The Oxford World Classic edition of ‘Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf’, edited by David Bradshaw, brings together 30 of Woolf’s essays, reviews and miscellaneous prose pieces, and groups them under four headings:
- Reading and Writing
- Life-Writing
- Women and Fiction
- Looking On
Earlier blog posts give my introductory notes to the essays and summary of the first four essays in the ‘Reading and Writing’ section. This post summarises and comments on the last six essays in the ‘Reading and Writing’ section, numbers 5 to 10 in this list.
- The Decay of Essay-Writing (1905)
- Modern Fiction (1919)
- The Modern Essay (1922) [review of Modern English Essays 1870 to 1920]
- How It Strikes a Contemporary (1923)
- Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923)
- Character in Fiction (1924) [a talk]
- ‘Impassioned Prose’ (1926) [Thomas de Quincy]
- How Should One Read A Book? (1926)
- Poetry, Fiction and the Future (1927)
- Craftmanship (1937) [BBC radio talk]
5. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923: 5 pages)
The essence of fiction is character but the complexity of the world the Georgian novelists face means they have to reject the simplistic notions of character good enough for their Victorian and Edwardian forebears.
The story of this and the following essay are a bit confused.
In March 1923 the bestselling novelist Arnold Bennett wrote a review of Woolf’s avant-garde novel ‘Jacob’s Room’ (1922) in which he claimed her characters would never survive in ‘the real world’. This triggered Woolf to write 1) a rebuttal of Bennett’s criticisms that was published in the Athenaeum magazine in December 1923 under the title of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’.
Woolf realised she was onto something and expanded her points into a 2) longer essay and, the following year, presented the expanded version in a paper read to the Heretics Society at Cambridge University, still titled ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, on 18 May 1924.
When T.S. Eliot, as editor of The Criterion magazine, asked Woolf for an article she submitted the text of this talk and it was published in July 1924 under the title ‘Character in Fiction’. This second version, the expanded version, is the essay following this one in this selection, number 6 in my list. Woolf and her husband then published it themselves, as a standalone pamphlet, in their own Hogarth Press, on 30 October 1924. What makes things confusing is that they chose to publish it under the title of the short version, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’.
So this is my summary of the original 5-page review. In his selection Bradshaw follows it by publishing the longer version, as published in The Criterion and under the Criterion‘s title, ‘Character in Fiction’.
***
Woolf quotes the best-selling serious novelist of his day, Arnold Bennett, as writing in a recent essay that the foundation of good novel writing is character but that the Georgian novelists have lost interest in depicting character in preference for a blizzard of details. Woolf agrees but claims that it is Bennett and the two other successful novelists of his generation, H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy, who are chiefly responsible for drowning character in facts and details.
She claims that the characters of modern books such as Kipps or ‘The Old Wives Tale’ pale into comparison with any character from ‘the splendid opulence of the Victorian age’, notable for ‘the astonishing vividness and reality of the characters.’
For Woolf the Edwardian novelists suffer from at least three disadvantage: 1) In a sense they simply couldn’t compete with the scale and depth of the great Victorians. 2) There was also something squalid and vulgar about them. She is very rude about Samuel Butler.
No sooner had the Victorians departed than Samuel Butler, who had lived below stairs, came out like an observant boot boy, with the family secrets in ‘The Way of All Flesh’.
In the same vein John Galsworthy is accused of being overly concerned with social injustices, which was even more true of H.G. Wells and his incessant issue-mongering.
3) The impact of Constance Garnett’s powerful English translations of the Russian classic novelists, particularly Dostoyevsky. Not only the Edwardians but even the Victorians couldn’t compete with the scale and depth and complexity of characters such as Raskolnikov, Stavrogin et al.
Galsworthy gives us his sense of compassion, Wells his generous enthusiasm and Bennett his sense of time passing, but none of them match up to the great Russians.
Woolf claims that it was this, the change to a new sense of the depth and complexity of human nature, which marked the decisive break between the culture of the Edwardians and of the Georgians (King Edward VII died and was succeeded by his son George V in May 1910). This is the thinking behind her much quoted saying that ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed’, which comes in the expanded version of this essay (see below).
Character, she asserts, is crucial to human beings’ sense of life, of who we are and who other people are. Hence, if we disbelieve in the characters in novels as they are presented to us, then we want to go deeper and further, to search out their real meanings for ourselves.
At this point she introduces the figure of Mrs Brown – who is to feature so largely in the expanded version of the essay – but in a very different way from her later appearance. Here she is not much more than a name Woolf gives to her notion of a deeper, more unpredictable conception of character than the Edwardian writers can cope with, a notion which breaks up and shatters traditional ideas about character.
And it is amid these ruins of the old Victorian and Edwardian notions of ‘character’ that her generation of writers, the Georgians, have to somehow construct a reasonable dwelling place. She argues that the difficulties each of the Georgian writers encountered in trying to work out their own conception of ‘Mrs Brown’ (i.e. how to depict modern character) explain both the failures but also the daring experiments of her generation.
6. Character in Fiction (1924: 18 pages)
Extended criticism of the Edwardian novelists – Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells – for their excessive naturalistic detail which swamps their characters, for ignoring the spiritual for the material, which is why her generation of Georgian novelists must reject them.
This is the text of the paper read to The Heretics in Cambridge on 18 May 1924 mentioned above. (The Cambridge Heretics was a society formed at the University of Cambridge in 1909, to oppose compulsory Christian worship and celebrate humanist values.)
Woolf actually delivered it under the title of the original article rebutting Bennett i.e. ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (see above) which was also the title she used when she published it in her own Hogarth Press edition. But in an effort to distinguish between the two versions, David Bradshaw publishes it here with the title it was given when published in T.S. Eliot’s journal, The Criterion i.e. ‘Character in Fiction’.
This explains why, when you look it up online, you find the text given here as ‘Character in Fiction’ is everywhere else given the Hogarth Press title of Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.
***
Woolf opens with a modest, self-deprecating tone. She describes herself as ‘one solitary, ill-informed, and misguided individual’ and goes on to say:
It seems to me possible, perhaps desirable, that I may be the only person in this room who has committed the folly of writing, trying to write, or failing to write, a novel. And when I asked myself, as your invitation to speak to you about modern fiction made me ask myself, what demon whispered in my ear and urged me to my doom, a little figure rose before me—the figure of a man, or of a woman, who said, ‘My name is Brown. Catch me if you can.’
She gets the ball rolling going by quoting Arnold Bennett as saying that the most important thing in novel writing is creating character, everything follows from that. So that’s the Mr Bennett of the title accounted for.
To the reader’s mild surprise, Woolf suddenly makes the grand declaration that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed.’ What changed? She explains. Between her generation and the Victorians there is a gulf:
All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910.
Ah. So it’s an arbitrary but useful dividing line which she has airily invented.
She goes on to admit that to some extent everybody is an expert in ‘character’. To assess other people’s characters is a fundamental human need. But novelists take it a stage further:
The study of character becomes to them an absorbing pursuit; to impart character an obsession. And this I find it very difficult to explain: what novelists mean when they talk about character, what the impulse is that urges them so powerfully every now and then to embody their view in writing.
Then she makes what appears, at first sight, to be one of her bewildering digressions. She tells everyone about an incident which occurred to her recently, when she was late catching a train and hurriedly climbed into a compartment where a man and woman seemed to be having an argument. They both shut up when she got in but she could feel the tension in the carriage. being Woolf, she promptly invented names for these two unknown strangers, naming the bluff irritated man Mr Smith and the much older, visibly poor woman, Mrs Brown. So this is the Mrs Brown of the title.
Woolf then reports this pair’s inconsequential conversation, Smith leaning forward and threateningly extracting from the woman what he wanted, namely a promise to meet someone named George somewhere on Thursday. Once assured of this, the man jumps out at Clapham Junction, while Mrs Brown continues on to Waterloo station, gets out and walks – like so many of the bit characters she observes in London streets – out of Woolf’s life.
What just happened? We have just watched Woolf conjure character and interest out of an apparently chance and trivial encounter and she begins to make her point:
I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite. I believe that all novels, that is to say, deal with character, and that it is to express character — not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved.
She reminds us that Arnold Bennett claimed that fictional characters must be ‘real’ to make a book work, but Woolf asks the obvious question: what is reality? One man’s reality is another man’s nonsense.
For instance, in this article he says that Dr Watson in Sherlock Holmes is real to him: to me Dr Watson is a sack stuffed with straw, a dummy, a figure of fun.
Anyway, her point is this: Why are there no plausible characters in contemporary (1920s) fiction? She has another go at Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy, saying their books lack the completion and closure of, say, Jane Austen. They miss something, they are incomplete.
To make her point she entertainingly speculates what Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett would have made of her made-up Mrs Brown. Her three little parodies are unusually funny for Woolf. She spends most effort on Bennett’s version. Then, to check, she takes down a novel of his, Hilda Lessways. She quotes from it, from the long factual description of Hilda Lessway’s house, in order to graphically demonstrate what a blizzard of realistic detail clutters up Bennett’s texts. No wonder his novels are so bloody long.
But Woolf says Bennett’s approach is the wrong way round. The house isn’t important, the person living in it, Hilda, is the important thing.
Back to 1910 and Woolf says that E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence spoiled their early work by giving in to the British public’s need for conventions and facts. They compromised with what she calls the Edwardian quality of Wells-Galsworthy-Bennett’s books. Foster and Lawrence had to wriggle free of the old conventions in order to capture the uniqueness of ‘Mrs Brown’.
By now we can see that this ‘Mrs Brown’ has become a metaphor for a particular view of reality, of Life as portrayed in fiction. And so Woolf comes to the present day and tells us that she can hear all around her the sound of authors crashing and smashing down those Victorian-Edwardian conventions in order to convey the truth of life. But the trouble with contemporary authors is they don’t know what to replace all those dead old conventions with. Hence the sense of confusion and lack of common values which she lamented in ‘How it strikes a contemporary’. It’s one thing to tear down the old rule, but what are the new rules and how do we agree on them?
Then Woolf is surprisingly harsh on a couple of notorious modern writers, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. She condemns Joyce for his indecency and Eliot for his obscurity. It’s part of her broader point that modern writers have to waste so much of their energy smashing the old conventions and forging their own way. This was not true of her ideal writers from earlier times, authors like Jane Austen or Macauley the historian, who were at one with their times and so wrote easily and gracefully. Instead:
We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments. We must reflect that where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition. Ulysses, Queen Victoria, Mr Prufrock — to give Mrs Brown some of the names she has made famous lately — is a little pale and dishevelled by the time her rescuers reach her.
Drawing to a conclusion, Woolf asks her readers to be tolerant of the problems and difficulties of modern fiction, to ‘tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure.’ Modern authors are trying their best but they are having to invent a whole new world.
After all this talk about smashing and crashing and difficulties, she ends with the surprising claim that:
We are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature. But it can only be reached if we are determined never, never to desert Mrs Brown.
Summary
Well, this is a Great Essay. She delivers a good, clear point of view, forcefully and vividly expressed. Just as T.S. Eliot’s essays in the early 1920s helped him think through his position and helped the perplexed public understand what his new type of poetry was trying to do, so Woolf’s essays show her developing her new and radical aesthetic, and this is very interesting. And her criticism of Wells and Bennett’s materialism becomes more debatable, discussable and powerful, the more you read it.
7. ‘Impassioned Prose’ (1926: 8 pages)
Justification of her wish to restore poetry to prose, on the model of her hero Thomas de Quincy.
She means poetic prose, prose poetry. She laments that most prose fiction is resolutely factual, that we are continually told that it is a solecism to include poetic flights in a prose text.
If the critics agree on any point it is on this, that nothing is more reprehensible than for a prose writer to write like a poet. Poetry is poetry and prose is prose—how often have we not heard that! Poetry has one mission and prose another
Trouble is that this occludes half of life, prevents us exploring our subjective, inner lives.
Therefore all that side of the mind which is exposed in solitude they ignore. They ignore its thoughts, its rhapsodies, its dreams, with the result that the people of fiction bursting with energy on one side are atrophied on the other.
Luckily there are in all ages writers who are not themselves of the first rank but who widen the possibilities of writing for contemporaries and successors. The example she has in mind is Thomas de Quincey who wrote a huge amount, and had a poetic sensibility, but never wrote any poetry because he didn’t have the sustained gift; and by the same token wasn’t interested enough in people to be a novelist so never write fiction.
In what form was he to express this that was the most real part of his own existence? There was none ready made to his hand. He invented, as he claimed, ‘modes of impassioned prose‘. With immense elaboration and art he formed a style in which to express these ‘visionary scenes derived from the world of dreams’. For such prose there were no precedents, he believed; and he begged the reader to remember ‘the perilous difficulty’ of an attempt where ‘a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins the whole music’.
And so he carved out his own space, writing poetically in the other prose genres: essays, biographies, confessions and memoirs.
He was an exception and a solitary. He made a class for himself. He widened the choice for others.
She goes on to describe at length the strength and weakness of her favourite among de Quincey’s books, the ‘Autobiographic Sketches’. By this stage she’s made her point, for surely she is the modern de Quincey, deploying ‘modes of impassioned prose’ to convey a deeper perception of life, than the stony prose writers. We sit with our friends and family, eating, talking, in too close proximity.
But draw a little apart, see people in groups, as outlines, and they become at once memorable and full of beauty. Then it is not the actual sight or sound itself that matters, but the reverberations that it makes as it travels through our minds. These are often to be found far away, strangely transformed; but it is only by gathering up and putting together these echoes and fragments that we arrive at the true nature of our experience.
She is describing her own technique.
8. How Should One Read A Book? (1926: 11 days)
Quite frequently Woolf displays the number one mistake of intellectuals and writers in thinking that the present moment, the moment she’s writing about, is somehow uniquely special, and moreover uniquely degraded and decadent. Thus she opens this essay:
At this late hour of the world’s history…
But it isn’t ‘this late hour of the world’s history’. Who’s to say this isn’t an early hour in the world’s history, that the last 3,000 years are just a prelude to what comes after. In fact they obviously will be. Human history will go on as long as there are humans to record it and who knows how long that will be – maybe thousands and thousands of years to come. This decline-and-fall trope is a cliché and doesn’t give you confidence of her broader understanding of history or society. You get the feeling that her orientating herself in culture and history is subtly awry, but then there’s something awry about all her writings, the detachment, the alienation, but also the odd insights of the mentally ill.
Anyway, her point is that there are more books than ever before (another cliché, something she also complains about in ‘The Decay of Essay-Writing’) so how should you read them? Well, there are no rules but the first thing to acknowledge is that books come in all shapes and sizes and genres and forms and we should respond appropriately.
Her essays often address issues which feel very outdated; her values are those of another age. Still in thrall to Victorian earnestness, she asks whether one should read books for pleasure or profit? Answer: no-one really cares. It’s a non-question. Maybe a GCSE-level question to get schoolchildren thinking but tangential to our concerns.
Anyway, she does make one simple Big Point, which is that nobody really understands what reading is. The physical activity, yes; you can test people on their ability to read, on their level of comprehension, on what they understand or remember. But at the more advanced level of registering nuance and implication… I wonder if there’s a specialist area of modern neuroscience devoted to the science of reading?
Belles letterism
Belles-lettres is a category of writing, originally meaning beautiful or fine writing… The phrase is sometimes used pejoratively for writing that focuses on the aesthetic qualities of language rather than its practical application.
I can’t see how a lot of Woolf could not be considered belle-letterism: the concern for fine, flowing elegant prose redolent of nineteenth century fine writing (Lamb, Pater); the use of the royal ‘we’; mention of ‘turning to the bookcase’ which evokes the comfy air of a book-lined study in a fine house or gentlemen’s club. It’s a permanent puzzle how radical and drastic her experiments in fiction were and yet how conservative and backward-looking her prose style is.
The problem [of what to read] is not so simple in a library as at the Zoölogical Gardens. Books have a great deal in common; they are always overflowing their boundaries; they are always breeding new species from unexpected matches among themselves. It is difficult to know how to approach them, to which species each belongs. But if we remember, as we turn to the bookcase, that each of these books was written by a pen which, consciously or unconsciously, tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that, adventuring the other; if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string.
The leisurely, all-the-time-in-the-world elegance of this authorial ‘we’, the royal we, the superior ‘we’ of the privileged literary elite.
Co-production
At the end of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, Woolf introduced the idea that any book is a co-production between the writer and the reader. (This idea was taken up decades later, in the late 1960s, by reader response theory and to some extent anticipates Roland Barthes’ ideas about the death of the author and the birth of the creative reader.) She does the same again, here:
To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice.
Writers’ worlds
She asks us to imagine encountering a beggar in the street (as I, in fact, routinely do, every time I go shopping there are people begging or selling the Big Issue at both the front and the back entrance to Sainsburys: no escaping the modern beggar in London town).
Woolf gives an entertaining account of how such an encounter would be turned into fiction by 1) Daniel Defoe, 2) Jane Austen, 3) Thomas Hardy. Out of this little frolic she makes the fairly obvious point that each really great writer is a world of their own with a distinct perspective.
It is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him all he can give us. We have to remember that it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision. It is by reason of this masterliness of theirs, this uncompromising idiosyncrasy, that great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us.
She makes the equally obvious point that: sometimes the writing we have to work hardest to understand is ultimately the most rewarding; and that different works appeal to us in different moods. (Along the way she betrays her bias or premise that ‘real books [are] works of pure imagination’, in contrast to histories and other factual books.)
Over-reading
She mentions something equally as common but which I’ve never seen described before, the risk of ‘over-reading – when you overdo it with a book you’re enjoying, read too much, become tired, and suddenly realise you’re tired, fed up, and abruptly take against the whole thing:
Suddenly the book becomes dull as ditchwater and heavy as lead. We yawn and stretch and can not attend.
The cure (pretty obviously) is to read something else of a different type, Woolf’s favourite alternatives being biography or history. But:
However interesting facts may be, they are an inferior form of fiction, and gradually we become impatient of their weakness and diffuseness, of their compromises and evasions, of the slovenly sentences which they make for themselves, and are eager to revive ourselves with the greater intensity and truth of fiction.
Thus speaks the novelist who (surprise) believes that the novel is the highest form of writing. The risk of reading literary writers is taking them at their own value. As you get older you realise there are many other types of writing with just as much claim to importance, and that’s before the thousands of other human activities we need (doctors, nurses, teachers etc). Presenting the reading and writing of novels as some kind of heroic endeavour is a form of chauvinism; deeper down, a type of narcissism, defined as: ‘an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one’s own needs.’ All Woolf’s essays are about herself.
Reading poetry
Then she switches to what is required of reading poetry and its rewards.
Anyone who has read a poem with pleasure will remember the sudden conviction, the sudden recollection (for it seems sometimes as if we were about to say, or had in some previous existence already said, what Shakespeare is actually now saying), which accompany the reading of poetry, and give it its exaltation and intensity.
Good description.
After-reading
In the last part of the essay she describes what happens when we’ve finished reading a book i.e. we judge it. Here she suggests that in reading we go through two processes: one might be called the actual reading; the other the after-reading. It is really in the after-reading that all the bits and pieces we’ve been bombarded with during the reading coalesce into an overall view and opinion. Neat idea.
And is it good or bad, the novel, the fiction you just read? It’s the question which has been dogging literary theory for two and a half thousand years. The simple answer is – it’s up to you. Critics can’t help. They all disagree with each other. Opinions aren’t much help because ‘minds differ too much to admit of close correspondence in matters of detail’. The best approach is:
by realizing our own impression as acutely as possible and referring this to the judgments which we have gradually formulated in the past.
We must ask demanding questions of the book and follow the answers to the limits of our ability. Only when we’ve completed this process can we hold our opinion up against other people’s or the criteria laid down by the great critics.
Summary
To summarise:
A good reader will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as he can. In the next place, he will judge with the utmost severity. Every book, he will remember, has the right to be judged by the best of its kind. He will be adventurous, broad in his choice, true to his own instincts, yet ready to consider those of other people.
A defence of reading
She has a last word for the moralists who criticise reading books as a lazy self-indulgent activity. She thinks the firmest defence is that books give pleasure, ‘mysterious, unknown, useless as it is’.
This is the argument of an aesthete and could have come from the lips of Oscar Wilde (we always have to remember what a Victorian Woolf was). The most obvious defence of reading is that it is educational and an educated population is an undeniable public good. The more educated and literate a population, the more economically active, productive and wealth creating. Then there’s the liberal defence that reading imaginative literature broadens the mind and produces a population of broad-minded, empathetic readers. Personally, I’ve always found this a weak argument because the twentieth century provides ample evidence of highly literate and civilised populations which allowed fiendish behaviour, Germany being the obvious one. Other factors are required to produce a liberal, civilised population besides just widespread literacy and reading.
Personally, I think practical arguments which eschew lofty aims and avoid moral principles, are most effective in a debate. And so it’s most effective not to argue that reading is valuable for this or that noble or social or moral end, but to start with the empirical fact that lots of people simply like reading. Begin with the evidence in the real world, the statistics about the numbers of books published, bought, borrowed and read each year. Can’t argue with the facts.
Lots of people go to football matches or pop concerts or go fishing or potter in their gardens. Reading takes its place among the range of activities practiced by tens of millions of people in a civilised society. It needs no more defence than that.
Comic conclusion
Woolf concludes with a piece of satirical exaggeration, stylish and silly, which made me smile.
That pleasure [of reading] is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgment when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.
Heroically wrong. Houses, pavements, plumbing, wiring, power stations, reservoirs and sewerage farms aren’t designed and built by bookish readers. But it’s a rare florescence of humour in Woolf’s writing and so a little treat.
9. Poetry, Fiction and the Future (1927: 11 pages)
Describes a theoretical work of fiction in the future which will incorporate into its prose a high degree of poetry and drama, pointing towards her own novel The Waves.
Woolf claims that the present (1927) is problematic for fiction. She and so many of her contemporaries are struggling to express themselves. Why? One reason is that poetry, which was so easily available and expressive for the Victorians, has become impossibly complicated and difficult. Not only that but society is in turmoil, with the old Christianity destroyed yet people yearning to believe; with the awesome scale of scientific discoveries, from the age of the earth to the size of the universe, crushing the human spirit, creating an atmosphere of ‘doubt and conflict’.
For some reasons she moves on to consider the poetic play and notes how the attempts of the great nineteenth century poets – Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne – were miserable failures, and how the attempts of her contemporaries (maybe she’s thinking of T.S. Eliot’s doomed attempts to revive the play in Elizabethan blank verse) have likewise failed.
Why? You have to go back to the Elizabethan dramatists (as she so often in her essays goes back to Shakespeare) to understand why. It’s because the Elizabethan playwrights could write about anything; they completely shared a worldview and experiences and a diction with their audiences and readers, and so didn’t need to hold back. Modern authors, by contrast, live in a highly atomised, class-ridden society, where everyone lives locked up in their own houses, in their own living rooms, listening to their own records or radio or reading their own books, each in little worlds of their own. No wonder the modern writer finds it so hard to cut through.
Above all there’s a corrosive cynicism which means the modern writer daren’t be caught out celebrating simple beauty without hastening to show the dark and ugly side of life as well. Poetry hasn’t the flexibility, the ability to change subjects and register, which the fragmented modern mind requires.
Therefore – and here’s her point – it may be that modern prose is going to take over some of the duties formerly performed by poetry. It may be that in 10 or 15 years’ time prose will be used for purposes it has never been used for before; that that cannibal, the novel, will have swallowed up even more of the territory of literature.
In particular there may come a book which is written in prose but with the sensibility of poetry, which will have some of the exaltation of poetry but written in prose. It will be read but not acted. We won’t even have a name for its hybrid form. I realise that she is referring to the experimental novel she was currently writing, The Waves, published in 1931 and which she referred to not as a novel but as a ‘playpoem’, and she goes on to describe other ways in which poetry will be melded with prose in her experiment.
Surprisingly, maybe, she thinks the classic novel which most successfully incorporated poetry is Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne. Because it is continually changing subject matter, tone and register, we tend not to notice that there are passages of deliberately exquisite feeling, because these are completely incorporated into the text alongside the farce and pratfalls and bawdy and sentiment. Sterne fashions a prose which is getting on for being as flexible and omni-expressive as the Elizabethans.
10. Craftsmanship (1937)
A radio broadcast on April 20th, 1937. This text is immediately bewildering because it starts with a series of claims all of which seem questionable, simplistic or wrong.
We know little that is certain about words, but this we do know—words never make anything that is useful; and words are the only things that tell the truth and nothing but the truth.
‘Words tell the truth and nothing but the truth.’ This is so wrong it’s hard to know where to start. What words are, what language is and how it works, is too encyclopedic a subject to be knocked off in a pithy phrase. The claim is so vague and insubstantial I wondered if it’s one of her mad essays.
Let us then take for our starting point the statement that words are not useful. This happily needs little proving, for we are all aware of it. When we travel on the Tube, for example, when we wait on the platform for a train, there, hung up in front of us, on an illuminated signboard, are the words ‘Passing Russell Square.’ We look at those words; we repeat them; we try to impress that useful fact upon our minds; the next train will pass Russell Square. We say over and over again as we pace, ‘Passing Russell Square, passing Russell Square.’ And then as we say them, the words shuffle and change, and we find ourselves saying, ‘Passing away saith the world, passing away… The leaves decay and fall, the vapours weep their burthen to the ground. Man comes…’ And then we wake up and find ourselves at King’s Cross.
Woolf comes from another time and place. Having never done any real work, having servants to do all the housework, leading a pampered, sheltered life, Woolf has no idea, no idea at all, of the importance of words in professional contexts, in the law, in the civil service, in the administration of nations and counties and cities, in rules and regulations, in the vast world of healthcare and medicine. Only if you leave out most of what people in civilised societies use language for, can you acquiesce in the dreamy digressions of this pampered lady.
Very symptomatically the quote which ends the piece – ‘The leaves decay and fall, the vapours weep their burthen to the ground. Man comes…’ – is from Tennyson, patron saint of mellifluous dreaminess. It’s a characteristically Victorian reference point, to a man who devoted his long career to ignoring the gritty, complex realities of the Victorian age and created a dream otherworld into which his many readers and fans could take refuge. Despite her often challenging handling of her content, in terms of her style Woolf’s novels offer a similar level of mellifluous, elegantly shaped escapism, part of the reason for her enduring popularity.
Credit
‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most of the essays can be found online. The OWC introduction can be read on Amazon.
Related links
- Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf on Planet Gutenberg (a different selection)
- The Virginia Woolf Society
Books & Boots 