But this is what I have always
felt and known and desired! Ahd one boils over with excitement, and,
shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were something
very precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives, one puts
it back on the shelf, I said, taking War and Peace and putting
it back in its place. If, on the other hand, these poor sentences that
one takes and tests rouse first a quick and eager response with their
btight co louring and their dashing gestures but there they stop: something
seems to check them in their development: or if they bring to light
only a faint sctibble in that corner and a blot over there, and nothing
appears whole and entire, then one heaves a sigh of disappointment and
says, Another failure. This hovel has come to grief somewhere. And for the most
part, of course, novels do come to grief somewhere. The imagination
falters under the enormous strain. The insight is confused; it can no
longer distinguish between the true and the false; it has no longer
the strength to go on with the vast labour that calls at every moment
for the use of so many different faculties. But how would all this be
affected by the sex of the novelist, I wondered, looking at Jane
Eyre and the others. Would the fact of her sex in any way interfere
with the integtity of a woman novelist--that integtity which I take
to be the backbone of the 5, The Hagia Sophia, a domed basilica completed in A,D. 537, named for the female personification of Wisdom in the Bible. [2508] writer? Now, in
the passages I have quoted from Jane Eyre, it is clear that anger was
tampering with the integrity of Charlotte Brontë the novelist.
She left her story, to which her entire devotion was due, to attend
to some personal grievance. She remembered that she had been starved
of her proper due of experience--she had been made to stagnate in a
parsonage mending stockings when she wanted to wander free over the
world. Her imagination swerved from indignation and we feel it swerve. But there were
many more influences than anger tugging at her imagination and deflecting
it from its path. Ignorance, for instance. The portrait of Rochester
is drawn in the dark. We feel the influence of fear in it; just as we
constantly feel an acidity which is the result of oppression, a buried
suffering smouldering beneath her passion, a rancour which contracts
those books, splendid as they are, with a spasm of pain. And since a novel
has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent
those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ
very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally,
this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely,
football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion,
the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably
transferred from life to fiction; This is an important book, the critic
assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because
it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a
battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop--everywhere and
much more subtly the difference of value persists. The whole structure,
therefore, of the early nineteenth-century novel was raised, if one
was a woman, by a mind which was slightly pulled from the straight,
and made to alter its clear vision in deference to external authority.
One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone
of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting
criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way
of conciliation. She was admitting that she was "only a woman,"
or protesting that she was ''as good as a man." She met that criticism
as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger
and emphasis. It does not matter which it was; she was thinking of something
other than the thing itself. Down comes her book upon our heads. There
was a flaw in the centre of it.. And I thought of all the women's novels
that lie scattered, like small pock-marked apples in an orchard, about
the secondhand book shops of London. It was the flaw in the centre that
had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion
of others. But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge either to the right or to the left. What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal sociery, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. It is another feather, perhaps the finest, in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue--write this, think that. They alone were deaf to that persistent voice, now grumbling, now patronising, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at them, like some too conscientious governess, adjuring them, like Sir Egerton Brydges,6 to be refined; dragging even into the criticism of poetry criticism of sex; admonishing them, if tehy would be good and win, as I suppose, some shiny prize, to keep within certain limits which the gentleman in ------------------------------ 6. Scholar and
editor (1762-1837), Brydges had criticized the writings of Margaret
Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1674) for what he considered to
be their coarse language. [2509] question thinks
suitable:7 ". ..female novelists should only aspire to excellence
by courageous1y acknowledging the limitations of their sex."8 That
puts the matter in a nutshell, and when I tell you, rather to your surprise,
that this sentence was written not in August 1828 but in August 1928,
you will agree, I think, that however delightful it is to us now, it
represents a vast body of opinion--I am not going to stir those old
pools, I take only what chance has floated to my feet--that was far
more vigorous and far more vocal a century ago. It would have needed
a very stalwart young woman in 1828 to disregard all those snubs and
chidings and promises of prizes. One must have been something of a firebrand
to say to oneself, Oh, but they can't buy literature too. Literature
is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are,
to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there
is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my
mind. But whatever effect discouragement and criticism had upon their writing--and I believe that they had a very great effect--that was unimportant compared with the other difficulty which faced them (I was still considering those early nineteenth-century novelists) when they came to set their thoughts on paper-that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help. For we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure. Lamb, Browne, Thackeray, Newman, Sterne, Dickens, De Quincey--whoever it may be--never helped a woman yet, though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use. The weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully. The ape is too distant to be sedulous. Perhaps the first thing she would find, setting pen to paper, was that there was no common sentence ready for her use. All the great novelists like Thackeray and Dickens and Balzac have written a natural prose, swift but not slovenly, expressive but not precious, taking their own tint without ceasing to be common property. They have based it on the sentence that was current at the time. The sentence that was current atthe beginning of the nineteenth century ran something like this perhaps: "The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generations of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success." That is a man's sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon9 and the rest. It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman's use. Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said. Indeed, since freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art, such a lack of tradition, such a scarcity and inadequacy of tools, must have told enormously upon the writing of women. Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes. And this shape too has -------------------- 7. "[She]
has a metaphysical purpose, and that is a dangerous obsession, especially
with a woman, for women rarely possess men's healthy love of rhetoric.
It is a strange lack in the sex which is in other things more primitive
and more materialistic."--New Criterion, June 1928 [Woolf's
note]. [2510] been made by men
out of their own needs for their own uses. There is no reason to think
that the form of the epic or of the poetic plays suits a woman any more
than the sentence suits her. But all the older forms of literature were
hardened and set by the time she became a writer. The novel alone was
young enough to be soft in her hands-another reason, perhaps, why she
wrote novels. Yet who shall say that even now "the novel"
(I give it inverted commas to mark my sense of the words' inadequacy),
who shall say that even this most pliable of all forms is rightly shaped
for her use? No doubt we shall find her knocking that into shape for
herself when she has the free use of her limbs; and providing some new
vehicle, not necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her. For it is
the poetry that is still denied outlet. And I went on to ponder how
a woman nowadays would write a poetic tragedy in five acts-would she
use verse-would she not use prose rather? But these are difficult
questions which lie in the twilight of the future. I must leave them,
if only because they stimulate me to wander from my subject into trackless
forests where I shall be lost and, very likely, devoured by wild beasts.
I do not want, and I am sure that you do not want me, to broach that
very dismal subject, the future of fiction, so that I will only pause
here one moment to draw your attention to the great part which must.
be played in that future so far as women are concerned by physical conditions.
The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one
would say that women's books should be shorter, more concentrated, than
those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady
and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be. Again,
the nerves that feed the brain would seem to differ in men and women,
and if you are going to make them work their best and hardest, you must
find out what treatment suits them-whether these hours of lectures,
for instance, which the monks devised, presumably, hundreds of years
ago, suit them-what alternations of work and rest they need, interpreting
rest not as doing nothing but' as doing something but something that
is different; and what should that difference be? All this should be
discussed and discovered; all this is part of the question of women
and fiction. And yet, I continued, approaching the bookcase again, where
shall I find that elaborate study of the psychology of women by a woman?
If through their incapacity to play football women are not going to
be allowed to practise medicine------- Happily my thoughts were now given another turn. Chapter 6 [2511] characters to whom
the streets serve for clubroom, hailing men in carts and giving information
without being asked for it. Also there were funerals to which men, thus
suddenly reminded of the passing of their own bodies, lifted their hats.
And then a very distinguished gentleman came slowly down a doorstep
and paused to avoid collision with a bustling lady who had, by some
means or other, acquired a splendid fur coat and a bunch of Parma violets.
They all seemed separate, self-absorbed, on business of their own. At this moment,
as so often happens in London, there was a complete lull and suspension
of traffic. Nothing came down the street; nobody passed. A single leaf
detached itself from the plane tree at the end of the street, and in
that pause and suspension fell. Somehow it was like a signal falling,
a signal pointing to a force in things which one had overlooked. It
seemed to point to a river, which flowed past, invisibly, round the
comer, down the street, and took people and eddied them along, as the
stream at Oxbridge had taken the undergraduate in his boat and the dead
leaves. Now it was bringing from one side of the street to the other
diagonally a girl in patent leather boots, and then a young man in a
maroon overcoat; it was also bringing a taxi-cab; and it brought all
three together at a point directly beneath my window; where the taxi
stopped; and the girl and the young man stopped; and they got into the
taxi; and then the cab glided off as if it were swept on by the current
elsewhere. The sight was ordinary enough; what was strange was the rhythmical order with which my imagination had invested it; and the fact that the ordinary sight of two people getting into a cab had the power to communicate something of their own seeming satisfaction. The sight of two people coming down the street and meeting at the corner seems to ease the mind of some strain, I thought, watching the taxi turn and make off. Perhaps to think, as I had been thinking these two days, of one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of the mind. Now that effort had ceased and that unity had been restored by seeing two people come together and get into a taxi-cab. The mind is certainly a very mysterious organ, I reflected, drawing my head in from the window, about which nothing whatever is known, though we depend upon it so completely. Why do I feel that there are severances and oppositions in the mind, as there are strains from obvious causes on the body? What does one mean by "the unity of the mind," I pondered, for clearly the mind has so great a power of concentrating at any point at any moment that it seems to have no single state of being. It can separate itself from the people in the street, for example, and think of itself as apart from them, at an upper window looking down on them. Or it can think with other people spontaneously, as, for instance, in a crowd waiting to hear some piece of news read out. It can think back through its fathers or through its mothers, as I have said that a woman writing thinks back through her mothers. Again if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall,! when from being the natural inheritor of that civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical. Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into different perspectives. But some of these states of mind seem, even if adopted spontaneously, to be less comfortable than others. In order to keep oneself continuing in them one is unconsciously holding something back, and gradually the repression becomes an effort. But there may be some state of mind in which one could continue without effort because nothing is required to be held back. And this perhaps, I thought, coming in from the window, is one of them. For certainly when I saw the couple get into the taxi-cab the ----------------- 1. A main thoroughfare
in central London and site of government offices. [2512] mind felt as if,
after being divided, it had come together again in a natural fusion.
The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to co-operate.
One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory
that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction,
the most complete happiness. But the sight of the two people getting
into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether
there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the
body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete
satisfaction and happiness. And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan
of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one
female; and in the man's brain, the man predominates over the woman,
and in the woman's brain, the woman predominates over the man. The normal
and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony
together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman
part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse
with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that
a great mind is androgynous.2 It is when this fusion takes place that
the mind is fully fertilised and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind
that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is
purely feminine, I thought. But it would be well to test what one meant
by man-womanly, and conversely by woman-manly, by pausing and looking
at a book or two. Coleridge certainly
did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it
is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes
up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the
androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed
mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous;
that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative,
incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare's mind
as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind, though it would
be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women. And if it be true
that it is one of the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does
not think specially or separately of sex, how much harder it is to attain
that condition noW than ever before. Here I came to the books by living
writers, and there paused and wondered if this fact were not at the
root of something that had long puzzled me. No age can ever have been
as stridently sex-conscious as our own; those innumerable books by men
about women in the British Museum are a proof of it. The Suffrage campaign
was no doubt to blame} It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire
for self-assertion; it must have made them lay an emphasis upon their
own sex and its characteristics which they would not have troubled to
think about had they not been challenged. And when one is challenged,
even by a few women in black bonnets, one retaliates, if one has never
been challenged before, rather excessively. That perhaps accounts for
some of the characteristics that I remember to have found here, 1. thought,
taking down a new novel by Mr A, who is in the prime of life and very
well thought of, apparently, by the reviewers. I opened it. Indeed,
it was delightful to read a man's writing again. It was so direct, so
straightforward after the writing of women. It indicated such freedom
of mind, such liberty of person, such confidence in himself. One had
a sense of physical well-being in the presence of this well-nourished,
well-educated, free mind, which had never been thwarted or ---------------------------- 2. The poet Samuel
Taylor Coleridge made the remark in September 1832-"a great mind
must be androgynous" and it was duly recorded in his Table Talk. [2513] opposed, but had
had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in whatever way it liked. All this was admirable.
But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the
page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the
letter "I." One began dodging this way and that to catch a
glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or
a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to
the letter "I." One began to be tired of "I." Not
but what this "I" was a most respectable "I"; honest
and logical; as hard as a nut, and polished for centuries by good teaching
and good feeding. I respect and admire that "I" from the bottom
of my heart. But-here I turned a page or two, looking for something
or other the worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter "I"
all is shapeless as mist. Is that a tree? No, it is a woman. But. ..she
has not a bone in her body, I thought, watching Phoebe, for that was
her name, coming across the beach. Then Alan got up and the shadow of
Alan at once obliterated Phoebe. For Alan had views and Phoebe was quenched
in the flood of his views. And then Alan, I thought, has passions; and
here I turned page after page very fast, feeling that the crisis was
approaching, and so it was. It took place on the beach under the sun.
It was done very openly. It was done very vigorously. Nothing could
have been more indecent. But. ..I had said "but" too often.
One cannot go on saying "but." One must finish the sentence
somehow, I rebuked myself. Shall I finish it, "But. ..I am bored!"
But why was I bored? Partly because of the dominance of the letter "I"
and the aridity, which, like the giant beech tree, it casts within its
shade. Nothing will grow there. And partly for some more obscure reason.
There seemed to be some obstacle,. some impediment of Mr A's mind which
blocked the fountain of creative energy and shored it within narrow
limits. And remembering the lunch party at Oxbridge, and the cigarette
ash and the Manx cat and Tennyson and Christina Rossetti all in a bunch,
it seemed possible that the impediment lay there. As he no longer hums
under his breath, "There has fallen a splendid tear from the passion-flower
at the gate," when Phoebe crosses the beach, and she no longer
replies, "My heart is like a singing bird whose nest is in a water'd
shoot," when Alan approaches what can he do? Being honest as the
day and logical as the sun, there is only one thing he can do. And that
he does, to do him justice, over and over (I said, turning the pages)
and over again. And that, I added, aware of the awful nature of the
confession, seems somehow dull. Shakespeare's indecency uproots a thousand
other things in one's mind, and is far from being dull. But Shakespeare
does it for pleasure; Mr A, as the nurses say, does it on purpose. He
does it in protest. He is protesting against the equality of the other
sex by asserting his own superiority. He is therefore impeded and inhibited
and self-conscious as Shakespeare might have been if he too had known
Miss Clough4 and Miss Davies. Doubtless Elizabethan literature would
have been very different from what it is if the woman's movement had
begun in the sixteenth century and not in the nineteenth. What, then, it amounts to, if this theory of the two sides of the mind holds good, is that virility has now become self-conscious-men, that is to say, are now writing only with the male side of their brains. It is a mistake for a woman to read them, for she will inevitably look for something that she will not find. It is the power of suggestion that one most misses, I thought, taking Mr B the critic in my hand and reading, very carefully and very dutifully, his remarks upon the art of poetry. Very able they were, acute and full of learning; but the trouble was, that his feelings no longer communicated; his mind seemed separated into different chambers; not a sound carried ------------------------- 4 Anne Jemima Clough (1820-1S92), feminist and first Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge |
||
|
[2514] from one to the
other. Thus, when one takes a sentence of Mr B into the mind it falls
plump to the ground-dead; but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge
into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas,
and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has
the secret of perpetual life. But whatever the
reason may be, it is a fact that one must deplore. For it means-here
I had come to rows of books by Mr Galsworthy and Mr Kipling-that some
of the finest works of our greatest living writers fall upon deaf ears.
Do what she will a woman cannot find in them that fountain of perpetual
life which the critics assure her is there. It is not only that they
celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of
men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is
to a woman incomprehensible. It is coming, it is gathering, it is about
to burst on one's head, one begins saying long before the end. That
picture will fall on old Jolyon's head;5 he will die of the shock; the
old clerk will speak over him two or three obituary words; and all the
swans on the Thames will simultaneously burst out singing. But one will
rush away before that happens and hide in the gooseberry bushes, for
the emotion which is so deep, so subtle, so symbolical to a man moves
a woman to wonder. So with Mr Kipling's officers who turn their backs;
and his Sowers who sow the Seed; and his Men who are alone with their
Work; and the Flag-one blushes at all these capital letters as if one
had been caught eavesdropping at some purely masculine orgy. The fact
is that neither Mr Galsworthy nor Mr Kipling has a spark of the woman
in him. Thus all their qualities seem to a woman, if one may generalise,
crude and immature. They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks
suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot
penetrate within. And in that restless
mood in which one takes books out and puts them back again without looking
at them I began to envisage an age to come of pure, of selfassertive
virility, such as the letters of professors (take Sir Walter Raleigh's
letters, for instance) seem to forebode, and the rulers of Italy have
already brought into being.6 For one can hardly fail to be impressed
in Rome by the sense of unmitigated masculinity; and whatever the value
of unmitigated masculinity upon the state, one may question the effect
of it upon the art of poetry. At any rate, according to the newspapers,
there is a certain anxiety about fiction in Italy. There has been a
meeting of academicians whose object it is "to develop the Italian
novel." "Men famous by birth, or in finance, industry or the
Fascist corporations" came together the other day and discussed
the matter, and a telegram was sent to the Duce expressing the hope
"that the Fascist era would soon give birth to a poet worthy of
it." We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful whether
poetry can come out of an incubator. Poetry ought to have a mother as
well as a father. The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little
abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some county
town. Such monsters never live long, it is said; one has never seen
a prodigy of that sort cropping grass in a field. Two heads on one body
do not make for length of life. However, the blame for all this, if one is anxious to lay blame, rests no more upon one sex than upon the other. All seducers and reformers are responsible, Lady Bessborough when she lied to Lord Granville; Miss Davies when she told the truth to Mr Greg. All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy ------------------------ 5 A climactic moment
in John Galsworthy's novel sequence The Forsyte Saga (1906-1929) [2515] age, before Miss
Davies and Miss Clough were born, when the writer used both sides of
his mind equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare
was androgynous; and so was Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and
Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a
dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoi. In
our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too
much of a woman. But that failing is too rare for one to complain of
it, since without some mixture of the kind the intellect seems to predominate
and the other faculties of the mind harden and become barren. However,
I consoled myself with the reflection that this is perhaps a passing
phase; much of what I have said in obedience to my promise to give you
the course of my thoughts will seem out of date; much of what flames
in my eyes will seem dubious to you who have not yet come of age. Even so, the very
first sentence that I would write here, I said, crossing over to the
writing-table and taking up the page headed Women and Fiction, is that
it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. it is fatal
to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.
it is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to
plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as
a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with
that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilised.
Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for
a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds
of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between
the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished.
Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind
must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating
his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there
must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer. The curtains
must be close drawn. The writer, I thought, once his experience is over,
must lie back and let his mind celebrate its nuptials in darkness. He
must not look or question what is being done. Rather, he must pluck
the petals from a rose or watch the swans float calmly down the river.
And I saw again the current which took the boat and the undergraduate
and the dead leaves; and the taxi took the man and the woman, I thought,
seeing them come together across the street, and the current swept them
away, I thought, hearing far off the roar of London's traffic, into
that tremendous stream. Here, then, Mary
Beton ceases to speak. She has told you how she reached the conclusion-the
prosaic conclusion-that it is necessary to have five hundred a year
and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry.
She has tried to lay bare the thoughts and impressions that led her
to think this. She has asked you to follow her flying into the arms
of a Beadle, lunching here, dining there,drawing pictures in the British
Museum, taking books from the shelf, looking out of the window. While
she has been doing all these things, you no doubt have been observing
her failings and foibles and deciding what effect they have had on her
opinions. You have been contradicting her and making whatever additions
and deductions seem good to you. That is all as it should be, for in
a question like this truth is only to be had by laying together many
varieties of error. And I will end now in my own person by anticipating
two criticisms, so obvious that you can hardly fail to make them. No opinion has
been expressed, you may say, upon the comparative merits of the sexes
even as writers. That was done purposely, because, even if the time
had come for such a valuation--and it is far more important at the moment
to know how much money women had and how many rooms than to theorise
about their capacitieseven if the time had come I do not believe that
gifts, whether of mind or character, [2516] can be weighed
like sugar and butter, not even in Cambridge, where they are so adept
at putting people into classes and fixing caps on their heads and letters
after their names. I do not believe that even the Table of Precedency
which you will find in Whitaker's Almanac7 represents a final order
of values, or that there is any sound reason to suppose that a Commander
of the Bath will ultimately walk in to dinner behind a Master in Lunacy.
All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all
this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to
the private school stage of human existence where there are "sides,"
and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost
importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the
Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As people mature they cease
to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots.
At any rate, where books are concerned, it is notoriously difficult
to fix labels of merit in such a way that they do not come off. Are
not reviews of current literature a perpetual illustration of the difficulty
of judgment? "This great book," "this worthless book,"
the same book is called by both names. Praise and blame alike mean nothing.
No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile
of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the
most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write,
that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for
hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision,
a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver
pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve,
is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity
which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere
flea-bite in comparison. Next I think that
you may object that in all this I have made too much of the importance
of material things. Even allowing a generous margin for symbolism, that
five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, that a lock
on the door means the power to think for oneself, still you may say
that the mind should rise above such things; and that great poets have
often been poor men. Let me then quote to you the words of your own
Professor of Literature, who knows better than I do what goes to the
making of a poet. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch writes:8 "What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelly, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne. ..we may stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men; and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well to do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds litrle truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well to do, and I challenge you that, if he had not been well to do, he would no more have attained to write Saul or The Ring and the Book than Ruskin would have attained to writing Modern Painters if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos9 slew young, as she ------------------------------ 7 A compendinm
of general information first published in 1868 [2517] slew John Clare
in a mad-house, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment.
These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is--however dishonouring
to us as a nation--certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth,
the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years,
a dog's chance. Believe me--and I have spent a great part of ten years
in watching some three hundred and twenty elementary schools--we may
prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little
more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into
that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born." Nobody could put
the point more plainly. "The poor poet has not in these days, nor
has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance. ..a poor child in England
has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated
into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born."
That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry
depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor,
not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women
have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves.
Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is
why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own. However,
thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of whom I wish
we knew more, thanks, curiously enough, to two wars, the Crime an which
let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and the European War
which opened the doors to the average woman some sixty years later,
these evils are in the way to be bettered. Otherwise you would not be
here tonight, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year,
precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in the extreme. Still, you may object, why do you attach so much importance to this writing of books by women when, according to you, it requires so much effort, leads perhaps to the murder of one's aunts, will make one almost certainly late for luncheon, and may bring one into very grave disputes with certain very good fellows? My motives, let me admit, are partly selfish. Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading-I like reading books in the bulk. Lately my diet has become a trifle monotonous; history is too much about wars; biography too much about great men; poetry has shown, I think, a tendency to sterility, and fiction-but I have sufficiently exposed my disabilities as a critic of modern fiction and will say no more about it. Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however ttivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the wotld, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. For I am by no means confining you to fiction. If you would please me--and there are thousands like me--you would write books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science. By so doing you will certainly profit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing each other. Fiction will be much the better for standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy. Moreover, if you consider any great figure of the past, like Sappho, like the Lady Murasaki,1 like Emily Brontë, you will find that she is an inheritor as well as an originator, and has come into existence because women have come to have the habit of writing naturally; so that even as a prelude to poetry such activity on your part would be invaluable. ----------------------------------- 1. Sappho (c. mid-7th century B.C.), Greek woman poet; Shikibu Murasaki (97S-1014) wrote The Tale of Genji, a major early work of Japanese literature. [2518] But when I look
back through these notes and criticise my own train of thought as I
made them, I find that my motives were not altogether selfish. There
runs through these comments and discursions the conviction--or is it
the instinct?--that good books are desirable and that good writers,
even if they show every variety of human depravity, are still good human
beings. Thus when I ask you to write more books I am urging you to do
what will be for your good and for the good of the world at large. How
to justify this instinct or belief I do not know, for philosophic words,
if one has not been educated at a university, are apt to play one false.
What is meant by "reality"? It would seem to be something
very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now
in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun.
It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms
one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real
than the world of speech-and then there it is again in an omnibus in
the uproar of Piccadilly.2 Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes
too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it
touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when
the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left
of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think,
has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this
reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate
it to the rest of us. So at least I infer from reading Lear or
Emma or La Recherche du Temps Perdu. For the reading of
these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses;
one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering
and given an intenser life. Those are the enviable people who live at
enmity with unreality; and those are the pitiable who are knocked on
the head by the thing done without knowing or caring. So that when I
ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to
live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear,
whether one can impart it or not. Here I would stop,
but the pressure of convention decrees that every speech must end with
a peroration. And a peroration addressed to women should have something,
you will agree, particularly exalting and ennobling about it. I should
implore you to remember your responsibilities, to be higher, more spiritual;
I should remind you how much depends upon you, and what an influence
you can exert upon the future. But those exhortations can safely, I
think, be left to the other sex, who will put them, and indeed have
put them, with far greater eloquence than I can compass. When I rummage
in my own mind I find no noble sentiments about being companions and
equals and influencing the world to higher ends. I find myself saying
briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself
than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would
say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.
And again I am reminded by dipping into newspapers and novels and biographies
that when a woman speaks to women she should have something very unpleasant
up her sleeve. Women are hard on women. Women dislike women. Women.
..but are you not sick to death of the word? I can assure you that I
am. Let us agree, then, that a paper read by a woman to women should
end with something particularly disagreeable. But how does it
go? What can I think of? The truth is, I often like women. I like their
unconventionality. I like their subtlety. I like their anonymity. I
like--but I must not run on in this way. That cupboard there--you say
it holds clean table-napkins --------------------------- 2. A district of London. [2519] only; but what
if Sir Archibald Bodkin were concealed among them?3 Let me then adopt
a sterner tone. Have I, in the preceding words, conveyed to you sufficiently
the warnings and reprobation of mankind? I have told you the very low
opinion in which you were held by Mr Oscar Browning. I have indicated
what Napoleon once thought of you and what Mussolini thinks now. Then,
in case any of you aspire to fiction, I have copied out for your benefit
the advice of the critic about <;:ourageously acknowledging the limitations
of your sex. I have referred to Professor X and given prominence to
his statement that women are intellectually, morally and physically
inferior to men. I have handed on all that has come my way without going
in search of it, and here is a final warning-from Mr John Langdon Davies.4
Mr John Langdon Davies warns women "that when children cease to
be altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary."
I hope you will make a note of it. How can I further
encourage you to go about the business of life? Young women, I would
say, and please artend, for the peroration is beginning, you are, in
my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery
of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an
army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have
never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilisation.
What is your excuse? It is all very well for you to say, pointing to
the streets and squares and forests of the globe swarming with black
and white and coffee-coloured inhabitants, all busily engaged in traffic
and enterprise and lovemaking, we have had other work on our hands.
Without our doing, those seas would be unsailed and those fertile lands
a d~sert. We have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the
age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three
million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in
existence, and that, allowing that some had help, takes time. There is truth
in what you say--I will not deny it. But at the same time may I remind
you that there have been at least two colleges for women in existence
in England since the year 1866; that after the year 1880 a married woman
was allowed by law to possess her own property; and that in 1919--which
is a whole nine years ago--she was given a vote? May I also remind you
that the most of the professions have been open to you for close on
ten years now? When you reflect upon these immense privileges and the
length of time time during which they have been enjoyed, and the fact
that there must be at this moment some two thousand women capable of
earning over five hundred a year in one way or another, you will agree
that the excuse of lack of opportunity, training, encouragement, leisure
and money no longer holds good. Moreover, the economists are telling
us that Mrs Seton has had too many children. You must, of course, go
on bearing children, but, so they say, in twos and threes, not in tens
and twelves. Thus, with some
time on your hands and with some book learning in your brains-you have
had enough of the other kind, and are sent to college partly, I suspect,
to be uneducated-surely you should embark upon another stage of your
very long, very laborious and highly obscure career. A thousand pens
are ready to suggest what you should do and what effect you will have.
My own suggestion is a little fantastic, I admit; I prefer, therefore,
to put it in the form of fiction. 3 Sir Archibald
Bodkin was then Director of Public Prosecutions; his office had been
responsible for the 1928 prosecution of Radclyffe Hall's novel The
Well of Loneliness on a charge of obscenity It was subsequently
banned. Woolf had wanted to give evidence in the book's defense at the
trial, but expert witnesses were not allowed by the presiding magistrate. [2520] told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young--alas, she never wrote a word.. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle.. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives.. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed.. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her.. For my belief is that if we live another century or so--I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals-and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the wotld of reality and not only to the wotld of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born.. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible.. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.. |
||