by Ruth Gruber
“Considering that the little party had been seated round the tea-table for less than twenty minutes, the animation observable on their faces, and the amount of sound they were producing collectively, were very creditable to the hostees.”14
Feminine imagination is not obliterated, but is self-consciously guarded. An attempt to confine herself to facts is striking after the associative flights of “The Voyage Out.” There, grief, the grief of a mother had been depicted in short native Anglo-Saxon idioms with rhythmic graphic imagery. “What with misery for her children, the poor, and the rain, her mind was like a wound exposed to dry in the air.”15 Three words, “misery”, “children” and “exposed”, in the whole cadenced sentence deviate from the monosyllabic pattern. Grief in “Night and Day” is no longer the emotional grief of a mother, but the intellectual grievance of a lawyer at odds with his environment. Comparatively analyzed, its expression is devoid of sentiment and imagery, slowly deliberative. “He tried to recall the actual words of his little outburst, and unconsciously supplemented them by so many words of greater expressiveness that the irritation of his failure was somewhat assuaged. Sudden stabs of the unmitigated truth assailed him now and then … ”16
There is a maturity in such writing which unveils the reversion from the bubbling, overflowing expressiveness common to youth. Here Virginia Woolf denies her arbitrary associations; the “true” style lies in a more factual reality than her lyrical imagination imposes. Yet a complete suppression of the earlier poetry is impossible; traces of her former imagery and rhythmic romantizations appear, suggesting that they are more native to her than the stoic adherence to logic and objectivity. Objects are no longer unquestionably like something else, but the “smaller room was something like a chapel in a cathedral, or a grotto in a cave, for the booming sound of the traffic in the distance suggested the soft surge of waters, and the oval mirrors, with their silver surface, were like deep pools trembling beneath starlight.”17 The lyric, feminine romanticism has returned only to be shattered directly by a cold analysis of the imagery. “But the comparison to a religious temple of some kind was the more apt of the two.”18 A defined reaction against emotional creativeness is conspicuous; she is seeking like the Joyceans and the humanists, anti-sentimentality and restraint.
Apologetically, she tries to justify her effeminate, romantic impulse for illusions, for conceits. “To put it figuratively”, becomes the excuse. The world is no longer a delightful vision, “like an apple in a tub”, but “a good world, although not a romantic or beautiful place or, to put it figuratively, a place where any line of blue mist softly linked tree to tree upon the horizon.”19 Her poetic urge to associate, to explain one sensation through another, seems irrepressible, yet she gives it a new form, distorted under apologies.
In the mentality of her characters, she personifies her conflict between rhapsody and pragmatic restraint. The sentimental exuberance of youth she encloses in Cassandra, (the very name is typical), and in Mrs. Hilberry, daughter of a poet. But in Katherine, her daughter, she personifies mature sobriety. Seen through one of the characters, descriptions of beauty are allowed; loveliness is no longer the observation of the author. A dinner table, always an object of ornamental worship for Virginia Woolf, is suffered here only through Cassandra’s vision. “Had the scene been looked at only through her eyes, it must have been described as one of magical brilliancy.”20 But her pleasure in the refulgent patterns and colors “must be repressed”, Virginia Woolf decrees ironically, conscious of the restraint she is teaching herself, “because she was grown up and the world held no more for her to marvel at.”21 Yet the poetess consoles herself; if she has forsaken the world of mysterious wonders, of woods and fairies and breathless sensations, she has found a new world, profounder in its broader scope. Life, reality, human beings have taken the place of fanciful illusions. “The world held no more for her to marvel at, it is true; but it held other people, and each other person possessed in Cassandra’s mind some fragment of what privately she called ‘reality’.” 22 Cassandra does not lose her romantic spirit of wonder, but diverts it from fascinating flowers or poems to fascinating human beings. She retains her exuberance in expressing this new fixation, while Virginia Woolf seeks, less naturally, to adapt an intellectual form to her psychological interest in man. The idea, the Platonic concept, stands now as the impetus of life, with God or love or nature. The poet has matured into the philosopher. It is Katherine who embodies this newly evolved mode. “What is it that makes these people go one way rather than the other? It’s not love; it’s not reason; I think it must be some idea. Perhaps … our affections are the shadow of an idea. Perhaps there isn’t any such thing as affection in itself … ”23
If the change in her style be the inevitable result of a profound conversion in her concept of life, it would signalize maturity rather than a loss of integrity, or doubt. But the self-consciousness of this new tone, the startling echoes of the earlier lyricism and its apologetic concessions, suggest that she has come to this style while she is still in conflict. She has neither obliterated her poetry nor ascertained the beauty of unrhythmic prose. Where before, imagery and tone were an integral part of her writing, she has now become uneasily style-conscious. She is wary of purple prose, and speaks of it with abstract or learned criticism. She disintegrates conceits from her style and analyzes their value. With quizzical irony, she makes Rodney, the poet of classical formalism, read a scientific paper on the use of metaphors in Elizabethan poetry. “It had been crammed” she derides it “with assertions that such-and-such passages, taken liberally from English, French, and Italian, are the supreme pearls of literature. Further, he was fond of using metaphors which, compounded in the study, were apt to sound either cramped or out of place as he delivered them in fragments. Literature was a fresh garland of spring flowers, he said, in which yew-berries and the purple nightshade mingled with the various tints of the anemone; and somehow or other this garland encircled marble brows.”24
The vague impossible associations of overwrought purple prose, observed in herself, she condemns in him. She has assumed, with doubtful integrity, the compensating role of destructive critic; having denied the poetry in herself, she begins to criticize it in others. But her criticism is not bitter. She is still too uncertain of her new convictions to laugh devastatingly at the old. She has still not taken an absolute stand; her mind has not “consumed impediments” and become “incandescent”. She wavers between denying, or giving expression to her romantic femininity and emotional hallucinations. It is the tortuous problem which she later satirizes in “Orlando”, detailing her struggle and solution. With acute insight, her travesty is that of a man laughing at himself. She mocks with no injured hatred of the world, no polemics, no fear of retaliation. In portraying her own conflict, she has objectified it. “Orlando” seems as much the history of her own literary growth as that of Miss Sackville-West or of England. Virginia Woolf appears to trace her poetic development from that of a romantic child to a woman seeking the realities modulated by her sex.
The primary impulse of her youth, which is the urge to write, she depicts in Orlando, “a nobleman afflicted with a love of literature.”25 The parallel is close, Virginia Woolf being a noblewoman by birth, the daughter of the essayist, Sir Leslie Stephen. Mocking the creative urge, she analyzes her concept of literary style. “It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality”26 definitely the romantic concept of writing. Style becomes the expression of a personal illusion rather than of absolute, objective truth.
Just as Monsieur Rolland had attempted to set down the processes by which his hero created, and succeeded in showing himself more than Jean Christophe in the flux and reflux of inspiration, so Virginia Woolf depicts the struggle with which she, like Orlando, “undertook to win immortality against the English language.”27 With obvious intimations of self-characterization, she confesses that “Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to
be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; … vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.”28
His style is a burlesque upon her own. He experiences the same conflict of impulsive romantic writing against the restraint produced by destructive criticism. And like Virginia Woolf, maturity awakens him to the reality beyond his imagination. Imagery, profuse in her early writing is, with conscious travesty, wild and unconstrained in his. Making love to a Russian princess, he calls her “a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.”29
Both Orlando and Virginia Woolf are essentially visual-minded, and aural in their sensitivity to life’s rhythm. “Sights disturbed him,” she says of Orlando, “sights exalted him—the birds and the trees; and made him in love with death, the evening sky, the homing rooks; and so, mounting up the spiral stairway into his brain-which was a roomy one—all these sights, and the garden sounds too, the hammer beating, the wood chopping, began that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests.”30 She seems not only to be classifying her own faults but even chastising herself. The young Orlando is not a clear worshipper of the eye, desiring to see objects in their structural truth. The eye for Orlando is only the quick passage between the object and his imagination, his memory and his consciousness. He goes to nature to satisfy his need for beauty, but he perceives this beauty only through the associations it has stimulated. The beauty of a tree lies not in its tangibility, but in its likenesses; in its strange outline against the horizon or its wavering reflection in a stream. The fantastic shapes cast by nature suggest images of wildest romanticism. “Trees were wooded hags, and sheep were grey boulders.”31 Orlando “likened the hills to ramparts, to the breasts of doves, and the flanks of kine … compared the flowers to enamel and the turf to Turkey rugs worn thin.”32 In the same manner that she had satirized Rodney’s confusion of conceits in “Night and Day”, Virginia Woolf now mocks Orlando’s. “Images, metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in his mind.”33
Partly inspired in its title and Elizabethan imagery by Robert Greene’s fragmentary play, “The History of Orlando Furioso” (ca. 1591) “Orlando” takes its hero from Shakespeare to the present, and in all ages, shows the struggle for integrity, the struggle between the poet and the critic. At the hands of Nick Greene, modelled perhaps from the author of the “Orlando Furioso”, Robert Greene the Shakespearian critic, satirist and pamphleteer, Orlando suffers a poet’s torments. In her reverberating accusations against the aesthetic or social critic, Virginia Woolf endangers her objectivity, her crucible of artistry. In her essays, where she is defending or propounding a thesis, objectivity is less vital than in her novels. She meets the danger however, in this fantastic satire of criticism, by mocking not only critics but poets as well. If she accuses her own oppressors, she laughs too at their victim. The conceits which mark Orlando’s poetry are a travesty upon all romantic imagery. Reality lies only in his imagination, to which he gives wild expression. He is happy, untormented, so long as he writes in solitude. But the moment he shows his work to the critic, his stability is gone. Nick Greene, symbol of the critic of all ages, denounces his style as “wordy and bombastic”34 and holds his allegorical metaphors up to ridicule. Orlando’s desire to create, greater than all else in life, is mutilated. Philosophy, friendship and even nature cannot console him. He wavers between the reality he perceives and the new standard set by the critic. He cannot bring himself to write as Nick Greene would dictate. Yet the criticism of his own style, with its pathetic fallacies, has stung him deeply. He is oppressed by the ominous conflict, observed in Virginia Woolf, the conflict of rationalization and poetic emotion. His images, he is told, are not truthful; he is wildly rhapsodic; he has no idea of objective reality, of “Life”.
He attempts to change his style. Integrity hangs in the balance. “ ‘Another metaphor by Jupiter!’ he would exclaim … ‘And what’s the point of it?’ he would ask himself. ‘Why not say simply in so many words—’ and then he would try to think for half an hour,—or was it two years and a half?—how to say simply in so many words what love is. ‘A figure like that is manifestly untruthful’, he argued, ‘for no dragon-fly, unless under very exceptional circumstances, could live at the bottom of the sea’.”35 He is beginning to seek the truth beyond his imagery, and in condemning conceits, he consciously adopts even the language of ratiocination. “Manifestly”, “under very exceptional circumstances”, these are Latinities which before would have made him shudder. But it is all for truth, and to the professor, truth lies in polysyllables. So he rejects his vision of the dragon-fly because it lacks scientific veracity. “ ‘And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? Confound it all’, he cried, ‘why say Bedfellow when one’s already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and leave it?’ So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help reverencing. ‘The sky is blue’, he said, ‘the grass is green’. Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair, and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods.”36
Under cover of mock biography, Virginia Woolf thus gives expression to the desperate struggle of poetic versus critical realism, of rhapsody versus restraint. For Orlando at least, solution is hopeless. “I don’t see that one’s more true than another. Both are utterly false.”37 Orlando had known no such dilemma before acknowledging the critic. His feelings alone in the early songs of innocence had guided him to what was true and what false. Truth had been emotional, a simple sensation; the critic, bringing experience and self-analysis, makes it involved, an intellectual perception. His dreams are called hollow, his visions, quixotic. Orlando loses first the self-confidence and then the sincerity of a Shakespeare or a Jane Austen to see life as he chooses. He begins to fall prey to tradition. He wavers, he looks about him for props, he wonders what “a true poet, who has his verses published in London, would say about the grass and sky.”38 The lash, almost laid upon Virginia Woolf’s shoulders, is now laid heavily upon his. He cringes to the critic, to Nick Greene, as though Nick “were the Muse in person.”39 He exposes his creations desperately, offering the critic “a variety of phrases, some plain, others figured.”40 But the critic with his eyes cast on Cicero and the “Gloire” of the past, discourages all his attempts whether they be in his old style or his new. And suddenly Orlando sees the light—“I’ll be blasted if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I’ll write, from this day forward, to please myself.”41 Integrity has conquered and “Orlando” takes its place in the long procession of works “In Defence of the Poet Against the Critic”.
The poetry which Virginia Woolf had repressed in “Night and Day” she burlesques here as that romantic, effeminate poetry which revelled in Lorelis and in dark cavernous landscapes. With a few devices to make these extravagant visions seem Orlando’s, she holds no check upon her own fancy. “What woman,” she gushes, “would not have kindled to see what Orlando saw then burning in the snow— for all about the looking-glass were snowy lawns, and she was like a fire, a burning bush, and the candle flames about her were silver leaves; or again, the glass was green water, and she a mermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in a cave, singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell down, down to embrace her.”42 The tone of “Orlando” is one of arch belittling; the hum
or is heightened by the very apologies and modifications which in “Night and Day” suggest an aesthetic breakdown, a self-conscious concession to the critic. The luminous color and mystic Pre-Raphaelite images, derived from Virginia Woolf’s own fancy and typical of her feminine creation, are attributed with droll satire to Orlando. “Now the Abbey windows were lit up and burnt like a heavenly, many-coloured shield (in Orlando’s fancy); now all the west seemed a golden window with troops of angels (in Orlando’s fancy again) passing up and down the heavenly stairs perpetually.”43
She apologizes humorously, not only for her extravagant images but for her connotative diction. Made conscious of her feminine flair for associations, she seeks to justify herself with sincerity. Thus letting Orlando fling himself under an oak tree, she justifies the extravagance in the word “flung”, through a hyphenated apology: “—there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word—.”44
In satirizing Orlando, she gives vent to all the lyricism, all the sentimental illusions she had repressed in herself. The onrush of thoughts and words is typical of the liberation of her style. The color and tremendous movement felt here, she repeats throughout the book; the abundance of her visions swells the length of her sentences, and to give them all expression, she reverts to the medieval device of lists. The pure pleasure in words incites such a profusion of kaleidoscopic details that her sentences seem to rock with the burden of single completed visions. In purple rhythms with long lists of swaying verbs: she describes how the lights “dipped and waved and sank and rose, as if held in the hands of troops of serving men, bending, kneeling, rising, receiving, guarding, and escorting with all dignity indoors a great Princess alighting from her chariot.”45