Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  A woman’s clothes are so sensitive that, far from seeking one influence to account for their changes, we must seek a thousand. The opening of a railway line, the marriage of a princess, the trapping of a skunk - such external events tell upon them; then there is the ‘relationship between the sexes’; in 1867 the Empress Eugénie, wearing a short skirt for the first time, went for a drive with the Emperor and Empress of Austria. As the ladies stepped into the carriage, the Emperor turned to his wife and said, ‘Take care, or someone may catch sight of your feet.’ The influences of beauty and of reason are always fighting in a woman’s clothes; reason has won some remarkable triumphs, in Germany for the most part, but generally submits to a weak compromise. When we talk of fashion, however, we mean something definite though hard to define. It comes from without; we wake in the morning and find the shops alive with it; soon it is abroad in the street. As we turn over the pictures in these volumes we see the spirit at work. It travels all over the body ceaselessly. Now the skirt begins to grow, until it trails for six feet upon the ground; suddenly the spirit leaps to the throat, and creates a gigantic ruff there, while the skirt shrinks to the knees; then it enters the hair, which immediately rises in the pinnacles of Salisbury Cathedral; a slight swelling appears beneath the skirt; it grows, alarmingly; at last a frame has to support the flounces; next the arms are attacked; they imitate Chinese pagodas; steel hoops do what they can to relieve them. The hair, meanwhile, has subsided. The lady has outgrown all cloaks, and only a vast shawl can encompass her. Suddenly, without warning, the entire fabric is pricked; the spirit moves the Empress Eugénie one night (January 1859) to reject her crinoline. In an instant the skirts of Europe melt away, and with pursed lips and acrimonious manners the ladies mince about the streets clasped tightly round the knees, instead of swimming. It is from the crinoline, no doubt, that Meredith got his favourite ‘she swam’.

  Fashion dealt more discreetly with men, and chiefly haunted their legs. Nevertheless, there was a great sympathy between the sexes. When her skirts ballooned, his trousers swelled; when she dwindled away, he wore stays; when her hair was Gothic, his was romantic; when she dragged a train, his cloak swept the ground. About 1820 his waistcoat was more uncontrollable than any garment of hers; five times within eight months it changed its shape; for a long time the cravat preserved a space for jewellery where the necklaces were rivalled. The only parts of men that survived the stark years of the thirties and forties were the hat and the beard; they still felt the sway of political changes. The democratic spirit required felt hats that drooped; in 1848 they dissolved about the ears; stiffening again as reaction set in. The same principle ruled the beard; to be clean shaven was a sign of unflinching respectability; a ragged beard, or even a beard alone, showed that one’s opinions were out of control. At the present time ‘Only at home does the gentleman indulge in coloured gold-laced velvet, silk, or cashmere; when he appears in public he may only venture by the superior cut of his garments to aim at any distinction; if the male attire thereby loses in effect, it gains in tone.’

  With furniture we find the same thing. Quite slowly every chair and table round us changes its form; if one had fallen asleep in an early Victorian drawing-room, among the patterns and plush, one would wake up this year with a horrid start. The room would seem little better than an attic. Yet, if one had sat there open-eyed, one would scarcely have seen the things change. Dress and furniture are always moving, but, having done his utmost to make them depend upon ‘the spirit of the time’, the author declares himself baffled. ‘The longer we study the question, the more certain do we become that though we know the how, we shall never know the wherefore.’ Are we truly in the grip of a spirit that makes us dance to its measure, or can it be laid without recourse to magic? When one compromises one delivers no clear message. Throughout the nineteenth century both dress and furniture were at the mercy of a dozen different aims, and the original meaning was further blunted by the intervention of machines. Only great artists, giving their minds to nothing else, represent their age; dressmakers and cabinet-makers generally caricature it or say nothing about it. As for manners, the term is so vague that it is difficult to test it; but it is probable that they too only approximate, and that people’s behaviour is the roughest guide to what they mean. If manners are not rubbed smooth by a machine, the comfort of society depends upon using a common language, and only saying what can be misunderstood without disaster. For this reason a history of modes and manners must use phrases which are as empty as any in the language, and the history is not a history of ourselves, but of our disguises. The poets and the novelists are the only people from whom we cannot hide.

  Men and Women.

  If you look at a large subject through the medium of a little book you see for the most part something of such vague and wavering outline that, though it may be a Greek gem, it may almost equally be a mountain or a bathing machine. But though Mile Villard’s book is small and her subject vast, her focus is so exact and her glass so clear that the outline remains sharp and the detail distinct. Thus we can read every word with interest because it is possible at a thousand points to check her statements; she is on every page dealing with the definite and the concrete. But how, in treating of a whole century, a whole country, and a whole sex, is it possible to be either definite or concrete? Mile Villard has solved the problem by using fiction as her material; for, though she has read Blue-books and biographies, her freshness and truth must be ascribed largely to the fact that she has preferred to read novels. In novels, she says, the thoughts, hopes and lives of women during the century and in the country of her most remarkable development are displayed more intimately and fully than elsewhere. One might indeed say that were it not for the novels of the nineteenth century we should remain as ignorant as our ancestors of this section of the human race. It has been common knowledge for ages that women exist, bear children, have no beards, and seldom go bald; but save in these respects, and in others where they are said to be identical with men, we know little of them and have little sound evidence upon which to base our conclusions. Moreover, we are seldom dispassionate.

  Before the nineteenth century literature took almost solely the form of soliloquy, not of dialogue. The garrulous sex, against common repute, is not the female but the male; in all the libraries of the world the man is to be heard talking to himself and for the most part about himself. It is true that women afford ground for much speculation and are frequently represented; but it is becoming daily more evident that Lady Macbeth, Cordelia, Ophelia, Clarissa, Dora, Diana, Helen and the rest are by no means what they pretend to be. Some are plainly men in disguise; others represent what men would like to be, or are conscious of not being; or again they embody that dissatisfaction and despair which afflict most people when they reflect upon the sorry condition of the human race. To cast out and incorporate in a person of the opposite sex all that we miss in ourselves and desire in the universe and detest in humanity is a deep and universal instinct on the part both of men and of women. But though it affords relief, it does not lead to understanding. Rochester is as great a travesty of the truth about men as Cordelia is of the truth about women. Thus Mile Villard soon finds herself confronted by the fact that some of the most famous heroines even of nineteenth-century fiction represent what men desire in women, but not necessarily what women are in themselves. Helen Pendennis, for example, tells us a great deal more about Thackeray than about herself. She tells us, indeed, that she has never had a penny that she could call her own, and no more education than serves to read the Prayer-book and the cookery-book. From her we learn also that when one sex is dependent upon the other it will endeavour for safety’s sake to simulate what the dominant sex finds desirable. The women of Thackeray and the women of Dickens succeed to some extent in throwing dust in their masters’ eyes, though the peculiar repulsiveness of these ladies arises from the fact that the deception is not wholly successful. The atmosphere is one of profound distrust. It is possible that Hel
en herself flung off her widow’s weeds, took a deep draught of beer, produced a short clay pipe, and stuck her legs on the mantelpiece directly her master was round the corner. At any rate, Thackeray cannot forbear one glance of suspicion as he turns his back. But midway through the nineteenth century the servile woman was stared out of countenance by two very uncompromising characters - Jane Eyre and Isobel Berners. One insisted that she was poor and plain, and the other that she much preferred wandering on a heath to settling down and marrying anybody. Mile Villard attributes the remarkable contrast between the servile and the defiant, the sheltered and the adventurous, to the introduction of machinery. Rather more than a century ago, after whirling for many thousands of years, the spinning-wheel became obsolete.

  En fait, le désir de la femme de s’extérioriser, de dépasser les limites jusque-là assignées à son activité, prend naissance au moment même où sa vie est moins étroitement liée à toutes les heures aux tâches du foyer, aux travaux qui, une ou deux générations auparavant, absorbaient son attention et employaient ses forces. Le rouet, l’aiguille, la quenouille, la préparation des confitures et des conserves, voire des chandelles et du savon... n’occupent plus les femmes et, tandis que l’antique ménagère disparaît, celle qui sera demain la femme nouvelle sent grandir en elle, avec le loisir de voir, de penser, de juger, la conscience d’elle-même et du monde où elle vit.

  For the first time for many ages the bent figure with the knobbed hands and the bleared eyes, who, in spite of the poets, is the true figure of womanhood, rose from her wash-tub, took a stroll out of doors, and went into the factory. That was the first painful step on the road to freedom.

  Any summary of the extremely intelligent pages in which Mile Villard has told the story of the Englishwoman’s progress from 1860 to 1914 is impossible. Moreover, Mile Villard would be the first to agree that not even a woman, and a Frenchwoman at that, looking with the clear-sighted eyes of her race across the Channel, can say for certain what the words ‘emancipation’ and ‘evolution’ amount to. Granted that the woman of the middle class has now some leisure, some education, and some liberty to investigate the world in which she lives, it will not be in this generation or in the next that she will have adjusted her position or given a clear account of her powers. ‘I have the feelings of a woman says Bathsheba in ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, “but I have only the language of men.’ From that dilemma arise infinite confusions and complications. Energy has been liberated, but into what forms is it to flow? To try the accepted forms, to discard the unfit, to create others which are more fitting, is a task that must be accomplished before there is freedom or achievement. Further, it is well to remember that woman was not created for the first time in the year 1860. A large part of her energy is already fully employed and highly developed. To pour such surplus energy as there may be into new forms without wasting a drop is the difficult problem which can only be solved by the simultaneous evolution and emancipation of man.

  Coleridge as Critic.

  In his preface to the ‘Anima Poetae’ Mr E. H. Coleridge remarks that the ‘Table Talk’, unlike other of Coleridge’s prose writings, still remains well known and widely read. We do not know that the brief article by Coventry Patmore prefixed to this new edition tells us much more than that Mr Patmore was himself a Conservative, but if the preface had any share in the re-publication of the ‘Table Talk’, we owe it our thanks. It is always well to re-read the classics. It is always wholesome to make sure that they still earn their pedestals and do not merely cast their shadows over heads bent superstitiously from custom. In particular it is worth while to re-read Coleridge because, owing to his peculiarities of character and to the effect which they had upon such portrait painters as Hazlitt, De Quincey, and above all, Carlyle, we possess a very visible ghost - Coleridge, a wonderful, ridiculous, impossibly loquacious old gentleman who lived at Highgate and could never determine which side of the path to walk on. The loquacity can hardly have been exaggerated, but read the Table Talk’ and you will get what no portrait painter can possibly catch - the divine quality of the old gentleman’s mind, the very flash of his miraculous eye. Whether or no it is a test of true greatness, his own words give us at once not indeed a sense of perceiving the distinction between the reason and the understanding, but of knowing him as no second person can reveal him; there is a being in the book who still speaks directly to the individual mind.

  The comparison between Coleridge and Johnson is obvious in so far as each held sway chiefly by the power of his tongue. The difference between their methods is so marked that it is tempting, but also unnecessary, to judge one to be inferior to the other. Johnson was robust, combative, and concrete; Coleridge was the opposite. The contrast was perhaps in his mind when he said of Johnson:

  ... his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced... Burke, like all men of genius who love to talk at all, was very discursive and continuous; hence he is not reported; he seldom said the sharp, short things that Johnson almost always did, which produce a more decided effect at the moment, and which are so much more easy to carry off.

  Modesty may have required him to say Burke instead of Coleridge, but either name will do. The same desire to justify and protect one’s type led him no doubt to perceive the truth that ‘a great mind must be androgynous... I have known strong minds with imposing, undoubting, Cobbett-like manners, but I have never met a great mind of this sort’.

  But the chief distinction between the talk of Coleridge and that of Johnson, or indeed, between the talk of Coleridge and that of most of the famous talkers, lay in his indifference to, in his hatred of, ‘mere personality’. That omission rules out more than gossip; it rules out the kind of portrait painting in which Carlyle excelled, or the profound human insight so often expressed by Johnson. One cannot suppose that Coleridge would ever have lifted a poor woman to his shoulders, but he could be ‘pained by observing in others, and was fully conscious in himself of a sympathy’ with the upper classes which he had not for the lower, until, hearing a thatcher’s wife cry her heart out for the death of her child, ‘it was given him all at once to feel’ that, while sympathizing equally with poor and rich in the matter of the affections - ‘the best part of humanity’ - still with regard to mental misery, struggles and conflicts, his sympathies were with those who could best appreciate their force and value. From this it is plain that if we seek Coleridge’s company we must leave certain human desires outside, or rather we must be ready to mount, if we can, into an atmosphere where the substance of these desires has been shredded by infinite refinements and discriminations of all its grossness.

  The incompatibility which certainly existed between Coleridge and the rest of the world arose, so the Table Talk persuades us, from the fact that even more than Shelley he was ‘a beautiful and ineffectual angel’ - a spirit imprisoned behind bars invisible and intangible to the tame hordes of humanity, a spirit always beckoned by something from without. Very naturally, to his fellow prisoners behind the bars his interpretation was confused, and from a philosophic point of view inconclusive. But there has been no finer messenger between gods and men, not one whose being kept from youth to age so high a measure of transparency. His criticism is the most spiritual in the language. His notes upon Shakespeare are, to our thinking, the only criticisms which bear reading with the sound of the play still in one’s ears. They possess one of the marks which we are apt to discover in the finest art, the power of seeming to bring to light what was already there beforehand, instead of imposing anything from the outside. The shock, the surprise, the paradox, which so often prevail and momentarily illumine, are entirely absent from the art of Coleridge; and the purity of his criticism is further increased by his neglect here also of ‘mere personality’. The possibility that one may throw light upon a book by considering the circumstances in which it was written did not commend itself to Coleridge; to him the light was concentrated and confined in one ray - in the art itself. We have, of cou
rse, to take into account the fact that he never produced any complete work of criticism. We have only imperfect reports of lectures, memories of talk, notes scribbled in the margins of pages. His views are therefore scattered and fragmentary, and it is usual to lament the ruin wrought by opium upon the vast and enduring fabric which should have been built from these broken stones. But this mania for size savours rather of megalomania. There is a great deal to be said for small books. It is arguable that the desire to be exhaustive, comprehensive, and monumental has destroyed more virtue than it has brought to birth. In literary criticism at least the wish to attain completeness is more often than not a will o’ the wisp which lures one past the occasional ideas which may perhaps have truth in them towards an unreal symmetry which has none.