VIRGINIA WOOLF

Evening Star, Issue 23864, 19 April 1941, Page 3

VIRGINIA WOOLF

[Written by Panache, for the ' Evening Star.’.]

Once or twice in a lifetime it is one’s good fortune to pick up a book .carelessly, flick over a page or two, and suddenly become entranced. The toobright sun was shining on the greenbine cover of a book, and so 1 gave it a gentle shove into the shade. It fell open, and, dipping, I read of a lady, newly back in the world after an illness, going to buy flowers for a party. With her, eyes I saw the green oilcloth on the passage and I heard the drip of the bathroom tap with her ears. Nothing much seemed to happen, but something in the telling, more akin to .poetry than to prose, fitted me on to a peak in Darien. The novel was Virginia Woolf’s ‘ Mrs Dalloway.’ Filled with the excitement that comes from making a new acquaintance whoso idiom one immediately understands, I bought each now volume as it issued from the Hogarth Press, so that a seagreen kingfisher-blue line stretches along my dearest bookshelf. The row will not be much longer now, since Virginia Woolf died on April 3. , Now that she is dead, distinguished critics will proceed to a revaluation of her work and attempt to prove that she is the most distinguished novelist of the century, or, alternatively, that she is merely a fashion with a certain class (chiefly vegetarians and others of low vitality?) who -will be forgotten as soon as the authoress of ‘ The Sheik.’ Until the April weeklies arrive from London (with,. I hope, appreciations by E. M. Forster and Rose Macaulay, since they share Virginia Woolf’s passion for truth and integrity) it is for her.admirers here to see that her death is not unnoticed. Although it is only 59 years since Virginia Woolf was born, her environment strikes us as fabulously remote find fantastically cultured. Imagine being the daughter of Leslie Stephen, Cambridge don. editor of the ‘Cornhill ’ and the ‘ Dictionary of National Biography.’ Imagine about the house the aroma of the first wife, a daughter of Thackeray. Imagine having a mother half-French, a sister called \anessa, and brothers answering to Julian and Adrian. Imagine beiii" taught the Greek alphabet by Walter *i lt l er .’ s sister. It is easier to think / or being bom in a wood near pro-war Athens, and playing with brothers named Cobweb and Mustardseed. Too .delicate to bo sent to school, irginia \\oo.f spent her days iu her father s horary with holidays beside the. sea, whose colour and sparkle we see so often m her prose, and whose rhythm we hear there as if s, shell were *2 oar - She complains that she is uneducated, but she refers in her criticism, with the + the well-informed, to the literature of England, France Russia, and Germany. Beginning her literary work as a reviewer for ‘ The Hmes Literary Supplement,’ Virginia * a PPb g d the measuring rod which she was always to use, whether as critic or novelist— * The first essential of good art is truth; the second is that the form must burn up the idea ” In finding a form that will burn up the idea, the artist who uses words is at a disadvantage, she believes. One of her heroines asks,. “ Why do you write novels? You ought to write music. Music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once.” And she herself, writing of Walter Sickert says: “ Words are an impure medium;’ better far to havo been born into the silent kingdom ot paint.” Wc. arc glad that it was not notes or paint she was born to, and, in spite of her. denial of words, it is her voice that we hear when one of her characters speaks of his love for tremendous

and sonorous words, of words lashing their manes and tails, of the hot laval how of a sentence. It is her voice that says, “ How lovely the smoke of my phrase is, rising”; and, more soberly, “ A good phrase has an independent existence.” There are some people who would like to enjoy the novels of Virginia Woolf, but they can’t. They call them difficult, though the novels are no more difficult than those of other novelists who are concerned with character rather than with external actions and who do not sacrifice truths to the creation of memorable types. The earlier novels, like 1 The Voyage Out,’ written before psychology invaded the novel, are conventional in form; buv here some readers discern a disturbing hint of what used to be called feminism. For example, in this first novel there is a charming Mrs Ambrose who valued the intellectual virtues of intelligence and honesty; “ nor did she encourage those habits of unselfishness and amiability, founded upon insecurity, which are put at so high a value in mixed households of men and women.” Against the code which imposed insecurity, with its resultant insincerity, upon women, Virginia Woolf is always ready to tilt; and already in ‘ The Voyage Out,’ is the germ of the idea that flowered in ‘A Room of One’s Own,’ which has been called the educated woman’s Bible; Setting out to discover an answer to the questions why more women have not written fiction, why no Elizabethan woman contributed to a literature in which every other man was capable of song or sonnet, Virginia Woolf comes to the conclusion that women have always been poor, and intellectual freedom depends upon material things; poetry depends upon material things. Hence her thesis that until a woman has £SOO a year, a room of her own, with a look on the door, she cannot write poetry. Virginia Woolf was sufficiently blessed with material things to have leisure to write a fantasy, ‘ Orlando,’ and a. novel, ‘To the Lighthouse.’ Readers complained that they could not understand either. They were disconcerted by the hero of the one suddenly changing his sex, and the heroine in the other unexpectedly dying. ‘ Orlando ’ is an allegory about, literature and sex and time: ‘To the Lighthouse ’ is pure poetry; the one is rich in humour. pathos, and invention; the other is one of the most beautiful novels ever written, and Mrs Ramsay an effective answer to those critics who accuse modern novelists of failing to create memorable characters. In her study of Virginia Woolf, Winifred Holtby speaks of the part death plays in .her novels. Mrs Dalloway, alive, was preocupiced with the thought of death; but Mrs Ramsay, dead, lived on through, her influence. After Mrs Ramsay’s death the novel is still lit by her. So Virginia Woolf, dead, will continue to illumine for us many things, big like independence and integrity, or small as green oilcloth and the drip of a bathroom tap.