Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  At this time, before the publication of the Autocrat, he was famous for his talk and for his verses. The verses were for the most part inspired by dinners and ‘occasions’; they light up for us the circle of American men of letters who met and talked at Parker’s Hotel, as men had talked at Will’s Coffee House; they are addressed to people who know each other well. His reputation, therefore, independently of his medical works, was very intense, but very local. He was almost fifty when the first of the Autocrat papers ‘ came from my mind almost with an explosion’. The Professor and The Poet followed; then there were the two novels; he became, in short, a man of letters from whom the public expects a regular statement of opinion. Even at this distance it is easy to imagine the rush with which the Autocrat came into the world. Every breakfast-table in Boston knew the writer by repute, knew of his birth and traditions, and read his views in print with a kind of personal pride, as though he were the mouthpiece of a family. Those associations are no longer ours; but, as the manner of beauty clings when beauty is gone, so we can still relish the gusto with which Dr. Holmes addressed himself to his fellow-citizens.

  This is true, and yet is it possible that we should not dwell upon such considerations if we were altogether beneath the Autocrat’s spell? There is, we must own it, a little temptation to try to account for our ancestors’ tastes, and so to avoid formulating our own. The chief interest, however, of these centenary celebrations is that they provide an opportunity for one generation to speak its mind of another with a candour and perhaps with an insight which contemporaries may hardly possess. The trial is sharp, for the books that live to such an age will live to a much greater age, and raise the standard of merit very high. Let us own at once that Dr. Holmes’s works can hardly be said to survive in the sense that they still play any part in our lives; nor is he among the writers who live on without any message to deliver because of the sheer delight that we take in their art. The fact that there is someone who will write a centenary biography for a public that reads the Autocrat cannot be set down to either of these causes; and yet, if we seek it on a lower plane, we shall surely find reason enough. There is, to begin with, the reason that our own experience affords us. When we take it up at a tender age — for it is one of the first books that one reads for oneself — it tastes like champagne after breakfast cups of weak tea. The miraculous ease with which the talk flows on, the richness of simile and anecdote, the humour and the pathos, the astonishing maturity of the style, and, above all, some quality less easy to define, as though fruits just beyond our reach were being dropped plump into our hands and proving deliciously firm and bright — these sensations make it impossible to think of the Autocrat save as an elderly relative who has pressed half-sovereigns into one’s palm and at the same time flattered one’s self-esteem. Later, if some of the charm is gone, one is able to appraise these virtues more soberly. They have, curiously enough, far more of the useful than of the ornamental in their composition. We are more impressed, that is, by the honesty and the common sense of the Autocrat’s remarks, and by the fact that they are the fruit of wide observation, than by the devices with which they are decked out.

  The pages of the book abound with passages like the following:

  Two men are walking by the polyphlcesbcean ocean, one of them having a small tin cup with which he can scoop up a gill of sea-water when he will, and the other nothing but his hands, which will hardly hold water at all — and you call the tin cup a miraculous possession! It is the ocean that is the miracle, my infant apostle! Nothing is clearer than that all things are in all things, and that just according to the intensity and extension of our mental being we shall see the many in the one and the one in the many. Did Sir Isaac think what he was saying when he made his speech about the ocean — the child and the pebbles, you know? Did he mean to speak slightingly of a pebble? Of a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its compartment of space before the stone that became the pyramids had grown solid, and has watched it until now! A body which knows all the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion! A body from the contemplation of which an archangel could infer the entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries! A throne of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its very atom since the rosary of heaven was strung with beaded stars!

  This is sufficiently plausible and yet light in weight; the style shares what we are apt to think the typical American defect of over-ingenuity and an uneasy love of decoration; as though they had not yet learnt the art of sitting still. The universe to him, as he says, ‘swam in an ocean of similitudes and analogies’; but the imaginative power which is thus implied is often more simply and more happily displayed. The sight of old things inspires him, or memories of boyhood.

  Now, the sloop-of-war the Wasp, Captain Blakely, after gloriously capturing the Reindeer and the Avon, had disappeared from the face of the ocean, and was supposed to be lost. But there was no proof of it, and, of course, for a time, hopes were entertained that she might be heard from. Long after the last real chance had utterly vanished, I pleased myself with the fond illusion that somewhere on the waste of waters she was still floating, and there were years during which I never heard the sound of the great gun booming inland from the Navy-yard without saying to myself, ‘The Wasp has come!’ and almost thinking I could see her, as she rolled in, crumpling the water before her, weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars and threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts and tears of thousands. This was one of those dreams that I nursed and never told. Let me make a clean breast of it now, and say that, so late as to have outgrown childhood, perhaps to have got far on towards manhood, when the roar of the cannon has struck suddenly on my ear, I have started with a thrill of vague expectation and tremulous delight, and the long-unspoken words have articulated themselves in the mind’s dumb whisper, The Wasp has come!

  The useful virtues are there, nevertheless. The love of joy, in the first place, which raced in his blood from the cradle was even more of a virtue when the Autocrat was published than it is now. There were strict parents who forbade their children to read the book because it made free with the gloomy morality of the time. His sincerity, too, which would show itself in an acrid humour as a young man, gives an air of pugnacity to the kindly pages of the Autocrat. He hated pomp, and stupidity, and disease. It may not be due to the presence of high virtues, and yet how briskly his writing moves along! We can almost hear him talk, ‘taking the words out of one’s mouth’, in his eagerness to get them said. Much of this animation is due to the easy and almost incessant play of the Autocrat’s humour; and yet we doubt whether Dr. Holmes can be called a humourist in the true sense of the word. There is something that paralyses the will in humour, and Dr. Holmes was primarily a medical man who valued sanity above all things. Laughter is good, as fresh air is good, but he retracts instinctively if there is any fear that he has gone too deep:

  I know it is a sin

  For me to sit and grin —

  that is the kindly spirit that gives his humour its lightness, and, it must be added, its shallowness. For, when the range is so scrupulously limited, only a superficial insight is possible; if the world is only moderately ridiculous it can never be very sublime. But it is easy enough to account for the fact that his characters have little hold upon our sympathies by reflecting that Dr. Holmes did not write in order to create men and women, but in order to state the opinions which a lifetime of observation had taught him. We feel this even in the book which has at least the form of a novel. In Elsie Venner he wished to answer the question which he had asked as a child; can we be justly punished for an hereditary sin? The result is that we watch a skilful experiment; all Dr. Holmes’s humour and learning (he kept a live rattlesnake for months, and read ‘ all printed knowledge ‘ about poison) play round the subject, and he makes us perceive how curious and interesting the case is. But — for this is the sum of our objections — we are not interested i
n the heroine; and the novel so far as it seeks to convince us emotionally is a failure. Even so, Dr. Holmes succeeds, as he nearly always does succeed, in making us think; he presents so many facts about rattlesnakes and provincial life, so many reflections upon human life in general, with such briskness and such a lively interest in his own ideas, that the portentous ‘ physiological conception, fertilized by a theological idea’, is as fresh and almost as amusing as the Autocrat or The Professor. The likeness to these works, which no disguise of fiction will obscure, proves again that he could not, as he puts it, ‘get cut of his personality’, but by that we only mean to define his powers in certain respects, for ‘personality’ limits Shakespeare himself. We mean that he is one of those writers who do not see much more than other people see, and yet they see it with some indescribable turn of vision, which reveals their own character and serves to form their views into a coherent creed. Thus it is that his readers always talk of their ‘intimacy’ with Dr. Holmes; they know what kind of person he was as well as what he taught. They know that he loved rowing and horses and great trees; that he was full of sentiment for his childhood; that he liked men to be strong and sanguine, and honoured the weakness of women; that he loathed all gloom and unhealthiness; that charity and tolerance were the virtues he loved, and if one could combine them with wit it was so much to the good. Above all, one must enjoy life and live to the utmost of one’s powers. It reads something like a medical prescription, and one does not want health alone. Nevertheless, when the obvious objections are made, we need not doubt that it will benefit thousands in the future, and they will love the man who lived as he wrote.

  BOOKS AND PORTRAITS

  First published in 1978, this collection of essays illustrates Woolf’s ability as a critic of rich perception and persuasive intelligence. The book contains several previously uncollected pieces, including reviews, fictional vignettes and topical essays. The short works are all marked by Woolf’s familiar sensibility, providing precise and objective observations of the differing subjects.

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE: OF WRITING AND WRITERS

  In the Orchard.

  A Woman’s College from Outside.

  On a Faithful Friend.

  English Prose.

  Impressions at Bayreuth.

  Modes and Manners of the Nineteenth Century.

  Men and Women.

  Coleridge as Critic.

  Patmore’s Criticism.

  Papers on Pepys.

  Sheridan.

  Thomas Hood.

  Praeterita.

  Mr Kipling’s Notebook.

  Emerson’s Journals.

  Thoreau.

  Herman Melville.

  Rupert Brooke.

  The Intellectual Imagination.

  These are the Plans.

  Mr Sassoon’s Poems.

  A Russian Schoolboy.

  A Glance at Turgenev.

  A Giant with Very Small Thumbs.

  Dostoevsky the Father.

  More Dostoevsky.

  Dostoevsky in Cranford.

  The Russian Background.

  A Scribbling Dame.

  Maria Edgeworth and Her Circle.

  Jane Austen and the Geese.

  Mrs Gaskell.

  The Compromise.

  Wilcoxiana.

  The Genius of Boswell.

  Shelley and Elizabeth Hitchener.

  Literary Geography.

  Flumina Amem Silvasque.

  Haworth, November 1904.

  PART TWO: MAINLY PORTRAITS

  The Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth.

  The Diary of a Lady in Waiting.

  Queen Adelaide.

  Elizabeth Lady Holland.

  Lady Hester Stanhope.

  The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt.

  Lady Strachey.

  John Delane.

  Body and Brain.

  Acknowledgments I am very much indebted to Ian Parsons for his editorial advice and wise guidance throughout my work on this book. I am also grateful to Miss B. J. Kirkpatrick both for her personal research on my behalf and for her excellent Bibliography, an invaluable book for all Virginia Woolf scholars.

  PART ONE: OF WRITING AND WRITERS

  In the Orchard.

  Miranda slept in the orchard, lying in a long chair beneath the apple-tree. Her book had fallen into the grass, and her finger still seemed to point at the sentence ‘Ce pays est vraiment un des coins du monde où le rire des filles éclate le mieux...” as if she had fallen asleep just there. The opals on her finger flushed green, flushed rosy, and again flushed orange as the sun, oozing through the apple-trees, filled them. Then, when the breeze blew, her purple dress rippled like a flower attached to a stalk; the grasses nodded; and the white butterfly came blowing this way and that just above her face.

  Four feet in the air over her head the apples hung. Suddenly there was a shrill clamour as if they were gongs of cracked brass beaten violently, irregularly, and brutally. It was only the school-children saying the multiplication table in unison, stopped by the teacher, scolded, and beginning to say the multiplication table over again. But this clamour passed four feet “above Miranda’s head, went through the apple boughs, and, striking against the cowman’s little boy who was picking blackberries in the hedge when he should have been at school, made him tear his thumb on the thorns.

  Next there was a solitary cry - sad, human, brutal. Old Parsley was, indeed, blind drunk.

  Then the very topmost leaves of the apple-tree, flat like little fish against the blue, thirty feet above the earth, chimed with a pensive and lugubrious note. It was the organ in the church playing one of Hymns Ancient and Modem. The sound floated out and was cut into atoms by a flock of fieldfares flying at an enormous speed - somewhere or other. Miranda lay asleep thirty feet beneath.

  Then above the apple-tree and the pear-tree two hundred feet above Miranda lying asleep in the orchard bells thudded, intermittent, sullen, didactic, for six poor women of the parish were being churched and the Rector was returning thanks to heaven.

  And above that with a sharp squeak the golden feather of the church tower turned from south to east. The wind had changed. Above everything else it droned, above the woods, the meadows, the hills, miles above Miranda lying in the orchard asleep. It swept on, eyeless, brainless, meeting nothing that could stand against it, until, wheeling the other way, it turned south again. Miles below, in a space as big as the eye of a needle, Miranda stood upright and cried aloud: ‘Oh, I shall be late for tea!’

  Miranda slept in the orchard - or perhaps she was not asleep, for her lips moved very slightly as if they were saying, ‘Ce pays est vraiment un des coins du monde... où le rire des filles... éclate... éclate... éclate...’ and then she smiled and let her body sink all its weight on to the enormous earth which rises, she thought, to carry me on its back as if I were a leaf, or a queen (here the children said the multiplication table), or, Miranda went on, I might be lying on the top of a cliff with the gulls screaming above me. The higher they fly, she continued, as the teacher scolded the children and rapped Jimmy over the knuckles till they bled, the deeper they look into the sea - into the sea, she repeated, and her fingers relaxed and her lips closed gently as if she were floating on the sea, and then, when the shout of the drunken man sounded overhead, she drew breath with an extraordinary ecstasy, for she thought that she heard life itself crying out from a rough tongue in a scarlet mouth, from the wind, from the bells, from the curved green leaves of the cabbages.

  Naturally she was being married when the organ played the tune from Hymns Ancient and Modem, and, when the bells rang after the six poor women had been churched, the sullen intermittent thud made her think that the very earth shook with the hoofs of the horse that was galloping towards her (‘Ah, I have only to wait!’ she sighed), and it seemed to her that everything had already begun moving, crying, riding, flying round her, across her, towards her in a pattern.

  Mary is chopping the wood, she thoug
ht; Pearman is herding the cows; the carts are coming up from the meadows; the rider - and she traced out the lines that the men, the carts, the birds, and the rider made over the countryside until they all seemed driven out, round, and across by the beat of her own heart.

  Miles up in the air the wind changed; the golden feather of the church tower squeaked; and Miranda jumped up and cried: ‘Oh, I shall be late for tea!’

  Miranda slept in the orchard, or was she asleep or was she not asleep? Her purple dress stretched between the two apple-trees. There were twenty-four apple-trees in the orchard, some slanting slightly, others growing straight with a rush up the trunk which spread wide into branches and formed into round red or yellow drops. Each apple-tree had sufficient space. The sky exactly fitted the leaves. When the breeze blew, the line of the boughs against the wall slanted slightly and then returned. A wagtail flew diagonally from one corner to another. Cautiously hopping, a thrush advanced towards a fallen apple; from the other wall a sparrow fluttered just above the grass. The uprush of the trees was tied down by these movements; the whole was compacted by the orchard walls. For miles beneath the earth was clamped together; rippled on the surface with wavering air; and across the corner of the orchard the blue-green was slit by a purple streak. The wind changing, one bunch of apples was tossed so high that it blotted out two cows in the meadow (‘Oh, I shall be late for tea!’ cried Miranda), and the apples hung straight across the wall again.