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Title:      Woolf Essays
Author:     Virginia Woolf
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Language:   English
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Woolf Essays
Author:     Virginia Woolf





CONTENTS

THE COMMON READER
"JANE EYRE" AND "WUTHERING HEIGHTS"
THE PATRON AND THE CROCUS
THE MODERN ESSAY
THE DEATH OF THE MOTH
EVENING OVER SUSSEX: REFLECTIONS IN A MOTOR CAR
THREE PICTURES
OLD MRS. GREY
STREET HAUNTING: A LONDON ADVENTURE
JONES AND WILKINSON
"TWELFTH NIGHT" AT THE OLD VIC
MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ
THE HUMANE ART
TWO ANTIQUARIES: WALPOLE AND COLE
THE REV. WILLIAM COLE: A LETTER
THE HISTORIAN AND "THE GIBBON"
REFLECTIONS AT SHEFFIELD PLACE
THE MAN AT THE GATE
SARA COLERIDGE
"NOT ONE OF US"
HENRY JAMES
  1. WITHIN THE RIM
  2. THE OLD ORDER
  3. THE LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
GEORGE MOORE
THE NOVELS OF E. M. FORSTER
MIDDLEBROW
THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
CRAFTSMANSHIP
A LETTER TO A YOUNG POET
WHY?
PROFESSIONS FOR WOMEN
THOUGHTS ON PEACE IN AN AIR RAID




THE COMMON READER



There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson's Gray which might well be written up
in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books,
where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people. " . . . I
rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of
readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of
subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim
to poetical honours." It defines their qualities; it dignifies their
aims; it bestows upon a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and
is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction of
the great man's approval.

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and
the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so
generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge
or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct
to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some
kind of whole--a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the
art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and
ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of
looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection,
laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now
this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds
it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and
rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be
pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the
final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth
while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant
in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.




"JANE EYRE" AND "WUTHERING HEIGHTS"



Of the hundred years that have passed since Charlotte Bronte was born,
she, the centre now of so much legend, devotion, and literature, lived
but thirty-nine. It is strange to reflect how different those legends
might have been had her life reached the ordinary human span. She might
have become, like some of her famous contemporaries, a figure familiarly
met with in London and elsewhere, the subject of pictures and anecdotes
innumerable, the writer of many novels, of memoirs possibly, removed from
us well within the memory of the middle-aged in all the splendour of
established fame. She might have been wealthy, she might have been
prosperous. But it is not so. When we think of her we have to imagine
some one who had no lot in our modern world; we have to cast our minds
back to the 'fifties of the last century, to a remote parsonage upon the
wild Yorkshire moors. In that parsonage, and on those moors, unhappy and
lonely, in her poverty and her exaltation, she remains for ever.

These circumstances, as they affected her character, may have left their
traces on her work. A novelist, we reflect, is bound to build up his
structure with much very perishable material which begins by lending it
reality and ends by cumbering it with rubbish. As we open JAYNE EYRE
once more we cannot stifle the suspicion that we shall find her world of
imagination as antiquated, mid-Victorian, and out of date as the
parsonage on the moor, a place only to be visited by the curious, only
preserved by the pious. So we open JAYNE EYRE; and in two pages every
doubt is swept clean from our minds.


   Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the
left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me
from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the
leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon.
Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near, a scene of wet
lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly
before a long and lamentable blast.


There is nothing there more perishable than the moor itself, or more
subject to the sway of fashion than the "long and lamentable blast". Nor
is this exhilaration short-lived. It rushes us through the entire
volume, without giving us time to think, without letting us lift our eyes
from the page. So intense is our absorption that if some one moves in the
room the movement seems to take place not there but up in Yorkshire. The
writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road, makes us see what
she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to forget her. At the
end we are steeped through and through with the genius, the vehemence,
the indignation of Charlotte Bronte. Remarkable faces, figures of strong
outline and gnarled feature have flashed upon us in passing; but it is
through her eyes that we have seen them. Once she is gone, we seek for
them in vain. Think of Rochester and we have to think of JAYNE EYRE. Think
of the moor, and again there is JAYNE EYRE. Think of the drawing-room,
[Note, below] even, those "white carpets on which seemed laid brilliant
garlands of flowers", that "pale Parian mantelpiece" with its Bohemia
glass of "ruby red" and the "general blending of snow and fire"--what is
all that except JAYNE EYRE?

[Note: Charlotte and Emily Brontë had much the same sense of colour.
". . . we saw--ah! it was beautiful--a splendid place carpeted with crimson,
and crimson-covered chairs and tables, and a pure white ceiling bordered
by gold, a shower of glass drops hanging in silver chains from the
centre, and shimmering with little soft tapers " (WUTHERING HEIGHTS).
"Yet it was merely a very pretty drawing-room, and within it a boudoir,
both spread with white carpets, on which seemed laid brilliant garlands
of flowers; both ceiled with snowy mouldings of white grapes and vine
leaves, beneath which glowed in rich contrast crimson couches and
ottomans; while the ornaments on the pale Parian mantelpiece were of
sparkling Bohemia glass, ruby red; and between the windows large mirrors
repeated the general blending of snow and fire" (JANE EYRE).]

The drawbacks of being Jane Eyre are not far to seek. Always to be a
governess and always to be in love is a serious limitation in a world
which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the other.
The characters of a Jane Austen or of a Tolstoi have a million facets
compared with these. They live and are complex by means of their effect
upon many different people who serve to mirror them in the round. They
move hither and thither whether their creators watch them or not, and the
world in which they live seems to us an independent world which we can
visit, now that they have created it, by ourselves. Thomas Hardy is more
akin to Charlotte Bronte in the power of his personality and the
narrowness of his vision. But the differences are vast. As we read JUDE
THE OBSCURE we are not rushed to a finish; we brood and ponder and drift
away from the text in plethoric trains of thought which build up round
the characters an atmosphere of question and suggestion of which they are
themselves, as often as not, unconscious. Simple peasants as they are, we
are forced to confront them with destinies and questionings of the hugest
import, so that often it seems as if the most important characters in a
Hardy novel are those which have no names. Of this power, of this
speculative curiosity, Charlotte Brontë has no trace. She does not
attempt to solve the problems of human life; she is even unaware that
such problems exist; all her force, and it is the more tremendous for
being constricted, goes into the assertion, "I love", "I hate",
"I suffer".

For the self-centred and self-limited writers have a power denied the
more catholic and broad-minded. Their impressions are close packed and
strongly stamped between their narrow walls. Nothing issues from their
minds which has not been marked with their own impress. They learn little
from other writers, and what they adopt they cannot assimilate. Both
Hardy and Charlotte Brontë appear to have founded their styles upon a
stiff and decorous journalism. The staple of their prose is awkward and
unyielding. But both with labour and the most obstinate integrity, by
thinking every thought until it has subdued words to itself, have forged
for themselves a prose which takes the mould of their minds entire; which
has, into the bargain, a beauty, a power, a swiftness of its own.
Charlotte Brontë, at least, owed nothing to the reading of many books.
She never learnt the smoothness of the professional writer, or acquired
his ability to stuff and sway his language as he chooses. "I could never
rest in communication with strong, discreet, and refined minds, whether
male or female", she writes, as any leader-writer in a provincial journal
might have written; but gathering fire and speed goes on in her own
authentic voice "till I had passed the outworks of conventional reserve
and crossed the threshold of confidence, and won a place by their hearts'
very hearthstone". It is there that she takes her seat; it is the red
and fitful glow of the heart's fire which illumines her page. In other
words, we read Charlotte Brontë not for exquisite observation of
character--her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy--hers
is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life--hers is that of a
country parson's daughter; but for her poetry. Probably that is so with
all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that,
as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make
themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at
war with the accepted order of things which makes them desire to create
instantly rather than to observe patiently. This very ardour, rejecting
half shades and other minor impediments, wings its way past the daily
conduct of ordinary people and allies itself with their more inarticulate
passions. It makes them poets, or, if they choose to write in prose,
intolerant of its restrictions. Hence it is that both Emily and Charlotte
are always invoking the help of nature. They both feel the need of some
more powerful symbol of the vast and slumbering passions in human nature
than words or actions can convey. It is with a description of a storm
that Charlotte ends her finest novel VILLETTE. "The skies hang full and
dark--a wrack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into
strange forms." So she calls in nature to describe a state of mind which
could not otherwise be expressed. But neither of the sisters observed
nature accurately as Dorothy Wordsworth observed it, or painted it
minutely as Tennyson painted it. They seized those aspects of the earth
which were most akin to what they themselves felt or imputed to their
characters, and so their storms, their moors, their lovely spaces of
summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a dull page or
display the writer's powers of observation-they carry on the emotion and
light up the meaning of the book.

The meaning of a book, which lies so often apart from what happens and
what is said and consists rather in some connection which things in
themselves different have had for the writer, is necessarily hard to
grasp. Especially this is so when, like the Brontës, the writer is
poetic, and his meaning inseparable from his language, and itself rather
a mood than a particular observation. WUTHERING HEIGHTS is a more
difficult book to understand than JAYNE EYRE, because Emily was a greater
poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said with eloquence and
splendour and passion "I love ", "I hate", "I suffer". Her experience,
though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there is
no "I" in WUTHERING HEIGHTS. There are no governesses. There are no
employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily
was inspired by some more general conception. The impulse which urged her
to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out
upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power
to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout
the novel--a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say
something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely "I
love" or "I hate", but "we, the whole human race " and "you, the
eternal powers . . ." the sentence remains unfinished. It is not strange
that it should be so; rather it is astonishing that she can make us feel
what she had it in her to say at all. It surges up in the half-articulate
words of Catherine Earnshaw, "If all else perished and HE remained, I
should still continue to be; and if all else remained and he were
annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger; I should not
seem part of it". It breaks out again in the presence of the dead. I see a
repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of
the endless and shadowless hereafter--the eternity they have entered--where
life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy and joy in
its fulness." It is this suggestion of power underlying the apparitions
of human nature and lifting them up into the presence of greatness that
gives the book its huge stature among other novels. But it was not enough
for Emily Brontë to write a few lyrics, to utter a cry, to express a
creed. In her poems she did this once and for all, and her poems will
perhaps outlast her novel. But she was novelist as well as poet. She must
take upon herself a more laborious and a more ungrateful task. She must
face the fact of other existences, grapple with the mechanism of external
things, build up, in recognisable shape, farms and houses and report the
speeches of men and women who existed independently of herself. And so we
reach these summits of emotion not by rant or rhapsody but by hearing a
girl sing old songs to herself as she rocks in the branches of a tree; by
watching the moor sheep crop the turf; by listening to the soft wind
breathing through the grass. The life at the farm with all its
absurdities and its improbability is laid open to us. We are given every
opportunity of comparing WUTHERING HEIGHTS with a real farm and
Heathcliff with a real man. How, we are allowed to ask, can there be
truth or insight or the finer shades of emotion in men and women who so
little resemble what we have seen ourselves? But even as we ask it we see
in Heathcliff the brother that a sister of genius might have seen; he is
impossible we say, but nevertheless no boy in literature has a more vivid
existence than his. So it is with the two Catherines; never could women
feel as they do or act in their manner, we say. All the same, they are
the most lovable women in English fiction. It is as if she could tear up
all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable
transparences with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers,
then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its
dependence on facts; with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so
that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the
thunder roar




THE PATRON AND THE CROCUS



Young men and women beginning to write are generally given the plausible
but utterly impracticable advice to write what they have to write as
shortly as possible, as clearly as possible, and without other thought in
their minds except to say exactly what is in them. Nobody ever adds on
these occasions the one thing needful: "And be sure you choose your
patron wisely", though that is the gist of the whole matter. For a book
is always written for somebody to read, and, since the patron is not
merely the paymaster, but also in a very subtle and insidious way the
instigator and inspirer of what is written, it is of the utmost
importance that he should be a desirable man.

But who, then, is the desirable man--the patron who will cajole the best
out of the writer's brain and bring to birth the most varied and vigorous
progeny of which he is capable? Different ages have answered the question
differently. The Elizabethans, to speak roughly, chose the aristocracy to
write for and the playhouse public. The eighteenth-century patron was a
combination of coffee-house wit and Grub Street bookseller. In the
nineteenth century the great writers wrote for the half-crown magazines
and the leisured classes. And looking back and applauding the splendid
results of these different alliances, it all seems enviably simple, and
plain as a pikestaff compared with our own predicament--for whom should we
write? For the present supply of patrons is of unexampled and bewildering
variety. There is the daily Press, the weekly Press, the monthly Press;
the English public and the American public; the best-seller public and the
worst-seller public; the highbrow public and the red-blood public; all
now organised self-conscious entities capable through their various
mouthpieces of making their needs known and their approval or displeasure
felt. Thus the writer who has been moved by the sight of the first crocus
in Kensington Gardens has, before he sets pen to paper, to choose from a
crowd of competitors the particular patron who suits him best. It is
futile to say, "Dismiss them all; think only of your crocus", because
writing is a method of communication; and the crocus is an imperfect
crocus until it has been shared. The first man or the last may write for
himself alone, but he is an exception and an unenviable one at that, and
the gulls are welcome to his works if the gulls can read them.

Granted, then, that every writer has some public or other at the end of
his pen, the high-minded will say that it should be a submissive public,
accepting obediently whatever he likes to give it. Plausible as the
theory sounds, great risks are attached to it. For in that case the
writer remains conscious of his public, yet is superior to it--an
uncomfortable and unfortunate combination, as the works of Samuel Butler,
George Meredith, and Henry James may be taken to prove. Each despised the
public; each desired a public; each failed to attain a public; and each
wreaked his failure upon the public by a succession, gradually increasing
in intensity, of angularities, obscurities, and affectations which no
writer whose patron was his equal and friend would have thought it
necessary to inflict. Their crocuses, in consequence, are tortured
plants, beautiful and bright, but with something wry-necked about them,
malformed, shrivelled on the one side, overblown on the other. A touch of
the sun would have done them a world of good. Shall we then rush to the
opposite extreme and accept (if in fancy alone) the flattering proposals
which the editors of the Times and the Daily News may be supposed to make
us--"Twenty pounds down for your crocus in precisely fifteen hundred
words, which shall blossom upon every breakfast table from John o' Groats
to the Land's End before nine o'clock to-morrow morning with the writer's
name attached"?

But will one crocus be enough, and must it not be a very brilliant yellow
to shine so far, to cost so much, and to have one's name attached to it?
The Press is undoubtedly a great multiplier of crocuses. But if we look
at some of these plants, we shall find that they are only very distantly
related to the original little yellow or purple flower which pokes up
through the grass in Kensington Gardens early in March every year. The
newspaper crocus is an amazing but still a very different plant. It fills
precisely the space allotted to it. It radiates a golden glow. It is
genial, affable, warm-hearted. It is beautifully finished, too, for let
nobody think that the art of "our dramatic critic" of the Times or of
Mr. Lynd of the Daily News is an easy one. It is no despicable feat to
start a million brains running at nine o'clock in the morning, to give
two million eyes something bright and brisk and amusing to look at. But
the night comes and these flowers fade. So little bits of glass lose
their lustre if you take them out of the sea; great prima donnas howl
like hyenas if you shut them up in telephone boxes; and the most
brilliant of articles when removed from its element is dust and sand and
the husks of straw. Journalism embalmed in a book is unreadable.

The patron we want, then, is one who will help us to preserve our flowers
from decay. But as his qualities change from age to age, and it needs
considerable integrity and conviction not to be dazzled by the
pretensions or bamboozled by the persuasions of the competing crowd, this
business of patron-finding is one of the tests and trials of authorship.
To know whom to write for is to know how to write. Some of the modern
patron's qualities are, however, fairly plain. The writer will require at
this moment, it is obvious, a patron with the book-reading habit rather
than the play-going habit. Nowadays, too, he must be instructed in the
literature of other times and races. But there are other qualities which
our special weaknesses and tendencies demand in him. There is the
question of indecency, for instance, which plagues us and puzzles us much
more than it did the Elizabethans. The twentieth-century patron must be
immune from shock. He must distinguish infallibly between the little clod
of manure which sticks to the crocus of necessity, and that which is
plastered to it out of bravado. He must be a judge, too, of those social
influences which inevitably play so large a part in modern literature,
and able to say which matures and fortifies, which inhibits and makes
sterile. Further, there is emotion for him to pronounce on, and in no
department can he do more useful work than in bracing a writer against
sentimentality on the one hand and a craven fear of expressing his
feeling on the other. It is worse, he will say, and perhaps more common,
to be afraid of feeling than to feel too much. He will add, perhaps,
something about language, and point out how many words Shakespeare used
and how much grammar Shakespeare violated, while we, though we keep our
fingers so demurely to the black notes on the piano, have not appreciably
improved upon ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. And if you can forget your sex
altogether, he will say, so much the better; a writer has none. But all
this is by the way--elementary and disputable. The patron's prime quality
is something different, only to be expressed perhaps by the use of that
convenient word which cloaks so much--atmosphere. It is necessary that
the patron should shed and envelop the crocus in an atmosphere which
makes it appear a plant of the very highest importance, so that to
misrepresent it is the one outrage not to be forgiven this side of the
grave. He must make us feel that a single crocus, if it be a real crocus,
is enough for him; that he does not want to be lectured, elevated,
instructed, or improved; that he is sorry that he bullied Carlyle into
vociferation, Tennyson into idyllics, and Ruskin into insanity; that he
is now ready to efface himself or assert himself as his writers require;
that he is bound to them by a more than maternal tie; that they are twins
indeed, one dying if the other dies, one flourishing if the other
flourishes; that the fate of literature depends upon their happy
alliance--all of which proves, as we began by saying, that the choice of a
patron is of the highest importance. But how to choose rightly? How to
write well? Those are the questions.




THE MODERN ESSAY



As Mr. Rhys truly says, it is unnecessary to go profoundly into the
history and origin of the essay--whether it derives from Socrates or
Siranney the Persian--since, like all living things, its present is more
important than its past. Moreover, the family is widely spread; and while
some of its representatives have risen in the world and wear their
coronets with the best, others pick up a precarious living in the gutter
near Fleet Street. The form, too, admits variety. The essay can be short
or long, serious or trifling, about God and Spinoza, or about turtles and
Cheapside. But as we turn over the pages of these five little volumes,
[MODEM ENGLISH ESSAYS, edited by Ernest Rhys, 5 vols. (Dent).] containing
essays written between 1870 and 1920, certain principles appear to
control the chaos, and we detect in the short period under review
something like the progress of history.

Of all forms of literature, however, the essay is the one which least
calls for the use of long words. The principle which controls it is
simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we
take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an
essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with
its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. In the
interval we may pass through the most various experiences of amusement,
surprise, interest, indignation; we may soar to the heights of fantasy
with Lamb or plunge to the depths of wisdom with Bacon, but we must never
be roused. The essay must lap us about and draw its curtain across the
world.

So great a feat is seldom accomplished, though the fault may well be as
much on the reader's side as on the writer's. Habit and lethargy have
dulled his palate. A novel has a story, a poem rhyme; but what art can
the essayist use in these short lengths of prose to sting us wide awake
and fix us in a trance which is not sleep but rather an intensification
of life--a basking, with every faculty alert, in the sun of pleasure? He
must know--that is the first essential--how to write. His learning may be
as profound as Mark Pattison's, but in an essay it must be so fused by the
magic of writing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the surface
of the texture. Macaulay in one way, Froude in another, did this superbly
over and over again. They have blown more knowledge into us in the course
of one essay than the innumerable chapters of a hundred text-books. But
when Mark Pattison has to tell us, in the space of thirty-five little
pages, about Montaigne, we feel that he had not previously assimilated M.
Grün. M. Grün was a gentleman who once wrote a bad book. M. Grün and his
book should have been embalmed for our perpetual delight in amber. But
the process is fatiguing; it requires more time and perhaps more temper
than Pattison had at his command. He served M. Grün up raw, and he
remains a crude berry among the cooked meats, upon which our teeth must
grate for ever. Something of the sort applies to Matthew Arnold and a
certain translator of Spinoza. Literal truth-telling and finding fault
with a culprit for his good are out of place in an essay, where
everything should be for our good and rather for eternity than for the
March number of the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW. But if the voice of the scold
should never be heard in this narrow plot, there is another voice which
is as a plague of locusts--the voice of a man stumbling drowsily among
loose words, clutching aimlessly at vague ideas, the voice, for example,
of Mr. Hutton in the following passage:


Add to this that his married life was very brief, only seven years and a
half, being unexpectedly cut short, and that his passionate reverence for
his wife's memory and genius--in his own words, "a religion"--was one
which, as he must have been perfectly sensible, he could not make to
appear otherwise than extravagant, not to say an hallucination, in the
eyes of the rest of mankind, and yet that he was possessed by an
irresistible yearning to attempt to embody it in all the tender and
enthusiastic hyperbole of which it is so pathetic to find a man who
gained his fame by his "dry-light" a master, and it is impossible not
to feel that the human incidents in Mr. Mill's career are very sad.


A book could take that blow, but it sinks an essay. A biography in two
volumes is indeed the proper depository; for there, where the licence is
so much wider, and hints and glimpses of outside things make part of the
feast (we refer to the old type of Victorian volume), these yawns and
stretches hardly matter, and have indeed some positive value of their
own. But that value, which is contributed by the reader, perhaps
illicitly, in his desire to get as much into the book from all possible
sources as he can, must be ruled out here.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow or
other, by dint of labour or bounty of nature, or both combined, the essay
must be pure--pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness,
deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter. Of all writers in the first
volume, Walter Pater best achieves this arduous task, because before
setting out to write his essay ("Notes on Leonardo da Vinci") he has
somehow contrived to get his material fused. He is a learned man, but it
is not knowledge of Leonardo that remains with us, but a vision, such as
we get in a good novel where everything contributes to bring the writer's
conception as a whole before us. Only here, in the essay, where the
bounds are so strict and facts have to be used in their nakedness, the
true writer like Walter Pater makes these limitations yield their own
quality. Truth will give it authority; from its narrow limits he will get
shape and intensity; and then there is no more fitting place for some of
those ornaments which the old writers loved and we, by calling them
ornaments, presumably despise. Nowadays nobody would have the courage to
embark on the once famous description of Leonardo's lady who has


learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas and
keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with
Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as
Saint Anne, the mother of Mary. . . .


The passage is too thumb-marked to slip naturally into the context. But
when we come unexpectedly upon "the smiling of women and the motion of
great waters", or upon "full of the refinement of the dead, in sad,
earth-coloured raiment, set with pale stones", we suddenly remember that
we have ears and we have eyes, and that the English language fills a long
array of stout volumes with innumerable words, many of which are of more
than one syllable. The only living Englishman who ever looks into these
volumes is, of course, a gentleman of Polish extraction. But doubtless
our abstention saves us much gush, much rhetoric, much high-stepping and
cloud-prancing, and for the sake of the prevailing sobriety and
hard-headedness we should be willing to barter the splendour of Sir
Thomas Browne and the vigour of Swift.

Yet, if the essay admits more properly than biography or fiction of
sudden boldness and metaphor, and can be polished till every atom of its
surface shines, there are dangers in that too. We are soon in sight of
ornament. Soon the current, which is the life-blood of literature, runs
slow; and instead of sparkling and flashing or moving with a quieter
impulse which has a deeper excitement, words coagulate together in frozen
sprays which, like the grapes on a Christmas-tree, glitter for a single
night, but are dusty and garish the day after. The temptation to decorate
is great where the theme may be of the slightest. What is there to
interest another in the fact that one has enjoyed a walking tour, or has
amused oneself by rambling down Cheapside and looking at the turtles in
Mr. Sweeting's shop window? Stevenson and Samuel Butler chose very
different methods of exciting our interest in these domestic themes.
Stevenson, of course, trimmed and polished and set out his matter in the
traditional eighteenth-century form. It is admirably done, but we cannot
help feeling anxious, as the essay proceeds, lest the material may give
out under the craftsman's fingers. The ingot is so small, the
manipulation so incessant. And perhaps that is why the peroration


To sit still and contemplate--to remember the faces of women without
desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be
everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and
what you are


has the sort of insubstantiality which suggests that by the time he got
to the end he had left himself nothing solid to work with. Butler adopted
the very opposite method. Think your own thoughts, he seems to say, and
speak them as plainly as you can. These turtles in the shop window which
appear to leak out of their shells through heads and feet suggest a fatal
faithfulness to a fixed idea. And so, striding unconcernedly from one
idea to the next, we traverse a large stretch of ground; observe that a
wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing; that Mary Queen of Scots
wears surgical boots and is subject to fits near the Horse Shoe in
Tottenham Court Road; take it for granted that no one really cares about
Aeschylus; and so, with many amusing anecdotes and some profound
reflections, reach the peroration, which is that, as he had been told not
to see more in Cheapside than he could get into twelve pages of the
Universal Review, he had better stop. And yet obviously Butler is at
least as careful of our pleasure as Stevenson; and to write like oneself
and call it not writing is a much harder exercise in style than to write
like Addison and call it writing well.

But, however much they differ individually, the Victorian essayists yet
had something in common. They wrote at greater length than is now usual,
and they wrote for a public which had not only time to sit down to its
magazine seriously, but a high, if peculiarly Victorian, standard of
culture by which to judge it. It was worth while to speak out upon
serious matters in an essay; and there was nothing absurd in writing as
well as one possibly could when, in a month or two, the same public which
had welcomed the essay in a magazine would carefully read it once more in
a book. But a change came from a small audience of cultivated people to a
larger audience of people who were not quite so cultivated. The change
was not altogether for the worse. In volume iii. we find Mr. Birrell and
Mr. Beerbohm. It might even be said that there was a reversion to the
classic type, and that the essay by losing its size and something of its
sonority was approaching more nearly the essay of Addison and Lamb. At
any rate, there is a great gulf between Mr. Birrell on Carlyle and the
essay which one may suppose that Carlyle would have written upon Mr.
Birrell. There is little similarity between A CLOUD OF PINAFORES, by Max
Beerbohm, and A CYNIC'S APOLOGY, by Leslie Stephen. But the essay is
alive; there is no reason to despair. As the conditions change so the
essayist, most sensitive of all plants to public opinion, adapts himself,
and if he is good makes the best of the change, and if he is bad the
worst. Mr. Birrell is certainly good; and so we find that, though he has
dropped a considerable amount of weight, his attack is much more direct
and his movement more supple. But what did Mr. Beerbohm give to the essay
and what did he take from it? That is a much more complicated question,
for here we have an essayist who has concentrated on the work and is
without doubt the prince of his profession.

What Mr. Beerbohm gave was, of course, himself. This presence, which has
haunted the essay fitfully from the time of Montaigne, had been in exile
since the death of Charles Lamb. Matthew Arnold was never to his readers
Matt, nor Walter Pater affectionately abbreviated in a thousand homes to
Wat. They gave us much, but that they did not give. Thus, some time in
the nineties, it must have surprised readers accustomed to exhortation,
information, and denunciation to find themselves familiarly addressed by
a voice which seemed to belong to a man no larger than themselves. He was
affected by private joys and sorrows, and had no gospel to preach and no
learning to impart. He was himself, simply and directly, and himself he
has remained. Once again we have an essayist capable of using the
essayist's most proper but most dangerous and delicate tool. He has
brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but
so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any
relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know
that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes. The
triumph is the triumph of style. For it is only by knowing how to write
that you can make use in literature of your self; that self which, while
it is essential to literature, is also its most dangerous  antagonist.
Never to be yourself and yet always--that is the problem. Some of the
essayists in Mr. Rhys' collection, to be frank, have not altogether
succeeded in solving it. We are nauseated by the sight of trivial
personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.  As talk, no doubt,
it was charming, and certainly the writer is a good fellow to meet over a
bottle of beer. But literature is stern; it is no use being charming,
virtuous, or even learned and brilliant into the bargain, unless, she
seems to reiterate, you fulfil her first condition--to know how to write.

This art is possessed to perfection by Mr. Beerbohm. But he has not
searched the dictionary for polysyllables. He has not moulded firm
periods or seduced our ears with intricate cadences and strange melodies.
Some of his companions--Henley and Stevenson, for example--are momentarily
more impressive. But A CLOUD OF PINAFORES has in it that indescribable
inequality, stir, and final expressiveness which belong to life and to
life alone. You have not finished with it because you have read it, any
more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up
and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive;
we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we
look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come
September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk. Yet it is true
that the essayist is the most sensitive of all writers to public opinion.
The drawing-room is the place where a great deal of reading is done
nowadays, and the essays of Mr. Beerbohm lie, with an exquisite
appreciation of all that the position exacts, upon the drawing-room
table. There is no gin about; no strong tobacco; no puns, drunkenness, or
insanity. Ladies and gentlemen talk together, and some things, of course,
are not said.

But if it would be foolish to attempt to confine Mr. Beerbohm to one
room, it would be still more foolish, unhappily, to make him, the artist,
the man who gives us only his best, the representative of our age. There
are no essays by Mr. Beerbohm in the fourth or fifth volumes of the
present collection. His age seems already a little distant, and the
drawing-room table, as it recedes, begins to look rather like an altar
where, once upon a time, people deposited offerings--fruit from their own
orchards, gifts carved with their own hands. Now once more the conditions
have changed. The public needs essays as much as ever, and perhaps even
more. The demand for the light middle not exceeding fifteen hundred
words, or in special cases seventeen hundred and fifty, much exceeds the
supply. Where Lamb wrote one essay and Max perhaps writes two, Mr. Belloc
at a rough computation produces three hundred and sixty-five. They are
very short, it is true. Yet with what dexterity the practised essayist
will utilise his space--beginning as close to the top of the sheet as
possible, judging precisely how far to go, when to turn, and how, without
sacrificing a hair's-breadth of paper, to wheel about and alight
accurately upon the last word his editor allows! As a feat of skill it is
well worth watching. But the personality upon which Mr. Belloc, like Mr.
Beerbohm, depends suffers in the process. It comes to us not with the
natural richness of the speaking voice, but strained and thin and full of
mannerisms and affectations, like the voice of a man shouting through a
megaphone to a crowd on a windy day. "Little friends, my readers", he
says in the essay called "An Unknown Country", and he goes on to tell
us how


There was a shepherd the other day at Findon Fair who had come from the
east by Lewes with sheep, and who had in his eyes that reminiscence of
horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of mountaineers different
from the eyes of other men. . . . I went with him to hear what he had to
say, for shepherds talk quite differently from other men.


Happily this shepherd had little to say, even under the stimulus of the
inevitable mug of beer, about the Unknown Country, for the only remark
that he did make proves him either a minor poet, unfit for the care of
sheep, or Mr. Belloc himself masquerading with a fountain pen. That is
the penalty which the habitual essayist must now be prepared to face. He
must masquerade. He cannot afford the time either to be himself or to be
other people. He must skim the surface of thought and dilute the strength
of personality. He must give us a worn weekly halfpenny instead of a
solid sovereign once a year.

But it is not Mr. Belloc only who has suffered from the prevailing
conditions. The essays which bring the collection to the year 1920 may
not be the best of their authors' work, but, if we except writers like
Mr. Conrad and Mr. Hudson, who have strayed into essay writing
accidentally, and concentrate upon those who write essays habitually, we
shall find them a good deal affected by the change in their
circumstances. To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to
write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people
coming home in the evening, is a heart-breaking task for men who know
good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's
way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public,
or anything sharp that might irritate its skin. And so, if one reads Mr.
Lucas, Mr. Lynd, or Mr. Squire in the bulk, one feels that a common
greyness silvers everything. They are as far removed from the extravagant
beauty of Walter Pater as they are from the intemperate candour of Leslie
Stephen. Beauty and courage are dangerous spirits to bottle in a column
and a half; and thought, like a brown paper parcel in a waistcoat pocket,
has a way of spoiling the symmetry of an article. It is a kind, tired,
apathetic world for which they write, and the marvel is that they never
cease to attempt, at least, to write well.

But there is no need to pity Mr. Clutton Brock for this change in the
essayist's conditions. He has clearly made the best of his circumstances
and not the worst. One hesitates even to say that he has had to make any
conscious effort in the matter, so naturally has he effected the
transition from the private essayist to the public, from the drawing-room
to the Albert Hall. Paradoxically enough, the shrinkage in size has
brought about a corresponding expansion of individuality. We have no
longer the "I" of Max and of Lamb, but the "we" of public bodies and
other sublime personages. It is "we" who go to hear the MAGIC FLUTE; "we"
who ought to profit by it; "we", in some mysterious way, who, in our
corporate capacity, once upon a time actually wrote it. For music and
literature and art must submit to the same generalisation or they will
not carry to the farthest recesses of the Albert Hall. That the voice of
Mr. Clutton Brock, so sincere and so disinterested, carries such a
distance and reaches so many without pandering to the weakness of the
mass or its passions must be a matter of legitimate satisfaction to us
all. But while "we" are gratified, "I", that unruly partner in the
human fellowship, is reduced to despair. "I" must always think things
for himself, and feel things for himself. To share them in a diluted form
with the majority of well-educated and well-intentioned men and women is
for him sheer agony; and while the rest of us listen intently and profit
profoundly, "I" slips off to the woods and the fields and rejoices in a
single blade of grass or a solitary potato.

In the fifth volume of modern essays, it seems, we have got some way from
pleasure and the art of writing. But in justice to the essayists of 1920
we must be sure that we are not praising the famous because they have
been praised already and the dead because we shall never meet them
wearing spats in Piccadilly. We must know what we mean when we say that
they can write and give us pleasure. We must compare them; we must bring
out the quality. We must point to this and say it is good because it is
exact, truthful, and imaginative:


Nay, retire men cannot when they would; neither will they, when it were
Reason; but are impatient of Privateness, even in age and sickness, which
require the shadow: like old Townsmen: that will still he sitting at
their street door, though therby they offer Age to Scorn . . .


and to this, and say it is bad because it is loose, plausible, and
commonplace:


With courteous and precise cynicism on his lips, he thought of quiet
virginal chambers, of waters singing under the moon, of terraces where
taintless music sobbed into the open night, of pure maternal mistresses
with protecting arms and vigilant eyes, of fields slumbering in the
sunlight, of leagues of ocean heaving under warm tremulous heavens, of
hot ports, gorgeous and perfumed. . .


It goes on, but already we are bemused with sound and neither feel nor
hear. The comparison makes us suspect that the art of writing has for
backbone some fierce attachment to an idea. It is on the back of an idea,
something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus
compelling words to its shape, that the diverse company which includes
Lamb and Bacon, and Mr. Beerbohm and Hudson, and Vernon Lee and Mr.
Conrad, and Leslie Stephen and Butler and Walter Pater reaches the
farther shore. Very various talents have helped or hindered the passage
of the idea into words. Some scrape through painfully; others fly with
every wind favouring. But Mr. Belloc and Mr. Lucas and Mr. Squire are not
fiercely attached to anything in itself. They share the contemporary
dilemma--that lack of an obstinate conviction which lifts ephemeral sounds
through the misty sphere of anybody's language to the land where there is
a perpetual marriage, a perpetual union. Vague as all definitions are, a
good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its
curtain round us but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.




THE DEATH OF THE MOTH



Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not
excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which
the commonest yellow-underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never
fails to rouse in us. They are hybrid creatures, neither gay like
butterflies nor sombre like their own species. Nevertheless the present
specimen, with his narrow hay-coloured wings, fringed with a tassel of
the same colour, seemed to be content with life. It was a pleasant
morning, mid-September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than
that of the summer months. The plough was already scoring the field
opposite the window, and where the share had been, the earth was pressed
flat and gleamed with moisture. Such vigour came rolling in from the
fields and the down beyond that it was difficult to keep the eyes
strictly turned upon the book. The rooks too were keeping one of their
annual festivities; soaring round the tree tops until it looked as if a
vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the
air; which, after a few moments sank slowly down upon the trees until
every twig seemed to have a knot at the end of it. Then, suddenly, the
net would be thrown into the air again in a wider circle this time, with
the utmost clamour and vociferation, as though to be thrown into the air
and settle slowly down upon the tree tops were a tremendously exciting
experience.

The same energy which inspired the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and
even, it seemed, the lean bare-backed downs, sent the moth fluttering
from side to side of his square of the window-pane. One could not help
watching him. One was, indeed, conscious of a queer feeling of pity for
him. The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and
so various that to have only a moth's part in life, and a day moth's at
that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meagre
opportunities to the full, pathetic. He flew vigorously to one corner of
his compartment, and, after waiting there a second, flew across to the
other. What remained for him but to fly to a third corner and then to a
fourth? That was all he could do, in spite of the size of the downs, the
width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice,
now and then, of a steamer out at sea. What he could do he did. Watching
him, it seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy
of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body. As
often as he crossed the pane, I could fancy that a thread of vital light
became visible. He was little or nothing but life.

Yet, because he was so small, and so simple a form of the energy that
was rolling in at the open window and driving its way through so many
narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain and in those of other
human beings, there was something marvellous as well as pathetic about
him. It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking
it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and
zig-zagging to show us the true nature of life. Thus displayed one could
not get over the strangeness of it. One is apt to forget all about life,
seeing it humped and bossed and garnished and cumbered so that it has to
move with the greatest circumspection and dignity. Again, the thought of
all that life might have been had he been born in any other shape caused
one to view his simple activities with a kind of pity.

After a time, tired by his dancing apparently, he settled on the window
ledge in the sun, and, the queer spectacle being at an end, I forgot
about him. Then, looking up, my eye was caught by him. He was trying to
resume his dancing, but seemed either so stiff or so awkward that he
could only flutter to the bottom of the window-pane; and when he tried
to fly across it he failed. Being intent on other matters I watched
these futile attempts for a time without thinking, unconsciously waiting
for him to resume his flight, as one waits for a machine, that has
stopped momentarily, to start again without considering the reason of
its failure. After perhaps a seventh attempt he slipped from the wooden
ledge and fell, fluttering his wings, on to his back on the window sill.
The helplessness of his attitude roused me. It flashed upon me that he
was in difficulties; he could no longer raise himself; his legs
struggled vainly. But, as I stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him
to right himself, it came over me that the failure and awkwardness were
the approach of death. I laid the pencil down again.

The legs agitated themselves once more. I looked as if for the enemy
against which he struggled. I looked out of doors. What had happened
there? Presumably it was midday, and work in the fields had stopped.
Stillness and quiet had replaced the previous animation. The birds had
taken themselves off to feed in the brooks. The horses stood still. Yet
the power was there all the same, massed outside indifferent,
impersonal, not attending to anything in particular. Somehow it was
opposed to the little hay-coloured moth. It was useless to try to do
anything. One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those
tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have
submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings;
nothing, I knew, had any chance against death. Nevertheless after a
pause of exhaustion the legs fluttered again. It was superb this last
protest, and so frantic that he succeeded at last in righting himself.
One's sympathies, of course, were all on the side of life. Also, when
there was nobody to care or to know, this gigantic effort on the part of
an insignificant little moth, against a power of such magnitude, to
retain what no one else valued or desired to keep, moved one strangely.
Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again,
useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable
tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew
stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew
death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so
great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as
life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.
The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly
composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.




EVENING OVER SUSSEX: REFLECTIONS IN A MOTOR CAR



Evening is kind to Sussex, for Sussex is no longer young, and she is
grateful for the veil of evening as an elderly woman is glad when a
shade is drawn over a lamp, and only the outline of her face remains.
The outline of Sussex is still very fine. The cliffs stand out to sea,
one behind another. All Eastbourne, all Bexhill, all St. Leonards, their
parades and their lodging houses, their bead shops and their sweet shops
and their placards and their invalids and chars-á-bancs, are all
obliterated. What remains is what there was when William came over from
France ten centuries ago: a line of cliffs running out to sea. Also the
fields are redeemed. The freckle of red villas on the coast is washed
over by a thin lucid lake of brown air, in which they and their redness
are drowned. It was still too early for lamps; and too early for stars.

But, I thought, there is always some sediment of irritation when the
moment is as beautiful as it is now. The psychologists must explain; one
looks up, one is overcome by beauty extravagantly greater than one could
expect--there are now pink clouds over Battle; the fields are mottled,
marbled--one's perceptions blow out rapidly like air balls expanded by
some rush of air, and then, when all seems blown to its fullest and
tautest, with beauty and beauty and beauty, a pin pricks; it collapses.
But what is the pin? So far as I could tell, the pin had something to do
with one's own impotency. I cannot hold this--I cannot express this--I
am overcome by it--I am mastered. Somewhere in that region one's
discontent lay; and it was allied with the idea that one's nature
demands mastery over all that it receives; and mastery here meant the
power to convey what one saw now over Sussex so that another person
could share it. And further, there was another prick of the pin: one was
wasting one's chance; for beauty spread at one's right hand, at one's
left; at one's back too; it was escaping all the time; one could only
offer a thimble to a torrent that could fill baths, lakes.

But relinquish, I said (it is well known how in circumstances like these
the self splits up and one self is eager and dissatisfied and the other
stern and philosophical), relinquish these impossible aspirations; be
content with the view in front of us, and believe me when I tell you
that it is best to sit and soak; to be passive; to accept; and do not
bother because nature has given you six little pocket knives with which
to cut up the body of a whale.

While these two selves then held a colloquy about the wise course to
adopt in the presence of beauty, I (a third party now declared itself)
said to myself, how happy they were to enjoy so simple an occupation.
There they sat as the car sped along, noticing everything: a hay stack;
a rust red roof; a pond; an old man coming home with his sack on his
back; there they sat, matching every colour in the sky and earth from
their colour box, rigging up little models of Sussex barns and
farmhouses in the red light that would serve in the January gloom. But
I, being somewhat different, sat aloof and melancholy. While they are
thus busied, I said to myself: Gone, gone; over, over; past and done
with, past and done with. I feel life left behind even as the road is
left behind. We have been over that stretch, and are already forgotten.
There, windows were lit by our lamps for a second; the light is out now.
Others come behind us.

Then suddenly a fourth self (a self which lies in ambush, apparently
dormant, and jumps upon one unawares. Its remarks are often entirely
disconnected with what has been happening, but must be attended to
because of their very abruptness) said: "Look at that." It was a light;
brilliant, freakish; inexplicable. For a second I was unable to name it.
"A star"; and for that second it held its odd flicker of
unexpectedness and danced and beamed. "I take your meaning," I said.
"You, erratic and impulsive self that you are, feel that the light over
the downs there emerging, dangles from the future. Let us try to
understand this. Let us reason it out. I feel suddenly attached not to
the past but to the future. I think of Sussex in five hundred years to
come. I think much grossness will have evaporated. Things will have been
scorched up, eliminated. There will be magic gates. Draughts fan-blown
by electric power will cleanse houses. Lights intense and firmly
directed will go over the earth, doing the work. Look at the moving
light in that hill; it is the headlight of a car. By day and by night
Sussex in five centuries will be full of charming thoughts, quick,
effective beams."

The sun was now low beneath the horizon. Darkness spread rapidly. None
of my selves could see anything beyond the tapering light of our
headlamps on the hedge. I summoned them together. "Now," I said,
"comes the season of making up our accounts. Now we have got to collect
ourselves; we have got to be one self. Nothing is to be seen any more,
except one wedge of road and bank which our lights repeat incessantly.
We are perfectly provided for. We are warmly wrapped in a rug; we are
protected from wind and rain. We are alone. Now is the time of
reckoning. Now I, who preside over the company, am going to arrange in
order the trophies which we have all brought in. Let me see; there was a
great deal of beauty brought in to-day: farmhouses; cliffs standing out
to sea; marbled fields; mottled fields; red feathered skies; all that.
Also there was disappearance and the death of the individual. The
vanishing road and the window lit for a second and then dark. And then
there was the sudden dancing light, that was hung in the future. What we
have made then to-day," I said, "is this: that beauty; death of the
individual; and the future. Look, I will make a little figure for your
satisfaction; here he comes. Does this little figure advancing through
beauty, through death, to the economical, powerful and efficient future
when houses will be cleansed by a puff of hot wind satisfy you? Look at
him; there on my knee." We sat and looked at the figure we had made that
day. Great sheer slabs of rock, tree tufted, surrounded him. He was for
a second very, very solemn. Indeed it seemed as if the reality of things
were displayed there on the rug. A violent thrill ran through us; as if
a charge of electricity had entered in to us. We cried out together:
"Yes, yes," as if affirming something, in a moment of recognition.

And then the body who had been silent up to now began its song, almost
at first as low as the rush of the wheels: "Eggs and bacon; toast and
tea; fire and a bath; fire and a bath; jugged hare," it went on, "and
red currant jelly; a glass of wine with coffee to follow, with coffee to
follow--and then to bed and then to bed."

"Off with you," I said to my assembled selves. "Your work is done. I
dismiss you. Good-night."

And the rest of the journey was performed in the delicious society of my
own body.




THREE PICTURES (Written in June 1929.)



THE FIRST PICTURE


It is impossible that one should not see pictures; because if my father
was a blacksmith and yours was a peer of the realm, we must needs be
pictures to each other. We cannot possibly break out of the frame of the
picture by speaking natural words. You see me leaning against the door
of the smithy with a horseshoe in my hand and you think as you go by:
"How picturesque!" I, seeing you sitting so much at your ease in the
car, almost as if you were going to bow to the populace, think what a
picture of old luxurious aristocratical England! We are both quite
wrong in our judgments no doubt, but that is inevitable.

So now at the turn of the road I saw one of these pictures. It might
have been called "The Sailor's Homecoming" or some such title. A fine
young sailor carrying a bundle; a girl with her hand on his arm;
neighbours gathering round; a cottage garden ablaze with flowers; as one
passed one read at the bottom of that picture that the sailor was back
from China, and there was a fine spread waiting for him in the parlour;
and he had a present for his young wife in his bundle; and she was soon
going to bear him their first child. Everything was right and good and
as it should be, one felt about that picture.

There was something wholesome and satisfactory in the sight of such
happiness; life seemed sweeter and more enviable than before.

So thinking I passed them, filling in the picture as fully, as
completely as I could, noticing the colour of her dress, of his eyes,
seeing the sandy cat slinking round the cottage door.

For some time the picture floated in my eyes, making most things appear
much brighter, warmer, and simpler than usual; and making some things
appear foolish; and some things wrong and some things right, and more
full of meaning than before. At odd moments during that day and the next
the picture returned to one's mind, and one thought with envy, but with
kindness, of the happy sailor and his wife; one wondered what they were
doing, what they were saying now. The imagination supplied other
pictures springing from that first one, a picture of the sailor cutting
firewood, drawing water; and they talked about China; and the girl set
his present on the chimney-piece where everyone who came could see it;
and she sewed at her baby clothes, and all the doors and windows were
open into the garden so that the birds were flittering and the bees
humming, and Rogers--that was his name--could not say how much to his
liking all this was after the China seas. As he smoked his pipe, with
his foot in the garden.



THE SECOND PICTURE


In the middle of the night a loud cry rang through the village. Then
there was a sound of something scuffling; and then dead silence. All
that could be seen out of the window was the branch of lilac tree
hanging motionless and ponderous across the road. It was a hot still
night. There was no moon. The cry made everything seem ominous. Who had
cried? Why had she cried? It was a woman's voice, made by some extremity
of feeling almost sexless, almost expressionless. It was as if human
nature had cried out against some iniquity, some inexpressible horror.
There was dead silence. The stars shone perfectly steadily. The fields
lay still. The trees were motionless. Yet all seemed guilty, convicted,
ominous. One felt that something ought to be done. Some light ought to
appear tossing, moving agitatedly. Someone ought to come running down
the road. There should be lights in the cottage windows. And then
perhaps another cry, but less sexless, less wordless, comforted,
appeased. But no light came. No feet were heard. There was no second
cry. The first had been swallowed up, and there was dead silence.

One lay in the dark listening intently. It had been merely a voice.
There was nothing to connect it with. No picture of any sort came to
interpret it, to make it intelligible to the mind. But as the dark arose
at last all one saw was an obscure human form, almost without shape,
raising a gigantic arm in vain against some overwhelming iniquity.



THE THIRD PICTURE


The fine weather remained unbroken. Had it not been for that single cry
in the night one would have felt that the earth had put into harbour;
that life had ceased to drive before the wind; that it had reached some
quiet cove and there lay anchored, hardly moving, on the quiet waters.
But the sound persisted. Wherever one went, it might be for a long walk
up into the hills, something seemed to turn uneasily beneath the surface,
making the peace, the stability all round one seem a little unreal.
There were the sheep clustered on the side of the hill; the valley broke
in long tapering waves like the fall of smooth waters. One came on
solitary farmhouses. The puppy rolled in the yard. The butterflies
gambolled over the gorse. All was as quiet, as safe could be. Yet, one
kept thinking, a cry had rent it; all this beauty had been an accomplice
that night; had consented; to remain calm, to be still beautiful; at
any moment it might be sundered again. This goodness, this safety were
only on the surface.

And then to cheer oneself out of this apprehensive mood one turned to
the picture of the sailor's homecoming. One saw it all over again
producing various little details--the blue colour of her dress, the
shadow that fell from the yellow flowering tree--that one had not used
before. So they had stood at the cottage door, he with his bundle on his
back, she just lightly touching his sleeve with her hand. And a sandy
cat had slunk round the door. Thus gradually going over the picture in
every detail, one persuaded oneself by degrees that it was far more
likely that this calm and content and good will lay beneath the surface
than anything treacherous, sinister. The sheep grazing, the waves of the
valley, the farmhouse, the puppy, the dancing butterflies were in fact
like that all through. And so one turned back home, with one's mind
fixed on the sailor and his wife, making up picture after picture of
them so that one picture after another of happiness and satisfaction
might be laid over that unrest, that hideous cry, until it was crushed
and silenced by their pressure out of existence.

Here at last was the village, and the churchyard through which one must
pass; and the usual thought came, as one entered it, of the peacefulness
of the place, with its shady yews, its rubbed tombstones, its nameless
graves. Death is cheerful here, one felt. Indeed, look at that picture!
A man was digging a grave, and children were picnicking at the side of
it while he worked. As the shovels of yellow earth were thrown up, the
children were sprawling about eating bread and jam and drinking milk
out of large mugs. The gravedigger's wife, a fat fair woman, had propped
herself against a tombstone and spread her apron on the grass by the
open grave to serve as a tea-table. Some lumps of clay had fallen among
the tea things. Who was going to be buried, I asked. Had old Mr. Dodson
died at last? "Oh! no. It's for young Rogers, the sailor," the woman
answered, staring at me. "He died two nights ago, of some foreign
fever. Didn't you hear his wife?" She rushed into the road and cried
out. . . . "Here, Tommy, you're all covered with earth!"

What a picture it made!




OLD MRS. GREY



There are moments even in England, now, when even the busiest, most
contented suddenly let fall what they hold--it may be the week's washing.
Sheets and pyjamas crumble and dissolve in their hands, because, though
they do not state this in so many words, it seems silly to take the
washing round to Mrs. Peel when out there over the fields over the
hills, there is no washing; no pinning of clothes to lines; mangling and
ironing no work at all, but boundless rest. Stainless and boundless
rest; space unlimited; untrodden grass; wild birds flying hills whose
smooth uprise continue that wild flight.

Of all this however only seven foot by four could be seen from Mrs.
Grey's corner. That was the size of her front door which stood wide
open, though there was a fire burning in the grate. The fire looked
like a small spot of dusty light feebly trying to escape from the
embarrassing pressure of the pouring sunshine.

Mrs. Grey sat on a hard chair in the corner looking--but at what?
Apparently at nothing. She did not change the focus of her eyes when
visitors came in. Her eyes had ceased to focus themselves; it may be
that they had lost the power. They were aged eyes, blue, unspectacled.
They could see, but without looking. She had never used her eyes on
anything minute and difficult; merely upon faces, and dishes and fields.
And now at the age of ninety-two they saw nothing but a zigzag of pain
wriggling across the door, pain that twisted her legs as it wriggled;
jerked her body to and fro like a marionette. Her body was wrapped round
the pain as a damp sheet is folded over a wire. The wire was
spasmodically jerked by a cruel invisible hand. She flung out a foot, a
hand. Then it stopped. She sat still for a moment.

In that pause she saw herself in the past at ten, at twenty, at
twenty-five. She was running in and out of a cottage with eleven
brothers and sisters. The line jerked. She was thrown forward in her
chair.

"All dead. All dead," she mumbled. "My brothers and sisters. And my
husband gone. My daughter too. But I go on. Every morning I pray God to
let me pass."

The morning spread seven foot by four green and sunny. Like a fling of
grain the birds settled on the land. She was jerked again by another
tweak of the tormenting hand.

"I'm an ignorant old woman. I can't read or write, and every morning
when I crawls down stairs, I say I wish it were night; and every night,
when I crawls up to bed, I say, I wish it were day. I'm only an ignorant
old woman. But I prays to God: 0 let me pass. I'm an ignorant old
woman--I can't read or write."

So when the colour went out of the doorway, she could not see the other
page which is then lit up; or hear the voices that have argued, sung,
talked for hundreds of years.

The jerked limbs were still again.

"The doctor comes every week. The parish doctor now. Since my daughter
went, we can't afford Dr. Nicholls. But he's a good man. He says he
wonders I don't go. He says my heart's nothing but wind and water. Yet I
don't seem able to die."

So we--humanity--insist that the body shall still cling to the wire. We
put out the eyes and the ears; but we pinion it there, with a bottle of
medicine, a cup of tea, a dying fire, like a rook on a barn door; but a
rook that still lives, even with a nail through it.




STREET HAUNTING: A LONDON ADVENTURE (Written in 1930.)



No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But
there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to
possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse
for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter
hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in
order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the
desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a
pretext, and getting up we say: "Really I must buy a pencil," as if
under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest
pleasure of town life in winter--rambling the streets of London.

The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the
champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are
grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for
shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour,
too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow.
We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine
evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by
and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers,
whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room. For
there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity
of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience.
That bowl on the mantelpiece, for instance, was bought at Mantua on a
windy day. We were leaving the shop when the sinister old woman plucked
at our skirts and said she would find herself starving one of these
days, but, "Take it!" she cried, and thrust the blue and white china
bowl into our hands as if she never wanted to be reminded of her
quixotic generosity. So, guiltily, but suspecting nevertheless how badly
we had been fleeced, we carried it back to the little hotel where, in
the middle of the night, the innkeeper quarrelled so violently with his
wife that we all leant out into the courtyard to look, and saw the vines
laced about among the pillars and the stars white in the sky. The moment
was stabilized, stamped like a coin indelibly among a million that
slipped by imperceptibly. There, too, was the melancholy Englishman, who
rose among the coffee cups and the little iron tables and revealed the
secrets of his soul--as travellers do. All this--Italy, the windy morning,
the vines laced about the pillars, the Englishman and the secrets of his
soul--rise up in a cloud from the china bowl on the mantelpiece. And
there, as our eyes fall to the floor, is that brown stain on the carpet.
Mr. Lloyd George made that. "The man's a devil!" said Mr. Cummings,
putting the kettle down with which he was about to fill the teapot so
that it burnt a brown ring on the carpet.

But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like
covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for
themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of
all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness,
an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once
revealed and obscured. Here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight
avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands
of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for
all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an
air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life,
deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. But, after all, we are
only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a
diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a
stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.

How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and
its long groves of darkness, and on one side of it perhaps some
tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding herself to
sleep naturally and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those
little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose
the silence of fields all round them, an owl hooting, and far away the
rattle of a train in the valley. But this is London, we are reminded;
high among the bare trees are hung oblong frames of reddish yellow
light--windows; there are points of brilliance burning steadily like low
stars--lamps; this empty ground, which holds the country in it and its
peace, is only a London square, set about by offices and houses where at
this hour fierce lights burn over maps, over documents, over desks where
clerks sit turning with wetted forefinger the files of endless
correspondences; or more suffusedly the firelight wavers and the
lamplight falls upon the privacy of some drawing-room, its easy chairs,
its papers, its china, its inlaid table, and the figure of a woman,
accurately measuring out the precise number of spoons of tea which----She
looks at the door as if she heard a ring downstairs and somebody asking,
is she in?

But here we must stop peremptorily. We are in danger of digging deeper
than the eye approves; we are impeding our passage down the smooth
stream by catching at some branch or root. At any moment, the sleeping
army may stir itself and wake in us a thousand violins and trumpets in
response; the army of human beings may rouse itself and assert all its
oddities and sufferings and sordidities. Let us dally a little longer,
be content still with surfaces only--the glossy brilliance of the motor
omnibuses; the carnal splendour of the butchers' shops with their yellow
flanks and purple steaks; the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so
bravely through the plate glass of the florists' windows.

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty; like a
butterfly it seeks colour and basks in warmth. On a winter's night like
this, when nature has been at pains to polish and preen herself, it
brings back the prettiest trophies, breaks off little lumps of emerald
and coral as if the whole earth were made of precious stone. The thing
it cannot do (one is speaking of the average unprofessional eye) is to
compose these trophies in such a way as to bring out the more obscure
angles and relationships. Hence after a prolonged diet of this simple,
sugary fare, of beauty pure and uncomposed, we become conscious of
satiety. We halt at the door of the boot shop and make some little
excuse, which has nothing to do with the real reason, for folding up the
bright paraphernalia of the streets and withdrawing to some duskier
chamber of the being where we may ask, as we raise our left foot
obediently upon the stand: "What, then, is it like to be a dwarf?"

She came in escorted by two women who, being of normal size, looked like
benevolent giants beside her. Smiling at the shop girls, they seemed to
be disclaiming any lot in her deformity and assuring her of their
protection. She wore the peevish yet apologetic expression usual on the
faces of the deformed. She needed their kindness, yet she resented it.
But when the shop girl had been summoned and the giantesses, smiling
indulgently, had asked for shoes for "this lady" and the girl had
pushed the little stand in front of her, the dwarf stuck her foot out
with an impetuosity which seemed to claim all our attention. Look at
that! Look at that! she seemed to demand of us all, as she thrust her
foot out, for behold it was the shapely, perfectly proportioned foot of
a well-grown woman. It was arched; it was aristocratic. Her whole manner
changed as she looked at it resting on the stand. She looked soothed and
satisfied. Her manner became full of self-confidence. She sent for shoe
after shoe; she tried on pair after pair. She got up and pirouetted
before a glass which reflected the foot only in yellow shoes, in fawn
shoes, in shoes of lizard skin. She raised her little skirts and
displayed her little legs. She was thinking that, after all, feet are
the most important part of the whole person; women, she said to herself,
have been loved for their feet alone. Seeing nothing but her feet, she
imagined perhaps that the rest of her body was of a piece with those
beautiful feet. She was shabbily dressed, but she was ready to lavish
any money upon her shoes. And as this was the only occasion upon which
she was hot afraid of being looked at but positively craved attention,
she was ready to use any device to prolong the choosing and fitting.
Look at my feet, she seemed to be saying, as she took a step this way
and then a step that way. The shop girl good-humouredly must have said
something flattering, for suddenly her face lit up in ecstasy. But,
after all, the giantesses, benevolent though they were, had their own
affairs to see to; she must make up her mind; she must decide which to
choose. At length, the pair was chosen and, as she walked out between
her guardians, with the parcel swinging from her finger, the ecstasy
faded, knowledge returned, the old peevishness, the old apology came
back, and by the time she had reached the street again she had become a
dwarf only.

But she had changed the mood; she had called into being an atmosphere
which, as we followed her out into the street, seemed actually to create
the humped, the twisted, the deformed. Two bearded men, brothers,
apparently, stone-blind, supporting themselves by resting a hand on the
head of a small boy between them, marched down the street. On they came
with the unyielding yet tremulous tread of the blind, which seems to
lend to their approach something of the terror and inevitability of the
fate that has overtaken them. As they passed, holding straight on, the
little convoy seemed to cleave asunder the passers-by with the momentum
of its silence, its directness, its disaster. Indeed, the dwarf had
started a hobbling grotesque dance to which everybody in the street now
conformed: the stout lady tightly swathed in shiny sealskin; the
feeble-minded boy sucking the silver knob of his stick; the old man
squatted on a doorstep as if, suddenly overcome by the absurdity of the
human spectacle, he had sat down to look at it--all joined in the hobble
and tap of the dwarf's dance.

In what crevices and crannies, one might ask, did they lodge, this
maimed company of the halt and the blind? Here, perhaps, in the top
rooms of these narrow old houses between Holborn and Soho, where people
have such queer names, and pursue so many curious trades, are gold
beaters, accordion pleaters, cover buttons, or support life, with even
greater fantasticality, upon a traffic in cups without saucers, china
umbrella handles, and highly-coloured pictures of martyred saints. There
they lodge, and it seems as if the lady in the sealskin jacket must find
life tolerable, passing the time of day with the accordion pleater, or
the man who covers buttons; life which is so fantastic cannot be
altogether tragic. They do not grudge us, we are musing, our prosperity;
when, suddenly, turning the corner, we come upon a bearded Jew, wild,
hunger-bitten, glaring out of his misery; or pass the humped body of an
old woman flung abandoned on the step of a public building with a cloak
over her like the hasty covering thrown over a dead horse or donkey. At
such sights the nerves of the spine seem to stand erect; a sudden flare
is brandished in our eyes; a question is asked which is never answered.
Often enough these derelicts choose to lie not a stone's thrown from
theatres, within hearing of barrel organs, almost, as night draws on,
within touch of the sequined cloaks and bright legs of diners and
dancers. They lie close to those shop windows where commerce offers to a
world of old women laid on doorsteps, of blind men, of hobbling dwarfs,
sofas which are supported by the gilt necks of proud swans; tables
inlaid with baskets of many coloured fruit; sideboards paved with green
marble the better to support the weight of boars' heads; and carpets so
softened with age that their carnations have almost vanished in a pale
green sea.

Passing, glimpsing, everything seems accidentally but miraculously
sprinkled with beauty, as if the tide of trade which deposits its burden
so punctually and prosaically upon the shores of Oxford Street had this
night cast up nothing but treasure. With no thought of buying, the eye
is sportive and generous; it creates; it adorns; it enhances. Standing
out in the street, one may build up all the chambers of an imaginary
house and furnish them at one's will with sofa, table, carpet. That rug
will do for the hall. That alabaster bowl shall stand on a carved table
in the window. Our merrymaking shall be reflected in that thick round
mirror. But, having built and furnished the house, one is happily under
no obligation to possess it; one can dismantle it in the twinkling of an
eye, and build and furnish another house with other chairs and other
glasses. Or let us indulge ourselves at the antique jewellers, among the
trays of rings and the hanging necklaces. Let us choose those pearls,
for example, and then imagine how, if we put them on, life would be
changed. It becomes instantly between two and three in the morning; the
lamps are burning very white in the deserted streets of Mayfair. Only
motor-cars are abroad at this hour, and one has a sense of emptiness, of
airiness, of secluded gaiety. Wearing pearls, wearing silk, one steps
out on to a balcony which overlooks the gardens of sleeping Mayfair.
There are a few lights in the bedrooms of great peers returned from
Court, of silk-stockinged footmen, of dowagers who have pressed the
hands of statesmen. A cat creeps along the garden wall. Love-making is
going on sibilantly, seductively in the darker places of the room behind
thick green curtains. Strolling sedately as if he were promenading a
terrace beneath which the shires and counties of England lie sun-bathed,
the aged Prime Minister recounts to Lady So-and-So with the curls and
the emeralds the true history of some great crisis in the affairs of the
land. We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the tallest
ship; and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort
matters; love is not proved thus, nor great achievements completed thus;
so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly,
as we stand on the balcony watching the moonlit cat creep along Princess
Mary's garden wall.

But what could be more absurd? It is, in fact, on the stroke of six; it
is a winter's evening; we are walking to the Strand to buy a pencil.
How, then, are we also on a balcony, wearing pearls in June? What could
be more absurd? Yet it is nature's folly, not ours. When she set about
her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one
thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into
each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at
variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all
of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands
on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in
June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor
that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that
it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way
unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? Circumstances compel unity; for
convenience sake a man must be a whole. The good citizen when he opens
his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a
nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in
the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah
howling with scepticism and solitude. When he opens his door, he must
run his fingers through his hair and put his umbrella in the stand like
the rest.

But here, none too soon, are the second-hand bookshops. Here we find
anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance
ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets. The very
sight of the bookseller's wife with her foot on the fender, sitting
beside a good coal fire, screened from the door, is sobering and
cheerful. She is never reading, or only the newspaper; her talk, when it
leaves bookselling, which it does so gladly, is about hats; she likes a
hat to be practical, she says, as well as pretty. 0 no, they don't live
at the shop; they live in Brixton; she must have a bit of green to look
at. In summer a jar of flowers grown in her own garden is stood on the
top of some dusty pile to enliven the shop. Books are everywhere; and
always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild
books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of
variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of
the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may
rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the
best friend we have in the world. There is always a hope, as we reach
down some grayish-white book from an upper shelf, directed by its air of
shabbiness and desertion, of meeting here with a man who set out on
horseback over a hundred years ago to explore the woollen market in the
Midlands and Wales; an unknown traveller, who stayed at inns, drank his
pint, noted pretty girls and serious customs, wrote it all down stiffly,
laboriously for sheer love of it (the book was published at his own
expense); was infinitely prosy, busy, and matter-of-fact, and so let
flow in without his knowing it the very scent of hollyhocks and the hay
together with such a portrait of himself as gives him forever a seat in
the warm corner of the mind's inglenook. One may buy him for eighteen
pence now. He is marked three and sixpence, but the bookseller's wife,
seeing how shabby the covers are and how long the book has stood there
since it was bought at some sale of a gentleman's library in Suffolk,
will let it go at that.

Thus, glancing round the bookshop, we make other such sudden capricious
friendships with the unknown and the vanished whose only record is, for
example, this little book of poems, so fairly printed, so finely
engraved, too, with a portrait of the author. For he was a poet and
drowned untimely, and his verse, mild as it is and formal and
sententious, sends forth still a frail fluty sound like that of a piano
organ played in some back street resignedly by an old Italian
organ-grinder in a corduroy jacket. There are travellers, too, row upon
row of them, still testifying, indomitable spinsters that they were, to
the discomforts that they endured and the sunsets they admired in Greece
when Queen Victoria was a girl. A tour in Cornwall with a visit to the
tin mines was thought worthy of voluminous record. People went slowly up
the Rhine and did portraits of each other in Indian ink, sitting reading
on deck beside a coil of rope; they measured the pyramids; were lost to
civilization for years; converted negroes in pestilential swamps. This
packing up and going off, exploring deserts and catching fevers,
settling in India for a lifetime, penetrating even to China and then
returning to lead a parochial life at Edmonton, tumbles and tosses upon
the dusty floor like an uneasy sea, so restless the English are, with
the waves at their very door. The waters of travel and adventure seem to
break upon little islands of serious effort and lifelong industry stood
in jagged column upon the floor. In these piles of puce-bound volumes
with gilt monograms on the back, thoughtful clergymen expound the
gospels; scholars are to be heard with their hammers and their chisels
chipping clear the ancient texts of Euripides and Aeschylus. Thinking,
annotating, expounding goes on at a prodigious rate all around us and
over everything, like a punctual, everlasting tide, washes the ancient
sea of fiction. Innumerable volumes tell how Arthur loved Laura and they
were separated and they were unhappy and then they met and they were
happy ever after, as was the way when Victoria ruled these islands.

The number of books in the world is infinite, and one is forced to
glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of
understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing
and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime. It is about a woman
called Kate that they are talking, how "I said to her quite straight
last night . . . if you don't think I'm worth a penny stamp, I
said . . ." But who Kate is, and to what crisis in their friendship that
penny stamp refers, we shall never know; for Kate sinks under the warmth
of their volubility; and here, at the street corner, another page of the
volume of life is laid open by the sight of two men consulting under the
lamp-post. They are spelling out the latest wire from Newmarket in the
stop press news. Do they think, then, that fortune will ever convert
their rags into fur and broadcloth, sling them with watch-chains, and
plant diamond pins where there is now a ragged open shirt? But the main
stream of walkers at this hour sweeps too fast to let us ask such
questions. They are wrapt, in this short passage from work to home, in
some narcotic dream, now that they are free from the desk, and have the
fresh air on their cheeks. They put on those bright clothes which they
must hang up and lock the key upon all the rest of the day, and are
great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their
country at the hour of need. Dreaming, gesticulating, often muttering a
few words aloud, they sweep over the Strand and across Waterloo Bridge
whence they will be slung in long rattling trains, to some prim little
villa in Barnes or Surbiton where the sight of the clock in the hall and
the smell of the supper in the basement puncture the dream.

But we are come to the Strand now, and as we hesitate on the curb, a
little rod about the length of one's finger begins to lay its bar across
the velocity and abundance of life. "Really I must--really I must"--that
is it. Without investigating the demand, the mind cringes to the
accustomed tyrant. One must, one always must, do something or other; it
is not allowed one simply to enjoy oneself. Was it not for this reason
that, some time ago, we fabricated the excuse, and invented the
necessity of buying something? But what was it? Ah, we remember, it was
a pencil. Let us go then and buy this pencil. But just as we are turning
to obey the command, another self disputes the right of the tyrant to
insist. The usual conflict comes about. Spread out behind the rod of
duty we see the whole breadth of the river Thames--wide, mournful,
peaceful. And we see it through the eyes of somebody who is leaning over
the Embankment on a summer evening, without a care in the world. Let us
put off buying the pencil; let us go in search of this person--and soon
it becomes apparent that this person is ourselves. For if we could stand
there where we stood six months ago, should we not be again as we were
then--calm, aloof, content? Let us try then. But the river is rougher and
greyer than we remembered. The tide is running out to sea. It brings
down with it a tug and two barges, whose load of straw is tightly bound
down beneath tarpaulin covers. There is, too, close by us, a couple
leaning over the balustrade with the curious lack of self-consciousness
lovers have, as if the importance of the affair they are engaged on
claims without question the indulgence of the human race. The sights we
see and the sounds we hear now have none of the quality of the past; nor
have we any share in the serenity of the person who, six months ago,
stood precisely were we stand now. His is the happiness of death; ours
the insecurity of life. He has no future; the future is even now
invading our peace. It is only when we look at the past and take from it
the element of uncertainty that we can enjoy perfect peace. As it is, we
must turn, we must cross the Strand again, we must find a shop where,
even at this hour, they will be ready to sell us a pencil.

It is always an adventure to enter a new room for the lives and
characters of its owners have distilled their atmosphere into it, and
directly we enter it we breast some new wave of emotion. Here, without a
doubt, in the stationer's shop people had been quarrelling. Their
anger shot through the air. They both stopped; the old woman--they were
husband and wife evidently--retired to a back room; the old man whose
rounded forehead and globular eyes would have looked well on the
frontispiece of some Elizabethan folio, stayed to serve us. "A pencil,
a pencil," he repeated, "certainly, certainly." He spoke with the
distraction yet effusiveness of one whose emotions have been roused and
checked in full flood. He began opening box after box and shutting them
again. He said that it was very difficult to find things when they kept
so many different articles. He launched into a story about some legal
gentleman who had got into deep waters owing to the conduct of his wife.
He had known him for years; he had been connected with the Temple for
half a century, he said, as if he wished his wife in the back room to
overhear him. He upset a box of rubber bands. At last, exasperated by
his incompetence, he pushed the swing door open and called out roughly:
"Where d'you keep the pencils?" as if his wife had hidden them. The
old lady came in. Looking at nobody, she put her hand with a fine air of
righteous severity upon the right box. There were pencils. How then
could he do without her? Was she not indispensable to him? In order to
keep them there, standing side by side in forced neutrality, one had to
be particular in one's choice of pencils; this was too soft, that too
hard. They stood silently looking on. The longer they stood there, the
calmer they grew; their heat was going down, their anger disappearing.
Now, without a word said on either side, the quarrel was made up. The
old man, who would not have disgraced Ben Jonson's title-page, reached
the box back to its proper place, bowed profoundly his good-night to us,
and they disappeared. She would get out her sewing; he would read his
newspaper; the canary would scatter them impartially with seed. The
quarrel was over.

In these minutes in which a ghost has been sought for, a quarrel
composed, and a pencil bought, the streets had become completely empty.
Life had withdrawn to the top floor, and lamps were lit. The pavement
was dry and hard; the road was of hammered silver. Walking home through
the desolation one could tell oneself the story of the dwarf, of the
blind men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the quarrel in the
stationer's shop. Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little
way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to
a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and
minds of others. One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street
singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave
the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that
lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest
where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?

That is true: to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in
winter the greatest of adventures. Still as we approach our own doorstep
again, it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices,
fold us round; and the self, which has been blown about at so many
street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many
inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed. Here again is the usual
door; here the chair turned as we left it and the china bowl and the
brown ring on the carpet. And here--let us examine it tenderly, let us
touch it with reverence--is the only spoil we have retrieved from all
the treasures of the city, a lead pencil.




JONES AND WILKINSON(Drawn from the MEMOIRS OF TATE WILKINSON,4 vols.,1790.)



Whether Jones should come before Wilkinson or Wilkinson before Jones is
not a matter likely to agitate many breasts at the present moment,
seeing that more than a hundred and fifty years have rolled over the
gentlemen in question and diminished a lustre which, even in their own
time, round about the year 1750, was not very bright. The Rev. Dr.
Wilkinson might indeed claim precedence by virtue of his office. He was
His Majesty's Chaplain of the Savoy and Chaplain also to his late Royal
Highness, Frederick Prince of Wales. But then Dr. Wilkinson was
transported. Captain James Jones might assert that, as Captain of His
Majesty's third regiment of Guards with a residence by virtue of his
office in Savoy Square, his social position was equal to the Doctor's.
But Captain Jones had to seclude himself beyond the reach of the law at
Mortlake. What, however, renders these comparisons peculiarly odious is
the fact that the Captain and the Doctor were boon companions whose
tastes were congenial, whose incomes were insufficient, whose wives
drank tea together, and whose houses in the Savoy were not two hundred
yards apart. Dr. Wilkinson, for all his sacred offices (he was Rector of
Coyty in Glamorgan, stipendiary curate of Wise in Kent, and, through
Lord Galway, had the right to "open plaister-pits in the honour of
Pontefract"), was a convivial spirit who cut a splendid figure in the
pulpit, preached and read prayers in a voice that was clear, strong and
sonorous so that many a lady of fashion never "missed her pew near the
pulpit," and persons of title remembered him many years after misfortune
had removed the handsome preacher from their sight.

Captain Jones shared many of his friend's qualities. He was vivacious,
witty, and generous, well made and elegant in person and, if he was not
quite as handsome as the doctor, he was perhaps rather his superior in
intellect. Compare them as we may, however, there can be little doubt
that the gifts and tastes of both gentlemen were better adapted for
pleasure than for labour, for society than for solitude, for the hazards
and pleasures of the table rather than for the rigours of religion and
war. It was the gaming-table that seduced Captain Jones, and here, alas,
his gifts and graces stood him in little stead. His affairs became more
and more hopelessly embarrassed, so that shortly, instead of being able
to take his walks at large, he was forced to limit them to the precincts
of St. James's, where, by ancient prerogative, such unfortunates as he
were free from the attentions of the bailiffs.

To so gregarious a spirit the confinement was irksome. His only
resource, indeed, was to get into talk with any such "parksaunterers" as
misfortunes like his own had driven to perambulate the Park, or, when
the weather allowed, to bask and loiter and gossip on its benches. As
chance would have it (and the Captain was a devotee of that goddess) he
found himself one day resting on the same bench with an elderly
gentleman of military aspect and stern demeanour, whose ill-temper the
wit and humour which all allowed to Captain Jones presumably beguiled,
so that whenever the Captain appeared in the Park, the old man sought
his company, and they passed the time until dinner very pleasantly in
talk. On no occasion, however, did the General--for it appeared that the
name of this morose old man was General Skelton--ask Captain Jones to
his house; the acquaintance went no further than the bench in St.
James's Park; and when, as soon fell out, the Captain's difficulties
forced him to the greater privacy of a little cabin at Mortlake, he
forgot entirely the military gentleman who, presumably, still sought an
appetite for dinner or some alleviation of his own sour mood in
loitering and gossiping with the park-saunterers of St. James's.

But among the amiable characteristics of Captain Jones was a love of
wife and child, scarcely to be wondered at, indeed, considering his
wife's lively and entertaining disposition and the extraordinary promise
of that little girl who was later to become the wife of Lord Cornwallis.
At whatever risk to himself, Captain Jones would steal back to revisit
his wife and to hear his little girl recite the part of Juliet which,
under his teaching, she had perfectly by heart. On one such secret
journey he was hurrying to get within the royal sanctuary of St. James's
when a voice called on him to stop. His fears obsessing him, he hurried
the faster, his pursuer close at his heels. Realizing that escape was
impossible, Jones wheeled about and facing his pursuer, whom he
recognized as the Attorney Brown, demanded what his enemy wanted of him.
Far from being his enemy, said Brown, he was the best friend he had ever
had, which he would prove if Jones would accompany him to the first
tavern that came to hand. There, in a private room over a fire, Mr.
Brown disclosed the following astonishing story. An unknown friend, he
said, who had scrutinized Jones's conduct carefully and concluded that
his deserts outweighed his misdemeanours, was prepared to settle all his
debts and indeed to put him beyond the reach of such tormentors in
future. At these words a load was lifted from Jones's heart, and he
cried out "Good God! Who can this paragon of friendship be?" It was none
other, said Brown, than General Skelton. General Skelton, the man whom
he had only met to chat with on a bench in St. James's Park? Jones asked
in wonderment. Yes, it was the General, Brown assured him. Then let him
hasten to throw himself in gratitude at his benefactor's knee! Not so
fast, Brown replied; General Skelton will never speak to you again.
General Skelton died last night.

The extent of Captain Jones's good fortune was indeed magnificent. The
General had left Captain Jones sole heir to all his possessions on no
other condition than that he should assume the name of Skelton instead
of Jones. Hastening through streets no longer dreadful, since every debt
of honour could now be paid, Captain Jones brought his wife the
astonishing news of their good fortune, and they promptly set out to
view that part which lay nearest to hand--the General's great house in
Henrietta Street. Gazing about her, half in dream, half in earnest, Mrs.
Jones Was so overcome with the tumult of her emotions that she could not
stay to gather in the extent of her possessions, but ran to Little
Bedford Street, where Mrs. Wilkinson was then living, to impart her joy.
Meanwhile, the news that General Skelton lay dead in Henrietta Street
without a son to succeed him spread abroad, and those who thought
themselves his heirs arrived in the house of death to take stock of
their inheritance, among them one great and beautiful lady whose avarice
was her undoing, whose misfortunes were equal to her sins, Kitty
Chudleigh, Countess of Bristol, Duchess of Kingston. Miss Chudleigh, as
she then called herself, believed, and who can doubt that with her
passionate nature, her lust for wealth and property, her pistols and her
parsimony, she believed with vehemence and asserted her belief with
arrogance, that all General Skelton's property had legally descended to
her. Later, when the will was read and the truth made public that not
only the house in Henrietta Street, but Pap Castle in Cumberland and the
lands and lead mines pertaining to it, were left without exception to an
unknown Captain Jones, she burst out in "terms exceeding all bounds of
delicacy." She cried that her relative the General was an old fool in
his dotage, that Jones and his wife were impudent low upstarts beneath
her notice, and so flounced into her coach "with a scornful quality
toss" to carry on that life of deceit and intrigue and ambition which
drove her later to wander in ignominy, an outcast from her country.

What remains to be told of the fortunes of Captain Jones can be briefly
despatched. Having new furnished the house in Henrietta Street, the
Jones family set out when summer came to visit their estates in
Cumberland. The country was so fair, the Castle so stately, the thought
that now all belonged to them so gratifying that their progress for
three weeks was one of unmixed pleasure and the spot where they were now
to live seemed a paradise. But there was an eagerness, an impetuosity
about James Jones which made him impatient to suffer even the smiles of
fortune passively. He must be active--he must be up and doing. He must
be "let down," for all his friends could do to dissuade him, to view a
lead mine. The consequences as they foretold were disastrous. He was
drawn up, indeed, but already infected with a deadly sickness of which
in a few days he died, in the arms of his wife, in the midst of that
paradise which he had toiled so long to reach and now was to die without
enjoying.

Meanwhile the Wilkinsons--but that name, alas, was no longer applicable
to them, nor did the Dr. and his wife any more inhabit the house in the
Savoy--the Wilkinsons had suffered more extremities at the hands of Fate
than the Joneses themselves. Dr. Wilkinson, it has been said, resembled
his friend Jones in the conviviality of his habits and his inability to
keep within the limits of his income. Indeed, his wife's dowry of two
thousand pounds had gone to pay off the debts of his youth. But by what
means could he pay off the debts of his middle age? He was now past
fifty, and what with good company and good living, was seldom free from
duns, and always pressed for money. Suddenly, from an unexpected
quarter, help appeared. This was none other than the Marriage Act,
passed in 1755, which laid it down that if any person solemnized a
marriage without publishing the banns, unless a marriage licence had
already been obtained, he should be subject to transportation for
fourteen years. Dr. Wilkinson, looking at the matter, it is to be
feared, from his own angle, and with a view to his own necessities,
argued that as Chaplain of the Savoy, which was extra-Parochial and
Royal-exempt, he could grant licences as usual--a privilege which at
once brought him such a glut of business, such a crowd of couples
wishing to be married in a hurry, that the rat-tat-tat never ceased on
his street door, and cash flooded the family exchequer so that even his
little boy's pockets were lined with gold. The duns were paid; the table
sumptuously spread. But Dr. Wilkinson shared another failing with his
friend Jones; he would not take advice. His friends warned him; the
Government plainly hinted that if he persisted they would be forced to
act. Secure in what he imagined to be his right, enjoying the prosperity
it brought him to the full, the Doctor paid no heed. On Easter Day he was
engaged in marrying from eight in the morning till twelve at night. At
last, one Sunday, the King's Messengers appeared. The Doctor escaped by
a secret walk over the leads of the Savoy, made his way to the river
bank, where he slipped upon some logs and fell, heavy and elderly as he
was, in the mud; but nevertheless got to Somerset stairs, took a boat,
and reached the Kentish shore in safety. Even now he brazened it out
that the law was on his side, and came back four weeks later prepared to
stand his trial. Once more, for the last time, company overflowed the
house in the Savoy; lawyers abounded, and, as they ate and drank,
assured Dr. Wilkinson that his case was already won. In July 1756 the
trial began. But what conclusion could there be? The crime had been
committed and persisted in openly in spite of warning. The Doctor was
found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years' transportation.

It remained for his friends to fit him out, like the gentleman he was,
for his voyage to America. There, they argued, his gifts of speech and
person would make him welcome, and later his wife and son could join
him. To them he bade farewell in the dismal precincts of Newgate in
March 1757. But contrary winds beat the ship back to shore; the gout
seized on a body enfeebled by pleasure and adversity; at Plymouth Dr.
Wilkinson was transported finally and for ever. The lead mine undid
Jones; the Marriage Act was the downfall of Wilkinson. Both now sleep in
peace, Jones in Cumberland, Wilkinson, far from his friend (and if their
failings were great, great too were their gifts and graces) on the
shores of the melancholy Atlantic.




"TWELFTH NIGHT" AT THE OLD VIC (* Written in 1933.)



Shakespeareans are divided, it is well known, into three classes; those
who prefer to read Shakespeare in the book; those who prefer to see him
acted on the stage; and those who run perpetually from book to stage
gathering plunder. Certainly there is a good deal to be said for reading
TWELFTH NIGHT in the book if the book can be read in a garden, with no
sound but the thud of an apple falling to the earth, or of the wind
ruffling the branches of the trees. For one thing there is time--time
not only to hear "the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets"
but to unfold the implications of that very subtle speech as the Duke
winds into the nature of love. There is time, too, to make a note in the
margin; time to wonder at queer jingles like "that live in her; when
liver, brain, and heart" . . . "and of a foolish knight that you brought
in one night" and to ask oneself whether it was from them that was born
the lovely, "And what should I do in Illyria? My brother he is in
Elysium." For Shakespeare is writing, it seems, not with the whole of his
mind mobilized and under control but with feelers left flying that sort
and play with words so that the trail of a chance word is caught and
followed recklessly. From the echo of one word is born another word, for
which reason, perhaps, the play seems as we read it to tremble
perpetually on the brink of music. They are always calling for songs in
TWELFTH NIGHT, "0 fellow come, the song we had last night." Yet
Shakespeare was not so deeply in love with words but that he could turn
and laugh at them. "They that do dally with words do quickly make them
wanton." There is a roar of laughter and out burst Sir Toby, Sir Andrew,
Maria. Words on their lips are things that have meaning; that rush and
leap out with a whole character packed in a little phrase. When Sir
Andrew says "I was adored once," we feel that we hold him in the hollow
of our hands; a novelist would have taken three volumes to bring us to
that pitch of intimacy. And Viola, Malvolio, Olivia, the Duke--the mind
so brims and spills over with all that we know and guess about them as
they move in and out among the lights and shadows of the mind's stage
that we ask why should we imprison them within the bodies of real men
and women? Why exchange this garden for the theatre? The answer is that
Shakespeare wrote for the stage and presumably with reason. Since they
are acting TWELFTH NIGHT at the Old Vic, let us compare the two
versions.

Many apples might fall without being heard in the Waterloo Road, and as
for the shadows, the electric light has consumed them all. The first
impression upon entering the Old Vic is overwhelmingly positive and
definite. We seem to have issued out from the shadows of the garden upon
the bridge of the Parthenon. The metaphor is mixed, but then so is the
scenery. The columns of the bridge somehow suggest an Atlantic liner and
the austere splendours of a classical temple in combination. But the
body is almost as upsetting as the scenery. The actual persons of
Malvolio, Sir Toby, Olivia and the rest expand our visionary characters
out of all recognition. At first we are inclined to resent it. You are
not Malvolio; or Sir Toby either, we want to tell them; but merely
impostors. We sit gaping at the ruins of the play, at the travesty of
the play. And then by degrees this same body or rather all these bodies
together, take our play and remodel it between them. The play gains
immensely in robustness, in solidity. The printed word is changed out of
all recognition when it is heard by other people. We watch it strike
upon this man or woman; we see them laugh or shrug their shoulders, or
tum aside to hide their faces. The word is given a body as well as a
soul. Then again as the actors pause, or topple over a barrel, or
stretch their hands out, the flatness of the print is broken up as by
crevasses or precipices; all the proportions are changed. Perhaps the
most impressive effect in the play is achieved by the long pause which
Sebastian and Viola make as they stand looking at each other in a silent
ecstasy of recognition. The reader's eye may have slipped over that
moment entirely. Here we are made to pause and think about it; and are
reminded that Shakespeare wrote for the body and for the mind
simultaneously.

But now that the actors have done their proper work of solidifying and
intensifying our impressions, we begin to criticize them more minutely
and to compare their version with our own. We make Mr. Quartermaine's
Malvolio stand beside our Malvolio. And to tell the truth, wherever the
fault may lie, they have very little in common. Mr. Quartermaine's
Malvolio is a splendid gentleman, courteous, considerate, well bred; a
man of parts and humour who has no quarrel with the world. He has never
felt a twinge of vanity or a moment's envy in his life. If Sir Toby and
Maria fool him he sees through it, we may be sure, and only suffers it as
a fine gentleman puts up with the games of foolish children. Our Malvolio,
on the other hand, was a fantastic complex creature, twitching with
vanity, tortured by ambition. There was cruelty in his teasing, and a
hint of tragedy in his defeat; his final threat had a momentary terror
in it. But when Mr. Quartermaine says "I'll be revenged on the whole
pack of you," we feel merely that the powers of the law will be soon and
effectively invoked. What, then, becomes of Olivia's "He hath been most
notoriously abused"? Then there is Olivia. Madame Lopokova has by nature
that rare quality which is neither to be had for the asking nor to be
subdued by the will--the genius of personality. She has only to float on
to the stage and everything round her suffers, not a sea change, but a
change into light, into gaiety; the birds sing, the sheep are garlanded,
the air rings with melody and human beings dance towards each other on
the tips of their toes possessed of an exquisite friendliness, sympathy
and delight. But our Olivia was a stately lady; of sombre complexion,
slow moving, and of few sympathies. She could not love the Duke nor
change her feeling. Madame Lopokova loves everybody. She is always
changing. Her hands, her face, her feet, the whole of her body, are
always quivering in sympathy with the moment. She could make the moment,
as she proved when she walked down the stairs with Sebastian, one of
intense and moving beauty; but she was not our Olivia. Compared with her
the comic group, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria, the fool were more than
ordinarily English. Coarse, humorous, robust, they trolled out their
words, they rolled over their barrels; they acted magnificently. No
reader, one may make bold to say, could outpace Miss Seyler's Maria,
with its quickness, its inventiveness, its merriment; nor add anything
to the humours of Mr. Livesey's Sir Toby. And Miss jeans as Viola was
satisfactory; and Mr. Hare as Antonio was admirable; and Mr. Morland's
clown was a good clown. What, then, was lacking in the play as a whole?
Perhaps that it was not a whole. The fault may lie partly with
Shakespeare. It is easier to act his comedy than his poetry, one may
suppose, for when he wrote as a poet he was apt to write too quick for
the human tongue. The prodigality of his metaphors can be flashed over
by the eye, but the speaking voice falters in the middle. Hence the
comedy was out of proportion to the rest. Then, perhaps, the actors were
too highly charged with individuality or too incongruously cast. They
broke the play up into separate pieces--now we were in the groves of
Arcady, now in some inn at Blackfriars. The mind in reading spins a web
from scene to scene, compounds a background from apples falling, and the
toll of a church bell, and an owl's fantastic flight which keeps the
play together. Here that continuity was sacrificed. We left the theatre
possessed of many brilliant fragments but without the sense of all
things conspiring and combining together which may be the satisfying
culmination of a less brilliant performance. Nevertheless, the play has
served its purpose. It has made us compare our Malvolio with Mr.
Quartermaine's; our Olivia with Madame Lopokova's; our reading of the
whole play with Mr. Guthrie's; and since they all differ back we must go
to Shakespeare. We must read TWELFTH NIGHT again. Mr. Guthrie has made
that necessary and whetted our appetite for the CHERRY ORCHARD, MEASURE
FOR MEASURE, and HENRY THE EIGHTH that are still to come.



MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ


This great lady, this robust and fertile letter writer, who in our age
would probably have been one of the great novelists, takes up presumably
as much space in the consciousness of living readers as any figure of
her vanished age. But it is more difficult to fix that figure within an
outline than so to sum up many of her contemporaries. That is partly
because she created her being, not in plays or poems, but in
letters--touch by touch, with repetitions, amassing daily trifles,
writing down what came into her head as if she were talking. Thus the
fourteen volumes of her letters enclose a vast open space, like one of
her own great woods; the rides are crisscrossed with the intricate
shadows of branches, figures roam down the glades, pass from sun to
shadow, are lost to sight, appear again, but never sit down in fixed
attitudes to compose a group.

Thus we live in her presence, and often fall, as with living people,
into unconsciousness. She goes on talking, we half listen. And then
something she says rouses us. We add it to her character, so that the
character grows and changes, and she seems like a living person,
inexhaustible.

This of course is one of the qualities that all letter writers possess,
and she, because of her unconscious naturalness, her flow and abundance,
possesses it far more than the brilliant Walpole, for example, or the
reserved and self-conscious Gray. Perhaps in the long run we know her
more instinctively, more profoundly, than we know them. We sink deeper
down into her, and know by instinct rather than by reason how she will
feel; this she will be amused by; that will take her fancy; now she will
plunge into melancholy. Her range too is larger than theirs; there is
more scope and more diversity. Everything seems to yield its juice--its
fun, its enjoyment; or to feed her meditations. She has a robust
appetite; nothing shocks her; she gets nourishment from whatever is set
before her. She is an intellectual, quick to enjoy the wit of
La Rochefoucauld, to relish the fine discrimination of Madame de La
Fayette. She has a natural dwelling place in books, so that Josephus or
Pascal or the absurd long romances of the time are not read by her so
much as embedded in her mind. Their verses, their stories rise to her
lips along with her own thoughts. But there is a sensibility in her
which intensifies this great appetite for many things. It is of course
shown at its most extreme, its most irrational, in her love for her
daughter. She loves her as an elderly man loves a young mistress who
tortures him. It was a passion that was twisted and morbid; it caused
her many humiliations; sometimes it made her ashamed of herself. For,
from the daughter's point of view it was exhausting, was embarrassing to
be the object of such intense emotion; and she could not always respond.
She feared that her mother was making her ridiculous in the eyes of her
friends. Also she felt that she was not like that. She was different;
colder, more fastidious, less robust. Her mother was ignoring the real
daughter in this flood of adoration for a daughter who did not exist.
She was forced to curb her; to assert her own identity. It was
inevitable that Madame de Sévigné, with her exacerbated sensibility,
should feel hurt.

Sometimes, therefore, Madame de Sévigné weeps. The daughter does not
love her. That is a thought so bitter, and a fear so perpetual and so
profound, that life loses its savour; she has recourse to sages, to
poets to console her; and reflects with sadness upon the vanity of life;
and how death will come. Then, too, she is agitated beyond what is right
or reasonable, because a letter has not reached her. Then she knows that
she has been absurd; and realizes that she is boring her friends with
this obsession. What is worse, she has bored her daughter. And then when
the bitter drop has fallen, up bubbles quicker and quicker the
ebullition of that robust vitality, of that irrepressible quick
enjoyment, that natural relish for life, as if she instinctively
repaired her failure by fluttering all her feathers; by making every
facet glitter. She shakes herself out of her glooms; makes fun of "les
D'Hacquevilles"; collects a handful of gossip; the latest news of the
King and Madame de Maintenon; how Charles has fallen in love; how the
ridiculous Mademoiselle de Plessis has been foolish again; when she
wanted a handkerchief to spit into, the silly woman tweaked her nose; or
describes how she has been amusing herself by amazing the simple little
girl who lives at the end of the park--la petite personne--with stories
of kings and countries, of all that great world that she who has lived
in the thick of it knows so well. At last, comforted, assured for the
time being at least of her daughter's love, she lets herself relax; and
throwing off all disguises, tells her daughter how nothing in the world
pleases her so well as solitude. She is happiest alone in the country.
She loves rambling alone in her woods. She loves going out by herself at
night. She loves hiding from callers. She loves walking among her trees
and musing. She loves the gardener's chatter; she loves planting. She
loves the gipsy girl who dances, as her own daughter used to dance, but
not of course so exquisitely.


It is natural to use the present tense, because we live in her presence.
We are very little conscious of a disturbing medium between us--that she
is living, after all, by means of written words. But now and then with
the sound of her voice in our ears and its rhythm rising and falling
within us, we become aware, with some sudden phrase, about spring, about
a country neighbour, something struck off in a flash, that we are, of
course, being addressed by one of the great mistresses of the art of
speech.

Then we listen for a time, consciously. How, we wonder, does she
contrive to make us follow every word of the story of the cook who
killed himself because the fish failed to come in time for the royal
dinner party; or the scene of the haymaking; or the anecdote of the
servant whom she dismissed in a sudden rage; how does she achieve this
order, this perfection of composition? Did she practise her art? It
seems not. Did she tear up and correct? There is no record of any
painstaking or effort. She says again and again that she writes her
letters as she speaks. She begins one as she sends off another; there is
the page on her desk and she