VIRGINIA WOOLF’S ESSAYS

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31345, 15 April 1967, Page 4

VIRGINIA WOOLF’S ESSAYS

Collected Essays by Virginia Woolf. Hogarth Press. Volume 1. 361 pp. Volume 2. 304 pp. The essay is dead, but during its centuries-long life it nurtured some of the great writers of European literature. It was an art form of its own. But now the mass age has

taken over, instead of Hazlitt and Montaigne we have television and the Sunday papers. Virginia Woolf was one of the last essayists. Her criticism, highly praised at the time, was classical, both in its lively, balanced style, and in its preoccupation with purely literary subjects. Nearly all of the great English writers between Spenser and Lawrence are

discussed, and Virginia Woolf always fulfils the basic requirements. She has something to say, and she says it well. The reader wants to keep her on his shelves, to take her down and read at random, for to read Virginia Woolf is to read one of the great stylists in modem literature. But although these essays have this intrinsic virtue they have another quality which is less expected: they are thoroughly-modern. The judgments of Virginia Woolf are almost without exception those in current fashion. Whilst this is no necessary proof of their rightness, it is vindication enough of the tough-mindedness that gives such solid shape to her writing.

This is an important point, because Virginia Woolf was a writer rather than a critic. Her interest was in literature, in creating, in seeking artistic perfection. (In all matters of taste she is impeccable. The essay on "Middlebrow" is a delight.) To compromise her Intensely personal vision for the sake of conformity, or even less, for the sake of popularity, was so unlike her that it probably never even occurred to her. Time and again, in these essays, she emphasises the impossibility of fixing critical standards. It is not possible to say whether Jane Austen or Dickens is the greater, writer; it is possible only to search for the quality that makes greatness, that quality, found only rarely, that makes literature the most exciting of arts. But most important is the free and joyous act of creation. Being

in the van of the "stream of consciousness” Virginia Woolf certainly fulfils her own standards, but for those readers who find her novels difficult it should be pointed out that her essays are more conventional in form and likely to appeal to a wider audience. In these essays (the first two of a proposed four-volume edition of what was originally published in six volumes) there is remarkably little consciousness of the author’s place in history. Although she must have been acutely aware of the difficult position of women in Edwardian society, feminism is hardly mentioned. The "Bloomsbury Group” is mentioned only in pasting. Disappointingly, there are only very small—and often disapproving—references to her great contemporaries, Joyce, Eliot, and Lawrence. Some of her best writing, in fact, comes in the several essays in which she assails the realist school of Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells. “Facto,” she writes, “are a very inferior form of fiction.” To a mind as acute as Virginia Woolf’s the world has too many riches and offers too many insights for a writer to waste his time worrying about “Staffordshire factories, and calico, and freehold villas.” No, life is for the living, and writing is for the expression of life.